A friend of the blog writes:

Have you noticed the Star Tribune is really running a lot of Amy articles lately?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

Why, it’s almost as if they are “shaping the battlefield” on behalf of their former columnist’s daughter.

The thing about “progressivism” is that while it flaps its jaws about “helping” the vulnerable, it inevitably ends up harming them.

Give them a $15 minimum wage and mandatory sick time? Get them laid off!

Attack landlords for the “quality” of housing they provide? Make housing unaffordable!

Kamala Harris, in her celebrated (by the media) record as a prosecutor, did more than her fair share of being unfair.

. Her crusade against the scourge of parents whose kids skip school, for example:

The good news is that post-CNN town hall, although much of the media lauded Harris and posted adoring articles about her acumen and likability, several took it upon themselves to resurface videos of Harris’s recent support for cracking down on truancy violations.
In 2010, for example, video shows Harris saying, “I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.”
“Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco,” Harris noted, with a folksy giggle.
Another video showed Harris bragging about her power: “As a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have huge stick. The school district as a carrot. Let’s work together in tandem…to get those kids in school.”

Have I ever mentioned how much I love prosecutors who are drunk with their own power?

Her policies involved $2,000 fines, and even jail time, for parents whose kids missed “too much” school.

Which, people who actually pay attention to this issue will tell you, is a stupid, stupid plan, unless your goal is to paint yourself as “tough”:

…the people hurt by this carceral approach are the very people who are most likely to be financially crippled by a few fines. We’re not talking about wealthy people here, and generally speaking, criminal justice reform advocates fear using punitive means to “help” poor people because it can be so easy for them to get trapped in a cycle of unpaid fines that leads to jail time, which leads to time forcibly taken off of work, which leads to even less money and even less ability to pay outstanding debts.
None of this, you can imagine, helps children get a more stable home life with more attention from parents. 

With junior high and high school kids, truancy often isn’t something parents can control (while still holding down jobs, anyway).

With younger kids? If they’re missing school regularly, it’s usually not a matter of “truancy”; it’s problems at home, more often than not problems stemming from one personal or social pathology or another.

In what other area of society do we try to address this sort of thing with fines and jail time?

Kamala Harris is a public cancer.

When private health insurance was unable to provide uniform affordable coverage, Congress had no choice but to take it over through Obama-care.  The success of that program proves the principle is sound: government must do what private industry can’t do.
Thousands of people are without electricity during dangerously cold weather.  Private power companies have demonstrated they are incapable of providing uniform affordable coverage.  Congress has no choice but to take over the electrical industry. This is right in line with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ socialist philosophy, she’s the logical choice to introduce the legislation.  Government, not private business, is the only way to ensure prompt and efficient delivery of essential services to women and minorities, whatever the weather might be
In other news, the Post Office isn’t delivering mail today.  Mn/DOT pulled its snowplows off the road.  St. Paul schools are closed and it’s mandatory recycling program is suspended.  Government workers cannot promptly and efficiently deliver essential services because of the weather. 
Hmm, maybe we should revisit the concept of government taking over private businesses?  Do we really expect union government employees to be climbing power poles in the howling freezing wind in the dead of night?  Would that idea work any better than Obama-care or its inevitable successor, Kamela-care?
Whatever those guys on the power poles make (and they’re almost all guys), it’s not enough.  Whatever those gals in Congress make (and the goofy ones are almost all gals), it’s too much.

I for one am so happy I’ve got private-sector power. Although it’s a private monopoly in the area, so it’s not quite free market…

It’s not just an aphorism!

DC/Baltimore area liberal political comic lives it out:

Tim Young was heading to one of D.C.’s newest hotspots—The Wharf—when his life changed.
He was walking down a well-lit section of M Street at about 7:45 p.m. Wednesday when two men approached him—one of them had a gun.
“Terrified. You know, when I talk to people about this… you’re scared. There’s no man card involved. I was defenseless,” explained Young, who’s a political comedian and host of ‘No Things Considered’ at the D.C. Examiner. The men ran off with his cell phone.

Details: Last night I was robbed at gunpoint by 2 men in DC by the new @TheWharfDC on the way to get coffee at @dolcezzagelato at 7:45pm.
They got my phone and tossed me around while people watched from a half block away. Then they ran off.
Thanks to @DCPoliceDept for your help.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) January 18, 2018

Now, he said he absolutely plans to apply for a concealed carry permit in D.C., but it won’t be easy. The District is one of the toughest places in the country to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
“When you’re in an instance where there’s a gun is pointed at you and your life is being threatened for your property and no one’s going to help—and now I know that no one’s going to help—I want to feel more secure. I want to feel safe, and I have something to defend myself with,” he said.
When asked how the situation would have went differently if he had a gun, Young told Bruce Johnson on ‘Off Script’ that he probably would have pulled it out to defend himself.
He addressed people who are against conceal carry permits by saying they’ve probably never been in his position.
“I think a lot of those people who are opposed to having a conceal carry permit and being able to own a weapon have never had one pointed directly at them when they have nothing on them,” Young said.

Welcome to the party, Tim.

Bring some friends.

…I could only get one right myself.

Remember that quip you get from every bobbleheaded liberal when you remind them that the Second Amendment is supposed to be about defending freedom against tyranny?

“What?”, they inevitably respond, “you’re going to fight at tank with your AR15?” (No, I won’t have to, because if the government comes for the guns, it’ll be the AR15s and the tanks against the progressives with their protest signs. But I digress).

The question about whether tyranny in Venezuela will, to paraphrase Mick Jones, will stay or go, is partly about socialist power politics, partly about manipulation of mobs…

…and mostly about who’s got the guns.

Military defectors say it’s also all about guns.  The military apparently doesn’t have any, or at least access to them, despite the massive arms sales from Russia that Venezuela’s socialist regime has spent its oil bounty on. [Former soldier] Hidalgo Azuaje added: “We’re not saying that we need only US support, but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru, all brother countries, that are against this dictatorship.”
The military men are pleading for arms.  They’ll take care of the job, they say, if they have the tools to do it.
Recall that when Venezuelan soldiers mutinied in the area of Petare earlier this month, their priority also was seizing weapons.
It does suggest that a penurious armed force with no access to weapons is the problem.  Apparently, not even the soldiers are trusted with guns by the dictatorship.  The Maduro regime is starting to arm gangs as a means of checking the military.  They trust gangs and thugs, but not responsible military men with guns, and seem to have disarmed them

It’s worth noting that Hugo Chavez – whose death let to Maduro and his clacque ineriting and extending their absolute power – got his start as a paratrooper in the Venezuelan army. So the regime knows what it needs to defend against.

When Brazil’s new government instituted a right to keep and bear arms for Brazilians, it wasn’t entirely about street crime.

Totalitarian dictatorship has been described as “a boot on your face, forever”. A monopoly on firepower is what makes it possible to keep that boot there, unmolested.

Buzzfeed circles the drain. 

Kyle Smith watches it spinning:

Founded in 2006, BuzzFeed is, as of this year, a teenager, and as is true of many teens it has an unrealistic view of its own likely future. BuzzFeed dreams of landing the Disney prince of profitability by dolling itself up in two ways. One is to cut costs. Unload most of the journalists producing the kinds of pieces that could in theory appear in an actual newspaper because this stuff loses money. Dozens of people have been laid off already, with more to come. Yet BuzzFeed is at the same time advertising for “editorial fellows” (journalistic lingo for “low-paid employees”) to apply for jobs. Clear out all those 28-year-olds whose salaries have soared worryingly into the mid-five figures and replace them with 23-year-olds willing to work for Starbucks wages. Hey, being a journalista beats being a barista, right? And as hinted above, it’s not like BuzzFeed has any hangups about the quality of its content. If you can make a latte, you can probably make a listicle.

I knew Buzzfeed, at least as far as “journalism” goes, was going to be a joke when I first heard about it. Know how I knew? Because of the company it kept here in the Twin Cities.

The second part of the BuzzFeed makeover, coming soon, is to grow. BuzzFeed has hinted that it intends to hoover up many other similar sites, all those fourth-rate imitators of a third-rate product that also seek to provide micro-dopamine infusions to cupcake-scarfing arrested-development cubicle prisoners as they daydream of shopping at Forever 21 and wonder if Jafar is kind of hot. If 17 bajillion dollops of extreme-low-quality content delivering 150 gajillion eyeballs doesn’t work, double down! If gigantic scale doesn’t work, activate ludicrous scale!

If Buzzfeed spirals in, one hopes the American people would get smarter.

These days, it’s more likeliy it’d get replaced by something worse…

What better way to commemorate “the worst movie ever made” than with one of the worst written movie reviews ever excreted?

Four Houston cops were shot (and another sustained a non-gunshot injury) serving a warrant against a couple of drug dealers.

That’s bad enough.

Worse?

Houston Police Officers’ Union President Joe Gamaldi was upset:

“We are sick and tired of dirt bags trying to take our lives when all we’re trying to do is protect this community and our families,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

I get that. It’s downright understandable.

This next part – where he apparently declares war on anti-police thoughtcrime? A little more troublesome:

“If you’re the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, just know we’ve all got your number now, we’re going to be keeping track of all of y’all, and we’re going to make sure that we hold you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.We’ve had enough, folks. We’re out there doing our jobs every day, putting our lives on the line for our families.”

I’m curious what level of criticism

If this law passes, you will be able to march down to the County Recorder and pay $46 to have them record your Affidavit of Virtue.
Well, that’s not the exact title.  It’s called “Discharge of Restrictive Covenant Affecting Protected Classes.”  It has no legal effect.  Restrictive covenants which discriminate against protected classes already are unenforceable, but by recording this form you can proclaim to the world that unenforceable restrictive covenants on your land are now double-plus-ungood.  You and your virtuous neighbors might want to put up lawn signs, get t-shirts printed, have block parties.  You could invite city council members and legislators to attend and congratulate you on your virtue.
In addition, I suspect the newspapers will publish names of people who have signaled their virtue by recording these forms, and also the names of racist, hateful curmudgeons like me who won’t spring $46 to record a document that does absolutely nothing.  So you’ll have that going for you.
I can hardly wait.
Joe Doakes

Sort of a like a PC loyalty oath.

I’ve never been a yuge Pink Floyd fan.

But if you had to pick a guitar player whose style is probably most like mine, it’s probably David Gilmour.

And Gilmour is selling off most of his guitar collection for charity, including some seriously iconic pieces:

The instruments that will be on the auction block at Christie’s New York headquarters this June include many of his signature instruments. He’ll be selling the Black Strat — a guitar he played on “Money,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb” and enough other songs that it has amassed a legacy worthy of its own book — as well as his Stratocaster with the serial number 0001, the 12-string he wrote “Wish You Were Here” on and the Ovation six-string he’s played “Comfortably Numb” on at almost every live performance he’s done.

“These guitars have been very good to me,” he tells Rolling Stone on a phone call from his home in England. “They’re my friends. They have given me lots of music. I just think it’s time that they went off and served someone else. I have had my time with them. And of course the money that they will raise will do an enormous amount of good in the world, and that is my intention.”

I liked this particular pullquote:

It’s very hard to talk about the writing process and how I record and use little snippets. Sometimes I’m hearing a piece of music as it’s playing on the radio or on television, and I record 10 seconds of it, just for a little particular thing and rhythm or something attracts me. I will go back to that little moment to say, “What was it about this that attracted me and what can I … not steal, but pay homage to or extract a feeling from it.” Most of [the ideas] are things strummed on acoustic guitar or plunked on a piano. Ninety percent of them, I will not understand why on earth I jotted them down and recorded them, but I have several hundred of them. I’ll find something good in there.

So – time to find that winning lottery ticket…

Rep. Dan Crenshaw gives a better speech in Spanish than most Congresscritters give in English

Alternate title: “Ryan Winkler tries to make the trains run on time”.

The DFL majority in the House has moved all the House’s committees under the Ways and Means committee – meaning that Ways and Means chair Lyndon Carlson can can move bills around, and forward to votes, without a whole lot of scrutiny:

According to the DFLers who now make up the majority in the House, the newish method of managing the flow of budget-related bills is more efficient: a way for legislation to spend less time on the House floor and more time in committees, where the heavy lifting of legislating is really done.

But for House Republicans — both the 55-member Republican Caucus and the four-member “New Republican” caucus — those same rules constitute an anti-transparency move that puts democracy at risk. The newbie GOP even borrowed the motto of the Washington Post — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — when discussing the rules, and one person testifying against them even drew a comparison to the casus belli of the Revolutionary War.
So is the move anti-democratic or a way of making things more efficient? Both? And does anyone outside the halls of the state Capitol much care?

Given that we now have situations with pages of bills moving through “divisions” – not even “committees”, anymore – with a single terse memo of commentary, I’d say “anti-democratic”.

Indeed, given that Ryan Winkler is behind it, I’d say “prima facie anti-democratic“.  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools are closed today.  I’m getting old, my memory isn’t what it was.  I remember looking forward to snow days, but did we get cold days off school?  My sister claims there were a couple of occasions when the country kids didn’t have to come in, only the town kids, but I wonder if that was due to bad roads for the school busses more than low temperatures?
I’m having trouble squaring school closures for cold, record setting cold in Chicago, freezing temperatures for  75% of the nation, with The New Hotness’ claim global warming will destroy the world in 12 years.  
Although if it does, I suppose women and minorities will be hardest hit, so I’ve got that going for me.

It’s science, because shut up.

To: Andrew Zimmern, Celebrity Chef
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Appreciation!

Chef,

I caught this on Twitter over the past weekend:

Although the government shutdown is ending, at @lucky_cricket_west_end we are planning to continue to serve all those with a Fed Gov ID throughout next week, Monday-Friday, 2-5pm. We realize that furloughed workers will continue to need food since they h… https://t.co/h6qga7mPUP pic.twitter.com/67fbA92RaC

— Andrew Zimmern (@andrewzimmern) January 27, 2019

Glad to see you’ll be giving “Free” food to people who missed two checks…

…well, no. Wait. They had two checks delayed before getting it all paid back, amid a national welter of corporate virtue signaling of financial support – extremely low-interest loans, offers to skip payments, and, well, free food.

I and a few million private sector workers would have loved some of that ‘compassion” when we were struggling.

Know what I heard from one bill collector when I was out of work back in 2003? “Get a job”.

Hold that thought, Chef.

That is all.

…calls for a repeal of the First Amendent:

We cannot allow the financing of misinformation campaigns to shape our democracy.

We can disagree on policy, but climate change is real. Period.

Proud to have joined @chelliepingree on this letter asking for greater responsibility to our democracy and planet. https://t.co/5hLsg1FmgT

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 28, 2019

There’s really no other way to put it.

Ilhan Omar – perhaps the most powerful person in Minnesota today in terms of foreign policy – twote:

A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump’s efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican’s efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 25, 2019

She was basically parroting the Maduro regime line – that the Trump administration was imposing a “far right” government on the “democratically elected” government of Venezuela.

A congressman who isn’t actually an active disgrace to his state, Carlos Curbelo, responded:

.@jguaido is actually from a center left party. He supports human rights & the fair treatment of all people. He was also legitimately & democratically elected. You’d think a progressive would be a little more supportive. But no, the sick obsession w @realDonaldTrump is blinding https://t.co/Eh96qanAE4

— Carlos Curbelo (@carloslcurbelo) January 25, 2019

In her own way, Omar may be a dumber, more toxic sign of the times than Tide Pod Evita.

…another hypocrite.

Back in the nineties, there was a hilarious list circulating around this “internet” thing I’d just encountered – a list of rabidly anti-gun New York pols and celebrities who had New York City carry permits.  They included a slew of actors, politicians, and – most ironically at the time – the frothingly anti-gun publisher of the New York Times, Punch Sulzberger, who was known to have his Beretta 92 badly concealed under his suit coat as he’s rail against plebeians’ right to own firearms. 

Former mayor and soon to be perennial Presidential candidate Mike “Where Have You Gone Rudy Giuliani” Bloomberg, who has spent  most of his past 20 years surrounded by armed security and cops, donates millions to groups that want to disarm law-abiding citizens and crime victims.  It could be fairly said that he may not have bought the DFL the 2nd Congressional District in Minnesota, per se, but he certainly chipped in more than most of the Lefty Plutocrat Panel.  

His message:  Guns for plebeians, bad.  Muggles don’t need any more protection from crime than the cops, whenever they can fit you in.  

But if you go to his alma mater?  

Then, your life deserves armed protection.   

Bloomberg pimps for an armed police force for Johns Hopkins – because it’s in Baltimore. 

Despite his acknowledgement that firearms would be useful to protect the elites at Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg hasn’t let up on curbing everyone else’s access to the means of self-defense. In fact, the Sun reported that as he was in Annapolis advocating for the armed private police force, the anti-gun financier was also pressing lawmakers to advance his gun control agenda.
The average residents of Baltimore can’t afford to hire their own private police force, and thanks to gun control advocates like Bloomberg, they can’t provide for their own self-defense outside their homes either. Maryland is one of the eight remaining states that has a severely restrictive may-issue concealed carry permitting regime. 
Moreover, it’s not as if the law-abiding residents of Baltimore don’t have “good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun… as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.” In 2018, Baltimore saw 300 homicides for the fourth year in a row. In 2017, FBI data showed that Baltimore had the highest murder rateof an U.S. city with more than 500,000 residents and the second highest violent crime rate.

But certainly he never went full-blown hypocrite, rolling around in the special security he, personally, got, rubbing it all over himself like Scrooge McDuck in his cash vault?

Did he?

In 2011, the billionaire referred to the NYPD as “my own army.” Following his terms, Bloomberg hired some of the same officers from his security detail to work for him privately.

Oh.

Never mind.

…over the recent layoffs in the hipster millennial junk news industry…

…but in this case, it’s Iowahawk doing the Schadenfreud.

Another @iowahawkblog work of art pic.twitter.com/BDhiXxUKRo

— SixStringTweets (@SixStringTweets) January 25, 2019

I can’t tell if sound more like a Nebraska outtake or a Jay Farrar demo.

So the police roll up to a house, and the woman meets them out at the curb with two black eyes and a face puffed up from having been punched a couple times. 

The guy comes to the door in a, er wife beater (don’t look at me, I don’t invent these terms) without a scratch on him except for scraped knuckles with smears of blood up and down his fingers. 

Asked what happened, the guy responds “Sheprovoked the whoooole thing!”

How do you think that’s gonna play with the cops, the prosecutors, and a jury? 

Not well, most likely. Whatever the “provocation” may have been, it’d be pretty absurd to presume it warranted beating someone purple. It’s kind of a no-brainer. 

This past week, I’ve heard some people I otherwise have reason to believe are serviceably intelligent – who, in reference to the Covington flap, say “the MAGA cap is, itself, a provocation!” that warrants all manner of mayhem against people who wear them. 

I’m not big into wearing paraphernalia for political campaigns, even those I completely support. But this claim is one of the most toxic things I’ve heard lately. 

First of all – the MAGA cap is “racist” almost entirely because, for the past two years, Trump’s opponents have been *saying* it was. It has little or nothing to do with the actual behavior of actual individuals who supported or voted for Trump. It’s called “othering”, and it’s one of the most noxious tactics in modern politics. 

Second – the idea that there’s some license to try to destroy peoples’ lives (or worse), not just because of the (utterly legal) beliefs they have, not even because of the (utterly legal) symbols they may wear, but because of the meaning that (people have told) you the symbols have? 

Could there be a more toxic idea? 

In this society, the remedy for (for sake of argument) “bad speech” has always been “more better speech”, at least among those who deserve to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of our society [1] believes “our ends justify our means”. 

I mean, don’t get me wrong – if the notion of the intellectual “Purge Night” takes off, the thought of taking a can of Pam to the next smug little fop wearing a “Che Guevara” t-shirt would work for me…

…but for the fact that *no free society can survive* that sort of thing, any more than the marriage in that first example is going to survive. 

But just like the “She provoked me!” at the top of the post, “wearing your symbol justifies any evil I want to commit against you” is the refuge of the entitled narcissist and the abuser. 

[1] And in the interest of diplomacy, I’ll say “both sides do it”, although my heart’s really not in it. Mike Pence’s kids aren’t throwing smoke bombs and punching 17 year old girls at their opposition’s rallies, but Tim Kane’s kid sure as hell did. Still, the point is “your (interpretation of) someone’s symbol doesn’t justify a response faaaaar out of proportion to the symbol itself”. Ever.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution provides:  “He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”  The State of the Union originally was a letter the Present sent to Congress.  Later, the President went in person to speak to Congress, which turned into a silly partisan event where half the chamber leaps to applaud every time he takes a breath. 
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi won’t let President Trump deliver the State of the Union address to Congress while the government is shut down so it’s postponed, or maybe not, now that we’re open for three weeks.  Nobody knows. 
Actually, nobody cares.  It’s grandstanding.  It’s silly.  Instead of delivering a speech or mailing a letter, Trump ought to break new ground: give the State of the Union by Twitter.  Hey, it’s his signature medium.  Why not? 
 “The Constitution requires me to advise Congress on the State of the Union.  Democrats won’t let me speak to Congress in person so I’m tweeting it to you, the American people.  Pass along this message to your elected representative, will you?”
 “The union is in a sorry state.  We owe more than we can repay.  Deep state saboteurs within our own government are undermining the principles of representative democracy.  The nation is flooded with illegal immigrants who suck up welfare, commit crimes and vote in elections for policies that further weaken the nation.”
 “We can’t stem the violence in our own cities but we’re wasting lives and tax dollars protecting Europe from Russia and most of North Africa from themselves.  We’ve barely recovered from a decade-long economic slump but influential people are already demanding we saddle the economy with higher taxes and more regulations.”
 “I call on Congress to end deficit spending, cut government spending, lower taxes, reduce regulations, cease subsidizing other nations, defend our own borders, and then step out of the way.  Give us half a chance and ordinary Americans will make America great again.”
 “If Congress remains deadlocked, all is not lost.  Elections have consequences.  I have a pen and I’ve got a phone.  I can use that pen to sign executive orders and administrative actions that will move the ball forward.” 
 “Good night, and may God bless America.”
That ought to set the cat among the pigeons. 
Joe Doakes

It’s got my vote.

To: Most Of You In Big Media
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Perspective

All,

I remember back in 2003, during the post-9/11 recession, when my field was in its “last hired, first fired” phase, and I – a single parent with two kids – got laid off from a contracting job after my old startup closed.

How it took me three months to get an interview. Five to earn *any* money. And 10.5 months to actually get a job – which led to 6-12 months catching up back bills, and years rebuilding credit. How we scrimped, stretched unemployment checks and a tax refund and about five weeks of contract work to cover six months.

And you know what I remember the most? How the media constantly did stories talking about all the trouble we unemployed and underemployed private sector workers were having, and how dire our situations were – even after *two missed paychecks*, and nobody saying “when you finally land a job (whenever that is), we’re going to give you all the “back pay” you would have had coming”.

That helped so much.

UPDATE: Wait – that never happened. Nobody gave a crap. To the media, private sector unemployment when there’s a GOP president is a feature, not a bug.

As far as those Fed workers go – I get the dislocation that happens when your income gets diverted (see above), and that lots of federal workers aren’t the stereotype of Big Bureaucracy fatcats with the six figure salaries and the golden pensions (although a lot more are than they like to let on) and that invincible sense of entitlement to your income.

But when this kerfuffle over the budget and wall ends, THEY GET BACK PAY. EVERY PENNY.

As a private sector worker who’ll be working until he’s 75 to pay the pensions of all these federal and state and local workers so they can retire at 55, can I just say “please stop with the &^%$# waterworks”?

That is all.

NYTimes  reporter tweets:

I'm a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I'd like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.

— Dan Levin (@globaldan) January 24, 2019

Gosh – what do you suppose his angle is going to be?

Caitlin Flanagan at that noted conservative tool The Atlantic notes that h Big Media botched everthing that could be botched about the Covington flap – and gave us the pullquote of the week:

The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.

But read the whole thing anyway.

The serious answer – so the good guy doesn’t run out of bullets before the bad guy runs out of attack.

Homeowner in Houston repels a violent, armed home invasion…

…by five men with “big guns”:

One man was left dead in front of the house, at least one wounded man took off on foot and the others left in an SUV, police said.
The car crashed into a pole nearby at Harrisburg Boulevard, where a man was found dead inside, according to police. Police say another person in the car fled, collapsed down the street on Capitol Street and later died. 
The fourth and fifth suspects were also injured and taken to a hospital, police said.
Outside the house, homicide investigators are combing through the crime scene where it appears there was a shootout; several dozen shell casings have been found. 

No word yet on charges for the defender. Fingers crossed.

Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms notes:

No, five bad guys coming to your house may not be a common thing, but we can’t pretend it hasn’t happened. Not now.
Now, let’s imagine how someone in a situation like this would fair under a 10-round magazine limit. Oh, they could change magazines in theory, but with that much lead flying around? More rounds in the weapon at the start is always a better place to be.
Of course, if a 10-round limit is bad, imagine what they’d go through if they were stuck with Oregon’s proposed 5-round limit. This man would’ve never had enough ammo on his person to have survived this one.

Hey, just surrender and hope that your attackers don’t cut you into long thin strips…