Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Trump is threatening to send 10,000 troops to Iran, boots on the ground,  which moderate Republicans fear would be crossing a “red line” and would cost Republicans the midterm elections.

The fear is that if we lose seats in the midterm elections, then we won’t have power so we won’t be able to get Presidential appointments confirmed or judges confirmed or the Save Act passed or DHS funded.

Which would be different from now, how, exactly?

Maybe the problem is not lack of Congressional power but lack of willingness to use what power we have. That problem won’t get solved by backing down from Iran. 

Joe Doakes

 

Yep. I think we’re past the point where timidity is the prescription for the midterms.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I’ve been a Comcast customer since 1998 when I moved to The Cities. They recently jacked my rate to $103 per month.  I called but there is no customer loyalty reward program so fine, I’ll switch to T-Mobile.

That was a bust. It seems T-Mobile internet uses the same technology as my ordinary T-Mobile cell phone data plan, but somehow prioritizes ordinary cell phone data packets higher than internet data packets.  In busy times, the internet lag was worse than dial-up.  And that’s if the connection didn’t drop. 

Makes me wonder about other options. What do SITD readers use for internet connection? How fast and how reliable is it?  Anybody still using the telephone wires?  Anybody using Elon’s satellites?

Joe Doakes

 

I’m a little curious myself.   I’ve been on Comcast since ’99, and given that I do so much work from home the speed and, yes, reliability is hard to argue with.  

Starlink is JUST the wrong side of a viable option for me ATM.  But only just.  

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is talking with Bill GUNKEL, former Republican who is now chairmain of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul…er, Dennis Massie”.  

GUNKEL:   Illegal immigrant voting is impossible.   

BERG:  Of course it is.  

GUNKEL: Glad we agree!

BERG:  Of course.   When the DFL jammed down automatic vote registration on issuing drivers licenses, and then passed drivers licenses for illegal aliens. and pointedly shot down GOP attempts to have those IDs labeled “Not to be used for voting”, in a system that allows any voter to “vouch” up to eight other voters in with a – wait for it – drivers license, that was all just to spike the rhetorical ball in the end zone during the “trifecta”.  

GUNKEL:  There’ve only been five examples of illegal voting found in the past 400 years…

BERG:   Er…OK, so let’s say some illegal does vote in Minnesota.  We can’t identify illegals at the polls, and we don’t have provisional ballots, so once a ballot is cast, there’s nothing we can do about it in the unlikely event we do catch them.  Which, if you assume the oh-so-extreme hypothetical that Secretary of State Simon and Attorney General Ellison are in on the fraud, there’s absolutely no impetus for them to do.   Aren’t these “small numbers” small numbers because the system is designed not to catch illegal immigrants voting?

GUNKEL: (pregnant pause)

BERG:   Not to mention the thousands of cases of fraudulent registrations found in 2012, which I’m sure were there just for the fun it. 

GUNKEL:   Illegal immigrant voting is impossible.   

BERG:  Of course it is.  

The most reliable weapon in the arsenal of anyone at war with the United States is Americans – specifically Americans of the left and, lately, the “horseshoe right”, who’ve pretty much taken Jane Fonda’s mantel and run with it.  

The Mullahs knows this – it almost worked for them in re Gaza.  

And I’m pretty sure they’re counting on it working again – and that it’s behind the missile “attack” on Diego Garcia over the weekend.  

Launching two missiles at a target like that is like having your six year old nephew throw the first punch in a brawl.  It’d take a pretty serious “saturation” attack and/or a lot of luck to get anything onto that airfield that’d explode.  

And whoever fired the missiles had to know that.   The target wasn’t the B2s or B52s.  It was X, MSNow and Tucker Carlson.  

Oh yeah – and nations, especially nations that Mossad penetrated decades ago, don’t likely just arf up a missile that doubles the known range overnight, do they?

Not really, no.  

The target wasn’t bombers. It was an influence bomb.

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, writes:

When the people of a nation have been disarmed and oppressed, it is fanciful to expect them to rise up against the well-armed government which is oppressing them.  The Founding Fathers knew that and thus enshrined in the Constitution the right to keep and bear arms, not solely for defense against robbers or home invaders but also against a tyrannical government.

In World War 2, the United States air-dropped Liberator pistols to enable disarmed people in The French Resistance to kill Nazis. That wasn’t enough to win the war – troops in the air, on the seas and on the ground were still needed – but it was a gesture of faith in ordinary people’s ability to seize control of their own future.

I think we should do it again, in Cuba and Iran, with leaflets saying. “It’s your country. Take it back.”

What can it hurt?

Joe Doakes

 

The Liberator was a single-shot .45 pistol with a rate of fire of about one round a minute; it had a plug bolt, and no extractor – the user would run a stick down the bore to extract the case after firing. It was literally useful for nothing but knifepoint range assassinations. It came with, essentially, a Bazooka Joe comic (kids, ask your parents) showing illiterate tribesmen how to use it.

Records of its use are sketchy, but doesn’t love the concept?

I’m going to advocate for a revival of the “Sten” gun – a submachine gun designed and built in record time in the UK right after Dunkirk, when speed and simplicity were king;  made out of stampings so crude the Soviets looked and said “uh, that’s some crude stampings, there) with only the bolt and barrel being machined, and using the trove of 9mm ammunition captured in North Africa until domestic manufacturing started, It equipped most of the Commonwealth armies (at least among troops that didn’t rate a Thompson) and was airdropped into occupied Europe in prodigious numbers.  Iy was also so simple that plans airdropped into Poland, France, Norway and Yugoslavia allowed them to be manufactured in quantity in occupied Europe.   

Crude?  Absolutely.  Some Brits claimed theirs jammed every time they were fired.  The one I shot had the back receiver cap fall off with the last round I fired. 

But it cost $15 in 1944 dollars to build, with maybe five man-hours of time, including machining.   

Apropos not much.  Honest.  

What can I say, it’s been a busy year.   Details upcoming (and by “upcoming” I don’t necessarily mean “soon”.   

I pulled the plug on my attempted redesign.  It was just gruesome.    I thought I could make it work, but…well, you see what happened. 

I’m going to try to restore things to more or less the way they were from (ahem) 2006-ish to last year.   And yes, try to write more while we’re at it.   

Stay tuned.

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Forty years ago, I volunteered to serve as Election Judge for the 1984 Presidential election. Paper ballots. Hand counted. Two judges verified each ballot.   We had one volunteer election monitor watching us count for a while but he got bored and left early. Yes, it took a while – I remember the sun coming up as we were finishing – but nobody in the room had the slightest doubt the count was accurate and fair.

I remember watching lawyers scrutinize “hanging chads” on television for the 2000 election that even the New York Times finally admitted was accurate and fair.

I remember watching poll workers hang cardboard over the windows so nobody could watch the count in 2020. I still don’t believe that result was accurate or fair.

The key difference is transparency.  Why can’t we supplement eyeballs with technology?  

Hang a camera over every counting table, broadcasting to the internet in real time. The whole world can watch. Why not? What is there to hide?

Joe Doakes

 

Because that would risk delivering the undesired result.  

American society eventually coughed Alex Jones out of its system. 

Could we maybe do the same with Tucker Carlson?

The thing is, once he gets up the nerve to finally name Trump the person he’s yapping about, he’ll have a whole new career joining Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arne Carlson as “the good Republicans”.  

Not sure why he’s waiting.  

SCENE:   Velma pulls an “Elliot Ness” mask off of the crook, revealing Governor Tim Walz.  

DAPHNE AND SHAGGY:  “It’s Minnesota Governor Tim Walz”

WALZ:  “And let me tell you, I’d have gotten those fraudsters if its weren’t for…”

SCOOBY: “Rose Doggone Resky Kids?”

WALZ:  “No, knucklehead, those ICE agents.  I was just about there!”

He was —>this close<—-. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Got invited to be a lab rat. No thanks. My Dad participated in the national vaccine experiment during Covid and it gave him the myocarditis that killed him. But it occurs to me that Democrats always claim illegal aliens are here to do the jobs Americans won’t do.  Perfect. Step right this way, folks. 

This is a friendly reminder from Walgreens that you’re invited to join our Vaccine Research Community.

By joining, you’ll:

• Receive updates about future vaccine studies
• Learn about opportunities near you
• Decide if participation is right for you — with no obligation

Joining is voluntary, free, and you may opt out at any time. Every person who signs up helps researchers move science forward and support healthier communities.

 

Speaking for myself?  They gotta get research subjects somewhere.  

But the only ones that should do it for free have four legs.  

War is hell. 

I’m not going to be out there chanting “USA! USA!”. War generally means a lot of suffering and misery for the people who *didn’t* start it. It’s nothing to celebrate. 

Put a pin in that thought. We’ll come back to it. 

So, about some of the stuff I’m seeing on social media about this weekend’s happenings:

1. “Congress needs to approve this kind of thing”

Forget for a moment that no President, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, including Obama, has gone to Congress *before* going medieval since Harry S. Truman. 

Let’s go back to December 11, 1941. Remember when Congress declared war on Germany and Italy? 

Yeah? You do? Liar. They didn’t. 

They didn’t have to. Germany declared war on us. When someone goes to war *against us*, we don’t have to declare anything. 

Now – did Iran *declare* war against us? I mean, they stormed our embassy, kidnapped its staff and held them hostage for a year and a half (an act of war all by itself – even Jimmy Carter figured that out eventually), funded and equipped proxies that blew up our Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, funded other proxies and murdered many Americans all over the world between then and 2003, and covertly but directly supported attacks on US troops in Iraq; they perfected the modern “IED”, and Iranian money (and sometimes troops) were directly responsible for the deaths of 600 US servicepeople and indirectly for many more. And that’s just their attacks on America; their proxies conquered Lebanon (once a moderate, pluralistic nation), Yemen (which was not, but which they drove even further back into barbarism), and were the prime funders of Hamas through years of rocket attacks on Israel, 2-4 Intifadas, and October 7. 

So – do we need a notarized form to tell us that Iran considered *itself* at war with the US? 

Don’t get me wrong – I would very much like Congress to vote on this. I want to get votes on record. But I don’t care how “libertarian” you are – responding to acts of war against the US is a legitimate executive branch role. 

2. “Heyyyyy! Trump ran on being the ‘peace’ President!”

Yep. And the Middle East is the least peaceful place on earth, and with Al Quaeda pretty much vanquished most of that war (see above) has come to us courtesy of Iran; the *many* attacks on Israel by Hamas, Hezb’allah, the Houthis, the Iran/Iraq war that may have killed a million, the civil war in Lebanon that saw a modern, moderate, prosperous multireligious society destroyed with tens of thousands of dead, and replaced by a mini-Iran, the Yemeni, Libyan and Syrian civil wars that’ve claimed perhaps a million lives between them. 

And let’s not forget internal peace. Iran’s government had murdered it’s own people well into the six digit range over the past five decades. The Shah’s secret police were really nasty – but the “Revolutionary Guards” were much, much worse in terms of numbers and, yes, cruelty over time. 

Will removing the Mullahs make the middle east more peaceful or less? 

Oh, yeah – Russia is about to lose its main supplier of drones to shoot at Ukraine, and China just got a big warning sign about invading Taiwan (not to mention the very real chance that the US could cut off China’s supply of oil, especially given the removal of Venezuela). So it’s not just the Middle East. 

3. “It’s *reckless!*”

You know what’s reckless AND pointless? Responding to a terror attack that kills dozens of Americans and hundreds of other people by shooting a cruise missile at some empty tents and calling it square. That’s what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did – “sent messages” that, if you got us made enough, we might get angry. At best, it killed some terrorist foot soldiers; at worst, it convinced them that we were impotent – that they could, I dunno, crash planes into our skyscrapers and Pentagon without worrying too much. That all they had to do was hang on; they had plenty of red shirts for us to kill off. They didn’t care. 

But now, with Sulemani, Maduro, El Mecia and the Mullahs, we’re doing it different; we’re taking out the head of the snake. War is hell, indeed – but if you’re going to do it, taking out the leadership makes a whole lot more sense than killing bag men, camels or empty tents. We’re not trying to “Send messages” to people who answer their voice mail less often that Gen-Zs. We’re sending it to the foot soldiers: “See what happened to your leaders? You’ve got a chance. Take it”. 

Think of it this way: if the US and UK could have killed Hitler, Göring, Himmer, Göbbels, Seyss-Inquart and the rest of the leadership, and skipped Warsaw, Rotterdam, the Blitz, Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Hamburg and Dresden and the extermination camps and millions of lives – is that not a better plan *humanity as a whole*?

4. “He’s acting like a dictator”

He’s doing what Obama did. I was about to say “exactly what Obama did”, but that’d be false: Obama did a lot more of it, but it was a lot less effective. It – his policies and those of Big Guy after him – set the permission structure that led *directly* to Yemen, the Russo-Ukraine war, October 7, and were (and may still) lead to China invading Taiwan. 

5. “Regime change is bad, and we suck at it”

We certainly had a 20 year losing streak. 

But, er, remember Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, the eastern third of Germany and, eventually, Ukraine ? The people there will tell you we’re pretty GOOD at regime change when we do it right. 

6. “I mean, overthrowing governments to change the regime”

Like, Poland? It was, to borrow a phrase, “mostly peaceful” – but the US, UK, Germany, the Vatican and the *AFL-CIO* joined forces to undermine the Polish government. It was unironically mostly peaceful – ZOMO did all the killing – but it most definitely overthrew the government and changed the regime. 

So let’s give ourselves a couple of retrospective “W”s. The people of Poland, Estonia and Czechia sure do. 

7. “What about the schoolgirls we bombed!”

Nobody outside the Iran State News Service is reporting that yet. As loathsome as America’s mainstream media is, the ISNS is an *official* propaganda ministry. This time yesterday they were also saying Ayatollah Khamenei was alive and well and leading the troops at the front (?). To the extent there HAS been any independent investigation, there are reports that the school was next to an IRGC base. So did it happen? We don’t know – and when I say “we”, that means “neither of us”. Like I said – war is hell; it is inherently arbitrary, capricious and cruel. Like the mullahs – who, given the context, we’d *really* best make sure are gone for good. 

And if you’ve skipped past the murders of 32,000 Iranians in the streets, and likely hundreds or thousands more in prison, not to mention the many tens of thousands murdered over the past 47 years, let’s just say my respect for your point is, er, “nuanced”. 

Let’s get this over with, and help Iranians build themselves a free country.

I’ve been hearing the plaintive stories of Americans, many of them seniors, stranded in Puerto Vallarta by the Cartels’ tantrum over their jefe being put down.  

I’ve got a simple solution.  

They should form groups, organized online, to follow the sicarios around and blow whistles at them.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

A friend who owns a contracting business writes:

***

I’ve driven past a certain St. Paul grade school a few times this week, on the way to a job site. Each time, I see adults standing on the sidewalk wearing yellow vests, no kids around, apparently watching for ICE.

Just what the hell do they think they’re doing?   First off there is zero, absolutely zero, credible evidence that immigration efforts are directed at snatching kids from schools.  There is no interest in the government to waste time on that.  None.  So do these jackasses still think that’s what they’re protecting?  Or do they stand there because school administrators, janitors, indoctrinators (there are no teachers), and other adults are invaders?

And what is their plan?   Let’s assume they think they’re standing guard against ICE showing up to snatch up invaders of any type.  What do these jerks think they will do about it?  Do they intend to alert the invaders and assist them to flee to avoid arrest?  Are they intending to aid and abet known criminals?  Are they intending to engage in knowing obstruction of federal immigration enforcement?

I suspect the answer is yes to each of those and in each case it’s a crime.

They’ve been prosecuting people for silently praying outside baby murder factories for years now.  Isn’t it time to start prosecuting people who are intentionally obstructing federal law enforcement?  

***

He has a point. 

Joe Doakes

 

One the one hand, he’s got a point. ‘

On the other?  

It’s Minnesota.  Any county attorney that participated in the prosecution would find themselves doing document review for public works before the ink was dry on their motion. 

We’re all (*) familiar with the basic “logical fallacies” – flaws in reasoning that weaken or invalidate arguments. Things like the “ad hominen” (attacking the person rather than their argument), “appeal to authority” (comparing credentials rather than arguing the facts), “tu quoque” (comparing an argument with previous argument) and so on. 

I’m here to submit a few new ones. 

“Ad Foxinem” – claiming that someone’s argument is invalid because they supposedly “watch Fox News”. (And yes, the same applies to MSNow. Or would, if anyone watched it. That was an “Appeal to Ridicule” for those paying attention). 

“The Epstein Fallacy” – claiming that someone’s argument on an unrelated matter is false because the Epstein Files haven’t been released. 

“Argumentum ad Terminus” – believing that ending an argument by saying or typeing “Period” or “Full stop” makes an argument, whatever its merits, absolutely solid. 

“Faux Possibilitus – starting a claim with “What if I told you that…” does not make the claim true”. 

The Shifted Burden Fallacy: Ending a claim – solid or absurd – with “prove me wrong”. 

And “Argumentum ad LOL” – Ending your response to an argument with “LOL” is absolutely factually dispositive”. This is closely relate to the “Argumentum tu Emoji” – attacking an argument with an emoticon (for instance, the passive-aggressive “Laugh” emoji). 

Also – “Ad Omniciens” – responding to an argument with “Not EVERYONE believes that” (or its sibling, “Many people believe…”, also known as “the NPR Assertion”). 

“Argumentum pro Tantrum” – regardless of the merits of the argument, if you don’t acquiesce without question, I will unfriend you and never talk with you again. 

Discusss.

(*) I’m feeling optimistic, so sue me.

And poof, just like that, people who always venerated “due process” and chanted “NO KINGS” on demand…

…had always opposed due process and believed themselves kings. 

It’s not news – liquor licensing has always been a political meat tenderizer, used to beat businesses into whatever the powers that be want the business to comply with, frequently things most of us agree with (like punishing flagrant serving of minors or lots of unchecked brawling.   

But to “punish” businesses for patronizing a class of people who are doing something completely legal?

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Recently watched the Amazon Prime movie “Heads of State” starring Idris Elba as Prime Minister of the UK and John Cena as President of the United States.  They join forces to defeat the bad guys who want the US out of the NATO alliance.  

One of the bad guys gives a moving speech explaining the plan and the most amusing thing happened:  I found myself cheering for the bad guys. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Pretty good movie but a massive propaganda failure. 

Joe Doakes

Every time I’m tempted to re-up Prime, I hear something like this.

This is what’s been bothering me.  

We’re heading toward an election that might be the MNGOP’s best chance to move the needle in executive offices in a very long time.  The DFL’s fraud problem should by all rights give the GOP a shot at governor, if the GOP can pick a solid candidate (and the straw polls so far say we just might).  

And on the surface Richard Carlbom, the new chair of the DFL, doens’t appear to be the glib money master that his predecessor, Ken Martin, was.  (And don’t you dare let anyone say he looks like a young Herman Göring).

Here’s the problem.  Remember 2012?  

The Voter ID Amendment – which is an 80/20 issue nationwide, and even wins a majority of Democrats in public opinion polls- should have been an easy winner.  

But Carlbom engineering a campaign that emotionally logrolled ignorant, emotion driven Minnesotans into tying voting “yes” on same sex marriage to voting “no” on voter ID.  

And the morons did it.  

And he’s doing it again, with the ICE thing.   

Joe Doakes, ere of Como Park, emails:

Amazon just implemented two factor authentication. I hate it.

I get a daily email of free Kindle book listings which I receive on my phone

I sign into my Amazon account on my phone so I can download the free Kindle book

Amazon places a telephone call to my phone to recite the six digit authentication code. It is spoken so I cannot cut and paste

I flip from the phone app to the sign in page and enter the code they just told me over the telephone

And it’s an invalid code

Go all the way back to the beginning to start over

Even if it worked, all that would prove is that the person who’s trying to log into my account has my phone. Doesn’t mean it’s actually me. 

 I wish there was an opt out

Joe Doakes

 

It’s cut down my Amazon orders from mimimal to almost nil.  

Most of Secretary of State Simon’s, and his defenders’, responses to questions about election irregularities come off as some variant of:’

• Because I said so
• It’s the law, no take-backsies
• Don’t make me turn this car around.

I’m not convinced. 

Either is Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park:s

For those who don’t think it could happen

Am I the only one who thinks thar either:

1. All the posturing about ICE is to deflect attention from the fraud, or
2. if the focus turns to the fraud, all those protesters will switch from casing ICE agents to hassling auditors and FBI agents?

Remember when militant militias who rejected government authority were the bad guys?

The left, either.  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Sydney Sweeney (the Good Jeans ad model) is in trouble for climbing the hillside to hang her new line of fashion bras on the Hollywood sign. She didn’t get permission from the owners. Here’s the final photo:

You’re telling me this millionaire hot chick spent hours climbing all over the sign to personally hang bras?  I wouldn’t have believed it.  I would have bet real money that her publicity company hired people to do it, that hers is merely the name on the label, that she had no idea what permits are needed.  

Here’s the video.  I would have lost that bet.  Awesome prank.  Good for her.

I certainly hope the DA doesn’t prosecute poor Sydney.  She could wind up a convicted felon and get stuck serving as President of the United States.  Wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

Joe Doakes

 

Christy was, btw, a really good movie.   

Look, it’s not possible for me to respect Tim Walz any less than I did in 2022 – when he’d abandoned his National Guard unit, and then spent eighteen months as a pocket Mussolini to deal with a three month crisis, completely trashing the notion of “science” – much less today. 

But somehow he’s still trying.   

The quote speaks for itself:

I don’t have any words to describe my revulsion.

Fortunately, someone does:

How long til Walz or one of his toadies calls the Holocaust Museum “Nazis?”

I got into a debate over the Good and Pretti shootings.   

I’m posting this here mostly to have my summation available when I need it.  

Modern political social media demands binaries, black hats and white hats, no ambiguity. Which is a problem, given that sSeveral things can be, and in this case certainly are, true at the same time. 

In no particular order:

1. Civil liberties are for everyone, especially people we disagree with. 

2. It’d be obtuse not to admit that Big Left is a profoundly illiberal force that, true to Alinsky, seeks to force its enemies to live by the rules it only invokes for it’s own gain. As it does with all liberal institutions, Big Left seeks to kill and skin the institutions and wear them like a meat suit. If and when they get the power they want, they *will*, not might, render those liberties pointless. We know that because that’s exactly what they’ve done every place they’ve gotten power. 

3. Federal law enforcement is very militarized, just as we warned during the Obama administration. 

4. So are Big Left’s shock troops. Militarized, well funded, and not bound by any niceties of social behavior. This past year, ICE has been shot at, and rammed over 100 times, including at least twice here in the Twin Cities. I can’t say I’d want to face that wearing a Men’s Wearhouse suit; I’d choose the battle rattle too. 

5. We can NOT trust our sources of information. Depending on who you believe, Renee Good was either a stay at home mom who’d just dropped her kid off at school and was on her way to deliver cookies and butterflies to homeless amputees, or someone with a long criminal jacket, including domestic abuse charges, who ditched her husband and grabbed the kid to come to Minneapolis to live out her fantasy of being Robyn Hood. Evidence seems to be pointing more toward “B”, but I’ll admit I have some bias. Nevertheless, the media and Big Left’s noise machine is going all in on “A”. 

6. Depending on who you believe, she was either murdered in cold blood by an untrained, inexperienced goon hired straight out of a strip club in Pensacola who was given a gun and a quota, OR a veteran of two decades in the military and law enforcement and a spotless record and ample, painful experience with how little these entitled white progressive f*cks care about hurting people. 

This next one is a little abstruse:

7. In 1933, when German President Von Walz…er, Von Hindenburg declared emergency power, and using the provisions in the Weimar constitution installed the “Hitler Cabinet”, among the biggest supporters in the Reichstag were…the Communists. They figured that the upcoming struggle between the Communists and the “horseshoe right” of the day would make the center untenable, and they would benefit. They were right about the first part, but grossly miscalculated the last bit. Point being, Big Left benefits, or thinks they benefit, from destabilizing society, including the erosion of the rule of law and “order” in the broad sense of the term. That’s why they’re reacting with so much well-financed, organic-as-an-iPhone extremism. They figure, like Ernst Thälmann, that people fleeing the center will come to them. SInce they’re NOT faced with a party that’s going to shove them into camps if they lose, what’s to stop them? Small-“l” liberal democracy requires commitment from *all* parties. There is no such commitment from BIg Left, and we know this because what they’ve done, again, every time they have taken power, anywhere. 

8. My old criminal defense attorney used to get pissed at people invoking “due process”. Paraphrasing him, he said “due process isn’t a magical guarantee of justice, or even fairness; it just means the system follows the law as it’s written down”. And the due process of law on many immigration issues *does not provide* for jury trials; I’m no expert on immigration law, but IIRC many visa violations – which were the largest source of illegal immigration until the Biden regime – require an administrative hearing, which is by law is about as probative as a hearing about your parking ticket. Don’t like that? I may agree with you – but that *is* the “due process”. 

9. A whole lot of people who were experts on the War Powers Act a week ago are suddenly experts on Use of Force and Self-defense law. And most of them, on both sides, are substituting feeling for fact on this issue; IF “due process” is followed, the officer will claim he had a reasonable fear of immediate death or great bodily harm; the lawyers will argue and a jury will likely decide. And that jury will be in a Federal court – not because Trump’s got the fix in, but because *that is due process*, according to Neagle Vs. US; federal officers doing federal things are federal jurisdiction. The disinformation has already started on that one. 

10. Let’s not underestimate how this is being harnessed to deflect from Minnesota’s only growing industry, nonprofit fraud. 

One of the reasons, probably the main one, that I left the Libertarian party and never joined the Ron Paul mob was this: without order, prosperity is impossible; without prosperity, liberty is academic; without liberty, order is onerous. American small-“l” liberal pluralism is a lot more fragile than it looks. 

Is the fed’s enforcement of immigration law heavy-handed? Probably. Is the amount of disorder and contempt for the rule of law left by the previous administration, not to mention that is the stock in trade of the opposition, a daunting challenge? Absolutely.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Dumb thing for him to say. 

He’s making the same mistake that every juror makes in a gun case.  He’s looking at the situation from every angle, having all the time in the world to analyze frame by frame and second by second.

But that’s not the law. The question is did the officer have a reasonable belief that his life was in danger at the time he pulled the trigger?

That means the only angle that matters is the angle the officer was able to see. What’s happening from the back or the side or above is not relevant.

If the shooter couldn’t see the gray coat agent take the gun from the victim’s back, then as far as the shooter knew he was still facing an armed assailant who voluntarily thrust himself into the fray to attack the officers.

How did he know the assailant was armed? Because one of his team members shouted “gun.”  Is he justified in relying on that team members warning? Absolutely. Did he see the victim pointing at him holding something in his hand? Yes, but it turned out to be a phone not a gun.  Doesn’t matter. Under the totality of the circumstances, the shooting was justified. 

 I understand the lawyer/lobbyist wants to protect Second Amendment rights, but this is a terrible case to do that. And now he just handed the rabble a huge propaganda victory.  Mistake.  

Joe Doakes

 

It’s going to be a terrible case on which to be that juror, too – if it goes to trial. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

President Trump is working on acquiring Greenland. He announced the framework for a deal.  Some people can’t figure out why he wants it.  They look at the standard map and say “We don’t need Greenland to defend ourselves from a mass attack by Russian tanks, we have NATO troops in Germany.  Why Greenland?”

Not everybody does original thinking, I get that, but it can’t be too hard to reason out from basic principles.

The first duty of the American government is to defend the territory of United States.  Defending the territory of other nation-states comes second. 

A Russian tank attack through the Fulda Gap does not threaten the territory of the United States.  US troops in NATO countries are there to deter Russia from attacking Europe, not from attacking the US.  

Preventing an attack on Europe is lower priority than preventing an attack on the US.

Stationing US defense forces in locations to protect the US is more important than stationing defense forces in locations to protect Europe. 

The art of war has changed since World War II.  The standard map is deceiving, the polar map is revealing.  Modern war can take the polar route to strike us.  Greenland is a better location for US defense forces than Germany. 

We don’t need Europe.  We need Greenland.  

We should pull out of NATO and redeploy our defense forces to put America First. 

How hard is that to understand?

Joe Doakes

 

Now that Europe has more people and GDP than the US, it makes sense.  

their militaries are abiut 1/6 the size they were during the. Cold War, which does not.