Monthly Archives: October 2016

Let That Cycle Spin

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Leftist parties in Europe are facing declining membership, electoral routs, and a general malaise:

The sick list is headed by Britain’s Labour Party, where veteran radical Jeremy Corbyn last week easily won a leadership challenge by centrist MPs angry at his part in the shock Brexit vote.

But political analysts say the venerable party — founded in 1900 — faces electoral oblivion despite his victory.

Its dismal standing in the opinion polls is mirrored across Europe.

As with Labour, Spain’s Socialist Party is in the grip of a fratricidal war over the performance of its leader, Pedro Sanchez, at a time of national crisis.

In Germany, the Social Democratic Party has lost half its members since 1998.

In France, President Francois Hollande is the most unpopular president in his country’s modern history and would be routed if he stands in next year’s presidential elections, according to opinion polls.

Centre-left parties recently lost power in Denmark, a stronghold of social democracy, and registered their worst-ever results in Finland and Poland. In Greece, support for the once dominant Pasok has plunged to just six percent.

“Social democracy is a shadow of itself,” German political analyst Albrecht von Lucke said on NDR television channel. “We are dealing with decline of historic proportions.”

The bad news?  While the center right and populist parties are benefitting, many near-left voters are moving even further left.

No Pain…

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Social Security admits outgo will exceed income in four years, as older workers retire and start taking money out instead of paying it in.  They think they can stave off disaster until 2034, if the General Fund will repay the IOUs it has written over the last 40 years.  But everyone agrees that eventually, the program will collapse unless changes are made.

Liberals claim the program can be saved by small changes.  I don’t think that will work.

Social Security is like trying to fill a bathtub that you forgot to plug.  When the bath faucet was running full blast, the water level was good.  But when you begin to close the bath faucet, the water coming in can’t keep with the water going out.  Eventually, the tub runs dry.

The small changes that Liberals propose are like adding water from the sink.  By teaspoon. 

It’s not going to work.

That’s what I wish the presidential debates would have covered.  “Candidates, how will you solve this problem?”  I already know Hillary’s plan is to tax the rich (use a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon).  I would have liked to hear the details of Trump’s plan.

Joe Doakes

The problem we have is that both parties have suggested they can “solve” the problem – not just Social Security, but the entire debt and deficit issue – via means that cause no pain to the taxpayer, or in Hillary’s case only pain to other taxpayers.

We’re #25!

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24/7 Wall Street calls Minneapolis the 25th most dangerous city in the US, based on FBI stats:

Minneapolis landed on the 25th spot on the list, with a violent crime rate of 1,063 incidents per 100,000 residents. The website noted that robbery is especially common in Minneapolis, with 459 reported incidents per 100,000 residents – the 10th highest robbery rate in the nation.

The story – from WCCO – notes that despite the city’s nominally low unemployment, that…:

…the city has struggled with stark racial disparities, with people of color, particularly blacks, making less money, having lower home ownership rates and higher unemployment rates.

Right – fully a third of Minnesota’s murders, for the whole state, in the past year occurred on the North Side, which has a neighborhood murder rate of 100/100,000.  Which is, quite frankly, catastrophic.

But chalking up the murder rate to income, home ownership rates and unemployment is an evasion of responsibility; as PJ O’Rourke once said, “if you took away his bank account, it’s not like you’d find Thurgood Marshall selling crack at Union Station the next day”.

Is the crime rate in Minneapolis (the article painstakingly avoids mentioning the North Side) a result of poverty, or is the poverty a result of the crime and cultural breakdown?

 

Do What They Say…

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…while ignoring what they actually do.

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That’s what the Minnesota DFL would have people do on most “ethical” issues.

Government employees with cadillac health plans pushing Minnesotans onto MNSure?  No problem.

DFL legislators with guns in the house pushing anti-2nd-amendment legislation?  Par for the course.

Decry racism and preach “diversity” and “inclusion” out of one side of your mouth, but prey on the ignorant racism of too many DFLers out the other side and several other orifices? You expected what?

And now –  Minnesota DFL Caucus is sending out mailers promising to regulate “dark money” campaign spending…

 

…paid for with “dark money”.

dark-money

 

So let’s let this sink in:  while jabbering at the ignorant about “dark money”, DFL-affilated groups have spent 3.3 million (not counting the half-million from the MN Chamber of Commerce, which is often falsely called pro-GOP; its policies have largely been moderate-DFL for the past six years) in “dark money” out of the over nine million they’ve spent so far.   The DFL-affiliated groups have spent over double in “dark money” what all of the GOP affilated PACs in the top ten have spent all together.

Pass the word to your less curious friends.  And your DFL-leaning friends.

But I repeat myself.

“We, The Undersigned…

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…group of actors – people who earn an intermittent living acting like people we’re not, who almost universally live in a place and culture, Hollywood, that has no bearing on the objective reality most Americans live in – who are mostly famous for playing roles in a series about a fictional, utopian, creepily big-brotherish universal government, playing to a fan base that has treated us and the franchise (of, let me repeat, fiction) in which we acted like a pseudo-religion, which has continued to keep many of us paid via two generations of fan fairs and other residuals, ask  you, the people of the real world, to take our political advice seriously“.

I guess there’s a reason I’m not in PR for the Screen Actors Guild.

Farewell To Cults

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Another baseball post-season is upon us.  And if you’re a Cubs fan – and they are my National League team – it’s another season to anticipate how epic this season’s choke is going to be.  Notwithstanding the fact that this season’s Cubs team is perhaps the best to ever take to Wrigley field, with the best record in baseball,  wondering what legendary exit the Cubs have planned.

It’s time to stop the “lovable losers” twaddle, says George Will:

So, all you purveyors of Cubs Gush, listen up. Referring to Wrigley Field as a “baseball cathedral” should be a flogging offense. It is just a nice little place on the North Side where men (calling major leaguers “boys of summer” should be punishable by keelhauling) work hard at a demanding and dangerous craft. And Cub fans, loyal through thin and thin, you must remember this: Your team at least won the Cold War. For years, it held spring training on Catalina Island near Los Angeles. So when a Des Moines radio sportscaster named “Dutch” Reagan went to report on them, he stopped in Hollywood for a screen test, and the Soviet Union was doomed. So there.

Fingers crossed.

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In Play?

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It’s something Republicans have whispered hopefully to each other ever since I started watching Minnesota elections, 28 years ago; could Minnesota flip?

“Pshaw”, goes the conventional wisdom.

“Not so fast, and who the hell actually says ‘pshaw'”, say some polls:

Populism is at the heart of Mr. Trump’s economic and anti-establishment message. It’s also the significant enthusiasm gap between Mr. Trump’s very excited supporters and Mrs. Clinton’s very depressed voters that could result in a big upset, despite what the polls show ahead of the election. The state, which consistently boasts higher voter turnout than the national average, is also known for its more-than-average politically active citizenry and the strength of political movements could be exacerbated by it.

Now, not including the expanded Minnesota subsample taken from the PPD U.S. Presidential Election Daily Tracking Poll, a Gravis Marketing Poll released on Monday finds the race tied at 42% and another recent SurveyUSA Poll finds a six-point lead for Mrs. Clinton.

It wouldn’t be a story about Minnesota politics without Larry Jacobs:

“Minnesota is in play,” Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute, told Patch. “Trump is only six or seven points behind and has not campaigned actively in Minnesota, whereas Democrats are counting on Minnesota and have actually put some money in. So, I think these are surprising results.”…Seven percent (7%) remain undecided, slightly higher than the national average.

For myself?  I think Clinton will win, for one reason and one only:  if Democrat internal polling showed Clinton losing Minnesota, a state with about 4 million voting age adults (of whom about 2/3 actually vote in presidential elections) going to Trump by a thoroughly hypothetical million vote margin, 1.17 million to 700,000, the Metro DFL machine would turn out four million votes for Hillary in Minneapolis,  Saint Paul and Duluth, and the Secretary of State would certify it, and the Star-Tribune would call anyone who called BS a “racist” and shut them up.

But it’s an interesting theory.

Utterly Fearless Predictions

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Assange’s Infodump On Hillary will be utterly devastating – to a regular citizen.  The media will bury it, developing a sudden and utterly transient interest in storm damage in Haiti.

Black Lives Matter will be a huge force in the 2020 election, as George Soros and other plutocrats with deep pockets continue to fund it with gusto.  Unless Hillary wins.  Then, it’ll disappear from the public eye, unfunded and unmentioned in the media, by February 2017.

The continued collapse of the state health exchanges will garner more and more media publicity leading up to Hillary Clinton’s inaugural address, which will prominently feature single-payer healthcare as a national priority on the order of the New Deal or defeating Naziism.

All About The Ugly

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Opposition researchers are pretty much paid to be ugly, catty and anal-retentive.

The City Pages would have you believe that the oppo-research battle in the House race in Apple Valley is worse than most.  And in its way, it is – although not for the reasons the City Pages wants you to believe.

It’s a battle between two younger women – Republican Ali Jimenez-Hopper and DFLer Erin Maye-Quade – and the oppo researchers working with both of them.

Everybody’s Doing It:  Maye-Quade – who the City Pages’ Mike Mullen notes is a “biracial, married lesbian with impeccable credentials [although no details about the “credentials” are given – more on that in a moment] who worked to get Barack Obama elected and gun control passed”, although no gun controls have passed in this state in decades – was the first target.  Says Mullen:

Maye Quade’s persona became the subject of scrutiny last week when conservatives dragged out a number of posts meant to throw her qualifications into question. “Macy Gray wrote a love song to a vibrator,” Maye Quade tweeted last year, “shocking no woman who has ever used one.”

It’s a good line. But not the kind DFLers want to see parading across the screens of suburban voters.

Other posts show her pissed off (“today can blow me,” she once wrote) or turned on (actor Rob Lowe is “masturbate in public sexy,” according to a January 2013 tweet).

I can give Maye-Quade a break for that.  I’ve long lamented the idea that anyone who wants to get into politics basically needs to spend every waking moment of their lives from childhood on guarding against any hint of impolitic impropriety if they ever want to “serve” the public in elective office.

Of course, the name rang a bell with me – and it brought us back to this episode, in 2010, where Maye, then employed by “The Uptake”, giggled ““I’m Editing.  I feel important because I can make people say things they may not have said.  Muhahaha”   It gave her a kick that she now had the power to use her job editing news content to affect the political process.

Which reminded me that there are many, many better reasons not to vote for Erin Maye-Quade.

So Where’s The Bad Part? – The DFL responded by digging out this bit of “dirt” against Ms. Jimenez-Hopper:

On June 14, two days after 49 people were killed in a shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Jimenez-Hopper told her Facebook followers she’s armed and ready to defend herself. She’s not going to die “in a helpless blubbering heap on the floor begging for my life or my child’s life.” Hardly the requisite “thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families” that Republicans like to trot out.

Anyone who doesn’t agree that one is better fighting back against violence than being a passive victim is beyond moral help.

And have you noticed the gotcha – Republicans who ask “thoughts and prayers for the victims’ families” are condemned for not supporting the right response, while those who don’t get hit for…well, not?

By the way, Ms. Jimenez-Hopper?  Don’t change a thing.

Another post seemed distinctly anti-feminist. Jimenez-Hopper shared a meme that stated women “weren’t created to do everything a man can do.” The candidate added: “Men and women are not equal… what we are is equally different.”

The horror.

I love that last bit.  Democrats – most of whom haven’t taken a hard science since high school at the latest – jabber about their respect for empiricism, and snark down their sleeves about the evolution-denying “young earth creationists” they think all Christian Republicans are.

And yet faced with the ineluctible fact that evolution has equipped men and women differently, for remorselessly empirical reasons, suddenly they go all faith-based – in this case, out of faith that the left’s social dogma is the one real truth?

I endorse Ms. Jimenez-Hopper, by the way.  Hopefully the good people of Apple Valley can smell the difference between reason and dogma.

This Is DFL Government

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You, the DFL voter, wanted a government-managed healthcare market?  You got it!

And we’re all paying for it!

Health insurers are hiking premiums and limiting enrollment in Minnesota’s individual market next year, with regulators saying the emergency measures were needed to avert a market collapse.

The moves are a clear sign that the market for some 250,000 people who buy coverage for themselves is dysfunctional and needs reform, said Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman during a Friday news conference.

While rate increases of more than 50 percent aren’t fair to consumers, Rothman said, things could have been worse. He described a period this summer when all health insurers in the state seemed prepared to abandon that segment of the market.

Elections have consequences; as former New York mayor Ed Koch put it, “the voters have spoken, and now they must accept the consequences”.

It’d be nice if those consequences didn’t botch up everyone else’s life.

A Matter Of Trust

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This guy was sitting in the car reading a book, Tasered four times, then shot.

 Or he got out of the car with a gun and threatened the officers.

 Depends on who you believe.

 On the one hand, a certain group of people Whose Lives Matter have a history of making up facts to support their story.  The “Hands Up” thing comes to mind.

 On the other hand, a certain group of people Who Are Above The Law have a history of making up facts to support their story, too.  The cop who dropped the Taser next to his shooting victim comes to mind.

 I honestly can’t decide which group is less trustworthy and that terrifies me.  It means the main source of social cohesion is failing.  Every time that’s happened throughout history, it’s been a pre-cursor to societal upheaval, often leading to collapse, chaos, anarchy, dictatorship, riot, plague and death.

 It doesn’t matter who we elect as President, if there’s no nation to govern. 

 Joe Doakes

This is the elephant in the room; if we can’t trust our government and our fellow citizen, then freedom is really just a slogan.