Open Letter To MPR’s Jon Collins: Year 3

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To: Jon Collins, Senior Reporter on Race, Class and Communities, MInnesota Public Radio
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Anniversary + Findings

Mr. Collins,

As with last year and 2021, I hope this day finds you well.

It was three years ago today you sent this out on your listener mailing list::

“South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

What the heck – let’s give this a shot:

Now, I know MPR reporters don’t generally deign to respond to the peasantry – in fact, I know MPR News management specifically tells staff not to engage with the unwashed masses.

But I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?

It’s not of idle interest to me.  Mine was one of the neighborhoods that got burned, looted and vandalized in May of 2020 (noting at the time that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them – the sort of fieldcraft that’d make a Mossad agent envious).     

While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, very much off of it during his unfortunate unpleasantness a few years ago), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.  

I ask because a not-so-cursory look through the last three years of your reporting doesn’t seem to show anything.  

And as I do every year on the anniversary of this event, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings.   Because it’s everyone’s city. 

Thanks,

Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM

 

Urban Planning

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SCENE: Minnesota DFL Executive Meeting.

KEN MARTIN (Chait of the MNDFL): Next order of business.

INGE “LUCKY” CARROLL (A former guidance counselor at a school for monomaniacs, Inge is Head Meme-Buffer at “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”). Our next plan is to start building safe spaces for hard drug use.

STACEY HINTON (Executive Director of “Keep All Racists Eternally Nonplussed”, a white progressive support group). Brilliant.

GRETEL STROMBERG ()Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, Stromberg is married to both a woman and a male illegal immigrant) Here’s the news coverage:

KEN MARTIN: Great piece. Fawning and morally bankrupt without going too over the top.

STROMBERG: Like Esme Murphy. .

KEN MARTIN: Yep. Now, we’ll be building these “safe spaces” at places like Summit and Chatsworth, and Crocus Hill, and down amid the condos across from the Guthrie…

( Entire group sits silently, in disbelief, jaws literally dropping).

KEN MARTIN: Hah! You shoulda seen your faces. Nope, we’re building them among the proles.

(Various expressions of relief)

KEN MARTIN: So – between legal weed and shooting galleries, and the schools teaching the next generation to be ignorant, uncritical , compliant and distracted by contrived grievances, the next generation should be really solid DFL voters!~

Round of applause as the scene fades to black.

There Isn’t Much…

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…about the way high school was when I was a kid that makes me sit up and say “damn, they had the right idea.”

But I do know that if some students had started a petition saying “we don’t want to have graduation at the Civic Center [the only building in town big enough to hold the graduation], so move it or we won’t attend”, the principal – Virgil Buchholtz, who’d been a Marine fighter pilot during World War II – would have settled that quickly and sharply.

Perhaps it’s not being a teenager. Perhaps it’s having raised teenagers. Perhaps it’s reading some history, and realizing how deeply stupid movements on the macro scale led by “youth” tend to be.

But I wish someone in the Chaska/Chanhassen school district had the same common sense that Mr. Buchholtz had when I read stories like this:

Next week, Eastern Carver County Schools plan to host graduation ceremonies for Chaska and Chanhassen high schools at Eden Prairie’s Grace Church. But this year families are pushing for a change in venue after Chaska High Schooler Eli Frost created a petition.

On the petition that now has 364 signatures, Frost wrote: “Grace Church has a long history of making derogatory, public statements against the LGBTQ+ community. Further, they do not support divorce even in situations of domestic violence. As a community of students and parents who represent a wide variety of marginalized identities, we must change this venue.”

Young Mr. Frost has gotten a lot of facts wrong – go ahead and follow the link to Grace Church’s response.

And I hope the Chaskahassen schools have a sudden attack of common sense in the next week.

Mitch Edits Hollywood For Accuracy

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Before:

“Bill Hader perfectly illustrates the cultural left’s paranoid bigotry mixed with hysteria about “gun culture” with a single, dull-witted, cliche-clogged four minute scene from some streaming show I’ve never paid attention to.”

(CORRECTION: I guess it was just 30 seconds. Who knew?)

The Next Big Thing

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2022 was an upset and a good year at the polls for the DFL, largely on the strength of:

  • Hysteria about abortion, whipped up after the SCOTUS overturned Roe.
  • “Fully Funding Education” – a concept literally no DFLer could or would define.
  • …that’s about it.

In terms of divisive issues that turn out Democrats in droves, the big kahunas of recent years? They can’t re-overturn Roe, re-legalize pot, re-sanctify stalking and Munchausens Syndrome, re-legalize same sex marriage – and they got literally everything they asked for in education, so the schools should be “Fully Funded”, whatever that is.

So – let’s do some predicting.

What will the the next issue the DFL uses to try to panic their herds of ill-informed, uncritical, gullible, emotion-driven hysterical voter base to the polls?

Leave ’em in the comments.

Notes To Self Re 2023 Session: Part 1

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I made a series of notes to myself at the beginning of the session, re all the promises the DFL made in the wake of their “trifecta”

There were a lot of them.

Some of them won’t matter for a while, or won’t be measurable for quite some time. (Is the DFL really going to cut child poverty by 1/3 in the next year/)

But one can be tested today: “Did the DFL legalize Cannabis?”

And they did.

I’m a little surprised. While on the one hand a buzzed, stuporous electorate is a perfect DFL audience, I figured the issue was worth more to the DFL as a social wedge.

Of course, the law is full of gimmies to Big Pharma, and handouts to well-connected political insiders, and will benefit small producers not one iota. And as Colorado discovered, the taxes and regulation won’t actually affect the black market criminal sale:

Instead, in 2023, Colorado’s cannabis entrepreneurs face a perfect storm of problems: too much supply, not enough demand, plunging prices, heightened competition in other states, the allure of black market weed, a lack of cannabis tourism and more. That’s on top of the shaky economic forecast for the rest of the year, even though inflation is steadily slowing….Earlier this year, marijuana giant Curaleaf shuttered its operations in Colorado, along with California and Oregon. “We believe these states will represent opportunities in the future, but the current price compression caused by a lack of meaningful enforcement of the illicit market prevent us from generating an acceptable return on our investments,” CEO Matt Darin said.

There is ample evidence the DFL spent even less time thinking about unintended consequences than Colorado did:

Note to KARE: This might have been a good question during the session…

The greatest effect is likely to get rid of the Marijuana parties that’ve sapped DFL votes in recent years.

There were so many promises. This’ll keep us busy for a while.

Pounce!

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Democrat have been trying to wedge hunters apart from other gun owners for decades.

And they’re not happy that its not working.

“Jilted”

Oddly, that’s not the word the Strib used when Klink refudiated his “A” rating with the NRA. I’d use “stabbed in the back”, personally.

Anyway – welcome to the party, deer hunters.

That’s Gonna Leave A Mark – On Legal History

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Never thought I”d see the day.

In one of the highlights of last week, all nine justices of the SCOTUS united across ideological lines to beat Hennepin County like a pimp beating one of his girls.

Geraldine Tyler owed a $15,000 tax debt on a one-bedroom Minneapolis condo; to pay the debt, Hennepin County sold her home for $40,000 — and kept the extra $25,000 beyond what was owed. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the opinion of the Court that the taxpayer must “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more,” effectively ending the practice of home equity theft.

How clear-cut was Henco’s abuse? This clear-cut (emphasis added):

Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, adding that the county’s action also violates the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause.

“Economic penalties imposed to deter willful noncompliance with the law are fines by any other name,” he wrote. “And the Constitution has something to say about them: They cannot be excessive.”

Any day that Henco gets clobbered is a wonderful one.

Annals Of Leftist Semantics

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Zawahiri: “Austere Religious Scholar”

Lenin: “Controversial worker’s rights activist”

Nashville school shooter: “Tragic Victim”

Days of rioting, burning, looting: “Mostly Peaceful””.

Dolt in a MAGA hat carrying out perhaps the lowest level of vandalism possible:

“Terrorism”.

By the way – during the early days of the Civil Rights movement, activists were painstakingly trained not to lash out or do stupid things, since they’d be held against the entire movement.

The Tea Party got that pretty instinctively (which is why Big Left and the GOP Consultant Class had to invent their entire case against the Tea Party).

Someone’s gotta tell MAGA.

UPDATE: As you can see from the tweet, people figured it out.

Off Target

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It’s not a good week to be a Target shareholder.

Target’s stock price has taken a hit amid the backlash over its LGBT-themed products.

The New York Post noted on May 17 the retailer’s stock closed at $160.96 per share, giving it a market value of $74.3 billion.

But as of Thursday morning, its stock price was hovering around $140 a share. And its market value was down roughly $10 billion and around $64 billion.

Target is…

…I was about to say “pushing back”.

But it’s more “trying to deflect”: This piece is called “Target is being held hostage by annti-LGBTQ campaign”.

No word if any “pouncing” was also involved.

But here’s the part were I have a question. Target accepts a certain amount of “breakage”; shoplifting, vandalism, even people opening containers to see what’s i before they buy unopened ones. They accept it as part of the cost of doing business – even more so today, when their urban stores are plagued with rampant theft and vandalism.

So about this bit here:

The campaign became hostile, with threats levied against Target employees and instances of damaged products and displays in stores…In the end, Target opted to protect employee safety by removing certain items that it said caused the most “volatile” reaction from opponents.

DIsplays get damaged all the time. And Target employees are no strangers to angry, hostile customers. None of which is OK.

But Target is claiming there’ve been attacks, even violence, against Target workers.

So where are the reports of the actual acts of violence?

No video? Nothing in writing anywhere?

Call me a cynic, but it almost appears that Target is trying to deflect blame for its market bleeding away from tuck-under swimsuits for teenage boys and Satanic designers, and over to the Phantom MAGA Menace.

Someone show me if I’m wrong, here.

UPDATE 7:03 AM

Oh.

Given that the demand for “right wing violence” exceeds the supply by an order of magnitude or two, it was always a safe bet. But hate assuming

The Hangover

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PJ O’Rourke said it best: progressives in power are like crack whores with a stolen Platinum Card.

They certainly had their party this session – and ended things with a budget-signing yesterday that had Leni Riefenstahl sending a chef’s kiss from the great beyond:

The Law and Order: Missing
The Stalkers and Swatters: Enabled
The rent-a-crowd: De Rigeur
The smug. Overwhelming
The photos: cropped to a fine sheen.

The social media blitz of endzone-happy dancing, featuring gigabytes of the DFL’s one real product, the smug selfie, was worth of Kim Jong Un’s minions.

But the hangover is coming.

The first lawsuit to try to tamp down the Trifecta’s power-sodden overrreach is on the books:

The DFL admitted publicly they were targeting Northwestern and Crown due to their religion – and they didn’t care.

And it ain’t the last lawsuit you can expect to see.

This Year’s Breakout Star

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Rep. Andy Smith, wannabe kommissar and ultraprogressive rep from Kim Norton’s side of Rochester, seems to see himself as a left-of-center Steven Crowder. Or at least, that’s how he comes across.

Here’s his ode to enabling Munchhausen Mommies:

He truly is one of Minnesota Progressivism’s intellectual thought leaders.

Anyhoo, yesterday was his birthday:

I celebrated by tripling my monthly donation to the MN Gun Owners Caucus.

I invite you to do the same.

And anyone who wants to challenge him? I will give you whatever airtime it takes.

Everything Nice And Rough

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Tina Turner is passed away yesterday, in her home 83.

It was about this time forty years ago that radio programmers were asking “Tina who?“

I mean, she popped on on “oldies” radio.

She had some staples there, in fact:

But Turner was…

…well, in her forties. No woman in the Billboard Chart era had ever had a #1 hit at anywhere near her age.

And so everyone – me included – was kind of gobsmacked when perhaps the greatest comeback in the history of popular music happened about this time forty years ago; 43 year old Tina Turner climbed back from R&B obscurity to the top of the charts – the oldest woman to ever top the Billboard charts at the time, with a series of songs from “Private Dancer”, an album cut with a who’s who of the best sidemen in the business:

Dolly Parton, Shirley Bassey and Cher all had hits after age 50 – loooong after Turner did it.

The story of the intervening years was a catalog of horrors…

…literally the stuff of movies. If you’re not aware of the, uh, turbulence in Turner’s life from 1960 to 1976…

…the movie is one of the better music biopics ever.

Anyway – I loved a lot of things about Tina Turner – but perhaps most of all, the fact that Turner danced with the one that brung her, as it were – she never forgot the sheer power of a hot, fast, sweaty rave-up.

Rest in peace, Tina Turner.

If At First History Doesn’t Go Your Way? Rewrite It Again!

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Good thing Rep. Phillips grew up with a silver foot in his mouth. If he’d had to succeed on his merits, he’d be living in a homeless camp by the Quarry.

Example:

Show the world you know nothing about history by bellowing on social media you’re utterly ignorant.

Uh,, no. You got 1 out of 4. Roosevelt – the president who set the stage for Wilson’s “progressive” orgy – probably qualifies.

Lincoln didn’t promote slavery, so morally-consistent modern Democrats would not know what to do with him.

Jefferson would be a Libertarian; he’d hang out with Justin Amash and Rand Paul.

Washington? Someone who was given the chance at unfettered power, even declaring himself king, and demurred in favor of a constitutional Republic? Not a chance. He’d be a proto-Reagan conservative.

And JFK would get kicked out of today’s DFL. HHH was all but kicked out of the DFL of the 1970s, for crying out loud.

CD3 – please do better.

The Little Mussolinis Among Us

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“Representative” Andy Smith, DFL-Rochester, is so annoyed by having to deal with dissent:

I’m not saying DFLers are all totalitarians at heart.

I’m just saying when they elect hamsters like this, their “hearts” are irrelevant.

UPDATE: Smith’s legislative priorities seem to be, in order: Taking selfies, getting his hair just perfect, jumping off things the Teachers Union tells him to jump off of, and eating donuts.

“I’m An Expert!”

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Throughout the media, it’s a universal truism: Smart people with personalities go into radio; people who get by on looks go into TV.

It’s conventionally-accepted wisdom throughout the world of mass communications.

I have exactly as much factual oomph saying that as former Channel 5 weatherperson and DFL senator Nicole Mitchell (DFL, what else, Woodbury) talking about the civil liberty law:

She’s referring to Schenck vs. United States – in which an anti-draft protester during World War One sued over having his civil rights trampled on by the Woodrow Wilson administration, often regarded as a toxically stupid decision, one which the SCOTUS reversed in defense of a Klansman’s right to free speech.

But you know what’s more toxic than that?

Let’s say, for purposes of argument, that society has the communal wisdom to abrogate rights “for the public good” without doing vastly more harm than good – again, just for purposes of argument.

Who defines “the common good?”

Traditionally, it was families, churches, and traditional social institutions that had stood the test of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years .

The DFL and Big Left have been tearing those institutions down, and replacing them with…

…themselves.

It’s as plain a statement as there is that the DFL wants your civil rights – all of them – to be political swag to be doled out as rewards, if at all.

Untargeted

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I’m not especially big on boycotts.

Problem is, most of the stuff that conservatives are supposed to boycott these days or products, I’ve never used, or companies I’ve never really patronized.

I hadn’t used Gillette razors for years before they beclowned themselves with their anti-masculine ad campaign a few years back. not because they were work, but because they just weren’t very good razors.

I haven’t had beer in something like five years – and even then, I didn’t drink American mass-market beer. So Bud Light was irrelevant (and is only beer in the loose possible sense of the term)

Likewise, given a choice between Starbucks, Caribou, and driving home and making French press, Starbucks always comes in last. Not because of politics, but because it’s the worst value for the dollar.

But after Target’s recent bout of self immolation, I figured that’s a company I can do without.

Yeah, self-immolation:

So, starting last Friday, that’s exactly what I did; I swore off Target until they come around – however, long that takes.

It’s been three days. I’m still alive. Go figure.

#OneAbusedSpouse

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You and your significant other each earn $60,000 a year. That’s a total household income of $120,000.

Your bills – housing, transportation, loan payments, food, everything you do – come to $10,000 a month. Your family budget is balanced.

You go out to the casino one night, and get the luckiest break ever; you walk out $80,000 ahead. 

You buy a bigger house, a newer car (and a bridge loan to finish paying off your old one), do some remodeling, put a couple of vacations and cruises and a whole lot of happy hours, on your capital one card. 

With the new mortgage, car loan, revolving credit and loans to pay for all the other goodies, your monthly expenses go up to $16,000 a month – requiring a $200,000 a year income between you and your significant other – who, remember, are still earning $120,000 a year between you. So when you’ve burned through that $80 windfall, you’ll be coming up $80,000 a year in the red.

Your options to avoid insolvency, foreclosure, and repossession are:

a. Downsize, quick – go back to a smaller house, cheaper car, etc.

b. Keep going back to the casino and hope for another big score, and hope your significant other isn’t too stupid to know what a longshot that is.

c. Browbeat your significant other into earning more money so you don’t go bankrupt, and hope he or she doesn’t leave you. As the significant other why they hate children if they don’t ratchet their income up, but fast.

That’s exactly what the state legislature and Governor Klink have done; the pandemic left the state with a one time windfall that they have spent, and much more. 

And you and I, the taxpayers of Minnesota, are the significant other. 

So what are they going to do about it?

Well, they’re going to hope that you’re a dumb spouse that thinks you can bank on casino winnings. But they are just going to hold out for option C, and demand you pony up more.

That’s exactly what just happened.

If this were a marriage, you would call the big spender an abusive spouse. 

So when you are the victim, what do you call the perpetrator? 

Illegitimate!!!

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Representative Alicia Kozlowski – one of the DFL‘s leading public intellectuals and thought leaders – had this to say over the weekend about illegal immigration

So, apparently, Rep. Kozlowski‘s (and the DFL‘s) new taxes and gun control laws can be ignored, then?

For that matter, given that by her logic, the legislature itself is illegitimate, she shouldn’t actually have a position of any authority at all?

Urban Progressive Privilege means never having to really rationalize your only rationality.

I Heard It On The NARN

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Find out more about the Wall that Heals, at Saint Thomas Academy, Friday through Monday (5/26-29).

Oh, yeah – Jen McEwen’s coming for your guns.

Walter Hudson schoolling DFL apologists on their legalizing of pedophilia:

And here’s the music list for today’s show:

The Awesome Power Of Logic, Reason And Rhetoric

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Is there nothing in the worlds of negotiation, of convincing people to think and do things they aren’t entitled to, with the elegance, the power, the pure majesty of simply capping off one’s argument with a jaunty “full stop”?

If Abraham Lincoln had told Jefferson Davis “abolish slavery and rejoin the union, full stop!” there would’ve been no Civil War.

Had RIchard Nixon said “I am not a crook – full stop“, there’d have been no Watergate, no impeachment, no resignation.

If WInston Churchill had punctuated the Dunkirk speech – “…we shall fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, we shall never surrender, full stop!”, Hitler would have pulled back from France, abdicated, and fled to Mongolia.

Had the Pope responded to Martin Luther with a decisive “Iustificamur ex operibus, plenus finis” (“We are justified by works. Full stop“), there’d have been no Reformation, no 100 years war. \

If the guys in Milli Vanilli had simply said, “We are the real singers! Full stop!”, they would be bigger than Madonna, Elvis, the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Slim Whitman today.

So pity the poor Minnesota GOP. Who can stand in the face of such remorseless logic and deft rhetoric?

For example – I, personally, started out believing that “Rights” are inalienable, non-material things with which one is born, and from which one can not be legitimately separated except by very solemn due process.

But then I read this:

And voila! I’m convinced! A “right” is a bit of material swag bestowed on the deserving by the political process!

Even “Lieutenant” Governor Flanagan, who punctuated one of her (very, very few non-risible) arguments with this…

Is there nothing that phrase can’t do?

…