Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Scott Johnson from Powerline has a column explaining why Trump’s tariffs are calculated incorrectly and are therefore too high.  He gives a formula from some academics showing that the inelasticity of trade was improperly factored into setting our new rates.

Missing the point, Scott.  The point is foreign governments have been taking advantage of our generosity for years and it’s time to fix that. Yes, we’re a party to GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) but renegotiations have been stalled for decades – too many rice bowls at stake – so Trump’s unilateral new tariffs are a way to break the stalemate.

 

The specifics of Trump’s tariffs don’t matter, 10% on penguins or 90% on Vietnam, these numbers are just the opening round of negotiation.  It’s like the guy selling sombreros on the beach in Mazatlan, or the guy selling rugs in the souk in Marrakech.  His opening offer is ridiculous because you are expected to bargain with him. That’s the accepted practice in that culture.  So, too, in every real estate deal, which is where Trump learned his lessons.  You always set the listing price high to give yourself room to negotiate down.  And now we’re seeing it’s also true in setting foreign trade policy, as more than four dozen countries have already lined up to renegotiate their trade policy with us.

 

Scott’s column is so typical for RINOs. The other side can state any lie and it’s accepted at face value while our facts are scrutinized and debated endlessly, with the result that the opposition’s policies get enacted but ours get nibbled to death by ducks quacking around our ankles.  With friends like that . . . . . . .

 

Joe Doakes

State Rep. Maria Isa Perez-Vega wants to mow herself some of that fresh astroturf:

The DFLer, who enthusiastically participated in the orgy of spending that led to both tax hikes and a colossal deficit that has raised the cost of living, led to thousands of Minnesotans losing their jobs or moving their businesses out of state, piling unfunded mandates onto schools that are causing budget-tightening in the classroom, and cutting the very services the Representative is talking about, is going to try to deflect the whole mess over to Trump.

And she is going to do the brave, boss-lady thing and hold a town hall.

Where? 

When?

So, you can find out where the “town hall” is after we vet you to make sure you’re not one of the “bad” ones?

Since this takes place during show-time on Saturday, Avery Librelle will have to sit it out.

But if any of you go, feel free to call in with a report. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

I get lots of spam emails but never see them.  My spam filter works fine for real spam.  It’s spam-ish emails that get through.  “Legitimate” spam, so to speak.

 

Marketing people will tell you that the best source of business is your existing customer list.  They already know the way to your door. They paid you money in the past. The trick is to get them back in the door again to spend more money in the future.  How to do that?

 

Keep your name in front of them.  Email a quarterly newsletter.  Email monthly specials.  Email “Happy Birthday!” greetings.  That way, when the customer thinks “I should buy . . . ” they already know who to buy it from.

 

Except I HATE SPAM.  Pelting me with spam emails is far more likely to annoy me than to make me grateful.  Do businesses gain more repeat business from spam than they drive away?  I wonder.

 

And it’s everywhere.  The grocery store wants my email before I can get the BOGO on green grapes but that means receiving weekly coupon emails.  The oil change place wants to send me a three-month reminder in addition to holiday greetings. The dentist, health care provider, insurance agent, Congresscritter, drugstore, discount warehouse . . . STOP SENDING ME THIS CRAP!

 

But I can’t tell them that, or they will take my name off the list, and the next time I shop there, they will say my account has been closed at my request.  

 

Marketing majors take note: it’s people like you what cause civil unrest.  My next “mostly peaceful” protest may be at your office.  And not a soul would blame me.

 

Joe Doakes

Point taken – although I’m going after the people (or “people”) that design phone trees first. 

(Title reference):

OK, so work with me here [1].

I’m not especially a fan of tariffs. Some of the arguments against them aren’t much better, though. If they go through, they are taxes, yes indeed. And if they don’t – if they are leverage, used to successfully change trade policy, or in some cases safeguard an industry we *don’t* need getting offshored [2], then not so much.

But this goes way beyond tariffs, so again, bear with me [1].

Our economy has extremely healthy fundamentals – and some incredibly nasty endemic problems:

• – National debt that will crush the economy if we don’t do something useful
• – inflation that was down from four years ago, but still way higher than it should be, especially for working-class Americans (because the inflation rate for food, fuel and housing was and remains *way* higher than the economy at large)
• – A stock market that was very overvalued at the beginning of the year (with profit to earnings ratios almost double the rate of a healthy market), with a major bubble caused by federal spending and the AI bubble.
• – A Federal Reserve whose only answer is cutting rates (which will increase inflation, given all the loose money that’s already out there) or hiking them (strangling economic growth).
• – Four years of uncontrolled immigration, which depressed working-class wages (and artificially kept some prices down while raising other costs, economic and social).
• – A Congress that *can* and *should* fix all these problems, and *could*, at least to start by means-testing Social Security and Medicare, except that they have to win popularity contests every two years, and the noise machines of both sides have made being *honest* about the impending entitlement time bomb political suicide)
• Oh, yeah – Europe is closer to general war than it’s been in 85 years, and experts are predicting China will, not may, either invade or strangle Taiwan before the end of the decade. ]

So – what to do?

Let me take you back.

It’s 1982. I was still a Democrat. Probably kind of an obnoxious one, come to think of it.
And the economy had been a basket case for much of my childhood, and all my teenage years and adulthood to that point. The Oil Embargo led to the mid-seventies recession, which led to Stagflation, which led to the Malaise, and of course the Federal Government was spending money like crazy on the “war on poverty”, so inflation crushed economic activity; inflation peaked at over 12% when I was in high school.

President Reagan’s Fed chief, Paul Volcker, cranked the federal funds rate to *20%*. Mobbed up loan sharks said “dial it back, bub”. It SLAMMED inflation to the mat – but unemployement *soared* to 10.8% [3]. It triggered a VERY sharp recession in 1982 – one that’s still “the big one” to a lot of us.

The Democrat majority in Congress grew by 26 seats to a majority of *over 100 seats*. IF there’s been a Presidential election in 1982, Reagan would have lost by a landslide.

But here’s the thing about recessions – if the fundamentals of the economy are healthy, then the sharper the downturn, the sharper the recovery, if you let it [4]. In a year, the economy was gaining almost 500,000 jobs *a month* (and the population was 34 the size it is today), and the longest peacetime boom in history, almost 25 years, kicked off.

And Reagan rode that economy to the biggest landslide in history. And I made my first Republican vote, for Reagan (and my last Democrat one – for my Mom).

So – what about last week’s orgy of tariffs?

Maybe it just means Trump is stupid. Could be [5].

Or maybe the whole thing is:

1.  A sharp kick in the market’s teeth, to get those valuations down to size, AND…
2. … burn off some of that excess capital that Biden (and yes, Trump in 2020) pumped into the economy with no growth to eat it up, AND…
3.  Throw a stun granade into the international trade market to exert leverage on other countries to cut the tariffs that *are* there [6] AND…  Start creating demand for American blue-collar labor, to replace all the cheap foreign labor that the cartels aren’t walking across the border, AND…
4.  To force China into a recession that they can just not afford (if their exports are strangled, they are screwed blue), which might have the salutary effect of helping prevent WORLD WAR F**KING THREE in the Taiwan Straits, AND…
5. Unleash the Growth Fairy, which – let me put this as gently as I can – IS THE ONLY WAY THIS COUNTRY’S ECONOMY ISN’T GOING TO COLLAPSE in the next decade or so. Literally, those are the two choices – out of control growth, or collapse. There is no option C. Taxing billionaires don’t do it. Confiscating every dollar of wealth over a Billion, or a million, won’t do it. ONLY the greatest explosion of growth the world has ever seen will do it.

It’s not just me thinking this: my (Facebook) friend Glenn Reynolds wrote this [7]…

And HIS friend and my one-time rhetorical fencing partner Steven Green had this to say:

Decide for yourself. [1].

[1] Or don’t. I don’t care. But if you disagree, shoot for intelligent disagreement, OK? I’m kind of tired of the other kind.
[2] Germany is kind of starting to regret outsourcing the production of its army’s tanks to Greece, for one example.
[3] Yep, Millennials, almost a point worse than 2008. You didn’t survive the worst of all possible times.
[4] Which is why the 2008 recession, and the Great Depression for that matter, dragged on so long – government “recovery” efforts prolonged the economic trouble that caused the whole thing in the first place.
[5] We’ll see, one way or the other. I’ve been wrong about Trump before, and so have you. Anyway, hear me out [1].
[6] Both sides are wrong about trade, by the way; Trump’s largely wrong about the trade deficit (it’s mostly from us buying cheap stuff from poor countries, and the middle class has grown in the past 40 years) and his opponents are wrong about foreign countries’ policies (they DO hamper lots of American exports in the “free market”). We can discuss it [1].
[7] I eschew “appeal to authority” and other logical fallacies, and I hope you do too [1], but let’s be honest; he’s smarter than me, and probably smarter than you, too.

If it seems like just yesterday the national media was swooning over Saint Paul’s city council – the first all-female city council in the US, we were told – it’s because it practically was just yesterday that the entire establishment was swooning over them.  

They’re women, donchaknow.  

And I’m not gonna say I predicted this, but you know I kinda predicted this:

The president was, as luck would have it, my “representative”, Mitra Jalali – a woman whose “flexibility” on issues and identity makes Tim Walz look all boring and consistent; she left the council in January to focus on her health or something. 

Since then, the council has deadlocked on everything from a temporary replacement for Jalali, to space for the city’s new Sudanese-style trash collection service to stage its trucks (forcing Mayor Carter to declare an emergency and, speaking of emergemcies, forcing Mayor Carter to appear like a relative moderate and grownup.

Or perhaps the one person in the transaction who shows up for work: the councilwomens’ attendance is a little dismal:

That’s may actually be worse than the DFL in the House of Representatives. 

UPDATE: Mayor Carter has appointed Jalali’s legislative aide to serve out the term.  I don’t think this is over. 

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is pondering the tragedy that is his backyard garden when Avery LIBRELLE, riding a recumbent bike, rides up the alley, unbeknownst to BERG.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak.

BERG:  Huh.  And that’s RFK’s fault?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely.  He’s anti-Vaxx.

BERG: Whereas an enlightened country like, say, Canada won’t have any trouble with that kind of thing.

LIBRELLE:  Of course not. They’re enlightened and progressive!

BERG:  Huh.

LIBRELLE: Wait – is this another one of those things where you…

(BERG opens a link on his iPad):

Surely they must do better than the United States at controlling communicable diseases, right?

Yeah, well, not so much. Quite the opposite, actually.

While the numbers are inherently unreliable to some extent, we can get a rough estimate of the relative risk of somebody getting Measles here vs in Canada. Both have advanced healthcare systems that collect a lot of data, and both have active media environments that love to focus on scary stuff like spreading diseases.

Want to know the relative risk? Americans contract Measles at a rate of 1.1 per million more or less, while Canadians have a rate of 12.2 per million.

Canadians are more than 11 times more likely to get the disease than people in the United States. And they don’t have any mean, nasty conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. to spread conspiracy theories. The English, a similar society to both Canada and the United States, has a rate 5 1/2 times the US. France and Germany have rates similar to ours, if a tiny bit higher at the moment.

LIBRELLE:  Dammit! Why do you always do that?

BERG:  (Not very interested) Do what?

LIBRELLE:  Shoot down everything I say, and make me look like some kind of idiot?

BERG:  It’s a blessing and a curse.

And SCENE

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I notice a common theme running through Berg’s Third Law (disasters) and Mother Jones Corollary to the Tenth Law (vicious lies) and 18th Law of Media Latency (48 hour rule): the media rushes to lie about Conservatives, so thoughtful readers will wait for the dust to settle an the truth to be revealed.

I wonder if a similar principle should apply to President Trump?

He proposes a course of action, the media loses its mind, Democrats and RINOs panic, the feared apocalypse does not occur. It happens over and over. He wants fair trade with Canada; Canada threatens to punish every American; tariffs are proposed; media, Democrats and RINOs panic; Canada backs down. If everybody had waited a week or two before setting their hair on fire, it all would have blown over.

Generally takes longer than 48 hours so how about a two week rule?

Joe Doakes

The committee is taking it under advisement. 

One of the truisms of playing in a bar band (as I do) is that bar bands aren’t musicians.  They are beer salesmen. 

And if you’re playing an American Legion in Anoka, and you bust out some Parliament or Sonic Youth, or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, you’ll make a few hipsters and fanboys happy – and send the rest of the crowd to the exits, sooner or later,.  Mostly sooner.   The American Legion in Anoka (or wherever( wants its Creedence Clearwater and Tom Petty and Bad Company and a little classic country probably woudn’t hurt.  

We’ll come back to that. 

The big splash in local media this past week is KQRS – the classic rock station that used to have literally the highest ratings in the country, the station that was so powerful it could beat back Howard Stern at (or near) his peak – is adjusting its format. 

Along with a playlist more heavily steeped in ’90s alternative rock — including a promised bump in Minnesota acts such as Soul Asylum and the Replacements — KQ’s corporate operators Cumulus Media announced the addition of new on-air personalities who will be familiar to listeners of other Twin Cities stations.

Longtime 89.3 the Current midday jockey Jade Tittle and former Cities 97 host and music director Paul Fletcher have joined the remade KQRS staff, a clear attempt by Cumulus to pick up some of those competitors’ audiences.

The classic rock crowd is angry.  The 90s alt rock crowd is chanting “it’s about time”.

Me?  I’m surprised it took this long.  

Here’s why.  

Like the (not remotely hypothetical) bar band in my example at the top, radio isn’t about music (or sports, or even conservative talk.  Radio is a delivery system for advertising.  Nothing more. 

Advertising focuses on people who have money – specifically, money to spend on an advertiser’s products.  A station’s “format”, whether talk or sports or some genre of music, is pretty tightly associated with a demographic group that is in some way desirable to advertisers, and the products they sell.  Whether pitching nightclubs to 20-somethings (KDWB in the ’90s) or lifestyle products to women from 25-40 (KS95) to stuff for harried moms (ChickTalk 107) to mental red meat for men 35+ (conservative talk), you can tell who the station is trying to reach by the products they’re trying to sell.  

And it gets to them via the emotions. 

One of the little secrets radio programmers know is that people form deep, lifelong, intense emotional bonds with the music that they were exposed to between, roughly, puberty and the time the brain stops growing – usually the mid-to-late 20s.   Doesn’t matter what the genre – the music of that part that you associate with that part of life when so much else about peoples personalities get formed, and they start noticing and getting noticed by the opposite sex, has an intense emotional connection for them.  More or less intense, maybe, but still, it’s a a powerful hook into a person’s psyche. 

“Classic rock“ is music of the baby boom.   For the past fifty years, they’ve been the biggest, wealthiest demographic surge in history.  And “classic rock” is the music of the people who were born between 1945 and sometime in the early ’60s.  Who were entering puberty between the late ’60s and the mid-seventies.  And whose brains became more or less fully formed between 1970 and 1980 or so.  

And for most of the past 45 years or so, KQRS has prospered by cracking the emotional response of one of the biggest, wealthiest demographic groups in the area – white men (remember – mens and womens brains are different!) whose brains started forming in the mid-sixties, and pretty much switched to emotional, and thus musical, cruise control sometime during the George HW Bush administration.  

The baby boom starts turning 80 this year. The younger ones start retiring. They don’t have the money or the clout anymore. Advertisers are moving on.  Which is the same reason the last of the Big Band and Beautiful Music stations (KLBB, WLTE, KMFY) left the air 30+ years ago, and why KOOL108 switched from Elvis and Carl Perkins to, well, the stuff KQRS was playing until two weeks ago; because their audiences aged out of the prime advertising years. 

It’s not about the music. It’s about business.  You gotta sell the beer. 

It only took ten years, and the advent of ubiquitous AI, but my book “Trulbert:  A Comic Novella About The End Of The World As We Know It” is finally out on audio!

When “Satanists” – actually a sophomoric cheetoh-dusty club of militant atheists – erected a “Satanic” holiday display in the Capitol rotunda, Christians angrily dissented, and occasionally fulminated – but let the “Satanists” enjoy their free speech and one of their few trips outside their parents’ basements. 

When an Easter display got excluded from the Capitol, Christians – including former Senator Dan Hall – took it outdoors:

You didn’t need to be a playwrite to foreshadow this one:

No cigar for guessing this one:

Norby allegedly has an arrest record involving “Antifa-Like” activities in 2020. 

Of course, the real precedent is that Minnesota leftists feel entitled to destroy speech they disagree with.  

And this being John Choi’s Ramsey County, I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and predict Norby gets “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the separation of church and state, using precedent.  

Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week:  “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech!  They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”

Waiting period specified in statute passes:

Not sure it ever fails. 

Which is why we call ’em “laws”. 

Last fall’s election was a rough one for America’s left.   Their message was rejected by a majority of Latino men, an increasing share of the black vote, an astonishing percent of GenZ (some reports say that Trump drew a third of the vote at the deep-blue University of Minnesota), and even a near supermajority of Native Americans, to say nothing of the usual suspects, white men (especially blue collar men) and married women.

And the Democrats’ woes haven’t abated with the election – with their popularity hovering somewhere below “Serbian War Criminal” and above “Journalist“.  

You might be wondering if the drubbing they took caused the radical wing of Big Left to get a little circumspect?  To see if they might want to change their approach, especially to the parts of their late coalition that forsook them last November?  To even say “maybe we oughtta dial back the culture war schtick”?

Well, not many of them.  

This sign has been popping up in Minneapolis:

For all the “All Are Welcome Here” signs in Minneapolis yards, it’s clear some groups mean “all… except you.” The dark money socialist group “Minneapolis for the Many” finally said the quiet part out loud: “When we say ALL, we don’t really mean ALL.”

I don’t have to agree with… pic.twitter.com/SspBpmHPfd

— BECKA THOMPSON (@realBeckaT) March 23, 2025

The signs are posted by a group, “Mpls for the Many“, which apparently seeks to move Minneapolis’s city government even further to the left, and appears intended to supplant some of those “In This House” signs standing in the front yards of so many white, middle-class “progressives”.  

I put “progressives” in scare quotes because, well, if you read the responses to the tweet above, it just doesn’t seem very “progressive”.  It’s got that whole “scarlet letter” vibe about it.  

And it’s not a rare thing at all – as David (a Minneapolis inmate) points out, many on the left seem to think the social contract is, er, subject to terms and conditions (nearly a direct quote from many of the responses to the tweet above, in fact).  

Tom Knighton (at our sister publication Bearing Arms) points out that the current round of “mostly peaceful” demonstrators are putting the gloves back on – so as not to get gasoline, explosive residue or any stray flames on their hands:

Now, Molotov cocktails are bad, but the nature of them tends to mean that people know good and well that there’s no one around when they use one–or, conversely, that someone is present. Using one is a violent act, but it’s still a thing that gives the user at least some control over who all is going to be hurt by the cocktail when it’s thrown.

After that, all bets are off, which is why we don’t really treat them as a nothingburger.

But bombs are an escalation. These are intended to go off at a later time. It doesn’t say if they were meant for remote detonation or on a timer, but what we know is that these aren’t necessarily controlled and can be much more destructive.

To those who believe in such things as social contracts, it appears that part of our society is conjuring up some escape clauses in the fine print.  

Don’t make me turn this car around.

America loves second acts. 

The child star who disappeared under a mound of blow at age 15, coming back with a stellar performance.

The team that started the season in the cellar, going to the championship.

The 35 year old short reliever who started as an 18 year old prodigy before getting stuck in AAA ball for a decade and a half that pitches a shutout to get the save, and a little bit of immortality, in the big game.

The political party that squandered a $18B surplus to create a $6B deficit, while blowing up the budget 40% and jacking up taxes, rebranding itself as tax hawks for the children…

Wait.  Wut?

And kudos to the social media intern for that clever job of editing all the facts out of the interchange, to make it look like Rep. Gomez was winning the discussion.  It was…creative. 

…if the Walz administration would allow real journalists, like me, along on his entourage to junkets like this:

“Uh, yes, Governor Walz – do these farmers know that you signed a law that will ban all liquid fuel by 2040, including on farms? Meaning no gas or diesel to run tractors and combines, among other things?

What? You’re saying nobody asked that? 

Not even the farmer?

Or “farmer”?

So, it’s staged?

Like every godforsaken shot of  kids spontaneously hugging him?

It tracks.

Honestly, with some of these lefty s**tpost farms, I’m not sure why I bother fact-checking anything.  They don’t care, and they bank on their audience not caring as well. 

But there’s always the off chance that I’ll catch someone who hasn’t checked all of their brain in at the lefty claim check, who is looking for an honest answer to a stupid question.

To wit:

So let’s get this straight:  in the past 60 years, the United States has spent $22 Trillion dollars – more than the annual gross domestic product of China, or about 3/4 of a year’s GDP of the USA – to “eradicate poverty” and its effects. 

But, on top of all that spending (which is ongoing, and has accelerated well ahead of inflation), taking a small tax onto the small number of billionaires is what it’ll ackshyually take to fix the problem?

Huh.

We’ve been so close, all along!

OK.  Now let it sink in.  

Then press flush. 

Governor Walz, throwing Saint Paul’s ailing downtown a much-needed bone, calls state employees back to the office…

…a little:

Sure, much of the private sector never left the office (or work site), and much of the rest of the free market world has re-adapted.

But not Minnesota’s oh-so special state government union employees:

And they’re putting teeth into their whining:

My big question:  how many of them need to come back, not only to the Saint Paul, but to Minnesota. 

Or the US.

Or Earth?

I thought I was getting a little carried away with that last one, but the more I think about it…

I’ll allow that it’s possible that between David and I, Minnesota might get a little over-covered here at Hot Air.  

But I’ve got a theory:  national Democrats are trying out a lot of their national strategies and tactics in Minnesota; conservatives following Minnesota politics got a fair amount of deja vu during the ’24 presidential campaign, and that was even before Tim Walz got the (inexplicable but providential) nod to run for VP.   The accession of Minnesota DFL chair Ken Martin to the head of the DNC supports the theory.  So hear me out. 

The DFL in Minnesota has a bit of a crime problem:  their one vote majority in the State Senate (until Senator Eichorn is expelled for his arrest) hangs in the person of Sen. Nicole Mitchell, who is accused of multiple counts of burglary; the Walz administration is mired in a persistent series of non-profit fraud scandals, one of their elected representatives was tossed from office when it was revealed he didn’t live in his district (with the full knowledge of the DFL’s former Speaker of the House), and there’s the usual assortment of DUIs, not to mention the DFL taking the “20%” side of a lot of 80-20 issues (“stand your ground”, boys in girls sports, and so on).  

The response appears to be…

…slander all Republicans.  

State Senator Erin Maye Quade is a long-time progressive activist – think of her as a home-grown AOC.  Her terms as a state representative and state Senator from the south Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley were interrupted by a brief run for Lieutenant Governer, along with current Minnesota Senate majority leader Erin Murphy – who, significantly standing next to Maye Quade outside the Senate chamber as she said (read the thread, via Tom Hauser at KSTP-TV):

She said this with the Majority Leader standing right there.  You can see it. 

That’s about as close as you can get to declaring all Republicans potential sex criminals in advance, just to save the trouble.  

So I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and predict that Democrats nationwide are going to embark on a colossal campaign of name-calling.  

I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our money on.  

Promoting DEI in Serbia?   Transgender comic books in Peru?  Yaaawn.   Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting.  

So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is.   Why would we not be funding universities in Oz?”

What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under.  The Trump administration is asking seven Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest.  According to the Guardian:

The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.

University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities – Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia – since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.

Which is, according to Sky News, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:

A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.

“Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo said.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets. 

And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):

“The Federal Government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms.” – Alison Barnes, NTEU National President

Read the full media release here 👉 https://t.co/vUg4if1lJw@AlisonBarnes25 pic.twitter.com/rGDB2mUIlY

— NTEU (@NTEUnion) March 13, 2025

The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.

Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances.  

So, what’s worse? 

Empty real estate?

Or vacant lots?

Evan Ramstad – who’s in a hammer-and-tongs battle with Jennifer Brooks for “worst Strib columnist” – says “empty lots”

Now, that could make some sense, if there was some intense craving for downtown real estate – perhaps to build the “housing” that “urbanists” are fantasizing about.  

But Minneapolis already has a glut of overpriced “luxury” housing, and rent control (albeit not quite as stupid and myopic as Saint Paul’s version) and unicorn-style zoning are choking out the supply of middle-class construction.   

So I’m trying to see how this ends up as anything but a downtown full of lots suitable for graffiti, “encampments” and all the other bits and pieces of. urban blight that the Minneapolis City Council and the Strib columnist bullpen seem to think the city deserves. 

During his 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial bids, Minnesota governor Tim Walz ran under the motto and hashtag “One Minnesota”.   Now, if you’re a student of certain problematic eras in European history, the hair on the back of your neck might stand up when leaders start talking about making the place they want to govern “One…” of anything.  It’s kind of hte opposite of “E Pluribus Unum”, if you think about it. 

Especially when you compare to the Harris/Walz 2024 Presidental campaign, where the candidates spent a few cycles calling Republicans “Fascists” and “Nazis”.  

The election results showed that the results, er, came up a little short. 

Or…did they?

I’m of two minds about this story. Either:

• Tim Walz only has one setting, “defamatory gaffe”, or
• someone in the Democratic brain trust running Walz’s none-too-subtle 2028 Presidential pre-bid knows something we don’t about the hunger swing voters have to demonize half of their fellow Americans, with a little election denialism thrown in for good measure.

If I’m being consistent with my post on Walz and the team behind him from a week or so ago, I’d urge you not to rule out the second option too soon. 

This past Saturday, March 22, Walz spoke at a rally in Rochster, Minnesota – the largest city in the Minnesota First Congressional District, the district Walz represented in Washington from 2006 to 2018 (and which has, interestingly, voted for Walz’s opponents in two gubernatorial races and last year’s White House bid).   These…things, were found floating around the event.   As reported by Liz Collin, from Minnesota conservative outlet “Alpha News”:

On the one hand, “86” is a reference to the military (and bar industry) slang term for “permanently throw out”.   Which is the goal of politics.  Not a big deal.  

But “Bury Fascists?”

On top of all the other calls to violence, subtle and, er, not so subtle, in recent weeks?

And I did mention election denialism, didn’t I?

There are ways to not read that as denying the election results; delusion, magical thinking, or playing to a base that is more or less in intense denial about the Democratic party’s current state are the ones that jump to mind.  

Dean Phillips – former congressional representative and Democratic presidential candidate, and a Democrat who has found a niche as the Democrats’ and Minnesota DFL’s critical nagging conscience – is a little concerned about his former Minnesota political colleague:

Now, we don’t know who was handing them out, or how many were in circulation, or whether Walz was involved.

But this jibes with what Walz is saying, doing and, er, encouraging in his followers,

Before the inevitable half-assed walkback, anyway:

Learn more about the Minneapolis Republican Party.

Today’s music list!

I’ve actually started doing some writing for HotAir.com.

Those who’ve been paying attention may remember that I actually did write for HotAir, between 2009-2012.  

But this time I’m actually getting paid.   Which is kinda cool. 

This shouldn’t affect SITD. 

Saint Paul’s “Tony Soprano”-style trash collection system – which has morphed over the past decade from individually-contracted vendors to a dozen or so vendors allocated across the city by a city plan that drove most of them out of Saint Paul, to now one single contracted vendor that sucked up to the city properly, is facing a shutdown before it really starts:

After years of bitter debates that came be called “the trash wars,” the start of the new garbage hauler’s contract on April 1 is supposed to mark a turning point in the city’s bid to take a more central role in managing the service.

t. Paul City Council members voted 5-0 on Wednesday to block the new hauler, FCC Environmental, from placing its truck yard on a lot the company purchased last summer off West Seventh Street, just blocks from the Schmidt Artist Lofts.

The vote stems from a January appeal filed by a neighborhood group, which has argued the trash facility would undermine long-term plans for residential, mixed-use, transit-oriented development in the area.

Lesson #1 – the most powerful people in Saint Paul are white upper middle class “artists” living off government “humanities” grants in lofts. They may be even more powerful than white progressive 60-something livelong DFL women from Mac Groveland.

Hard as that may be to believe. 

Lesson #2 – White Saint Paul progressives apprently think that trash goes to the same place food comes from; some magical building. 

To: The MNDFL
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Pick A Side

So, profiles in courage that you are, you’ve decided to take a bold stance against (checks notes) iopeople attracted to minors. https://x.com/MinnesotaDFL/status/1902478708142702817

Pretty icky.

But wait – it was just two years ago that the DFL-controlled legislature passed a law, signed by Piglet, that removed “Minor Attraction” from the list of exceptions to the MN Human Rights Act.

The media’s Democrat-fluffery industry breathlessly told everyone it didn’t “protect pedophilia“.

And that’s true – technically.   It doesn’t make sex with underage people legal.  

What it did was open the door to litigation the next time someone who is attracted to minors suffers any form of discrimination if their attraction becomes public knowledge. 

Which is, let’s be honest, where slippery slopes start.

So – the DFL is being hypocritical about this one two levels – they started paving the way to make this sort of behavior acceptable (in Democrats), and as the GOP leads the way to expelling Eichorn, Nicole Mitchell – equally accused of a couple of felonies – remains covered by the DFL’s code of omertá and the network of DFL judges.