So, last week was a big week. A good one, by Minnesota Republican standards. For the DFL, less so.

Both chambers of of the Minnesota legislature flipped to “tied” last week – one by via human tragedy, and one by hubris and stupidity.

Let’s talk stupidity and hubris first.

The House

As we noted last week, the election in House District 40B got thrown out by a Ramco Judge – DFLer Julian Castro – because the DFL winner, Curtis Johnson, hadn’t lived in the district the required six months.

Naturally, it took his GOP opponent and his supporters to dig up the information that went to trial – God knows the media isn’t going to do it. But the locals did prevail. Johnson is out.

Which, including the still-disputed 54A race, leaves the GOP one vote ahead as the session looms. Which means a GOP speaker of the House – a much better speedbump on DFL control than the “shared power” arrangement people were talking about last week.

Or it will, if the DFL can’t figure out a way to juke the rules in their favor. Which is exactly what they’re going to try to do.

On Friday, Johnson A DFL state representative-elect said Friday he will not appeal a judge’s ruling that he is ineligible to hold the office because he did not meet residency requirements for the district.

On Friday, Johnson announced he was opening the way to a special election to fill the 40B seat by “resigning“:

A DFL state representative-elect said Friday he will not appeal a judge’s ruling that he is ineligible to hold the office because he did not meet residency requirements for the district.

In a letter to Gov. Tim Walz, Curtis Johnson said he has “made the difficult decision not to accept my seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives and to resign from the Office of State Representative effective immediately and irrevocably.”

Which is great – except the couldn’t resign. He was never in the office – it’s still Becker-Finn’s seat, and Johnson’s election was voided by the court.

Pretty Vacant

And the word “vacancy” has a statutory definition:

Which didn’t stop Governor Walz from declaring a special election on January 24.

Now, I’m no lawyer, but Johnson’s not the incumbent – Becker-Finn is.

So trying to jam down a special election is against the law:

But there is no vacancy, so (as I, and I suspect Mr. Hansen, and presumptive-Speaker Demuth) see it), the governor doesn’t get to call the special election until 22 days after Johnson isn’t sworn in, on January 14, the first day of session.

So with the House tied at 67-67 after the election, and the 54A seat in Shakopee still in court, this gives the GOP a 67-66 lead in the House, and the potential of picking up the 54A (and refusing to seat Brad Tabke until the issue is resolved in court).

I say it’s time for some intransigence.

Let’s talk about the Senate later today. 

Remember the movie “Miracle”? One of the last great Disney movies?

For a lot of us, the opening credits were intensely evocative:

These credits were as concisely effective a history of the 1970s, especially the Carter Administration, as I’ve seen.

I was 13 when Jimmy Carter took office, and 17 when he left.

I’m not going to pretend that I was an especially well-informed teenager about politics.  More well-read than most of my classmates?  Perhaps, but even then high schools didn’t spend a ton of time on political philosophy, for better or worse. 

But it’d be fair to say I leaned toward whatever passed for the left as a teenager.  My parents were both Democrats – Dad was a union guy, Mom had muted hippie tendencies – so it was the water in which I swam.  Jimmy Carter was “the good guy” in my house.  Not that Ford was the “bad guy”, necessarily – but the white hat/black hat dynamic of the two parties was kinda understood.  

Or at least I understood them that way, and certainly saw politics that way.  In 1980, I went to “Boy’s State”, a weeklong mock government program put on by the American Legion.  Somehow, I got elected state party chairman.  I wrote a platform that would have made Bernie Sanders gush with pride.   I think I knew then what Ken Martin and Governor Klink know now – satisfying peoples surface desires gets you votes. And it did – we swept the statewide offices. 

That fall, I wasn’t old enough to vote.   I certainly wasn’t voting for Reagan.

But I wasn’t going to vote for Carter, either.

While I was not yet an especially well-read or -informed person, I could read the room around me.   A few years before Boys State, I’d listened to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise Speech”.

And I started to get angry.   The message to me – probably 14 or 15 at the time – was “my generation got ours, but sorry, you young ‘uns, you’re gonna have to suck it up and deal with less”. 

And it kinda infuriated me.  And unlike a lot of things that pissed me off as a cranky teenager, it still does. 

There were a lot of things that started me toward pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and becoming a conservative talk show host in 1986.  

The Malaise speech, and the economic, moral and social malaise that had in fact swept the nation.

The foreign policy impotence that allowed Iran to hold Americans hostage with impunity (or, given the post-Vietnam atrophy of the US military leading to the failure of the rescue mission, even worse than impunity)

Meeting Vietnamese and Polish refugees – and, in fact, watching the Poles’ fight for freedom unfolding in real time.

Reading – at the urging of my English major advisor – Dostoëvskii, Tolstoy, Paul Johnson, PJ O’Rourke, Buckley and all the many other writers who were able to break through my adolescent inertia and show me the corrosive futility of statist utopianism and the power of freedom.

And seeing America find it’s feet – first slowly…

And then picking up speed:

And then definitively. For a decade or so, anyway.

All of those episodes were either direct result of Jimmy Carter’s America, or repudiations of it.

There’s a part of me that wants to study Carter and his supremely checkered legacy in more depth than the above (which is about as deeply as I’ve actually gone, ever).  He’s a fascinating mass of contradictions. 

He was considered a knee-jerk liberal by the standards of the time – but smarting from the humiliation of the hostage crisis, the Annapolis grad and 10-year Submarine officer actually started the military modernization that Reagan continued and accelerated. 

He took over the presidency at one of its peacetime low points – and kept things at a depressing, dare I say “malaise-ridden” plateau.  

He was broadly considered a “good man” – the past 40-odd years have been an endless series of Habitat for Humanity photo ops for Carter.  But he also spent much of the past 44 years trying to impart moral equivalence on some of the world’s worst dictators. 

For my part?  He’s no longer the worst president of my lifetime; all three Obama terms were much worse, for the nation and the world. 

There are signs – tiny sparks, really – that the generation burbling up through high school and universities today are as sick of this nation’s post-Obama moral confusion and malaise as I was of the post-sixties, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam jumble of miseries.   If I can do anything to foster that, I’ll consider it a mission. 

RIP, Jimmy Carter.

Former Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Kari Dziedzic passed away last Friday after a protracted battle with cancer.  She was 62.

“Senator Kari Dziedzic was a passionate legislator, a respected leader, and a trusted colleague and friend. She will be remembered for her integrity and her compassion for Minnesotans, something that we all saw as she continued to serve even as she battled cancer,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, an East Grand Forks Republican. “I’m deeply saddened at her passing and am praying for her family and friends as we all mourn this loss.”

She was the daughter of former City Councilmember Walt Dziedzic, who may have been the last genuine union moderate in Minneapolis politics.

Prayers and condolences to the Senator’s family. 

Her passing, along with other recent events, put the DFL in a bit of a bind – but I won’t pollute an obit with that. 

Vivek Ramaswamy ruffled a whole lot of feathers over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants.

Stipulated in advance – there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force. That may need some fixing.

But when you start comparing second-generation Indian immigrants?

He’s not really wrong.

You should open and read the entire tweet – but I’m going to pull this quote:

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers…[Families should emphasize] movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

That drew some, er, sporty responses from what media calls “MAGA”. No doubt you’ve heard ’em.

But if you leave aside the abuse of H1B visas, and the pretty spotty record of outsourcing engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results), he’s not wrong.

This guy – one of the less-useless voices in academia – puts it well (and again, you’d do well to read the entire tweet):

But again, I’ll pull the quote:

An entertaining aspect of the past few days’ race war is that the elite Asian/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (“You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid”) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white American critique of Black and Mexican scholastic culture.

As a political scientist, there’s an important point here: bigotry doesn’t just go in one direction. For most people, the more forward-caste person – the bastard ahead of them in society – will always be a ruthless, stiff, amoral, dead inside, thieving, SOB who is a trash lover. But, the more poor and rural person? A dumb, inbred, animalistic, backward, criminal, low-IQ, ridge-runner.

And it should hardly bother “MAGA” too much to notice that Ramaswamy agrees with them – modern American academic culture in general would have to stand on tiptoes to get to “mediocrity”, and that pathology is even leaking into the once-sacrosanct “STEM” fields.

But it’s not just academic culture.

Immigrants, as Reilly notes, have always had to kick it up a notch to get to “even” in America.  Indians – like Chinese, Koreans, VIetnamese, Philipinos, and before them Italilans, Jews, Germans and all the others, all the way back – have done it exceptionally well. 

The concentration of Indians in technology (and, this past few years, politics) should be taken as a challenge – to our education system, sure, but to our family culture as well.  

Democrats, 2020-November 2024:  “We need to vote to save Democracy!   Remember January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  January 6!  

Democrats today:

Anyone wanna place odds on an inauguration day riot?

SCENE:   Former Governor Mark DAYTON’s house, on Lake Minnetonka [1].  

He’s sitting in his bathrobe and slippers by a roaring fire, reading the Strib. His wife , Ana ORKE-DAYTON, enters the room.

ORKE-DAYTON:  I’m taking a stack of credit cards and taking the Porsche to the Galleria.

DAYTON:   Mpfmbfh. 

ORKE-DAYTON leaves, as DAYTON’s eye alights on a news item:

U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, has missed votes in Congress and has been “having some dementia issues late in the year,” her son told The Dallas Morning News. Granger, 81, last cast a vote on the morning of July 24…The congresswoman now resides in a Fort Worth senior living facility called Tradition Senior Living. There are two locations on the same property, but Brandon Granger confirmed it is not the memory care facility, as some media outlets have reported. Granger said his mother is staying in the independent living facility to be around other seniors.

DAYTON: (Thinking to self) Huh. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on pretending to be in office?

And SCENE

[1] I have no idea where he lives. It’s gotta be Minnetonka, right?

A Ramsey County judge has tossed out the election of DFLer Curtis Johnson:

Ramsey County District Judge Leonardo Castro issued an order granting an election challenge against Curtis Johnson, determining he didn’t live in the Roseville area district he sought to represent for the time required in state law. 

Johnson’s Republican challenger, Paul Wikstrom, sought the ruling after he and supporters gathered surveillance video and photos that aimed to show Johnson did not reside in the apartment he claimed to inhabit during the campaign.

The Minnesota Constitution spells out that a candidate must live in the state for one year prior to the election and in the district they hope to represent for six months ahead of the election.

 

This gives the MNGOP a one-vote lead in the House. The “trifecta” was dead even with 67-67 tie – tie votes are defeated.

But this means the Speaker will be a Republican, not some jury-rigged power-sharing arrangement.

I strongly urge the GOP to do to the DFL what John Bonham did to hotel rooms. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

The head of the NCAA says it’s “debatable” whether male athletes have a physical advantage over females.

I propose a scientific experiment to end the debate.   Take the top 50 male athletes in every NCAA sport and play them against the top 50 females.  Run a “Best of the Best” tournament with brackets, just like any other tournament.  See who winds up on top.  

Where there are different rules for men’s versus women’s sports, we play from the women’s tees, throw the women’s shot putt, etc.  Referees and judges will be equally split, men and women, to ensure fairness.

Biological men. Biological women.  No trans people allowed.  This competition is not a social studies project to pamper sensitive feelings, it is a scientific inquiry to determine whether biology plays a determinative role in sports.  Therefore, people with unusual medical conditions such as Imane Kehlif who has Swyer Syndrome, will be excluded, as they are outliers who will skew the results. 

The sports where guys win the tournament prove trannies cannot compete against girls because their male biology gives them an unfair advantage.

The sports where girls win are the sports where trannies can compete against them, since they won’t have an unfair physical advantage.    

And once we’ve established that by SCIENCE, it can never be questioned again.  After all, you trust the Science, don’t you?  You’re not a Science Denier, are you?  

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

 

 

That’d be cool – but it’s kinda been done.

You’re Tim Walz.

You just called half of your state “Nazis” and “Fascists”. 

How do you try to make up for that?

The same way you always did:

The same way he’s done everything; an endless ooze of food selfies, social media strawmen and intellectual Cream of Wheat.

Giggles isn’t paying her staff.

But sure, she could have fixed the economy. 

Let them eat brat vibes.

A friend of the blog emails:

Like Justine Bateman, I was thinking that I would see a flood of posts declaring that it wasn’t a host of other issues, but that it was the guns. Nope. Didn’t see a single post.

Saw a few people say no one deserves this, not even an insurance CEO with a lot of “but he’s killing people every day” responses.

I work in healthcare. I see the occasional sad case of someone who is underinsured or uninsured. We don’t let them die. In fact, we do a lot of work for those groups of people in the hospital to try to get them to a point where they can manage outside of the hospital. If they won’t get to that point, we usually find a transitional home for them. There are the even smaller groups of people who actually have a little net worth that would lose everything if they went to a transitional place and we continue to treat them to get them stable for home with the minimal resources we can find.

Yes, there are insurers who make care for patients extremely difficult. There is one Medicare Replacement insurance that many regional facilities will not accept as payment. I don’t know too many people with employer provided insurance, however, who dislike their plans. I’m sure there are some bad plans out there. But, I would guess even in those cases, it is a small minority.

Yet, I look at other areas around the world – I have a friend who in his 40s died in a hospital in Mexico from a heart attack. He was on vacation. Maybe he would have died here, but I feel like the hospitals here would have tried harder. I think of the Chinese father in law of a friend who had a stroke and was sent home to die 3 days later in China. By all accounts of what I heard, he likely wouldn’t have died that quickly here. I think of a Parisian friend who wasn’t well. But, she didn’t fit the narrative of someone who needed medical care, so she wasn’t being treated for anything when she died of a heart attack on a plane. She probably had something that here we might have caught early enough to treat and save her life. By all appearances in these cases, it seems socialized medicine said “we aren’t going to give costly tests and treatments to this person because they don’t fit the formula for those procedures.” So, they died. Is that any different than some private insurers here? The difference is that many of us have a choice in insurers and can choose an insurer that won’t deny that care to us. And while prices are negotiated between care providers and insurance, there is probably a bit of good insurance paying a bit more than is necessary which helps cover the cost of bad insurance/underinsured/uninsured.

Americans could do more to reduce healthcare costs, like manage or avoid some chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease. But, even when Americans get a chronic illness and even when they refuse to follow any medical advice to get it under control and stay out of the hospital, regardless of income or insurance, we still treat them and value their lives. Despite their own doings and despite some insurance companies. That is truly a difference that I think distinguishes us from much of the world. It is a distinction that I think few on the Team Shooter realize. Or maybe they do realize – maybe to them, not all life has value, much like socialized medicine around the world believes.

Sort of like the parables about democracy, our justice system and the free market – our health insurance system is the worst in the world, except for all the others. 

So, here’s a picture of Governor Walz with Lt. Governor Flanagan, taken back during the “trifecta”.

She was inescapable. She was in every photo with Walz. Her name may have been more prominent on their campaign signs.

The media actively dolled her up:

The camera and their photo selection didn’t do half bad by her.

At times it seemed as if the local media were just as much her PR firm as Walz’s. 

And now – this:

And this:

That – combined with the Rochelle Olson/Ryan Faircloth piece we talked about earlier – makes it look like Walz is trying to distance himself from Flanagan.

Why?

Because polling isn’t showing “DSA whackjobbery” is doing well?

Or because they’re both going to be running for Governor?

Tim Walz is back

And he’s pissed. 

It seems a bit of a squabble has broken out between his camp and Lt Governor Flanagan‘s:

Walz was asked in a recent interview if there was tension when he returned given Flanagan would have succeeded him as governor if the Harris ticket had won.

“No,” Walz responded. “There would be time to figure out all that afterwards. I was solely focused on making sure the state of Minnesota was going, we were getting things done. The lieutenant governor was here doing the work that she needed to do, reaching out to community.”

Others who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Walz team was not pleased at steps Flanagan had taken to assume the governorship, conferring with potential key hires and preparing for a possible run herself in 2026. “If the people of Minnesota want me to continue to serve, I am absolutely open to that,” Flanagan said at the State Fair in August.

The Walz camp was especially irked because Flanagan had tapped Walz’s gubernatorial campaign fund without authorization for some work, multiple sources said.

Walz is claiming to know nothing, NOTHing, about the matter. But I’m not the only one thinking something’s amiss:

Steven Schier, Carleton College political science professor emeritus, said it’s not uncommon in Minnesota for the governor and lieutenant governor to maintain a distance from each other. “What is notable are the timing of this and the apparent reasons for it,” Schier said. “Peggy Flanagan and Walz were joined at the hip for six years and now they seem separated by their individual ambitions.”

Joined at the hip is an understatement. I rarely recall seeing Lieutenant Governors consistently appearing with the Governor before Walz. One rarely saw Tina Smith or Mae Schunk or Joan Growe outside the odd campaign event or the State of the State.

But Flanagan was in every photo this past six years.  They had hundreds of shots of the two of them cavorting about the Fair, her feeding him corn dogs and playing fetch with him.  Her name was arguably more prominent than his on their campaign signs:

And the optics – literally – are absolutely strange on this.

More later today. 

SCENE: The rotunda at the Minnesota State Capitol.   A press conference is underway.  Standing at the podium, in front of a “Satanic” display, are three members of the Twin Cities Church of Satan:

• Joshua Micah GUMPKE – a tall, morbidly obese 30-something man with thick, unkempt back hair,  and a black neckbeard.  His arms are covered with “sleeves” of occult-looking tattoos.  He wears a black occult-themed T-shirt, stained with cheeto dust, fresh and otherwise. 
• Eva BACHMANN-DUMPF – a morbidly obese twenty-something woman with long straight blond hair.  She is wearing a different black occult-themed t-shirt, and sports a small pentagram tattooed under her left ear. 
• Edmund POCKERT – A short, wiry man with a fringe of white hair snaking around the back of his head to meet his white beard.  He wears a visibly worn suit. 

A smattering of reporters are gathered.

POCKERT:   I’m Edmund Pockert, the legal counsel for the Twin Cities Church of Satan. 

GUMPKE AND BACHMANN-DUMPF: (awkwardly, loudly) Hail Satan!

POCKERT:  Mr. J-Talon666 and Ms. QueenOfTheDark will now answer questions.

CHANNEL 11:   Mr. and Ms. What? 

POCKERT:  Those are the names our representatives go by. 

CHANNEL 9:  So what’s going on with this display?

GUMPKE:  This display is ack-shu-ally our way of striking a blow for religious pluralism.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  We love to notice the hypocrisy of Christians who melt down when other people exercise religious freedom. 

MPR NEWS:  When you say “melt down”…?

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Christians always have a cow and melt down when we assert our rights. 

POCKERT:  Always. 

ALPHA NEWS:  So, how do you respond to allegations that the “church of Satan” is less about religious freedom and more about getting a juvenile rise out of mainstream Christians.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Well, it is their own fault.  They always have a cow and melt down and freak out go into emotional tailspin and get loud and crazy and deranged and lose their shi…

GUMPKE:  They are very predictable. 

CENTER OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT:   So a local blogger and talk host left this satirical response to your display:

(GUMPKE and BACHMANN-DUMPF stand, gobsmacked and confused, for a moment. )

GUMPKE:   (finally breaking the silence) Well, this is typical.   A Christian freaking out…

CHANNEL 4:  This doesn’t appear to be – what was your term – “freaking out”.

ALPHA NEWS:  Yeah, more like “satire” or “parody”, speaking to the notion that “Satanism” exist just to try to mock and ridicule regular Christians.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Is this even legal?  Can they do that?

POCKERT:  (nods silently)

GUMPKE:   It’s our view that this just contributes to the climate of hate against Satanists…

PIONEER PRESS:  But it’s just mockery – not a whole lot different than this display, itself

POCKERT:  OK, this converence is over.

(The three shuffle away from the podium).

And SCENE

Seems like barely two weeks ago that a couple of “transgender women” claimed they’d been attacked at a rail station in downtown Minneapolis (aka “MAGA Country”) as a bunch of people cheered.

I pointed out at the time the story seemed…implausible? A heavily-surveiled place in a leftist city – is this ringing any bells?

CrimeWatch is among the groups that are proving Elon Musk right in declaring the MSM dead.  And as usual, they’ve got the actual story; the video. It’s a short thread:

The bigger the hype of the reveal, the bigger the flop it turns out to be. Never fails.

You know who I’m talking about – the young humanities major at your job; the know-it-all lady witih ELCA hair in the PTA; the angry young relative who deigns to grace you with her presence at holiday dinners anyway.

This one goes out to you.  Use it wisely. 

Reasons American healthcare is expensive:

6. American pharmaceutical and device research and development can’t recoup costs overseas, due to rigid price controls in “single payer” healthcare systems (ironically making all “single payer” systems in effect dual payer systems).

5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.

4. Americans are terrible drivers.

3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.

2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.

1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.

Reasons American healthcare is expensive:

5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.

4. Americans are terrible drivers.

3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.

2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.

1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.

Not reasons that American healthcare is so expensive:

2. Greed.

1. Upper middle dilettantes haven’t shot enough CEOs.

Hope that settles that.

2. Greed.

1. Upper middle dilettantes haven’t shot enough CEOs.

Hope that settles that.

Governor Klink – who two years before had arrogated emergency powers that Francisco Franco would have envied, who sicced the Attorney General on anyone who defied him – as the trifecta started marauding: “You got political capital, you gotta use it”.

Two years later and facing two years of tie votes in the House: “I hear NOTH-ing! I see NOTH-ing”:

But wait – it gets worse.  

You may think this is just a matter of the Governor and his media noise machine working to transfer the DFL’s little massive fraud problem to the House, abetted by the DFL’s noise machine and the subservient media. 

And you’d be partly right. 

But it’s worse than that:

That’s right – the governor who arroraged to himself the power to cancel Thanksgiving, to pack nursing homes with sick people, and to sort Minnesotans into “essential” and “nonessential”, apparently gave away the power to actually control his own executive branch. 

Looking to get someone to explain this madness on the show after Christmas. 

Today’s music list!

Have a blessed Christmas!

Governor Klink is doing the rounds of the Twin Cities media, saying he’s not going to rule out further runs for national office.

Of course, to a leftist, “conversation” means “Monologue” – which is what Walz is used to here in Minnesota, with his constant stream of selfies and Twitter proclamations and straw men.

His foray into national politics was his first attempt at a “conversation”.

It didn’t go well.  See also his debate with JD Vance. 

But hope springs eternal that we can have an actual conversation with Walz and the entire DFL over his and their dubious record in office – especially given the news of yet another corruption scandal (more next week).

Speaking of “conversations”:

Hey – one person’s “rumors about dogs and cats” is another person’s “neighborliness”.

“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
 — PJ O’Rourke

Remember 2010-2012?   When Democrats snarled that there was no way, no how that there were “death panels” buried in Obamacare?

And those of us with some experience in the healthcare industry responded “of course, there are, and have been ever since government poked its nose into controlling the healthcare system”?

The “people” jumping for joy over the murder of Brian Thompson for running a company that administers the metaphorical institutional “death panel”, exacty as foretold, are the same class of gerbils who said that was no way, no how anything Obamacare was about. Ever!

1. Create a problem:

2. Keep on letting it stew. Let the “steam” build:

3. Go “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s a crime problem!

4. “Ride to the rescue” with a meaningless band-aid that doesn’t come close to addressing the cultural crisis you, yourselves, fomented:

Of course I’m not the first or only one to notice this:

Apparently “chaos” and “crime” aren’t polling well enough to overcome the loss of the ‘Trifecta’.

Am I the only one that heard about Taylor Lorenz’s “Joy” at the murder of Brian Thompson…

…and thought “that certainly puts a new spin on the Harris campaign’s theme?”

• Freedom is slavery?
• 2+2=5?
• Murder is joy?

One “joy” I try to deny myself is excessive schadenfreud. Pinky swear.

But I’ll confess, I feel quite a bit of it seeing Lorenz’s sociopathic level of self-unawareness splashed about the place:

Less schadenfreud, Mitch.  Less schadenfreud. 

Fun Fact #2:   The people angry about that insurance companies – UHG today, but surely all the other ones before long – want to force you onto national health insurance, which doesn’t “deny claims” so much as stall, ration and – well, deny treatment, and are actively exploring (and in some cases have arrived at) “euthanasia”, sometimes without asking any kind of consent at all, and above whom there is nobody to appeal.

Did I say “fun”? I meant “illustrative”.

The woke mob is doing its best to try to simpify the Daniel Penny / Jordan Neely case into a matter of “if we’d only given him what he needed, he’d be alive and impersonating Michael Jackson today”.  

For all its squawking about humanism, modern progressivism tries to boil humanity down into a series of material equation; if you give a “black or brown body” (as opposed to a human) food and a roof over their head and 12 years of an approved curriculum, they’ll turn out just fine. 

It’s a seductive reductionism at best, and kind of cynically inhuman at worst. 

But it’s not purely a product of our cultural left. 

Among the many offshoots of the Penny/Neely case is the emergence of Neely’s father – who by all documentary accounts was a pretty horrible excuse for a father, even by “father of mentally ill drug addicted street person” standards.  He’s come out of the cold to file a lawsuit against Penny.  It’s the New York way. 

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire commented about it on his podcast last week, as the suit was filed. 

Walsh pointed out the fact that the senior Neely was, by all the available evidence, a bad, mostly absent father who appears to be looking to cash in on the misfortune of a son he didn’t seem to have made a whole lot of time for when he was alive. 

So far, so good.

But then he followed up with [paraphrasing closely, here] “kids who have good parents don’t grow up to be mentally ill crackheads harassing people on the subway”.

What “give people enough handouts or they’ll fail” is to the left, “living the prescribed life” is to the right; as if getting married at 23 and having a traditional household guarantees your kids will turn out just fine.

Don’t get me wrong – it certainly helps raise people whose heads are screwed on straight.  A traditional two-opposite-gender-parent family that prays together, stays together, eats dinner, celebrates holidays together (regardless of everyone’s politics) and keeps life in persepective ,  all other things being equal, is going have a way better than even chance of raising kids that turn into normal, healthy, productive, well-adjusted adults.  And that certainly wasn’t Neely’s chidhood.

But if you think it’s a guarantee?

Allow me to introduce you to mental illness, the world’s most merciless bitch. 

The serious, debilitating ones – crippling depression, schizophrenia, extreme bipolar disorder and the dog’s breakfast of others – don’t care about how you were raised. 

And for all the focus mental illness gets today, modern science still knows more about the dark side of the moon than about how the brain mis-wires itself.

You can be like this guy – from a well-off family, who grew up with all of life’s meaningful advantages, only for bipolar disorder to swerve him from an elite music program to a life of radical and sometimes violent personality swings, homelessness, occasional jail, living with his parents, gigging around a small town for extra money, and (after a brief flash of recovery when “they got his meds right”) an untimely death.

Or this guy, who grew up in a fairly normal if quite well-off family with both the means and the sincere motivation to raise a good kid – who slipped psychologically waaaaay off the rails and spent decades self-medicating, chemically and emotionally, to an extreme that harmed everyone within his personal blast radius, who eventually (and seemingly inevitably) succumbed, survived by parents who seemed broken hearted but to have seen and felt it coming for what must to any parent must have seemed an eternity. As I said five years ago:

And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.

And I’m sorry to say I’m reminded of him in a story a family I know is living right now – a child who grew up in a pretty traditional, normal family, into a pretty normal traditional life. Married at 22, two beautiful and talented kids…

…who had a drinking problem.  Which they gave up some time ago.  Which seemed to allow a whole platoon of demons to come out to play.  This person has since spent the past couple of years chasing around the country seemingly at random, has “come out” as the opposite gender, and is clearly in dire need of a qualified, competent, and perhaps supernaturally wise intervention (from which the “opposite gender” thing will almost certainly shield them).

Is it because this person had bad parents?

No.  It’s not.  Quite the opposite.

Bad parenting and the disintegration of the traditional family have incubated a lot of pathologies in this society.  But not all of them.

So when Matt Walsh says Neely’s father was a disgrace – of course there’s no argument. 

But when the big lesson he takes away is “this doesn’t happen to children of good parents?”

It’s not just simplistic and reductionist.  It’s smug and ignorant. 

Luigi Mangione has been “questioned” in the murder of Brian Thompson.

“They also recovered clothing, including a mask consistent with those worn by our wanted individual,” Tisch said. “Also recovered was a fraudulent New Jersey ID matching the ID our suspect used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting incident.”

Citing a law enforcement official, The Associated Press reported that along with the gun, authorities also found a silencer, fake IDs and writings that appeared to be critical of the health insurance industry, according to the law enforcement official.

The NYPD is sending detectives to Pennsylvania to question the person taken into custody.

His name only sounds like a character in Goodfellas:

Mangione was valedictorian of the Class of 2016 at the Gilman School, and he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. His family owns Turf Valley and Hayfields Country Club, NBC News confirmed.

This one goes out to all the social media detectives who solemnly swore he had to be a professional assassin, who was using a “Welrod” (a purpose-built silenced assassins firearm built for the CIA or MI5 or some such), and that he was just too L3Et to ever get caught.

If he’s the suspect, natch.

While we don’t know a lot more than that at the moment, I’m going to make a few fearless preditions:

• Like most radicals, he’s a little upper middle class prick who got radicalized at school.
• He’ll be lionized as a folk hero on the left.