I consider Dennis Prager, if not a friend in the classic sense, at least a good acquaintance.

Most decent people wish him all the best in his apparently extended recovery.  If your worldview calls for prayers, they’re being welcomed.

I specified “decent” people because…

…well…

Lakeville schools’ response was predictable enough:

Alpha News contacted District 196 for a response, and Communications Director Janet Swiecichowski provided the following statement:

“District 196 is aware of the post. The employee’s post does not reflect the values or opinions of the district. The district is reviewing the matter, but we cannot comment on personnel matters.”

Now, I’m not one of those people who tries to destroy the lives of disagreeable, venal people.  I don’t want her getting fired – partly because that’s kinda bitchy, and partly because there’s some moral symmetry to the social consequences that should follow this sort of tantrum. 

I love dishing up those consequences, personally. 

The DFL, 20-odd months ago:

Unless they’re Hunter Biden (starting just before “The Big Guy” started getting his cut from Burisma, and ending midnight Sunday).

Or Nicole Mitchell.

Or Judd Hoff.

Or Julie Blaha.

Or a whole lot of “Feeding our Future”, Childcare or Medicare fraudsters. 

Other than them, nobody’s above the law.

And Keith Ellison.  And probably Ilhan Omar. 

OK.  Now nobody’s above the law. 

Oh, Hillary Clinton!

OK. Now nobody is…

So the President has pardoned his son for crimes…

…that we were reliably informed, by NPR no less, were all nothing but Russian hoaxes.

It’s hard to tell if Biden’s timing is the a doddering old guy thrashing about at random, or a massive “FU” to the outgoing regime that pushed him under the bus, just as the whole “drain the swamp” movement is getting started.

Two “transgender women” were assaulted in downtown Minneapolis.

No, really.  At 5th and Hennepin.  

No, they weren’t (apparently) going out looking for Subway. But the story is…

..well, I’ll let the Cheerleaders on Four pick up the story:

The incident happened Nov. 10 at Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis. It’s where community members gathered for a rally Sunday afternoon, one week since the attack. 

Amber Muhm, a community leader with Trans Movement for Liberation, said the two trans women were attacked by a group of men at the light rail station after one of the men used transphobic slurs.

“No one came to help them. In fact, they said people were cheering the attackers on while they were getting beaten,” Muhm said.

She said the attack left one of them with a broken nose. Minneapolis police confirmed they are investigating the incident, but as of Sunday night, no one has been arrested. 

 

So – 5th and Hennepin, you say?

One of the busiest rail stops in the city? 

With a crowd of cheering onlookers – presumably on the surveillance cameras that are all over the place down there?

Not saying Berg’s 20th Law is the governing statute here, but…

To hear her partisans call it, Kamala Harris ran an amazing campaign – she just didn’t have the time to actually do interviews!

Harris was consistently criticized for shying away from substantive public interviews and appearances, enhancing a public image many associated with inauthenticity and empty spouts of “word salad.”

“Real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem,” Jen O’Malley Dillon said on the liberal podcast Pod Save America. “And then, on top of that, we would do an interview, and . . . the questions were small and process-y.”

The interviewers didn’t ask the right questions?

Forget for a moment that most of the media she faced bent over backwards to make her look good – that’s HER job as someone who’s, you know, campaigning.   To control the conversation!

If she couldn’t drive the discussion with Dana Bash or Bill Whitaker, what was she going to do with Putin, Xi or the Mullahs?

“I think back and think we should have signaled more of our strategy early on about podcasts and who we were trying to reach, but we had a limited amount of time to reach the people we were trying to reach, and we were trying to go to them,” the campaign’s chairwoman lamented…“Being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bullsh**,” Dillon claimed.

“We’da done more, if we’d only had the time!”

Problem is, Harris had all kinds of time. She was too busy trying not to talk:

I’m pretty sure Harris could have cobbled something together inside a month.

On the one hand, it’s amusing to see that suddenly “cultural appropriation” – in this case, a bunch of rhythmically-challenged Argentine leftist “Karens”

But I think this is a good thing. 

Hear me out.

Until the mid 1940s, Argentina was a wealthy first-world country, with a per capita GDP competitive with the US. 

Then, the “Argentine leftists” sold Argentine voters on “Rizz” and “Brat Vibes” with the Perons and a series of socialists, which gutted the economy and led to a series of coups and counter-coups, which also gutted the economy, which led to a war to restore pride that led to humiliating defeat that further gutted not only the economy but national pride, which led to further see-sawing back and forth, finally leading to a complete economic collapse 20 years ago, which has largely been met by further waves of center-to-far-left governments spending money they don’t have (or borrow from the IMF) to keep programs afloat at the expense of, well, everything.

So now the growups, led by Milei, are in charge, and they are showing the world the actual potential of the Argentine economy and people. 

So perhaps after his past 70-80 years, it’s best that Argentine leftists stick with club-footed cultural appropriation and dancing with all the rhythmic authority of Swedish disco dancers.  They cause less damage (artistic damage notwithstanding).

Walz comes back to Minnesota, looking like…

…well, he looks and sounds like hell quite frankly. “

“Take time to heal?”

That’s what Minnesota’s going to do after eight years, if it has the sense not to elect someone worse.

Among the things I’m thankful for is that life has evolved.

I was looking at some past Thansgiving pieces on this blog, and I found this one, written in 2002 – when this blog was nine months old.

And it took me back.

I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing – in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives…

I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her “Yeah – I’m still here in Jamestown”. Really, she asked? “Yeah, but I’m moving”. Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. “Minneapolis” seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. “Two weeks”, I blurted out without really thinking.

Damned if everyone didn’t remember that promise when we all sobered up. So – two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my ’73 Malibu, and I was off.

Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years – the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in ’87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in ’88, crazy in love in ’89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in ’90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in ’91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in ’92, in a new house in ’93…wondering how long my marriage would last in ’98, being able to answer the question “not long at all” in ’99…

…and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad…well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there’s the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I’d better get on with it.

There’ve been so many good lists of things to be thankful for, from people as diverse as Michelle Malkin and Ted Nugent and Andrew Sullivan – and my own for that matter.

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

Holy cow.  2002.   I can practialy feel the stomach acid from the most stressful part of my life.  I was about a year out of one of the ugliest times in my personal life, about a month away from the most grueling year of my vocational life.   Everything in life was a maelstrom of uncertainty, of finding a very uncertain way in a world where I felt like a passenger in a car driven by a drunk guy on the verge of blacking out.

Back then, in those days when blogging was something I did from 5AM until my kids woke up, this little project was my “me” time, yes – but also a little stake of sanity, where the things I wanted to happen, happened, and where a little part of my mind that’d been shut off for fifteen years, the wannabe pundit, got to come out and play for a bit. 

And for that, and everything since – two kids who grew up pretty good, two granddaughters who are the lights of more lives than they know, a talk show that pays me a lot more than money, a day job I genuinely enjoy working on every day, and more blessings than I’ve ever deserved – I’m grateful.

And the 2002 piece reminds me – it’s been a few years since I’ve done my Thanksgiving ritual of driving down to the Cathedral and looking out over the city.   I think I’ll do that today. 

NPR’s token Aztlani, Maria Hinojosa, yelling “SLAY, QUEEN GIRLBOSS!” as Mexico’s socialist female president briefly flexed on Trump’s border plans:

How it’s going:

Yep. The whole world witnessed it:

SCENE:  A “domestic” set in a media production room in DC.   Two Staffers, CHAD and JOSHUA, and two Harris staffers, COURTNEY and CLAUDE, are going over footage from an attempt to shoot a video.

COURTNEY:  OK, try take 45:

KAMALA HARRIS (on playback) “Hey, I’m Kamala Harris, and I spent the past week or two getting unburdened by what has been, raging on Jäger shots and weapons-grade weed, and trying to…

CLAUDE:  That’s not gonna work. 

COURTNEY:  What else we got?

JOSHUA:  Well, let’s just say this ad campaign is…um…

CHAD: Unburdened by a great take.

CLAUDE:  Well, I’m afraid that means the best take is…

COURTNEY:   63. 

CHAD:  Hard to say. She smelled like a three day bender the whole time.

COURTNEY:  (shrugs shoulders) Let’s try and see it again.

JOSHUA: (presses button)

The four wince visibly.

COURTNEY:  Seriously?   The best take?

JOSHUA:  Er…

CHAD:  Yep.  That’s as good as it gets.

CLAUDE:  We could try again when she’s sobered up?

COURTNEY:  OMG, she’s worse when she’s hung over. 

CLAUDE: (shakes head). What the hell.  Post it. 

CHAD: ( posting the video). Here comes the joy!

 And SCENE!

UPDATE:  I mean, look what they had to choose from?

It’s always the food photos with Governor Klink.

Only this time it’s not Pronto Pups:

Huh. For the past two years, we’ve been told Minnesota’s economy is boooooooming.

Now that a Republican is president-elect, the GOP will own Congress, and the DFL trifecta is dead…well, you see how this works.

So let’s translate this from MSM to English: “Governor who claimed MN economy was booming and promised to “reduce poverty 30%” by squandering a $19B surplus, now trying to get ahead of zooming poverty by spending >1% of what DFL constituents defrauded in “Feeding our Future”.

While this is good – and expected – news, I feel a little cheated.

Companies are ditching DEI because it’s bad for the bottom line; they can practice equality without flogging “equity”. 

But notice how it’s framed: “under pressure from conservative activists”. 

I mean, if you’re going to “blame” companies’ rediscovering economic and social sanity on people like me, and least call it “pouncing”, for fox’s sake.

The Democrat mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, is suddenly a big fan of enumerated powers:

Glad they’re learning to love federalism and separation of powers. It’ll be a great precedent when some other Democrat tinpot tries to do a “Mandatory Gun Buyback”.

By the way – doesn’t this seem just a skosh insurrection-y?

I’m pondering renewing my subscription to Daily Wire.  

On the one hand, they’ve got good news coverage. 

On the other, the “membership” user experience needs work. 

So as part of my analysis process, I present:

Mitch Ranks the Daily Wire Podcasts.

Podcasts are rated in terms of

• Overall quality (subjective, judged by me), and
• Standard deviations from the mean likely with any given episode.  For those who don’t wrangle much with statistics (and I realize much of my audience does), standard deviations are a measure of consistency of statistics.  Example:  a sample of several ratings within 70% would have a very small standard deviation; a “90%” leaking in there would have a very large standard deviation.
  

OK.  Let’s get started (subscribe to the Daily Mitch for the…oh, wait.  I don’t do that. Yet). 

Ben Shapiro:

• Rating: 92%.
• Standard Deviation: 3%

Shapiro is just about always super solid. He rarely deviates from a very solid mean; his show on October 8 2023 was two standard deviations above (99%), and his review of “Barbie” was an extremely rare 20 standard deviations below.

Andrew Klavan

• Rating: NA
• Standard Deviation: NA

I can not work up the interest to listen to Klavan.  Maybe I should.  

Someday.  Promise. 

Probably.

Matt Walsh:

• Rating: 65%.
• Standard Deviation: 20%

The problem with Matt Walsh is, when he’s hot, he’s amazing (hence the high standard deviation). The problem with Matt Walsh is that when he really wants to make a point, and has a point to make, he makes the point in such a way as to make the point he has to make. As in, makes the point – the one he set out to make. And then makes that point – and makes the point again. Seriously – I once counted him re-making the same assertion ten times in 90 seconds.

Michael Knowles:

• Rating: 73%.
• Standard Deviation: 2%

Knowles is always Knowles. And by that, I mean he’s a 34 year old guy who lectures people about “growing old gracefully”.  He’s a very strident Roman Catholic who relates have been an atheist at Yale (all good), but goes on to live out the ecclesiastical version of the old saying “the most annoying New Yorkers are the ones that were born in Albany”;  he couldn’t exude “recent RomCat Convert” any harder if he did the show in Latin and squirted incense through the speakers.  But his insights about politics, especially the intersection of culture an politics, are almost always spot-on. 

He’s docked five points for constantly use of the term “weird sex stuff”, like he’s the world’s oldest awkward eight-grade boy. Seriously, taking a drink when Knowles says “Weird Sex Stuff” could be a more toxic drinking game than “Hundred Beer Club”. He gets three points back for getting “Barbie” very right for the same reasons I did.

Daily Wire Backstage

• Rating:  40%
• Standard Deviation: 15

Like The View, if it were done by frat bros with whom I largely agree. 

Back in college, I did a little acting.  

The highlight?  I played Henry II i “The Lion in Winter”.   And I had a blast. 

One part of the role involved using makeup to turn 20 year old Mitch into 55 year old Hank Deuce.  And since this was a small college theater, at a school that didn’t even offer a drama degre,  there weren’t a whole lot of extra people playing “Makeup Girl”.  

More than that, the professor, the late Patricia Lavin, was a formidable woman – she’d been the first female theatrical producer in LA back in the fifties and sixties, and had a long list of theatrical and film credits (she had done makeup work on the original “Planet of the Apes”, for one example) – who made sure that we learned how to do the nuts and bolts of theater. 

Including makeup. 

Which meant I, the very adolescent-macho Mitch, had to learn how to do his own makeup. 

And looking at the photos of 20 year old Mitch playing 55 year old Hank II, I actually looked a fair bit like I do today (albeit with a lot more hair). 

I thought about that when I saw this “comedian” talking about the Rep. McBride crisis:

So that’s what a woman is! Someone who can do makeup!

By that definition…

…well, do I even need to finish the sentence?

Today’s music list:

It’s time for your periodic reminder: free markets solve pretty much everything:

Even the picayune exception you’re about to throw into the conversation?

Yes.  If the market is free enough, and you give it enough time and the fundamentals of the economy are strong enough (we’re talking Argentina, here – a nation that’s been enervated by almost 20 years of near collapse)? 

Yes. That too. 

Carry on.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Thank you to everyone who Voted as Hard as They Could.  It paid off.  The election was not stolen. 

I have a parenthetical thought that doesn’t pertain to Joe. I don’t want to interrupt the flow, so I’ll hit that at the bottom of the post.

Back to Joe, who has the same question I had the day after the election:

But I still have a lingering question or two.  What happened to those 81 million 2020 Biden voters?  They didn’t go to Trump – he got fewer votes this time than last.  They didn’t stay home – Kamala got as many votes as Hillary.  

Did they ever exist?  Or is this graphic proof of a stolen election after all? 

My first principle is to never assume malice when stupidity and sloth are equally possible. The drop in Trump voters indicates that it’s at least partly the expiration of Covid-era voting rules that allowed people to submit ballots via their DoorDash driver, or by blinking three times during a Zoom meeting.

But that is a lot of disappeared Democrat voters. Which may speak just as well to the “sloth” thing.

OK.  Discuss.

Deferred Parenthetical Thought: And again, pinky swear, isn’t aimed at Joe – I get the point he’s going for (or at least the one he will go for when I’m done interrupting), but could we retire the phrase “Vote Harder?” Smug anarcho libertarians have beaten that one to death.

We get it. You’re splendidly above the muggles and our quaint delusions. 

HBO tells the Wokies to take a breather.

Insert the requisite epilogue: it’s not the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end, it might be the end of the beginning. Or perhaps more recently – the monster in the movie never dies the first time it’s killed.

But maybe the Disney lesson is sinking in?

“Expert on Misinformation” , in a case on “deep fakes”, uses a source that doesn’t exist…

…and might be AI generated:

At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections.

Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.

For instance, the declaration cites a study titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior,” and says that it was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. But no study by that name appears in that journal; academic databases don’t have any record of it existing; and the specific journal pages referenced contain two entirely different articles.

“The citation bears the hallmarks of being an artificial intelligence (AI) ‘hallucination,’ suggesting that at least the citation was generated by a large language model like ChatGPT,” attorneys for the plaintiffs write. “Plaintiffs do not know how this hallucination wound up in Hancock’s declaration, but it calls the entire document into question.”

And that’s not all

Separately, libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh found that another citation in Hancock’s declaration, to a study allegedly titled “Deepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptance,” does not appear to exist.

If the citations were generated by artificial intelligence software, it’s possible that other parts of Hancock’s 12-page declaration were as well. It’s unclear whether the non-existent citations were inserted by Hancock, an assistant, or some other party. Neither Hancock nor the Stanford Social Media Lab replied to repeated requests for comment. Nor did Ellison’s office.

“Bad AI Deep Fake” would explain a lot of Kamala Harris speeches, on the other hand.

Liek this “legal note” – aka “bit of emergency ass-covering from the legal department” – that Sunny Hostin was forced to read on The View lest Matt Gaetz sue them for slander.

The pain was visible.

And glorious. 

And I don’t think they’re done.

Berating voters didn’t work well for Royce White.

And not finishing thoughts didn’t do Giggles a lot of favors (you’ll have to hunker down and get to the “end” of the video to get the reference, and I can’t blame you if you don’t).

But…

…maybe this time it’ll work.

PS:  What is the “Right to be Happy?”

Are Brzezinsky and Scarborough trying to save their jobs?

Or are they trying to belatedly act like “journalists?”

It’s a coin toss as far as I can tell. 

But one things’ for sure – while good deeds might not go unpunished, failing to “denormalize” the “Literal Hitler” certainly won’t:

(Side question: Why is it that everyone who comes to leftist punditry after a career of yapping about grown men chasing balls around fields and courts inevitably such an idiot?)

But there are some – what do I say – “leaks” on the left:

But their purity police never sleep.

Watching today’s Left self-immolate is the perfect Christmas gift

To:  Brian Stelter, CNN
From:  MItch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re:   Brendan Carr

Mr. Stelter,

You tweeted this about Brendan Carr, President-Elect Trump’s pick to head the FCC:

Just curious – what is it you think Carr is wrong about?

That is all.

…is that not only can you “appropriate” an indigenous culture to your rhetorical ends,  you can agglomerate indigenous cultures together into whatever custom mix you want to make whatever “point” you please.

For example, the term “Latinx”, which purports to consolidate widely disparate cultures (Puerto Rico has little in common with Central America, and less with Argentina and Chile).

Another example:  Er…

…this:

Perhaps the Maori of New Zealand might want to do something to nip this in the bud before white progressive women drag their culture over the shark with them?