SCENE: Mitch BERG is boxed in in at a stoplight. Avery LIBRELLE rides up in between cars on a recumbent e-bike. BERG ponders getting away over the sidewalk, but figures it’s not quite worth it.
BERG: (dejectedly, resigned to the inevitable). Hey, Aver…
LIBRELLE: Shut up, Merg. Republicans like you are slandering a good man who served honorably for 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard.
BERG: So you dispute…
LIBRELLE: Shut up! There is no overriding or exception to the honor that must be bestowed on people who serve .
BERG: Unless it’s George W Bush.
LIBRELLE: He was a silver-spooned coward!
BERG: Right. (Checks traffic. No joy). So, to recap, Governor Walz served…
LIBRELLE: …with impeccable honor. For 24 years.
BERG: Right. Now – you do realize it’s not me saying this.
LIBRELLE: It’s a bunch of political hacks!
BERG: It’s his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kolb:
The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.
“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.
Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq. Walz has said he did so to run for Congress, and he was elected the next year.
“He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States. That’s not who I would pick to run for vice president,” Thomas Behrends, one of the retired officials who signed the letter, told the New York Post on Tuesday.
They have between them, if I’m doing my math correctly, a bare minimum of 55 years of honorable service among them.
Does that not make their point of view not merely dispositive, but above reproach?
Truly we live in a time of miracles; there is now a pro-skyrocketing debt, pro-foreign-policy collapse, pro-Middle East war, pro-weaponization of the institutions against political opposition, pro-censorship, pro foreign policy of “losing slowly”, pro packing the SCOTUS, pro-crime, pro firearm confiscation, pro collapse of education, anti-federalism, pro redefinition of bedrock societal institutions, anti free speech, pro-rule-by-executive-decree, pro-open border, anti-sovereignty, pro-untrammeled bureaucracy, pro-socialism wing of the GOP.
We truly live in a time of wonder.
I mean, for those of you for whom “Duck Hunters for Gun Safety” isn’t enough.
UPDATE: I see Michael appropriated Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” title.
Among the choices Reagan put forth in his speech, Michael chose the wrong one.
The wrong choice 60 years ago, the wrong choice now, the wrong choice always.
SCENE: Mitch Berg is waiting for a coffee order before going on a road trip when Evan SCHMEISSER-JUNG, political scientist, walks into the room.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: Merg!
BERG: Oh, hey, Evan. Long time no…
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: Shut up! Did you see the results of the Twins game last night?
BERG: Yeah, the bullpen kinda let us down…
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: Why are you melting down over the Twins?
BERG: Er, I’m not sure I follow…
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: I just mentioned the Twins game, and you started melting down over it. It’s just a baseball game.
BERG: Oh, great. This again.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: What again?
BERG: Describing a perfectly emotionally neutral response – usually but not always in writing – as “Melting Down”. It’s a strawman and a deflection – trying to force me to defend a non-existent emotional state rather than arguing the actual point. It’s illogical, and kinda rhetorically abusive.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: So you’re angry.
BERG: Huh?
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: You’re roiling with anger!
BERG: Aaaaand more of the same.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: Does this make you maaaaad?
BERG: No.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: Tell the truth.
BERG: OK, the truth: no, and try to find a new subject.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: Speaking of straw men, why do you always transfer political subjects to fake people like Avery Librelle?
LIBRELLE: (sitting at a high-top table drinking free water and using the wi-fi). Beg pardon?
BERG: See? Not so much a fake person as a satirical invention. Because sometimes satire illuminates the truth better than just butting my head into it.
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: So you’re both melting down.
BERG: (Audibly sighs, turns back toward the front, waiting to order, as LIBRELLE looks on, puzzled )
SCHMEISSER-JUNG: More melting down.
(BERG orders a large dark roast with heavy cream. LIBRELLE goes back to playing Wordle) .
Now that Tim Walz is enjoying the first of his fifteen minutes, it’s high time we revisit some of his greatest hits.
Here’s Gwen Walz – who seems more and more like a Jill Biden character lately, and that’s not a good thig – talking about her, uh, odd perspective on the 2020 riots:
Minnesota First Lady says she left the windows open during the 2020 BLM riots to smell the burning tires and soak in the moment
As someone who didn’t need to leave any windows open to smell the smoke – it came from three blocks away – I want to make sure this clip sees a nice, wide audience.
So, Governor and Veep Candidate Walz supports censorship of “misinformation” (which is defined by his sycophants in the media) and “hate speech”, which is defined by…him.
HOLY SH!T
Governor Tim Walz: NO RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH if the government decides it is misinformation or hateful
CCR are the most awesomely bizarre case of a classic band that’s bigger than ever right now, without anyone really noticing. But their greatest-hits collection Chronicle is riding high on the Billboard 200 every week, always somewhere in the thirties or forties. It’s currently Number 39, right ahead of the new Ariana Grande album. It’s higher than anything by the Beatles or the Stones or Zeppelin or Queen. It’s crazy because there’s no star power involved, no cult of personality, no Freddie Mercury, no Stevie/Lindsey, no backstory or drama or charisma, no biopic or TV placement, and God knows no sex appeal. Just four anonymous flannel dudes and a bunch of perfect guitar songs about rivers.
Of all the “classic rockers who stay famous forever” stories, this is the one where there’s nothing but the songs. Of all the fans who bought/streamed/whatevered Chronicle this week, I doubt half could give the leader’s name, or tell you a thing about him. But only a hardcore fan could name the other three. Anyone who can tell Stu Cook from Doug Clifford probably is Stu Cook or Doug Clifford. You couldn’t pick any of these dudes out of a police lineup. There’s no hero worship, no narrative, no stars. There’s no love story, no death story. Only the songs.
For the record, I can tell the difference between Clifford and Cook. Most of the time.
The “why” is the interesting part:
But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story, if anyone knew or cared. There’s two brothers hating each other — after big brother Tom Fogerty quit the band, they never reconciled before his death. John was one of the very few rock stars to get drafted in the Vietnam era — he did his time in the Army, waiting out a year of misery, then returned to fight his way back into the Bay Area bar-band scene. None of his peers had a struggle like that to boast about, but it was a cred card he refused to play, even when he was protesting the war in “Fortunate Son.” There’s even the hilarious lawsuit after his 1985 solo hit “The Old Man Down the Road” — it sounded so much like Creedence, his ex-label took him to court, making him the only rock star ever to get sued for plagiarizing himself. He had to take the witness stand with a guitar, to show the jury why his songs sounded like John Fogerty. During cross-examination, he snapped, “What am I supposed to do, get an inoculation?”
Great stories — but only hardcore fans know them, because Fogerty had zero knack for talking about himself. Since the band broke up, he’s never stopped railing at his ex-bandmates, stewing over business injustices he never had much luck convincing anyone else to care about. His 2015 memoir is a barely-readable pity party. Even in their heyday, the group’s interviews were nothing but drab complaints about not getting taken seriously enough. As Cook groused to Rolling Stone, “People know about our music but they don’t know about our heads.”
I haven’t said “worth a read” about something in Rolling Stone in a long, long time. And it’ll probably be a while before I do it again.
Representatives for Hicks confirmed with FOX 9 that on Aug. 3, political signs in her yard, plus the siding on her home and a shed on her property were all vandalized by the masked intruders.
“My family was a victim of racist vandalism at our home this weekend. It has been a difficult two days, but then our community showed up,” Rep. Hicks said as part of a statement. “My family felt so much love and support from our friends, neighbors, and even strangers who came to lend a hand.”
House DFL Representative Kim Hicks, who represents Rochester and the surrounding areas of District 25A, has confirmed her home was vandalized over the weekend by people wearing masks who left graffiti containing racial slurs. https://t.co/6otblNLC81
All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.
There’ve been so many blown-up hoaxes in Minnesota – especially, curiously, southern Minnesota – in recent years that you’d think even DFLers would realize it’s a bad idea.
I’m just a little bit overjoyed that Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz.
How do I put this? Tim Walz is Bernie Sanders in an Elmer Fudd costume.
Kamala Harris felt the need, for whatever reason – we’ll come back to that – to to whatever sliver of the Democrat Party that is to her left, to a governor of a state that is only academically in play.
I’d been thinking Josh Shapiro was a lock – there’d even been some “congrats” videos “leaked” last weekend of various Democrat dignitaries congratulating Shapiro.
He would have been a formidable choice. That, too, we’ll come back to.
Walz? He’s got baggage. And I”m going to keep reminding the world of that baggage:
So – why not Shapiro?
Because he’s a JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, and the Democrat party has a bit of an antisemitism problem. They don’t want Chicago looking like, well, Lake Street.
Anyway – to all the Dems chanting “Hahaha! He’s America’s fun uncle! Cope!”, I say “his place on the ticket is all the ‘cope’ I need, thank you very much”.
So it’s Walz:
Bring on the fall!
UPDATE: Ben Shapiro captures a lot of what I’ve been thinking:
Barack Oba…er, Kamala Harris has picked Governor Klink to complete her ticket. The precedent was clear to anyone paying attention – Walz was governor because he’d made his deal with the devil.
Part of the deal appeared to be “making Flanagan appear to be a co-governor”; her name appeared below Walz’s on most campaign literature – but was longer, and usually colored such that her name “popped” harder than Walz’s.
You can hear the Twin Cities media going Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee all the way to Chicago. Those of us who live here and pay attention – a painfully small Venn diagram, as the 2022 election showed us – know that, as Scott Johnson says, Walz “casts the pale shadow of a man incapable of embarrassment and presents as an example of life imitating art, in this case the advertising art that created Joe Isuzu:
For those of you in my audience who aren’t from MInnesota, let’s go through a little of Tim Walz’s political record.
Congress: Walz spent six terms as a US House rep from the 1st District – the largely rural southern tier of counties, at the time. He ran to the commonsensical center to defeat the very moderate Gil Gutknecht; like Colllin Peterson, Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad and Earl Pomeroy, he made moderate noises for his rural base. He was a-rated by the NRA.
And when Governor Dayton ran up to his term (and, likely, health) limit in 2018, Walz took that record – sans his NRA rating, which he dumped like it was a “3” when a “5” was batting her eyes at him:
Emerging As A Puppet: Tossing aside the NRA endorsement wasn’t enough to impress the DFL’s newly surgent “Progressive” wing, which pushed the overtly extreme Erin Murphy, backed with the equally gleeful extremist Erin Maye Quade at a convention where even Keith Ellison was too moderate (they endorsed fire-breathing socialist Matt Pelikan over the, I say again, too moderate Keith Ellison.
Not even picking Peggy Flanagan – literally the most extreme leftist in the Minnesota House at that time – was enough to slow the prog wave, although it was a start:
Of course, DFL chair Ken Martin knew the electorate wasn’t quite as demented as the DFL activist base – outside the metro, anyway – and put his foot down, He pulled his backroom deals, put the DFL’s money behind Walz/Flanagan, and dragged them over the line for a win in the 2018 DFL primary.
The precedent was clear to anyone paying attention – Walz was governor because he’d made his deal with the devil.
Part of the deal appeared to be “making Flanagan appear to be a co-governor”; her name appeared below Walz’s on most campaign literature – but was longer, and usually colored such that her name “popped” harder than Walz’s.
Unremarkable: During those years, Walz’s most extreme urges were stymied by the GOP’s slim, often one-vote, majority in the Minnesota Senate. Not that he didn’t try – but the worst instincts of his “progressive” regime got tempered by Paul Gazelka’s canny politicking – one might call it “rear guard action”, either in the military sense, or (to some) the “covering one’s ass” sense. Take your pick.
The Deluge: And then came Covid.
Walz declared emergency power on Saint Patrick’s Day, 2020. In an infamous press conference, he said Minnesota would have a bare minimum of 20,000 dead by July, if everything went perfectly – with 70,000 much more likely. He seized emergency power, and shut down schools, churches, most businesses…
…but not big box stores, liquor stores, or “The World’s Largest Candy Store”, in Jordan, run by a major campaign contributor. He declared broad swathes of Minnesota’s labor force “non-essential”. He instituted a “snitch line”, which countless “Karens” used to report their neighbors for offenses against the Covid regime.
He also repeated Andrew Cuomo’s catastrophic errors in handling long-term care of the elder;ly; the carnage in Minnesota’s nursing homes was epic, and inexcusable.
But the death toll lagged his predictions – by about an order of magnitude. And for a brief, weird moment, the media did the unthinkable – they asked questions .
Including at a presser on May 11 – where a reporter asked if the Department of Health department would release the code for the model that had made the initial, alarming preductions .
And Walz’s spokesperson replied “No – because people might use it to get different results than we did”.
Which, for those of us who passed ninth-grade science class, is the opposite of science.
He held emergency power for seventeen months, for an emergency that in effect ended in the summer of 2020.
The Floyd Riots: Walz’s performance during the George Floyd riots was perhaps more controversial – mostly notably when Mayor Frey of Minneapolis asked where the National Guard was, after 2-3 days of rioting, and the Governor, essentially, asked why the Mayor hadn’t put a cover sheet on his TPS report.
Some in emergency management said he followed the plan (although the response was botched at many levels).
Speaking as someone who lives in a neighborhood hit hard by the riots, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. The Guard appeared in token numbers on the Friday after the riots came to Saint Paul – four days into the violence – and didn’t appear in numbers sufficient to tip the balance until Saturday.
The Governor may have done his job – maybe. But he did it to the absolute bureaucratic minimum standard. The only two leaders in the whole affair were Chief Axtell, and then-president Trump, whose threat to send the 82nd Airborne may or may not have spurred actual action, but certainly seemed to, whether coincidentally or not.
The Flood: And then came the 2022 elections.
The DFL did what it does best – scare suburban women into thinking abortion (protected in the MN Constitution for years, now) was in imminent danger. They rode that to seizing the “Trifecta” – control of both chambers of the Legislature.
It was a close fight – Keith Ellison and Julie Blaha nearly lost. 1,000 votes would have swung the Senate to the GOP; about 4,000 more, the House. Scott Jensen was a weak GOP candidate at the head of a decreasingly potent state GOP – but Walz only won by 8 percent.
But the DFL governed like they’d had a California-style mandate.
And the results have been wretched. I’ll just brain-dump them here:
He and the DFL squandered a $19 billion surplus. The “surplus” was structurally down to $2B as of the last forecast, but it’s going to be a deficit – right after the election. The money went to buying votes (“Feeding kids!”) and frau/ /
The Metro DFL is a fraud machine, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars through the HHS and Education Departments. Faced with the news, Walz said “it’s not my job, man”.
Much of the surplus also went to “fully funding education”. But school districts are still complaining about money, teachers are striking all over the place, and reading and math scores are still falling. Graduation rates improved, briefly – when they state removed most standards.
While Minnesota’s population is said to be holding steady, it’s mostly because of immigration. Minnesotans in their productive years, or with fungible capital, are leaving and taking their businesses and their money.
College students and young people are leaving Minnesota. That the reverse of the trend that obtained for decades before, when generations of young people – myself included – saw Minnesota as a destination.
While he prattles about “One Minnesota”, he has “sorted” Minnesotans pretty relentlessly.
He made MN a sanctuary State
He pushed drivers licenses for illegals
He drove making Minnesota a “trans refuge” – signing a law that mandated disregarding of child support decrees for children brought to the state by noncustodial parents to seek chemical and surgical neutering (alone among all causes).
Crime in the metro is about double what it was ten years ago – and while it’s down a skosh from 2021, it’s waaaay ahead of pre-pandemic levels.
The Rule Of The Brittle: Walz succeeded Mark Dayton – who was a fairly opaque governor, largely because his health was so atrocious his rarely went to the office (unreported by the state’s compliant media)
Walz is healthier – but far more opaque. Other than the stage-managed pressers during Covid, his only real communication is via his very active Twitter feed, which provides a constant deluge of photos of him cavorting about the state, usually in his “regular Joe” costume of a seed cap and overstretched T-shirt. State Fair time is usually high season – as he and his entourage waddle about the fair, sucking down corn dogs as the cameras roll.
Which is probably a good thing – because he doesn’t handle questioning well. And he appears to know it – the only debate in the 2022 cycle was on a feeble TV station in Rochester. And Scott Jensen got under his skin – which isn’t hard to do. He has a long record of losing his cool when people actually question him.
So his handlers allow none of that.
Speaking of questions:
Why Walz? I think most national GOP strategists thought Josh Shapiro would be the prime choice. Pennsylvania may be the swingiest of the swing states; some day it’s the hinge pin of this election.
While Minnesota is a 50-50 state (four DFL and four GOP reps in Congress), the DFL turnout machine dominates state races against a MN GOP that makes the Vikings look like overachievers.
if the state is in play then things are very bad for the Democrat indeed. This doesn’t seem to track the situation.
We in the conservative alt media often look forward to the demise of the mainstream media (StarTribune, I’m looking at you). And after the latest media outrage, we often repeat “you may think you hate the MSM – but you don’t hate them enough”.
But how did they get this way?
Richard “Wretchard” Fernandez, as often is the case, sums it up:
To understand the collapse of the media it is first important to understand its rise. People trust the voice that brings them plenty. During Cold War 1, Pravda was the voice of sawdust sausage, the gulag and the KGB. The BBC was London buses, miniskirts and American supermarkets. The media was once the song of whiskey, democracy, sexy. Then at some point it became the screech of diversity, equity and inclusion; the drone of degrowth, global warming and self hatred. It became the voice not of plenty but poverty. People stopped believing. Ask yourself: is it really your idea of a good time to watch blank faced faced octogenarians stumble around a stage? Watch obese transvestites caper in the spotlight? We signed up for a future of flying cars and space babes, not to eat bug salad under a creaking windmill. But what really drove most out of the tent was the sheer mendacity of people on TV. They lied repeatedly to our face and threatened those who would not believe their lies, forgetting that even a dog knows the difference between the hand of plenty and scabrous hand of deceit. So to those fact checkers who would exclaim “why don’t you believe? Why don’t you obey?”, the kindest answer is why don’t you just dry up and leave us alone?
The Star Tribune only cared about the Trump assassination when they thought they could call it “staged” or blame it on a Republican.
As this is written, the Harris campaign is evaluating its VP choices.
Inexplicably, Tim Walz is among them.
He’s a brittle little man, who breaks down when prodded on debate stage.
The state is stagnating:
As a Texas transplant to MN I am in the minority of people who have moved north. By the grace of God I pray my Republican vote will help. We need more Christians to get off the couch and vote. pic.twitter.com/z7cXEdvFpF
He squandered a $19B surplus and is driving the state to a deficit (just you watch, this December) just in time for the nation’s economy to start spluttering toward recession.
Crime has held steady at catastrophic levels.
“Haha, Merg. If he’s so bad, how do you suppose he won re-election”
He hid from even the compliant media – the only debate was in Rochester, and he got hammered – and had his fluffers convince enough gullible hysterical suburban soccer moms that abortion was in danger. He was blessed with a poor GOP opponent.
The cons of a Walz choice: it’l likely get plenty of DFL enthusiam going for the state elections, potentially contributing to DFL turnout in the House race.
The pros: it’ll put Klink on the national stage. JD Vance will flense the piglet.
How It Went: Governor Klink – in his “regular Joe” costume – claims credit for coining the “Weird” thing, the little playground chant that the Democrats apparently think is a political strategery
Any reason other than “he’s a mental lightweight with a thin skin who can’t articulate anything outiside an echo chamber, and has never faced any concerted opposition in his life”, I mean?
When you listen to Twin Cities mainstream media people talk amongst themselves – especially the print hacks – something “weird” emerges.
They admire the late Nick Coleman.
The guy who taught all of us bloggers, 10-20 years ago, that boundless smug entitlement, arrogance, and clubby paternalism masquerading as “life experience” didn’t necessarily equal credibility.
I should’ve screenshot all the examples over the years of Twin Cities media people paying dutiful homage to the greatness that was, er, Nick Coleman.
.@stribrooks coming in hot!!! Not quite channeling the ghost of Nick Coleman yet, but on the same half of the bell curve.
And it says that, whereas in Minnesota until today you had to make a reasonable effort to retreat before using lethal force in self-defense (outside your home), now you must retreat before even attempting to present a firearm.
In other words, you have to try to run away BEFORE you can draw your firearm to defend your, and your family’s, lives. 
That means if someone is trying to kill you, you have to give them a couple of seconds of trying to get away before you can even start to see to your own protection.
And that’s if you meet all the other criteria of self-defense; showing the threat to your life is reasonable and immediate, that you were not the aggressor, and that you only use the force to end the threat.
Now, you can do a completely correct self-defense shooting, and still go to prison because some district attorney thinks you should’ve tried harder, against a subjective standard that nobody’s figured out yet, to run away BEFORE you drew a firearm (or picked up any other weapon). 
Put succinctly, it says the life of a criminal is worth more than the life of their victim. This is completely backwards.
Huge congrats to our Women's Gymnastics team for taking gold in Paris–especially our local hero Suni Lee!
Suni has been an amazing advocate for Minnesota and stopped by the Capitol last year to help bring the U.S. Gymnastic Trials to Minneapolis this June. https://t.co/iui0HWVUkppic.twitter.com/QE3GaEg37p
— Senator Nicole Mitchell (@Sen_NMitchell) July 31, 2024
Courtesy Senator Mitchell’s Twitter account
…the cringiest photo you’ve seen since that collection of seventies family photos you got tricked into looking at?
Second: She’s got no intention of leaving office, does she?
She’s got a plea deal in the work with some sympathetic prosecutor, she’ll plead down to “disorderly conduct” – really, no worse than Matt Wolgamott/Brion Curran/Dave Hutchinson/Julie Blaha driving drunk! Maybe even less! – and ride the issue out, and stay in office, until she gets a sinecure at some state agency – like, the state sentencing board, just to add hilarious insult to injury.
