When I was a kid, I got my first drivers license in North Dakota. The whole process was handled via snail mail between state offices. Took about two weeks.

IN the decades I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve gotten or renewed my license eight times, counting last month.

Three of those times, it took six or more weeks to arrive. Another time, after three months, I went to the newly-computerized DPS, and found that some union data entry droog and entered an address that I had not only never lived at, but didn’t exist (“18xx Minnehaha in MInneapolis”).

And this last month? Six weeks and counting. I went to the DPS office. They said “Production issue”.

3-4 years ago, I got my mother’s drivers license renewed in North Dakota. Printed on the spot. Done while I waited, and I didn’t wait long enough to even notice.

So tell me, DFLers – when Minnesota brags about having “good government”, what are you talking about?

With the change in name from Twitter to “X”, we an in fact call these “X-ioms”:

“A tweet that starts with “hear me out” almost never deserves to be heard, much less heard “out””.

“Arguments that end with “period” or “full stop” should almost always have stopped before they started.”

“When a tweet ends with “that’s the tweet”, a silent “unfortunately” is assumed.”

“Posts beginning “As a [blank] scholar” or “[Blank] scholar here!” only have a high likelihood of being wrong and stupid. They are, however, infallibly guaranteed to be insufferable.” (This one is via @davidpdeavel on X. And it reminds me of a prominent NeverTrumper who tosses “GErman Studies major here…” in front of an amazing number of unrelated subjects).

“Any tweet that start with the words: “With all due respect” will include none.” (Via OldSchoolPhD on X)

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Stores are now locking up underwear to prevent shoplifting.  That’s backwards – we ought to be locking up shoplifters – but assuming Liberals will continue to own the DA’s offices so the sensible option is out, there’s still a better way to prevent shoplifting without forcing all of us to live in the gulag.

When you walk into the store, there are two doors.  The door to the Right will not open without a credit card.  The door to the Left is open all the time. 

Inside the store on the Right, it’s a normal store.  Grab a cart, walk around, browse, touch stuff, load up your cart, scan everything at the checkout which automatically bills it to the credit card you used to get in, take your stuff to your car. 

Inside the store on the Left, there are touch screen kiosks like McDonalds in front of a chest-high counter topped by plexiglas.  Touch the items you want to purchase.  The machine spits out a ticket.  When your number is called, go to the counter and pay the clerk, who gives you a receipt and passes your order through the secure pass-through door (like the Walgreens drive-through drawer, only bigger).  No pay, no merchandise.  

Yes, it would be possible for people on the Right to steal stuff.  You could do that now, at the self-service check-out at Cub.  So the store has employees watching and if you get caught, they charge it to your card and then they ban your card from accessing the store again.  From now on, you pay cash on the Left side like the other thieves.

Advanced options might include curbside pickup for online orders, or home delivery for a small additional fee, you know, the way things are done in an ordinary high-trust First World nation, the way America used to be.  That was nice.  I miss that.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

This – well, the “door to the left” – was exactly how grocery stores worked, until a little over 100 years ago, when the A&P chain invented the shopping cart and accessible shelves. You went to the counter, you told the clerk what you wanted, and you waited while he/she got your stuff and bagged it up.

Of course, we had a high(er) trust society back then.

Peter Schickele – better known to decades of music geeks as the author of the “PDQ Bach” music history saga – has passed away. He was 88.

It occurs to me that calling. him the “Spike Jones of Music Satire” depends on a generation of people who know who Spike Jones was.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”

That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”

“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Maybe the “Weird Al Yankovic of Classical Music”?

The music majors in college were all into PDQ Bach – and I eventually figured out why. He really, really did classical music satire – perhaps the most esoteric form of satire there is short of lampponing ancient Greeks in ancient Greek – really, really well. He not only nailed the punch line – the funny jab – but the setup, the keen understanding of the milieu he was sending up.

This one made me laugh so hard I had a hard time breathing.

Maybe you had to be there. But as I was there, there are no regrets.

One of the things that gave me the odd chuckle was Schickele’s constant North Dakota references. Clearly the guy knew something about the state – but he was a New Yorker.

An accomplished bassoonist, the young Mr. Schickele played in his local symphony, the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, when he was in high school.

Years later, he would pay tribute to his North Dakota roots by bestowing upon himself, in his role as P.D.Q.’s earthly representative, an august academic title: professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (There really is a Hoople, N.D. There really isn’t a University of Southern North Dakota there — or anywhere.)

So I learned something new:

RIP, Peter Schickele. .

Call it coming from a more genteel time, or more reasonable place, or having been raised by a guy, and taught by another, who exalted the virtues of civil engagement, even with people they disagreed with, as well as some of your basic Christian values.

So I feel a little bit bad admitting how much I loved watching this:

If I, personally, am any indication, there are a lot of guys over the age of 40 out there with a lot of thoroughly repressed anger about how this current generation is f***ing up society who’d like to tak a chunk out of some shrieking man-bun.

But again – part of me feels bad to think that.

Part of me.

.

I saw “The Fall of Minneapolis” again last week.

Now, when I first mentioned seeing it a few months back, a few smart people whose opinions I never discount asked “is there anything new that the courts didn’t settle?”

That brings up a couple of questions.

In our society, we usually think that if a court – an impartial jury of our peers, a couple of adversarial attorneys patiently digging out the facts, a fair and impartial judge facilitating it all via “due proces” – decides something, that’s that. The truth has been found.

There’s problems with that.

The was this guy, James Fleming, a Facebook friend, shooter and criminal defense attorney. He used to snap at people who referred to “due process” by itself as a reason to trust something. Paraphrasing: due process isn’t a guarantee of fairness, much less justice. It means the proceedings all check the same checkboxes and standards. The fairness and justice is all in the details.

So – how can that go wrong?

Years ago, I was *very* tangentially involved in the case of a man who’d been accused of a fairly grisly rape and murder in 1982. He had been kind of a lowlife, a petty criminal and drug addict, the kind of guy you’ve seen on a thousand episodes of “Cops” insisting to the officer “I have NO IDEA whose gun and cocaine that is!” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

The courts settled the matter.

A decade and change later, a group of people did enough digging and agitating on his behalf to get the attention of “The Innocence Project”, a group of pro-bono lawyers that works on what they believe to be unjust convictions.

The lawyers found that the original conviction had been secured via:
– A jailhouse snitch with a history of perjury whose testimony nonetheless was allowed
– A District Attorney hiding exculpatory evidence.
– An incompetent public defender.

The exculpatory evidence included forensic evidence that, with modern DNA testing, could have shed some light on who the attacker was. But it vanished as completely as whispering “due process” in the wind.

After years of legal wrangling, the lawyers found the evidence – and with more modern DNA testing, determined that the man, who’d been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” after “due process”, couldn’t have possibly been the murderer. In 2003 he was released, after 21 years on Death Row.

And he’s not alone. In the past 50 years, *185* inmates have been released from Death Row. Not granted new trials. Not commuted to lesser sentences. *Released* from Death Row to the world – because their “convictions beyond a reasonble doubt” were in error, due to perjury, official misconduct, incompetence, and even some honest but terrible mistakes.

So – do I think the answer to “is it true?” is “the courts have spoken?”

Let’s just say I believe in (grudging, conditional) trust but verification. Throw in a heaping dollop of skepticism about the integrity of public officials and systems.

More later this wee4

The DFL will repeatedly and systematically cheat in their own elections.

But no way, no how in everyone else’s.

Sheesh. What are you, some kind of Cheetoh-haired Literal Hitler?

The Sentencing Guidelines Commission has issued a report on how gun crime is dealt with in Minnesota.

It’s pretty putrid:

OF 958 convictions for gun crimes in MInnesota for a year ending last June, 413 had their mandatory minimum sentenes waived.

That was for the entire state. Any guesses on how that breaks down with Metro vs. Greater MN numbers?

Let’s look at the big stats – convictions and minimum sentences – for the four largest metro Counties:

Literally half of the people conviced of committing a crime with a gun in the Metro are given less than the state’s minimum sentence for the act – double the rate of the rest of the state.

I’ve been in Twin Cities radio off and on for a good chunk of the past three decades.

And truth be told, this is the first time I’ve seen a promotional campaign that says…

…that someone is still alive.

Governor Klink lies about “censorship”.

Hey, he’s the head of the Democrat Governors Association. He’s got to serve as a model for the rest of them.

Now, I think I read “Charlotte’s Web” in fourth grade. So it’s been a bit.

And I’d forgotten this bit – which is something that makes me seriously wonder…

…if there’s a Democrat school district out there that’s banned it because of its violent overtones?

There’s a conceit among the lace-underwear crowd that war is the same as it was in the MIddle Ages in Europe – “armies” squaring off in a field for some perfunctory jousting and stabbing leading to the exchange of land or a change in royal wedding plans. The modern equivalent would be a sort of legal negotiation punctuated with cruise missiles and video of screaming children.

“Proportionality”, it’s called; hitting back as you were hit, but no harder.

Among those calling for “proportionality” in the Gaza War [1], the eternally useless Fareed Zakaria:

Let’s look at “proportionality”

Had the US and Western Allies observed Zakaria’s Marquis of Queensberry notion of war [2], World War 2 would have looked a little different.

The US, UK and the Netherlands would have had to stop after sinking the Japanese fleet, and liberating the Philippines, Singapore, the East Indies, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Air strikes would have been limited to single engine aircraft, and the US would have been limited to six aircraft carriers. Once the Philippines were returned, that’s it.

Germany? Once France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway were liberated, we’d have had to stop at the Rhine River. The Soviets, likewise [3], would have been obliged to stop at the Oder River, the frontier between pre-war Germany and Poland. Hitler would have been left to figure out how to try again.

In other words, we – like Israel – would still be at war, 3/4 of a century later.

It is a national disgrace that Zakaria has a TV show.

[1] That is to say, a proportional response from Israel. Not from Hamas or Hez’b Allah.

[2] on the part of westerners, not those who want us dead or subjugated

[3] Although people like our modern Left always give Stalin a pass on the rules.

Don’t get me wrong. Jason DeRusha – former Channel 4 reporter and morning anchor, turned afternoon drive guy at the once-great WCCO – isn’t a bad guy. I’ve met him, engaged with him a time or two, and by Twin Cities media standards he’s OK. He’s no Bob Collins, anyway [1]

But if I were a DFL Comms person who wanted to come up with a nice, low-impact media appearance to side-slip the impression that your Governor’s only media contact was an endless stream of selfies and cheesecake (and donut, and pizza and corn dog) photos, without sweating the Governor too hard, DeRusha – or, really, anyone at ‘CCO – would be at the top of the list.

But somehow he managed to choke:

“Minnesota is a diverse state, it continues to grow. This flag was crafted in the 1890s,” said Gov. Walz regarding Minnesota’s current flag. “It’s highly offensive to a large number of people, and there’s very little debate about that.”

“…there’s very little debate” because the DFL steamrolled it through without a whole lot of debate allowed.

But here’s the clinker:

When asked about this topic, Gov. Walz compared these Republican efforts to “somehow saving the Confederate battle flag.” The governor added, “These are the arguments that happened with Jefferson Davis statues in Alabama.”

That’s right. The “old” flag was the one the 21st Virginia carried at Gettysburg.

Remember – he’s the governor of “#OneMinnesota”.

[1] Of course, either was Bob Collins, ’til he retired.

Sure.

But life isn’t all shooting three-pointers.

Sometimes you take the layup.

..and I”m taking a long weekend, myself.

With that in mind, I’ll urge you to listen, as I do this time every year, to Reverend King’s final, and in some ways most iconic, speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop”.

“I Have A Dream”, full of vigor and hope, gets all the headlines; “Mountaintop” is both more sober and more expansive; it focuses on the stump-pulling work of the battle for civil rights. It has lessons for those who fight for all civil rights.

As always, the whole thing is worth a listen.

Keep that in mind when you read some of the, uh, revision of King from the right these days – most notably Charlie Kirk:

Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to Augustine and Aquinas to justify resisting racist laws. He elevated character high above skin color and moral universalism above separatism of all kinds. His political claims were grounded in America’s founding promises, his message garbed in a high-minded, critical patriotism. He called the United States his “beloved nation,” even as he denounced Washington’s forever war in Vietnam. At a moment of profound polarization, King is one of the few figures who can still supply us with unifying themes.

So naturally, some in the more excitable corners of the right have been taking an ax to his legacy. The latest comer is Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who last week declared that “MLK was awful,” and vowed: “We’re gonna be hitting him next week. Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr.”

Civic pieties should be scrutinized in the light of later historiography, to be sure. But that isn’t what the MLK haters are up to. Their anti-MLK crusade is the mirror image of progressive efforts to discredit national icons and narratives. Ironically, MLK himself has also been the target of such attempts from the left, on the grounds that his moderation stunted more radical projects of racial liberation.

Now, Kirk is broadcast on Salem, so I urge you to listen for yourself.

Let’s just say I’d like a word with the guy.

Speaking of questions – I suspect George Orwell has some…

…for the FBI.

Brandon Herrera is one of my favorite Guntubers.

I watch him mainly for his detailed, frequently off-color, mostly hilarious, and technically interesting gun takedown vids. He’s sort of like Ian McCallum, only gleefully NSFW.

This clip – going over a lawsuit by one of the victims of a (thankfully) failed mass murder attempt against a long list of gun and accessory companies whose products weren’ t involved in the incident – is worth a watch.

Again – language exuberantly NSFW.

The interesting part is at the end; Herrera challenges the defendants to not settle this specious, frivolous lawsuit out of court, and the viewer to hold them accountable if they do.

I’m going to try to find the list (and the current status of the case).

Earlier this week, the Minnesota Reformer – a news outlet financed by “progressive” plutocrats iwth deep pockets – did its review of AlphaNews’s “Minneapolis Has Fallen”.

The claims – well, I’ll let the tweet do the talking for the piece, entitled “I Watched Minneapolis Has Fallen So You Don’t Have To”.

Let’s go briefly through Winter’s claims.

Restraint

The biggest hit Winter has against Collin is that, according to her, the movie’s revelation that Chief Arredondo and his training officer lied about whether “Maximal Restraint Technique” was part of the MPD’s training and policy. Collin showed cops, and Chauvin’s mother, opening the manual to the exact section, and showed multiple current and former MPD officers saying they’d been trained in the technique. The movie also said the jurors were not allowed to see the body cam footage that showed that Chauvin did the technique correctly – with his knee on the shoulder blade, rather than on George Floyd’s neck.

Winter claims that yes, the jury saw both.

OK – so if that’s true, and the jurors saw the same training that the officers had, then could someone explain to me why Chief Arredondo still lied about it?

Neither reporter has clarified that for me, so someone else has to.

UPDATE: Danger Close

And as I wrote this in a hurry, I forgot this. But as “Bigman” noted in the comments – why the fact that Cahill failed to sequester the jury – who came to and from a courthouse that was being fortified like the Green Zone in Baghdad, and who were being told more or less directly that if they reached the “wrong verdict” that they were in huge trouble – not being discussed?

I’ll ask the question because Winter didn’t think she had to.

White Riot

Winter goes on to discuss the parts of the film dealing with the riot, most specifically the evacuation of the Third Precinct (on which. apropos nothing much, I scooped the entire Twin Cities media), I’m trying to figure out what Winter’s point is.

I’ll dispense with the fact that Winter…lacks a certain amount of empathy, or at least insight outside her own apparently narrow experience (emphasis added):

Collin also spends considerable time questioning why the MPD and local and state officials were slow to take action as protests devolved into riots and arson that destroyed hundreds of buildings across the metro.

Retired MPD officer Jason Reimer tells Collin what bothered him the most is “they let people throw rocks and bricks and firebombs and we’re supposed to just put on a helmet and take that.”

Well, helmets, but likely also bulletproof vests and eye-irritant spray, handcuffs, Tasers and semi-automatic pistols.

Bulletproof vests don’t keep you from burning to death. Spray and tasers are useful to get control one on one, not against a mob.

And I’ll let Deena Winter’s idea of shooting into a crowd of rioters hang out there, because I sure didn’t want to have to do it for her.

Winter cites some fairly wrenching scenes in the movie (that reflect what I reported in May of 2020), to which I’ll add some emphasis:

“We were in the middle of a war zone,” Herron said. “We were ordered not to do anything.”

She said the fire department wasn’t responding to calls, and officers were “wandering around aimlessly, waiting to be told what not to do next.”

“They weren’t doing anything to control the riot,” she said. “They wouldn’t let us do our jobs.”

All true – but keep the emphasis in mind – the “they” that left them wandering around were the city and MPD leadership. We’ll come back to them.

Winter adds:

The city and state’s failed response and inability to quell the violence and arson are well documented, but it’s inaccurate to claim police were standing down. 

They went on joyrides, fired rubber bullets at protesters (see Jaleel Stallings); an officer, who went on to run an actual banana stand, was caught on video by a journalist macing protesters for no discernible reason; lots of cops in riot gear teargassed crowds. 

They shot protestors like Soren Stevenson with a rubber bullet and blinded him in one eye. They maced a journalist from Vice News in the face. They fired rubber bullets at journalists, including Reformer reporter Max Nesterak and Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix.

Side note: anyone but me notice how journalists only get really irate about injustice and official overreach when it’s other members of the Journo Club who are affected? Lake Street – and a fair chunk of the Midway, my neighborhood – got burned. The Minneapolis Police Department was, and remains, gutted. Crime soared, and is still double what it was as recently as 2018 – enh. But journalists got attacked ZOMG!

Not that Winter’s article tells you, but the main contention of the cops in the movie was that the city and the. MPD leadership – the “they” in the emphasized text in the first round of quotes, above:

• Had no plan to deal with the riot
• More specifically, abandoned the Third Precinct (apparently to “give the rioters ‘space to destroy'”), without having the foggiest idea about what the officers marooned there were supposed to do.

So when Winter snarks:

To the people on the other end of a rubber bullet or tear gas or mace, the police response sure didn’t feel like “standing down.” 

Stop me if I”m wrong, but everything she cites supports the cops contention. Some cops, operating in a complete vacuum, followed the normal human inclination to fucking hit back.

Either way, there was no plan. They were left danging in the breeze.

Winter doesn’t write about that, so I have to.

Who’s The Boss?

Winter goes on (and I’ll add emphasis):

[retired MPD cop Jason] Reimer says the weak response was all a deliberate attempt by politicians to use Floyd’s police killing to their advantage.

“The elections were coming up,” he said. “They were gonna use this incident for a political narrative, and they did.” 

Let’s hope Reimer was a better cop than he is a political analyst: The riots were a political disaster for the mayor, the governor and the entire DFL establishment. DFL political operatives blamed the riots and the defund/abolish police movement for key suburban losses that prevented a 2020 DFL trifecta. 

Although both Frey and Walz won reelection, they did so in part by hitching themselves to police during their reelection campaigns and would soon be accused by partisans on the left of being too cozy with cops.

I’m tempted to get cute and “hope that WInter is a better political analyst than Jason Reimer” – because it’d be more accurate to say the riots were a disaster for one city political establishment; the one where Jacob Frey and Andrea Jenkins and Lisa Bender were the “middle” and Alondra Cano was the loony left.

And for them, the riots were a disaster. For the new establishment, the one that gained huge ground in the ’22 elections and is poised to take the city over, the one led by the Democrat Socialists of America, against which Frey and Jenkins barely survived, and Bender and Cano retired lest they be seen as “too conservative” (literally the language the DSA droogs use to refer to Jacob F*cking Frey and Andrea Jenkins – the riots, and the aftermath (including the far far far left’s well-funded and well-organized response to whatever backlash there was in the ’20 elections) were a prime organizing opportunity.

But I won’t call Winter a myopic political analyst. Someone else will have to.

A Bonus I’ll Answer So You Don’t Need To

“Minneapolis Has Fallen” refers to quite a number of former MPD cops. Winter reminds us that a number of them are living on disability pensions and workmens comp settlements.

Someone needs to explain why that’s relevant (as opposed to, frankly, kinda pointlessly bitchy) since Winter will no doubt say she doesn’t have to.

I have a few transgender people in y social circle. All of them did their transitions, for whatever reason, as adults. I treat them with respect. They (mostly) reciprocate – I’ve had no ugly little moments over pronouns.

Because that’s kinda the point – voluntary human interaction requires some degree of mutual respect, as opposed to using every interaction as an excuse to try to squeedge a publicly-airable grievance out onto social media – something that might be equally well-termed “narcissism”.

And some of the LGB crowd is seeing it the same way.

Gay black guy comments on videos of Trans people complaining about being “misgendered”:

And I think he nails it.

One of many highlights: “If you’ve been to 25 restaurants and everyone’s calling you “Sir’, there’s a theme and consensus“.

Of course, as Camille Paglia points out, it’s not all laughs and games:

Apropos not much – but I looked at my stats about two minutes ago, and saw that there were precisely 19,999 posts published on this blog.

Which makes this 20,000!

It’s kind of like watching your car go from 99.999 to 100K, only it takes a lot longer…

So, Saint Paul has a new city council.

Sort of.

Just like the old city council, the new one treats the knobs and levers of government power as their toy and playground.

They’re just a little more overt about it:

And in terms of waving “Progressive” bloody sheets about in public?

Again – same as the old council, but more-so:

Couldn’t see that coming. Honest. Seriously.

I was casting about for the perfect way to describe the incoming City Council, when an email from a friend of the blog did it for me:

The New York Times thinks it’s important that Saint Paul, Minnesota has elected an all-female city council.

I was with a group of women the other day who also were saying how wonderful it was, how diverse this council is now, and laughing at unfunny jokes like “don’t we feel sorry for the middle aged white man?” 

“Change doesn’t happen with the same voices at the table,” Ward 6 Councilwoman Nelsie Yang says in the article.

Funny, I say to the group of women I’m with- these women who were recently elected, their campaigns all sounded the same. And on top of that, their campaign promises and priorities all sounded the same as Russ Stark. Is he middle aged yet? I’ll bet he is. And he’s definitely white. And, this entire newly elected council, why, their priorities all sound the same as another white man who has visited the Twin Cities often- Pete Buttigieg. 

But, their voices, their priorities, don’t sound the same as former Ward 7 Councilwoman Jane Prince’s priorities. She was often mocked and called all sorts of names on social media for being a different voice.

I’m going to break in here and say it: Jane Prince, the former staffer for Ellen Anderson, who used to seem waaaaaay out on the left. [2]

Their voices and priorities don’t sound 100% the same as former Ward 1 Councilman Dai Thao, who was the first Hmong American to be elected to Saint Paul City Council. While he was definitely liberal, because his voice was different, because he didn’t sound the same as those in power, he was often “accused” of being a Republican. LOL.

And Debbie Montgomery, who was mentioned in this article as the first Black Woman to win a Saint Paul City Council seat. I don’t remember her a lot on the council, but I do know that since her time on the council, she has been accused of being a Nimby and being out of touch with her neighborhood because she doesn’t sound the way these newly elected women sound. 

So, to Ms Yang and the rest of these women that are so proud to be a “different” voice on the council, you can ride that all they want, but the reality is, the majority percentage of the 30% or so of voters who bother to show up to vote in a local election really weren’t voting for change, weren’t voting for a new voice, they were voting for you because you sounded like the white men before you who were virtue signaling all the priorities that you virtue signaled in your campaigns.

Call me a cynic, or a realist, but I suspect our governing class thinks the not-at-all-new “New and more intesectional” council’s, er, predictability is a feature, not a bug:

As Alan Dershowitz once said in addressing a crowd we’d call “woke” today, but merely “PC” in the much less insipid early ’90s:

Your idea of “diversity” is someone with different colored skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you”

So that’s something that’ll never change.

[1] I acknowledge that I am not a biologist

[2] Jane Prince was also a great staffer – who made sure everyone, even pesky Republicans, got answers from Anderson’s office. Try that with Sandy Pappas or Rena Moran or Maria Isa).

The SF City Council voted to clean up all the sh*t on the streets.

Hahahahaha. Just kidding. The Cantina Band voted to throw their immense weight and foreign policy power behind a cease fire in Gaza:

No word if a pre-emptive stolen land declaration on behalf of Hamas was included in the decree.

Question: what is it about white “progressives” bobbing and lurching around like they’re at a “Phish” concert that makes me hope a pack of wild boars happens into the room?

The below is an update of a piece I first wrote almost four years ago. It was at that moment about the time when people – smart people, anyway – were starting to realize that Covid wasn’t the new Bubonic Plague, that the sky was not falling, and that whatever “model” Governor Klink was reading that was predicting 70,000 deaths in Minnesota alone by mid-July of 2020, and 20,000 dead as a best case if they shut the state down completely, was perhaps…wrong.

I was looking at the gutting of civil and religious freedom that Minnesotans had countenanced – perhaps more or less voluntarily in March,

Over this past weekend, Big Left went through what’s become an annual orgy of celebrating what’s become their secular holiday, January 6.

Governor Klink took a break from his regimen of selfies of him being fed donuts by Co-Governor Flanagan to have his social media intern blurt this out:

The DFL, likewise:

So – a year and a half after Governor Klink reluctantly gave up his “emergency powers”, and after three years of Joe Biden serving as the doddering mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s third term as the greatest stealth authoritarian since Woodrow Wilson, let’s take stock of the state of “democracy”, in Minnesota and nationwide.

One of the obligations of a free people – and especially of a free people that wants to stay that way – is to push back when government overreaches. Not just in emergencies (although that was the initial subject of the original post), but always, on every facet of liberty. Conservatism holds that order and liberty exist in a constant state of tension; without order (or health) prosperity is impossible; without health, freedom is academic (subsistence farmers don’t have time to petition for redress of grievances); without freedom, order is onerous and, let’s be honest, prosperity is most likely concentrated among those keeping the order.

Three years ago, I said that Government power is like a handgun – sometimes, a necessary tool in extreme circumstances, under terms that are as strictly circumscribed as any rule on justifiable use of lethal force. And like any necessary tool, free people need to make sure that the newbie isn’t sweeping people at the firing range with her hand on the trigger, and that government isn’t getting drunk and profligate with its use, or abuse of power.

Of course, three years later, it’s clear that the Biden and Walz regimes great government power less like a handgun on the nightstand, and more like a Reaper drone, orbiting loudly above everything, ready to strike arbitrarily and without a whole lot of reason or respect for the niceties of constitutional law.

Just as Governor Piglet’s administration used Covid as a pretext for seizing unprecedented arbitrary power, Democrats nationwide are waving “January 6” around like a bloody shirt, to try to justify their ravaging of the spirit and letter of AMerican democracy.

So lets list the outrages. Let me know what I’ve missed; I intend for this list to live on as long as needed:

Life and Liberty

• The emergence of the crypto-Maoist “Democratic Socialists of America” as the most powerful bloc in the Democrat party nationwide, and even moreso of the DFL – as both parties arrogate more power, wealth (transferred from taxpayers)
• The multi-pronged bringing to heel of the education system, from pre-school through the post-doctoral level, is “the long game” in attacking not just liberty, but the entire underpinning of Western Civilization. Creating a generation of ignorant droogs who think “freedom” is just material satiety is both a key goal of those who’d gut the American experiment and, seemingly, a long way toward being accomplished.

The Pursuit of Prosperity

Here, the DFL’s disdain for business and private property rears its head, above and beyond any actual response to the epidemic.

• The DFL “Trifecta” burned through nearly $18 Billion worth of “surprlus”, every dime of which came from a taxpayer of some kind or another. That’s nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – nearly $12,000 for a typical family of four. In one year. And they raised taxes enough to cover that and a whole lot more. And given that the state is inevitably falling into deficit while the Democrats control the Legislature, it’s going to get much worse. That money would, in fact, be better employed by the people.
• As Governor Klink established during Covid, the right to transact business is clearly subject to arbitrary, and in some cases seemingly capricious, interference. Small businesses are shut down (as big ones, and business with more, better lobbyists remain open), in many cases without regard to the business’ actual susceptibility to the virus (lawn services? nd smoke shops aren’t. It’s best that your vices not be politically unfashionable.
• Looking a back at the concept of “Essential” and “Non-Essential” workers – designations determined almost entirely via the political expediency of the designations, and their importance to the lifestyle of the “Laptop class” workers who make up the political class – feels like staring into the soul of Orwell’s universe, even three years later.
• The government started by barring all evictions and foreclosures, and halting student loan payments. The Twin Cities governments have moved on to rent control – furthering the road to gutting the affordable rental market, and completely foreclosing the existence of the small landlords that used to provide most of the metro’s “affordable housing” – while the Biden regime tried to unilaterally wipe out personal obligations to private student loan lenders.

Government Transparency

• The DFL created a “Hate Speech Registry”. What’s in it? What’s it for? How do we see what, and who, is in it? For what purposes will it be used? The registry’s supporters couldn’t and wouldn’t answer questions. They just jammed it down.
• The Governor’s “Covid Snitch Line” showed us not only the DFL’s ability for setting up a Stasi-like network of informants, but how much they genuinely enjoy it.
• School boards around the state are gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, being turned into rubber-stamps for district administrators and the state department of Education.
• For years, people complained, legitimately, that most of the legislature’s big decisions were made by the Governor, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, operating behind closed doors. That was intolerable and stupid when there were opposing parties involved in those negotiations. Now that they’re all with the same party? While elections have consequences, this is pure authoritarianism.
• Covid-era restrictions on meetings have morphed, post-pandemic, into a glib disregard for state open meeting laws, which serve more as suggestions these days.

First Amendment

• The collaboration of Big Government, Big Tech, Big Media and the Big Left’s non-profit/industrial complex completely gutted free speech in time for the 2020 election. The vituperation of their response to Elon Musk buying Twitter tips the hand; the Axis of Authority really, really wants “free speech” to be more about crappy art than actually holding government accountable.
• And as Big Left endlessly drones on about the “Threat” of “endemic white supremacist terrorism” that we’ve been told for 15 years is everywhere, honest, one of these days now – the threat of being swatted, of crowds of professional protesters and rioters making your free exercise of too much inconvenient speech potentially dangerous is always there. The March 4, 2017 “Anti”-Fa attack on a Republican gathering at the MN Capitol rotunda (and the fact that Ramsey County’s “criminal justice” system did everything but take the “protesters” out for dinner to apologize for the inconvenience of being arrested) was a warning; shut up, or you just might get cut up. Democrats and the DFL are very aware of this, because that malevolent mass of wannabe thugs are their children, nephews, classmates.

Second Amendment

• While the Second Amendment community remains strong, and with the departure of Wayne LaPierre may get some of its teeth re-sharpened at the national level, the attacks on the law-abiding gun owner in Blue jurisdictions are increasing, unconscionable, and not consistent with “protecting democracy”. More below.

Fourth Amendment

• The surveillance state has gotten steadily worse.
• The presence of anonymous “snitch lines” – and especially “hate crime” lines, may not have led to any Fourth Amendment perversions of probable cause yet – but don’t bet against it.
• “Red Flag” laws have largely trashed the Fourth Amendment (more below).

Fifth Amendment

• With the courts pretty much closed your right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury is pretty much toast for the duration.
• Let’s not forget how the state gutted the justice system – including the rights of defendants to speedy drials, to face their accusers, and of their attorneys to effectively prepare cases – under the pretext of “public emergency restrictions”.

Privacy

• Among the many other depredations of Minnesota’s “red flag” law – “Mental Health” professionals are in fact now deputized to participate in the abuse of those laws. I’d say “consider the unintended consequences”, but I don’t think there’s anything “unintended” about them.
• Government used your cell data to track the effectiveness of social distancing. Think that genie’s going back in the bottle?

When Democrats refer to Republicans as “fascists”, it’s a Berg’s Seventh Law case. .

I don’t care what you say. This…

…makes me feel genuine joy.

It’s been a rough 3-7 years to be a conservative, a Republican, an originalist.

An American who believes in what America was intended to be, really.

But let’s enjoy some good news. This past two weeks have been a speedbump – it’s way to early to say “Battle of Waterloo” – for “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), the Neo-Marxist corporate obedience training and consultant-enrichment racket masquerading as a business practice.

Charles C.W. Cooke on why Claudine Gay’s pre-emptive ouster at Harvard matters:

That Harvard lost this one ought to serve as a warning to those who have convinced themselves that the purpose of the American citizenry is to furnish a few members of a distant caste with ever-increasing tithes and never to ask how they are being spent. Commenting on the affair, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “a professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School,” told the New York Times that the architects of Claudine Gay’s ouster “will only be emboldened by Gay’s resignation.” If, by this, Muhammad means that they will no longer be willing to tolerate brazen double standards, open racial discrimination, and the subjugation of the entire human experience to a vicious scheme of antediluvian identity considerations, then he is absolutely correct. They will be emboldened, and they deserve to be. Claudine Gay did what she was accused of having done, and nobody has denied it. The critics were the good guys. Let’s hope they come back for more.

That was a nice appetizer, to be honest.

I do want more.

Last week, I asked “why all the hate for National Review?”

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, responded:

I had a subscription to National Review for decades.  I let it lapse when I realized O’Sullivan’s Law applied to his own magazine.  The writers I admired – who stated my views better than I could – were no longer welcome there.

Samuel Francis.  John Derbyshire.  Mark Steyn.  Conrad Black. Theodore Dalrymple.  Victor Davis Hanson.  Some of their names still appear on the website but they haven’t had an article published in years.  The views of the magazine have shifted.  Look at the articles in the last few issues, the most conservative guy is . . . James Lileks.  I love his writing but he’s not the successor to William F. that I would have chosen to write insightful political commentary.   I didn’t leave the magazine, the magazine left me but it’s worse than that.

“National Review is now run by a nest of never-Trumpers,” said Francis Sempa in 2021, and his comment is still on-point today. The man who is far and away the most popular candidate for the Republican nomination for President isn’t classy enough for National Review.   He’s a boor.  He doesn’t lose gracefully.  And those tweets!  He’d never get invited to one of National Review’s cruises.

Neither will I.  My views are too extreme, too conservative.  Like their former columnists and the former President, and the 80 million people who voted for Trump last time and the 120 million who will vote for him this time, I’m not good enough enough for National Review.  Which puts me in mind of Grocho Marx:  “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

Joe Doakes, former National Review subscriber, no longer in Como Park

Well, I do subscribe to the National Review. Some of my favorites are gone – Derb, Kevin WIlliamson – and others like Charles CW Cooke and Andrew McCarthy remain.

“Never Trump?” Some are. Some are, like me, Trump skeptics, or from the “what have you done lately?” crowd. Not sure if Trump isn’t classy enough for the NR, but I’ve never gelled with his personality, even back when he was a Democrat.

I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. I did in 2020, although his behavior between the election and Biden’s coronation was almost as stupid as, well, the system he fought. I’ll be in Team Ron ’til the bitter end, but I won’t be voting, directly or indirectly, for a fourth Obama term. Make of that what you will.

But the Trump era is going to end – next summer, next November, or perhaps in January of 2029. And I want the GOP that picks up at the end of all that to be more like the GOP of 1994 than the Matt Gaetz clown car of 2023.

And the National Review, whatever else you say about them, is about the same thing.

I hear what Joe’s saying. I understand it. I even agree to a point. I’m also a conservative before I”m a Republican. There will be a post-Trump era, sooner or later. I’d like whatever replaces Trump to reflect beliefs I can get behind. Love Trump, hate him, or fall somewhere in the middle,

Pro-Hamas protesters blocked a freeway in in Toronto.

But…is there something special about the neighborhood?

So – what is the Canadian government – the government that sicced the military on entirely peaceful anti-Covid-lockdown protesters three years ago – doing with this disruption to public order?

Canada – or at least, Toronto and Ontario and the Canadian federal government – have made manifest the message that Minnesota’s government has been sending this past three years. IF you’re part of the favored class, there’s literally nothing you can’t get away with. From blocking public thoroughfares to political vandalism to inflicting violence, it’s all OK…

…provided you’re pals with “progressives” with money and power.