Sure, it’s entirely plausible that an entire “white supremacist” group without a single inbred-looking morbidly overweight guy among ’em might march through DC without a mob of “counterprotesters” howling for their blood. It’s a crazy world, anything can happen.

What makes this whole thing seem just a tad lessplausible is…:

Last week, I did one of my periodic cites of Jeff Snyder’s epochal “A Nation of Cowards“.

It was partly in reference to the Penny case.

Daniel Penny was the good samaritan who put a sleeper (not choke) hold on a mentally-ill man who was actively threatening people in the NYC subway. He was assisted by a black man and a latino fellow – all good samaritans, all men doing the right thing, all examples of what masculinity is supposed to be in the face of danger.

But Penny is being charged by Manhattan DA Lavrentii Beria. Oops – I mean Alvin Bragg.

He’s got a legal defense fund:

Penny (amd the other men) were the opposite of the “cowards” Snyder assailed. Naturally Beria..er, Bragg can’t tolerate that.

This has the potential to wedge NYC the way the Bernard Goetz case did.

In a just world, anyway.

On Saturday, I had a chat with Shawn Holster about the new, vastly streamlined Minneapolis GOP. It’s a reform that makes sense – going from four Senate district and 13 ward committees to a single city organization. No more wondering what side of what arbitrary dividing line you live on, no more wondering if you went to the right meeting, no more wasted effort among a dozen sub-units, more focus on what matters- it’s freaking brilliant, and Saint Paul should do the same.

It starts at the :33 mark:

In the meantime, as I was talking with Shawn, this was the MInneapolis Ward 10 convention:

Ken Martin – who runs the party of Bill “Guillotine Republicans!” Davis, of Matt “He Who Flexes on Reporters who are 30 years older than him” Roznowski, of Leigh “Thrilla On the House Floor” Finke, whose party has presided over probably half a dozen cycles of Minneapolis district conventions breaking down into riots…

…is making vigorous noises about violbla beingbla bla unacceptibiblablabla.

A couple of punks shoplifting a store…

… beat down an armed robber.

Note the cool skateboard diversion.

Learn more about the new, improved, streamlined Minneapolis GOP here.

If you’re not in the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus – what do you want, an invitation? OK – I invite you to get involved. Do it!

And here’s the music list:

“Juvenile Offender” alleged to have murdered a Saint Paul man while burgling the man’s wife’s car is already a frequent flyer:

FOX 9 has confirmed through multiple sources that the 17-year-old suspect in custody on suspicion of Michael Brasel’s murder is the same young man captured on a video that went viral last year inside a Saint Paul Harding High School bathroom…the teen, who we are not naming at this point, was charged and eventually pled guilty to aggravated robbery in that case. He was discharged from probation and supervision four months ago, in January.

…

Former St. Paul Police chief Todd Axtell makes an appearance in the story, showing us again why he was literally the only public figure in either of the Twin Cities not to disgrace himself completely during the 2020 riots.

Remember – if the murder victim had instead shot the teen (while meeting all the other criteria for self-defense naturally), the Ramsey County Attorney’s office would have take a much greater interest in punishment.

That’s intentional.

And just watch – John Choi will not ask for the sentence enhancement for using a gun in a violent crime. Mark my words.

In the wake of his move to Twitter, some bad news for Tucker Carlson.

He’s been banned from…

…uh…

“Tribel”.

Because apparently nobody’s banning people on Mastodon.

Or Air America, apparently.

With great fanfare, Minneapolis and Saint Paul raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour. 

And now, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve says the policy has done…well, exactly what every conservative said it would do:  

 Pay is up 1% among those with jobs – but 2% fewer are employed as a direct result of the policies, and that’s just scratching the surface (emphasis added):

Many economists have reached similar conclusions about minimum wage increases in the past. Still, the size of the impacts the researchers measured — by comparing Minneapolis and St. Paul to data culled from other Minnesota cities from 2017 through 2021 — were eye-popping, especially in low-wage industries.

Take Minneapolis’ retail sector, for example: The minimum wage increase led to 28% fewer retail jobs than researchers would’ve expected from a similar city during the same five-year period. By this comparison, Minneapolis also saw a 20% drop in hours worked and a 13% dip in aggregate worker earnings.

Across St. Paul’s restaurant industry, the city’s 2018 minimum wage hike was responsible for drying up nearly one-third of available jobs, the study found. In “limited-service” (fast food) restaurants, both hours and earnings fell by more than half after the increase took effect.

“Good, they’re mostly terrible jobs anyway” say the white progressives from the non-profit/government/industrial complex. They re literally spinning this as good news – or excuses for more programs.

It’s possible that Big Left isn’t pushing these minimum wages as a way to gut opportunity for entry level workers. But if it were, I’m at a loss for what they’d do differently.

At what point in your mother’s pregnancy with you was it no longer OK to abort you?

Put another way – when did your life acquire moral weight? When did your choice – and existence – become something warranting defending?

Not some generic “woman”; your mother.

Not some abstract “fetus”; you.

Please leave an answer in the comments.

And if your answer is any variation of “It was entirely my mother’s choice, up until the moment I emerged” – in other words, that your very justification for existence didn’t develop moral weight until another human said it did, feel free to follow up with a logically consistent reason that murder is wrong. Either that, or consider me to have branded you a moral coward, and see yourself out.

Only Democrats/Lefties/pro-choicers in the comments, please.

Money – in the form of productive people – is moving from Blue to Red America:

Data show that several populous blue states—California, New York, and Illinois among them—have been losing population and companies for years. In 2021 Forbes wrote about “leftugees” fleeing blue states for red ones. A few years before that, a headline in The Hill touched on “the great exodus out of America’s blue cities.”

New IRS data, however, show the speed with which blue states are losing taxpayers—and their adjusted gross income (AGI)—is increasing. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that more than 100,000 people left Illinois in 2021, taking with them some $11 billion in AGI, nearly double its 2019 total. For New York it was $24.5 billion, an increase of more than 150 percent from 2019. California, meanwhile, saw its AGI loss ($29 billion) more than triple since 2019.

And Minnesota is far from immune – and, indeed, may be doing worse:

As Figure 1 shows, until 2001 Minnesota received more residents from other states each year than it lost to them. Since then, in all except two years, 2017 and 2018, our state has seen more residents leave than have chosen to come here from elsewhere in the United States. The loss of residents seen in 2021 and 2022 is not a new phenomenon, but the pace of exit is quickening: Minnesotans are fleeing the state in larger numbers.

Figure 1: Annual net domestic migration in Minnesota

Where did people move to and from? Figure 2 shows domestic net migration for 2022 for all the fifty states and District of Columbia. We see that the most popular destinations by far were Texas and Florida. On net, these states gained an impressive 549,816 residents in one year. The big losers were New York and California. Together, these two states lost a staggering 642,787 residents between 2021 and 2022.

It’s entirely possible that when co-governors Klink and Flanagan refer to “One Minnesota”, they mean “after all the productive, dissenting voters leave”.

Michael Cohen – the leftist dweeb, not the Trump lawyer – on “gun violence”:

That’s right, Michael. And if you can’t trust the Serbian government, which has committed oodles of genocide in the past 30 years, and has frequent flier miles at the Hague Human Rights Court, to trust the civil liberties of a disarmed populace, who can you trust?

In the 1960s into the 1980s, New York City hit rock bottom – so far.

It was a time when leftism had ravaged the city – rent control had eliminated the supply of affordable housing, leaving block after block of vacant, burned out buildings in a city where finding an apartment was the stuff of upper-middle-class horror story.

And the crime?

It got to the point where New Yorkers were advised to carry a “decoy” wallet – with a little bit of money in it (because muggers would sometimes attack or kill people who didn’t have some money to give up. New York had well over 2,000 homicides a year – among the most dangerous cities in the country.

And here we are today: as criminals re-take the streets, the violent mentally ill are all over the subway, and our idiot elite is saying we have it coming.

Go ahead – condemn the bystanders for grabbing cameras instead of hauling off on the crazy who’s abusing the woman on the bench. We’ve seen what happens when the wrong criminal, addict of crazy gets harmed. New York has a long history of holding good guys to a level of account that no bad guy will ever see.

Giuliani cleaned all that up. It’d doubtful there are enough sane voters left in Gotham to do that again, of course.

It’s not just New York, of course. This happened in Dinkytown Minneapolis on Friday night/Saturday morning:

Another episode – same night, some of the same “people”:

One of the victims contacted CrimeWatch:

A few people asked why “bystanders” didn’t help out. It’s simple – they travel in a pack, and pick out people walking alone:

Perhaps the good guys need a lot more bystanders to flood the zone?

By the way – this was the media’s coverage:

No word if the authorities are still looking for a man with an umbrella.

I bring it up because of the parallels with the 1970s.

It was 30 years ago that New Statesman published Jeffrey Snyder’s epochal monograph, “A Nation of Cowards”, which made the case that it was time for citizens to step up and defend the order that society depends on.

It was one of several prime movers in pushing “gun culture” out of the shadows and into the mainstream, of course – but more signally, it made the case that relying on the police to protect order was not only futile, but a little craven; what makes your life invaluable, but a cop’s worth only whatever we pay them to do the job?

Once, and always, worth a read.

f

To: Senator Klobuchar
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant
Re: Hire A Better Social Media Intern

Senator,

I’m not sure if you left your social media feed with your remedial intern last week, or if you – a former prosecutor – actually wrote this:

So let’s get this straight – you want to write a bill to “stop dangerous conversions”…

…that have been illegal on the federal level for nearly 90 years?

Saint Anthony Park is Saint Paul’s neighborhood for “old money” without all the ostentation of Summit Avenue or Crocus Hill.

Its leafy streets and gently-cared-for Victorians full of university profs and senior administrative types and other moderately successful architecture geeks is the kind of place that makes city life look good.

It’s also a neighborhood full of people who haven’t been robbed, burgled and gone over enough to get hypervigilant just yet.

Fearless prediction: if they find a perp, he’ll be out of jail on his own recognizance for several felonies, and was moving up-market by going to SAP.

Condolences to Mr. Brasel’s family.

Language NSFW, and you might wanna watch the volume, too:

Some are more eloquent. Some use their indoor voices. Some use words.

But one way or another, this is the archtype for all modern leftist oratory.

Interested in contributing to Pre-Born, to help bring ultrasound to women considering abortion? Call 833-850-BABY (2229). You also go to AM11280thepatriot.com.

Here’s today’s song line-up:

The Feds are on the case in Minneapolis, going after the gangland bosses who, we’re told, are driving the crime.

Getting mobsters off the street is a good start.

But this is also a very bad sign.

This is Minneapolis, Hennepin iCounty and the State’s job. Having the Feds do it just means that Jacob Frey won’t have to answer, personally, to the “Progressive” goon squad that bedevils him; that Mary Moriarty doesn’t have to explain to the “progressives” who own her why she’s rounding up gangsters; why Governor Klink doesn’t have to take flak from the “progressives” that have wires hooked to his giblets.

It’s cowardice, and political expediency.

Dems: Public broadcasting is NOT state media! 1% of their funding comes from government!

Normies: Then defunding won’t hurt anythi…

Dems: NOOO! You’ll KILL ELMO! Why do you hate Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers?

Minneapolis ranks 59th out of 63 cities, in terms of loss of foot traffic since 2019:

Researchers essentially treated smartphones and other mobile devices as a proxy for their owners. If a device pings a nearby cell tower, it’s a good bet that’s where the device’s owner is.

The Downtown Council says it’s all a matter of remote work, and perceptions:

Downtown Council CEO Steve Cramer told Axios. The largest downtown employer pre-pandemic, Target, has no in-person requirements. The perception of public safety is another factor, Cramer said.”Our downtown … is lot more safe than many of the downtowns that get measured on these indexes, but then you have to factor in perception, and we’ve been battling that.

He’s not wrong. Downtown isn’t especially dangerous. Near North and the middle South Side are where most of the actual danger is.

But your odds of having a problem if you’re a schmuck trying to go to a concert or a game or meet friends for happy hour are about double what they were in 2016. And while that is also a matter of perception, it’s not wrong, either.

Members of the House of Representatives routinely vote for each other.

The Minnesota House’s hours-long floor sessions are often mundane and monotonous, the chamber regularly half full at best. But when members get to voting on an amendment or a bill, the chamber suddenly looks as bustling as a bee hive.

Members press the green and red voting buttons at their desks to cast a “yes” or “no” vote. But some of them aren’t just recording their own vote. Many stretch, lean over and press the voting buttons for their seatmates, who are gone.

Then, a handful get out of their seats to make sure all the empty seats around them have a vote cast.

Where are the missing members? And why are they surrendering their vote to their seatmates?

Which is technically a violation of the rules, but hey, rules are for peasants.

The reps involved have their, er, reasons:

House members say voting for one another is a longstanding practice and no cause for alarm — though it’s technically against the rules.

House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, doesn’t believe the practice compromises the legitimacy of the vote.

Walter Hudson goes into the reason behind the reason:

This – the serious work being argued out behind closed doors by the Governor, Speaker and Senate Majority leader, has been a problem since at least the early years of the Dayton regime, if not longer.

The Pandemic made it worse; the state was in effect run by a junta, and the Legislature was of no more use than the Supreme Soviet.

That’s something for a future, good government to fix, if we ever get one.

Just a quick reminder as to the level of intellectual acuity the DFL is bringing to this session.

Dems: Trans women are women!

Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…

Dems: Genocide!

I get the impression that Gordon Lightfoot knew time was short when he recorded his last album, three years ago. At 81, it wasn’t a big stretch.

It’s the best album he’s done in quite a while – done solo, just Lightfoot on an acoustic guitar, solo, his voice nowhere near it’s strength and power of his glory days, but still very much him. And it was a surprise – in 2016, he famously retired from songwriting, saying it’d caused a lot of problemls with, and for, the people closest to him in his life.

Lightfoot’s best work wrestles with one of those most troublesome human emotions – regret. Popular culture’s current affectation is to “have no regrets” – which is only possibly if you live a life with no failures, mistakes or risks. Like Warren Zevon’s final album, The Wind, it sounds like a guy wrapping up accounts for a life spent swinging for the fence – and leaving a few broken bits and pieces in his wake.

It’s a wonderful end to a wonderful career.

I tried to figure out where to start writing something that I haven’t written dozens of times before, with a long-overdue watching of If You Could Read My Mind, the 2020 documentary about his sixty-plus year career, life and legacy.

The documentary opens, rather pointedly, with Lightfoot and his third wife watching him peforming “For Loving Me”, a semi-comic cad’s anthem that, it turned out, wasn’t nearly fictional enough to have not affected many of Lightfoot’s relationships over the years.

He’s visibly uncomfortable.

“Turn it off. I hate that f*cking song”, he says, face wrinkled in disgust that, we learn in the next 90 minutes, has a whole lot of hindsight behind it.

And the hindsight is fascinating indeed.

The first acoustic guitar part with a moving bass line that I ever learned to play, back in eighth grade, was “Sundown”.

And it occurred to me – while LIghtfoot’s music wasn’t a huge, life-altering influence at the front of my mind, like Springsteen or (in my annoying adolescent days) The Who, Lightfoot’s music was always not just there, but found a way to burrow into my mind. Lightfoot’s music was always filling – there was as substance to it. It didn’t just flit through the mind and keep going.

He was an infamously fastidious songwriter and producer (not to mention, as the documentary notes, a rhythm guitarist who was in his prime such a solid, powerful musical presence that his band didn’t need a drummer until well into the seventies). His craftsmanship was very deliberate, very personal (in sixty years, he never worked with a co-writer), and pretty much completely him.

He came to fame in the folk music revival scene of the early 60s, on the basis of a lot of live performances and several songs covered by other artists; “Early Molrning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind” were covered by everyone from a Johnny Cash-style version by, well, Johnny Cash, to a disco version by VIola Wells that topped the R&B charts for a month in 1980.

And that leads us to one of the things that always drew me to Lightfoot; his music, like Dylan’s, kicked the fey, mewling limitations of “revival” folk music out of the way. The covers wandered all over the waterfront – from Wills’s disco read of “If You Could Read My Mind”…

To the Replacements sloppy punk…

To Sarah McLachlan’s alt-pop:

Favorites, looking back at a sixty year carer? Leaving out some of the obvious ones, like “Sundown” and “Wrech of the Edmund Fitzgerald”?

Some days, it’s the maddeningly oblique “Summer Side of Life”, with not-subtle Gospel overtones, distinctly un-folky Hammond organ part, and one of the most glorious vocal hooks ever?

The subtle “Don Quixote”, a protest song about…well, everything, and one that runs through my mind every time I on the air, today?

The tartly autobiographical “Race Among The Ruins”?

The freezing-cold social commentary of “Circle of Steel”?

On any given day, any or all of ’em qualify.

But for today? Looking back at Lightfoot’s 84 years (and my own, uh, several decades), this one seems most appropriate; a wistful look back, wrestling with regret, and finding away to live with them and still live.

RIP, Gordon LIghtfoot.

…that the DFL made Minnesota a sanctuary state for Munchausen Mommies like this soulless crone.

(WARNING: You may vomit):

And when a Munchhausen Mom like this walks through a custody order to bring the kid that they’re “transing” to MN, the state will put her wishes above that of the other state’s court order.

Food for ugly, nightmarish thought.

DFL: Let’s fully fund education!

Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…

DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?