Remember last spring?

When Governor Klink told us we all had to sacrifice, while the state built up his heart hospital bed capacity (a commodity regulated by the executive branch he controls)?

Either, apparently, does Governor Klink.

The supply of hospital beds has dwindled since the spring:

This is Cynthia Johnson – a Democrat Michigan state representative, and her message to “Trump supporters”.

I’m done with asking questions like “can you imagine what would happen if a Republican, no matter how obscure, no matter how far removed from any actual political clout, were to say something like this?”.

We can’t. There’s no point in trying. Even asking for a pretense of “fairness” in the mainstream media’s reporting of these things is as pointless as wondering “wouldn’t it have been cool if the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor” while climing down the cargo net into a Higgins Boat off Utah Beach; fun to think about, but utterly pointless in light of current fact.

There’s a civil war afoot – and a lot of Democrats are pretty happy about it.

To: Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, Unruly Peasant
Re: Your Marching Orders

Dear Democrats

Consider it your moral duty to do exactly this. As much as you can, and then some.

Preferably right out of the gate in the next session of Congress.

If you succeed, Wellstone will smile down on you.

That is all.

Of course we are.

Well, except for the difficult stuff.

Suicides balloon by 31% in Minnesota since the beginning of the lockdowns.

I keep hearing journalists say the reason the public isn’t going along with mask orders and closures is Covid fatigue. We’re exhausted from the strain of trying so hard to comply.

No, it’s not fatigue. It’s fury. We’re furious at being lied to, talked down to, scolded, belittled, insulted. We’ve been hearing dire warnings about piles of bodies in the streets but looking around, we don’t see them. We hear about skyrocketing case numbers but looking around our circles of acquaintances, we know nobody who died from it; maybe one or two people who tested positive but they are fine. We hear those things cited as justification for arbitrary rules causing massive disruptions in our lives, our family finances, our children’s education – rules our own leaders unashamedly flaunt – and it pisses us off.

We’re not stupid. If Covid is deadly serious, then rules shouldn’t be just for little people, they should be for everybody to follow, to keep everybody safe. But since we’ve seen the rules ARE just for little people, then Covid must not be deadly serious. It must be a political hoax. That’s not a good enough reason for it to continue.

End the rules, already. Stop the ride, we want to get off.

Joe Doakes

I’ll believe it’s a crisis (for relatively healthy people below age 60) when the people telling me it’s a crisis (for relatively healthy people below age 60) start acting like it’s a crisis (for relatively healthy people below age 60).

Put another way – when I see people like Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, Lori Lightfoot, and that lightweight mayor of Denver flouting the rules because they can, and then I look at my parents (in their eighties, both vulnerable in a variety of ways), I want to jam a swab full of virus up their noses myself.

An initiative to overturn a state ban on affirmative action in California…

…failed.

And it failed largely due to the votes of Latino and Asian voters.

Unexpectedly:

Yet on Election Day, the proposition failed by a wide margin, 57 percent to 43 percent, and Latino and Asian-American voters played a key role in defeating it. The outcome captured the gap between the vision laid out by the liberal establishment in California, which has long imagined the creation of a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that would embrace progressive causes, and the sentiments of many Black, Latino, Asian and Arab voters.

Variations of this puzzle could be found in surprising corners of the nation on Election Day, as slices of ethnic and racial constituencies peeled off and cut against Democratic expectations….Asian-American Californians opposed the affirmative action measure in large numbers. A striking number of East and South Asian students have gained admission to elite state universities, and their families spoke to reporters of their fear that their children would suffer if merit in college selection was given less weight. That battle carried echoes of another that raged the past few years in New York City, where a white liberal mayor’s efforts to increase the number of Black and Latino students in selective high schools angered working- and middle-class South and East Asian families whose children have gained admission to the schools in large numbers.

“There’s more texture to California blue politics than you might think,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run. “Identity politics only go so far. There is a sense on affirmative action that people resent being categorized by progressives.”

Latinos, too, appear sharply divided. Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down.

The fact that some “POC” (and lord, do I hate that term) are defying their progressive overlords’ orders – most notably in the election – has got to be giving Democrats indigestion.

What gives me indigestion is wondering how the Minnesota GOP will screw this opportunity up.

Ilhan Omar thinks we’re the “Klan”:

Omar’s not stupid. She knows that’s not true.

She just knows that CD5 Democrats pretty much believe anything they’re told.

… this is one of the better explanations of critical theory I’ve seen:

On the other hand, I have a little doubt that it’s going to trigger some progressive…

I never quite know what to say to veterans.

Hear me out, here.

Saying “thank you for your service” seems trite – almost mawkish.   Someone who never served saying “Thanks for going overseas and getting shot at!”?

See what I mean?

In the meantime, what I want to say is “glad you made it home”.  But I can see that being taken the wrong way.

So I’ll wing it.

Veterans:  thanks for spending the best years of your lives in barracks, troops ships, foxholes, berthing spaces, CVC helmets, cockpits and gun mounts, doing things most of us can’t imagine, to protect the freedoms too many Americans take very much for granted.

If bars ever open again, the next drink’s on me.

It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it doesn’t have to.

(Adapted from a post I first ran five years ago).

Remember President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program?  Trade in an old
car for a more fuel-efficient one, get up to $4,500 in federal rebate
money.  Your clunker was crushed.  The effect of the program was to
distort the used car market, driving up prices of starter vehicles for
the young and poor, making it harder for them to get to work.  The
distortion took months to settle out.

Remember the Obama administration pushing mortgages for minority
borrowers?  It was actually possible to get into a house with less
out-of-pocket investment than getting into an apartment; I saw lots of
examples in the land records.  The effect of that program was to distort
the lending market and when sub-prime mortgages crashed, it took a
decade for the foreclosures and bankruptcies to settle out.

Governor Walz issued his Stay Home order closing businesses and throwing
more than a million Minnesotans out of work (we know this because a
million people filed for unemployment, which is not available to youth,
part-time, casual, contract or small business owners; therefore, the
total who lost their incomes is much, much higher).  The mortgage
delinquency rate is the highest in 20 years but Congress put
foreclosures of federally insured mortgages are on hold and Governor
Walz imposed a moratorium on evictions. The effect is to distort the
housing market again.  There’s a flood of foreclosures and evictions
coming down the pike as soon as the pandemic restrictions are lifted. 
That flood will cause a slump in home values as lenders dump foreclosed
homes, which will drive home prices down, which will be reflected in
worse economic numbers for whomever is President at the time.  It may
take years to settle out, again.

None of this was unforeseen.  The foreseeable consequences of the lock
down were ignored in order to gin up support for mail in voting to make
the election easier to steal.  The cost of that decision is going up
every day.

Joe Doakes

This is what happens when there’s no real check on power.

Apparently, the Menards in the Midway was worried about rioting Trump supporters.

They stacked up huge pallets of lumber in front of the doors – just like they did during the George Floyd riots / May.

Apparently, those Trump supporters I’m going to riot.

Any day now.

Just like those waves of “white supremacist terror“ we’ve been assured are imminent for the past 12 years or so.

“Anti”-Fa is an “idea”.

So are ISIS, Al Quaeda and every other toxic ideology in the history of the world.

Here’s the new documentary, “Antifa – Rise of the Black Flag”. It traces “Anti”-Fa’s roots back to the Communist Party of Weimar Germany…

…and straight through to the present day, right here and now.

Watch it:

This is not just an idea. It’s also not just a bunch of crazy kids. It’s not even just a domestic terror group. It is an insurgency.

Watch it.

Pass it along.

Make sure the Democrats, especially the MN DFL, owns it.

…Donald Trump apparently isn’t very good at getting the word out there.

Liberals are all excited about the number of Covid cases.  Not me. 
Cases don’t matter in a public policy discussion, only effects on the
public, i.e. hospitalizations and deaths.

Think of it this way: Covid is a virus, as is the rhinovirus, which
causes the common cold; influenza, which causes the flu; and herpes
simplex, which causes cold sores.  Those viruses are everywhere and
everybody has them lurking in their bodies all the time, but most of the
time they cause no symptoms so nobody cares that they have the viruses.

We don’t count cases of cold sore outbreaks because nobody dies of a
cold sore.  We don’t count cases of the common cold because nobody gets
hospitalized for it.

We do count cases of the flu because that does kill people – very young
and very old, mostly.  But not inactive cases.  We don’t go around
randomly testing people to see if they have influenza virus in their
bodies.  We only count cases that are bad enough for hospitalization or
result in death, because those are the cases that have a public impact. 
People walking around with virus in the body but no symptoms are ignored.

That’s how we should be handling Covid.  Count hospitalizations and
deaths, only.  By that measure, the epidemic is over.    125 people die
every day in Minnesota, from all sources.  The number of people being
hospitalized or dying from Covid is in the single digits.  If we weren’t
specifically searching for it, Covid would be indistinguishable from
statistical background noise.

The epidemic is over.  We won.  Open everything.

Joe Doakes

We have an entire generation – and on the left, probably more like two entire generations – who think “hardship” was “losing the 2016 election”. They hear people talking about the Spanish Flu, the breakdown of Europe, the Depression, World War 2, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Stagflation and the National Malaise, the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms race, and seem to feel left out of the Existential Dread sweepstakes.

And so Covid will serve as an existential crisis for a generation that doesn’t really know what existential crisis is.

It’s easy to wonder, if you’re a conservatve in Minnesota, whether voting matters. I’ve even heard that from some Third-Party and Never-Trumpers that “your GOP vote won’t matter in Minnesota, so why not vote third-party?

But while I, like all Minnesota conservatives, have had the Lucy Pulling the Football Away moment far too often, and I don’t really trust polls on either side of today’s questions, there are at least some indications that today’s vote does matter, a whole lot.

And if (as my pessimism tells me is unlikely) Trump is ahead tonight, look for them – the Democrats and media – to try to undercut it. They already are.

So if you’re a Conservative / Republican, get out and vote as if they’re going to be trying to lock us up if we lose. Which, it seems, they are.

See you at the polls.

Anyone remember “Julia”?

The Obama campaign’s infantiolization of the American voter?

This video from Kamala Harris makes “Julia” look like John Galt:

This is what Joe Biden is a delivery system for.

Dear Governor Wallz.

Follow the science!

Joe Doakes

Joe is mistaking “science” – means of focused questioning, observation and analysis – with “science”, a set of memes and commandments designed to exhort compliance.

Common mistake.

Larry Jacobs got dunked hard over this tweet last week:

I’m going to come to Professor Jacobs’ (partial, and let’s be honest, largely comic) defense.

I suspect he’s referring to the Uptown Bar. Which was at one point one of the most popular bars in Uptown, which is “in a college town” in the sense that Minneapolis has several colleges in it (rather than, say, Morris or Mankato or even my hometown). It was certainly a place to see and be seen back in the day – and I certainly saw and was seen there, a couple of lifetimes ago.

But it closed in 2009. Long before Covid.

It was replaced, by the way, by an Apple Store.

Which announced its impending closure last week, in the middle of a hamfisted lockdown and the Uptown neighborhood’s descent into crime and violence. While urbanists claim “stores close all the time in Uptown”, citing a number of flavor-of-the-month boutiques and restaurants, I’ll hasten to remind you – in the middle of a neighborhood full of hipsters with enough disposable income to, well, live in Uptown, it was an Apple Store.

And it’s gone. #Unexpectedly.

We interrupt this blog post for a song, which is not remotely thematic, nosirreebob.

Or, more to the point, Nosirree Bob:

Oh, yeah. The establishment in Dr. Jacobs’ tweet is…

…er, was the Uptown Theater. One of the signal arthouse theaters in Minneapolis, a place with some of my most treasured movie experiences.

But it’s gone, too.

Hey, how about another song?

Seems appropriate.

Jeffrey Toobin – caught on his own camera doing some, er, internal polling earlier this week – doesn’t have the problem.

All of you who are complaining that he was seen, non-social distancing, during a work meeting – you are the ones with the problems!

And that’s also what everyone is going to remember about Jeffrey Toobin, I’m afraid. But that says more about us than it does about him.

According to a 2016 survey, 95% of men and 81% of women in America have masturbated. Yet in the same poll, over half of respondents said they felt uncomfortable talking about it.

So we joke about it, instead, which relieves our anxieties but reinforces the taboo. Witness the outpouring of juvenile humor over the past two days about “Toobin his own horn,” his “sticky situation,” and so on.

Well, there was the little matter that he was “going on his third date with Rachel Maddow” or “universal gun registration” or “nationwide mask mandates” [or whomever it is that “progressive” guys think about while in flagrante solo] during a work meeting. On camera. A nation full of people who’ve been stuck on Teams or Zoom meetings (if we’re lucky) for seven months and joking about people not wearing pants “to work” are suddenly seeing how our self-appointed “elites” spend their time.

So of course you’re the one with the problem.

Usual disclaimers about “the only poll that counts is on November 3 [1] inserted here.

But pessimist that I am, I really didn’t see this coming

KSTP/SURVEYUSA: Tina Smith 43%; Jason Lewis 42%; 12% undecided; 3% people other. Confidence Interval +/- 5%. Smith had 11-point lead in September and 7-point lead earlier this month. pic.twitter.com/mX91q0MI6X

— Tom Hauser (@thauserkstp) October 21, 2020

Fluke?

Polls finding more-likely voters, ones who’ve actually been paying attention?

We’ll see.

I’ve heard more than a few fellow D-list pundits exclaim disbelief at “12% undecided”. I’m going to chalk that up to some misdirected Pauline Kael syndrome, from people who “write”/tweet about politics constantly, thinking everyone is the same as they are. Smith has tried hard to follow A-Klo’s model of being innocuous and invisible. We’ll see if it works.

Lewis beating the Butcher Of Vandalia would be an early Christmas present.

[1] And, let’s be honest, as we saw in 2008 and 2010, it still may not count, really, but let’s try not to go completely down the rabbit hole.

…the nation turns its lonely, topical limerick and haiku writing eyes to you. And Ryan Rhodes.

But since Foot is retired and Ryan is MIA, we’ll have to fill in ourselves.

There once was a fellow named Toobin
(Don’t confuse him with Jennifer Rubin).
His career met its doom,
when he dropped trou on Zoom
Now there’s a different part getting the lube-in.

Toobin takes “lid” off,
Two weeks’ frenzy erupts, as
Biden’s lid stays on.

So Toobin had fun of the kind,
the nuns said would make you go blind.
But there’s no point in moping,
it’s just Jeff’s way of hoping
for less trouble than the conjugal kind.

Carry on.

Talking about Hunter Biden’s addiction is mean to addicts.

Do you know what’s really mean to addicts?

Enabling them

Giving a separate justice system to the powerful.

(Notice how NPR “fact checked” the assertion that Biden was kicked out of the Navy? he got an “administrative discharge” – as if he’d have gotten that had he been a kid from Oklahoma…)

Using them as a misapplied political point.

That’s mean to addicts.

The question remains: with 85% of downtown workers not working downtown, and at least 10,000 of them never coming back, how much is this article about skyway businesses sodtpedaling the reality?

Steve Cramer, the president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, says only 15% of the typical workforce population works downtown right now.

Several businesses in the Skyway are closed at least temporarily due to COVID-19. Cramer couldn’t specify how many.

“We probably will see a few less of those establishments when things kind of bounce back, but when things bounce back, that will create new opportunities for growth so we’re looking for that hopeful day as well,” Cramer said.

In theory, yes – if Governor clink ever “allows“ things to go back to normal, it’s hypothetically true that all those empty skyway store fronts will provide a world of opportunity for the next round of merchants.

Provided, of course, that people come back – that working from home doesn’t gut the commercial real estate market – and that the public safety situation downtown doesn’t keep businesses away

Presidents nominating, and Senates confirming, SCOTUS seats via the the process defined in the Constitution is “packing”

Repealing a working-class tax cut won’t increase taxes on the working class.

Nobody’s coming for your guns.

“Anti”-Fa doesn’t exist.

High density cities, with all their accoutrements (mass transit, densely-packed infranstructure) are more sustainable, livable.

The protests are mostly peaceful.

A decade and a half of demonizing police and running a catch-and-release judicial system, combined with open threats to defund or abolish the police, have no effect on crime rates, silly peasants:

The problem isn’t that the Minneapolis Student Council and the president of its Sustainability Club are lying to the people.

The problem is that they know the people who vote for them are too uncritical, complacent, dependent or stupid to know any better.

So far, it seems like a winning strategy.

Politically, I mean.