This one goes out to everyone who ever noticed that guessing “the Christian” is always the guilty party at the end of every episode of every part of the Law and Order franchise is always right: The Five Christians you Meet In The Movies (and, let’s be honest, TV).

More tomorrow.

80 years ago, 20 year old men pushed the Nazi juggernaut from Normandy to the Elbe, wrestled coral islands from dug-in Japanese, and went on to build the greatest society ih history.

Fast forward: 20 year old child fires a gun, heads for a safe space.

Fearless prediction: As much as people natter on about the evils of the Baby Boom, I have a hunch one day the children and grandchildren of the Millennials and Zeepers are going to hate their elders much, much more.

To: Seni. Kellty Morrison
From: Mitch Berg: Prole on a mission
Re: Opportunity, if you’ve got the guts to take it.

Senator Morrison,

I left a message and an email with your office about this subject earlier this week. I’ve heard nothing. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.

Anyway – let’s try to seek some common ground, shall we?

The other day, you twote about your…er, I’m not sure whether to call it a “job”, “assignment” or what.

I’ll let your tweet explain as far as we can:

So here’s what I hope: when you say “engage” you, as an M.D., mean “address some of the horrific unintended consequences of Minnesota’s current opioid policy, which involves non-medical bureaucrats almost literally bean-counting doctors’ prescriptions for opioids to compare them to a more or less arbitrary standard that doesn’t account for patients’ actual need for painkillers, which has left a staggering number of chronic pain patiens and cancer patients in life-altering, wretched constant pain, leading to an extremely disproportionate number of suicides and other serious long-term physical and mental health issues”.

I suspect it means you will continue the feckless avoidance many of your fellow legislators have practiced, trying to avoid the misguided wrath of the Fentanyl Fatality Families mob – who deserve sympathy, but not complete obeisance at the expense of other people who need pain meds…

…and can’t get them because bureaucrats can and do hold doctors licenses hostage for prescribing, responsible, medically indicated quantities that pain patients can easily absorb (there was a time I respected doctors enough to assume they knew things like “someone in horrific pain can absorb amounts of opioids that’d kill a healthy NFL lineman, becasue that’s how the body is built”, but after this past three years I assume nothing).

Any chance you could break with the medical know-nothings of, to be fair, both parties, and do some good, here?

Go ahead. Shock us all.

That is all.

Why do you suppose the lefty media headlines from Wisconsin have focused exclusively on the Supreme Court race, in which the libs seized a one vote majority?

Oh.

According to some reports, the Nashville Covenant school was not a gun free zone.

Where “some reports” = a call to the police:

A woman who was at the Nashville, Tennessee, school during the mass shooting on March 27 told police that a few staff members typically carry a gun on campus, according to a police call obtained by The Tennessean.

Some of the usual suspects are already trying to use this factoid to indict the idea of armed school staff:

It’s an astonishingly ignorant view.

I’ll explain.

Even in “Stand your Ground” states, self-defense law doesn’t as a rule allow citizens to close with and engage perpetrators, acting as cops or infantry.

The proper role for an armed staffer, according to the way actual self-defense law works, is to barricade themselves and the kids they’re responsible for into a room, and be ready to shoot at a perp who comes through the door with mayhem in mind.

Not go hunting for perp. More’s the pity.

Again, we know nothing about whether these people were in the building, or what they did.

Which won’t stop the orcs from orcing.

But those are the facts.

Nashville shooting – or at least, the purchase of the firearms – could have been prevented if people took mental health reporting seriously:

Under federal law, it is illegal for “any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person, including as a juvenile” who has “been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution at 16 years of age or older.”

“Mental defective” is a term you don’t hear often anymore, and some may find it offensive, but under federal law, it has a specific meaning: a finding by any court, board, commission, or other lawful authority that a person “is a danger to himself or to others; or lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs,” as a result of “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”

The Nashville shooter was, indisputably, a danger to others, and that threat to others was almost certainly connected to her mental illness. The evidence was there for her to be declared legally mentally defective and barred from owning firearms. The shooter’s parents believed she should not be allowed to own a firearm, indicating the shooter had said or done things that made her parents believe she was a potential threat to herself or others. But no one acted upon those concerns, and no one reached out to police.

Tennessee does not have a “red flag” law that would allow police to seize the firearms of individuals that are at elevated risk of harming themselves or others. However, under Tennessee law, anyone who has been deemed “mental defective” cannot purchase a firearm in the first place.

How much of this was “fog of war” (from a mental health perspective), how much was bureaucratic inertia, and how much was unwillingness on officialdom and, most likely, the familiy’s part to piss of the increasingly militant trans lobby?

Unlike Uvalde and Parkland, the cops at the Covenant School shooting in Nashville did what cops (and citizens, for that matter) are supposed to do in the face of a spree killer: meet them with lethal force as quickly and effectively as possible.

As a general rule, spree killers spend a long time, sometimes years, planning their attacks, and frequently carry them out in a fugue state, almost a fantastical reverie. And resistance, especially with lethal force, even if it doesn’t kill or incapacitate them, frequently/usually makes them break off the attack, usually giving up or killing themselves as their fantasy comes to an abrupt end.

The Nashville cops appear to have done it right:

Here’s the body cam footage.

Warning: Extremely graphic.

And these cops, I will thank for their service.

So when a parent leaves a narcissistic piece of drama royalty who is using their children’s physiques and psyches as their personal doodle board, but their ex hauls them to Minnesota to complete the job, the Minnesota House has just voted to make the state a safe haven for kidnapping.

No, seriously:

And this is how popular it is here in Minnesota:

According to the latest Thinking Minnesota poll (February 26-28), an overwhelming majority (67%) of Minnesotans oppose sex change operations for minors. The poll was released as the Minnesota House prepares to debate a bill Thursday making Minnesota a “trans refuge” state where the practice will be protected and even encouraged. All political subgroups in the poll opposed sex change operations for minors including Democrats. There is a 51-point gap in support for the practice among Minnesota independents (16%-67%).  

The poll was conducted by Meeting Street Insights, a nationally recognized polling operation based in Charleston, South Carolina. Using a mix of cell phones and landline phones, the company interviewed 500 registered voters across Minnesota from February 26-28, 2023. The margin of error is +-4.38 percent.

And the DFL knows it:

But the DFL doesn’t care. They are using their “trifecta” of complete progressive control to do exactly what I said they’d do in 2018: jam down everything they can, knowing that even if they lose the trifecta next year, it’s going to be almost impossible to roll most of it back.

More on the show tomorrow.

Here’s Gary Gross’s first piece on guest Cassie Fredregill’s battle with the Little Falls school board. Read ongoing coverage at Freedom and Prosperity.

Today’s Progressive Minnesota Social Media Depravity competition:
– Bronze: Keith Ellison
– Silver: Melvin Carter
– Gold, Platinum and Uranium: Peggy Flanagan

Here’s today’s song list:

This is what “Restorative Justice” looks like:

The crime – the victim’s ex-boyfriend bought a gun for two juveniles to kill her new boyfriend and, if she got in the way, her as well – was egregious enough that even the fairly useless Mike Freeman was trying to charge the juveniles as adults.

The “boys” will now be out after a couple years in the Red Wing juvenile facility.

I’m offering the parents (and/or their advocates) an hour on the NARN to tell us how “restorative” they find Mary Moriarty’s idea of “justice”.

Question: what’s the difference between an ugly black assault rifle with a mega capacity, magazine designed to slaughter children, and…

… a firearm manifesting the righteous fury of a freedom fighter?

Why, the relative level of political correctness of the person holding it, of course!

We’re heading towards the 50th anniversary of the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

And like the Che Guevara T-shirt and the hammer and sickle, and the guy with the AK-47 clone, shows us that to the left, the means justify the ends.

One of the symptoms of a strong, thriving downtown, is when multiple outlets of a popular store chain, selling a common addictive product to locals and passersby, close en masse.

Haines – good news! – that’s exactly what’s happening!

Minnesota-based Caribou Coffee is reportedly closing some of its downtown Minneapolis shops in the near future.

Four stores, including three in the skyway, will be closing at the end of next month, as a part of Minneapolis’ continued renaissance.

A friend of the blog emails:

I got this link in an email from a woke acquaintance this morning who believes that if she can find my mental health records she can use the pending Red Flag laws to take away my guns.

Now for sale: Data on your mental health

Now for sale: Data on your mental healthFor years, data brokers have collected and resold Americans’ personal information. But the pandemic-fueled rise …

she suggested that while it might be problematic for Keith Ellison’s office to purchase and act upon this list directly it would be an ideal synergy for a NGO run by someone like Nancy Nord Bence; 

to buy the list,

winnow through all available social media targeting the non-woke,

and “possible” gun owners,

then presenting the courts with Red Flag requests for their political enemies.

She sees this possibility as a promising growth oriented cottage industry.

Count on it.

They want to make owning a firearm too personally, socially and legally dangerous…

…for minorities first. Then, peasants.

The Minnesota police officers standards and training board will no longer allow law enforcement to belong to extremist groups.

Remember 15 years ago, when the Southern Poverty Law Center” branded the Taxpayers League of Minnesota a “hate group”?

Since 2009, the Feds have branded land rights protesters, mens rights groups, gun rights groups, and today every single Republican an “extremist”.

And while we’re talking about law enforcers and extremism…

So yes, POST board. Let’s talk.

Today would have been the 119th birthday of my grandmother, Beatrice Gresley Berg.

The. youngest of four children of a drayman, Berndt Oleson, who’d emigrated from Graesli, Norway in the 1890s, she was born in the suburbs of Thief River Falls, MN, before moving up to Middle River. She grew up speaking Norwegian until she was 8. I always regretted the fact that second generation immigrants were so adamant about not passing on the language to their kids and grandkids – until I started learning Norwegian a few years ago, and realized Berndt’s hill-country dialect was to Norway what an Appalachian brogue is to the modern US, and I probably dodged a sociolinguistic bullet.

Other than being my grandmother, and my dad’s mom, Grandma Bea was most famous – sort of – for her involvement in one famous photo.

Bea had two aunts on her mother’s side, a couple of entrepreneurs who’d traveled the wilds of Minnesota and the Dakotas. starting photography studios all over the place and selling them off to new photogs. Some of those studios still exist. One that doesn’t, but has lived on in Minnesota lore, was the Eric Enstrom studio in Bovey – a stone’s throw from Coleraine. Grandma apprenticed with Enstrom, and one day in the early ’20s was involved in the staging, shooting, development and hand-coloring of this photo:

“Grace” went on to a place on the wall of nearly every dining room in the Upper Midwest. It made Enstrom famous (mostly posthumously), made Bovey at least something of a destination, and became the “Minnesota State Painting”, as Tim Pawlenty described it to me before I gave him the entire history.

She went on to answer an ad for an assistant at a new studio in Jamestown, North Dakota, where she eventually married the boss and had my father. Grandpa Oscar died in 1942, and Bea kept the studio going by herself for a few more decades.

I’ve often wished the three of them, Bea and her two photo tycoon aunts, could have a word with today’s “feminists”, none of whom could have carried Grandma or her aunt’s camera cases.

Nikole Hanna-Jones grift continues.

I caught her segment on “All Things Considered” over the weekend (so you don’t have to):

I think there is a segment of America that you will never reach. They don’t care what the facts are. They don’t care what the history is. They don’t want to hear it. But I don’t actually think that’s most Americans. As I say, you know, in the preface for the original project, we all suffer for the poor history we’ve been taught. And I couldn’t be a journalist – I wouldn’t have chosen this as my profession if I didn’t believe that if you can inform people, if you can provide people with the correct information, that that has the ability to be transformative.

One of the segments Hanna-Jones will never reach are people who prefer their history to tell the complete story, without being altered to drive a political agenda. People like those notorious conservative tools at The Atlantic, Forbes, Politico, and collections of Civil War academics and economists and on and on.

She’ll never reach those of us who object to her completely rewriting and slandering entire swathes of American history, while slathering herself in the strawman that critiqueing her project (or, merely, her) means shutting down the study of the history of slavery.

Somehow – unexpectedly – none of that made it into Michelle Martin’s fawning “interview”, which was more a matter of mutual toenail-painting than news.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her departure from office on Wednesday (US time).

Socialists and eggheads golf-clapped the end of her regime, filled with some of the most draconian and ill-advised Covid responses in the world, atop years of socialist knob-jiggling. .

I know, the video below is a fake. I don’t care. It reflects my feelings exactly.

Why is she leaving?

I don’t care. For right now, it’s sufficient that she is leaving.

I’m going to be off today, and probably Monday. But I’ll be back raring to go on Tuesday!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

This meme has been making the rounds:

This is false. Both are problems.

There is literally *zero* excuse for following closer than two seconds behind someone, no matter how slow they are going.

Seriously – when did MN stop teaching drivers “leave two seconds between you and the car in front of you (and double that in rain and on ice)”? I don’t know – but clearly, once the state passed its “left lane” law, a whole new caste of drivers started thinking they were entitled to drive in the left lane, no matter what.

And here’s a little note for some of you Minnesota drivers: if someone’s in the “passing” lane and going too slow – pass on the right, morons.

Last week, I kid you not, while driving I drove past a line of 6-8 drivers in the left lane, all less than half a second behind each other. I’d bet a shiny new quarter every last one of them was drooling “Muh Left Lane!” and cursing the “slowpoke” at the front of the parade.

Someday, if I’m ever king, shooting tailgaters will not only be legal, but I’ll pay a bounty.

Why, yes. I hate tailgaters.

Well, the latest testing statistics show that Minnesota teachers are doing a less than average quick job of teaching students how to do math clearly someone at the admin knows how numbers that up.They spent $4 million on contributing to the DFL‘s sweep of the 2022 elections.

And now, they’re after their payoff:

Union president Denise Specht, whose political action committee donates huge sums to DFL candidates each cycle, told WCCO Radio she will be asking the Legislature for more than $5 billion to address “chronic underfunding,” increase teacher compensation, and pay for mental health staff.

“The voters rejected the Republican Party’s strategy of obstruction and forced austerity. Now it’s time for Gov. Tim Walz and the leadership in the House and Senate to spend the state’s resources to improve the lives of working Minnesotans,” Specht said in a statement.

She said the state needs to “make up for funding lost to inflation” and “then go farther.”

My fearless prediction: driven by jackals like Specht, the DFL will turn the “surplus” – overtaxation – into permanent spending and grift for their stakeholders, just in time for a recession to crater the tax revenue, and leave us with a multibillion dollar deficit in 2026, and likely 2024.

It’s on my calendar.

Fifteen years ago, when Republican Senator Larry Craig was alleged to have sought sexual favors from an undercover cop in a rest room on the baggage claim level at Minneapolis/Saint Paul International Airport, there was no delay in getting the story out to the public.

Today – a few weeks after Sam Brinton, a much-noted Biden Administration official and gender-fluid person was arrested mere feet away for allegedly stealing a woman’s suitcase off the luggage carousel (after not checking a bag of, er, their own for the flight at all), we get…:

Look – if you want to shave your head, put on neon lipstick and a dress and excessively high heels, you go and live your best life. Go with God. Stay tf out of my business, I’ll stay out of yours.

The beef here is, as usual, the Strib had to be shamed into covering news unflattering to Democrats by a newspaper outside the Twin Cities. The New York Post took a shift (the London Daily Mail has spent so much time scooping the Strib on Ilhan Omar, it’s affecting the trade balance).

The Strib covered the story three days after conservative Alpha News.

The court filings themselves would be the sort of thing late night comics might have had a field day with…

…back in the day when late night comics weren’t bigger Democrat PR flaks than the Strib.

The city of Minneapolis wants to try again with installing speeder cameras on city streets.

These cameras will snap pictures of speeding cars, with the license plates, and mail the vehicles owner a citation.

A friend of the blog emails

If they actually go through with this, and it passes the legal challenge, it sounds like there will be some overlook or discretion on who gets a ticket. 

No chance for abuse here. 

It’s good to be king.

Well, kings, queens, qyngs and kweengs and whatever else they get called in woke culture…

Remember when Jesse Ventura got elected governor?

He had what appeared to be a “deer in the headlights” look about him – like he never expected to win the race, I had no idea what to do when he did. When he said “we shocked the world“, he was being inclusive.

There are those who say Donald Trump was in the same basic boat; He never really expected to become president. I don’t necessarily believe that.

But I could read this next story and wonder if he’s really thought all that terribly hard about running again.S

Stay with me, here.

Now, I was never a Donald Trump fan, but it would be dishonest not to say that he did some great things in office, and punched way above his weight on many levels.

One of his greatest achievements? The sentencing reforms he drove halfway through his term, reducing federal sentences for petty drug distribution convictions and renegotiating sentences imposed during the insanely oversentenced crack epidemic, started breaking the log jam of the black vote.

This was one of his announcements last night:

Is he actually going to do a complete 180 on one of the best things he ever did for the actual party that nominated him?

To all the veterans out there:

Glad and thankful you made it home. The nation is a better place for your service.

Signed,

A non-veteran.

A friend of the blog emails:

This woman has had 2 scary incidents. 

She tries to say in the op-ed that there are solutions. She doesn’t name any.

It doesn’t appear as though she called the police at all over either incident, so she is complicit, in my opinion, to allowing these criminals to terrorize others, maybe even kill someone next time. She doesn’t seem to care.

If she found herself visiting a small rural town, where several white rural stereotypes were shooting at each other and pointing their guns at her and her children, would she have the same beliefs? I don’t know.

But, in either case, she should be calling the police. Fine, believe in, advocate for early interventions. But, when someone is actively engaged in criminal activity, early intervention is too late. They are criminals. We have laws. Why is that so hard for people to understand? Does half the country have Stockholm Syndrome? 

I saw this morning that Peggy Noonan wrote that crime might elect a Republican in New York. And it is possible here in Minnesota, as well. I’m not going to win any friends by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway- I hope Republicans are truly prepared for that possibility.

Yeah, that’s kind of (pun incoming) elephant in the room: the GOP is going to need to deliver on a lot if they win significant enough majorities…well, anywhere.