A friend of the blog emails:

My child is not going to public school. Now that we are doing home based learning, the school continues to provide the excellent education we expected. We have a high quality teacher who gives a daily schedule that has my child doing educational work, physical activity related to the daily lesson, and 2 daily live meetings online with the entire class. This is how I envision the home school program should look. Advanced grade levels at this school are doing online group work in addition to the daily meetings with the entire class. This school is taking learning seriously. But, they were before being sent home, too.

My colleagues who have children in public schools have a different story. They tell me all their kids get is “busy work.” They tell me their kids are no longer learning anything and that home based learning “just doesn’t work for public schools.” “It’s a joke, really,” they tell me.

I honestly believe a percentage of the problem is the parents- they may be too busy to be involved, dealing with other family members, dealing with this economic crisis, etc. But, I also wonder if they have forgotten their own school experiences. Or how involved were they when their children were in actual school? In my view, a lot of public school is busy work. Why would their home program be any different?

I have a hunch that for kids whose notion of ‘education’ is learning from what goes on around them in life and applying their innate curiosity to the found opportunities the world is full of, this period could be a fantastic learning experience.

The public factory school model is not designed to foster that.

I’ve also heard – anecdotally, natch – that some public school parents, coming face-to-face with their kids curriculum for the first time, have been genuinely horrified at the, well, general uselessness of the whole charade.

One hopes that feeling carries through when the crisis is over.

There’s a video of two Calumet County Wisconsin Sheriff’s deputies hassling a woman because her kids went to the neighbor’s house to play. 

In response, the Sheriff posted this message:  

The problem with both the video and the response is the attitude.  This is the kind of behavior that gets people upset at law enforcement.  

Look at the male deputy in the video.  His tone is berating.  His attitude is condescending.  His body language is aggressive.  The Sheriff says the Deputy is there to educate the mother, that the deputies were not there because of a violation of the order.  But that’s what the deputies accuse her of – violating the order by letting her kids play at the neighbor’s house. 

The male deputy’s posture and word choice is confrontational.  He doesn’t educate, he berates.  It angers me just watching it.  He did nothing to de-escalate the situation.  
The female deputy’s passive-aggressive behavior is little better.  She doesn’t educate or placate, she’s there to document the contact for future prosecution because now the mother has been warned.  And the mother was uncooperative!  That’s going on her Permanent Record!  

That is the sort of officious, snotty, condescending, infuriating behavior by petty tyrants that causes unrest, as in “unrest in the Middle East” or “another day of unrest in Northern Ireland.”  People who can’t behave professionally in customer-facing positions should find another line of work.

Let me be perfectly clear for law enforcement and other people of limited intellectual ability: I am not calling for people to shoot cops.  But if this woman had and I were on the jury, I’d vote to acquit.
Joe Doakes

There’s something about “public service” that brings the worst out of a certain type of personality – the kind wonderfully parodied by Rainn Wilson for nine years as “Dwight Schrute”.

Although this isn’t funny.

This just came out from the State of Wisconsin:

Because glass, apparently, isn’t virus-proof.

No. It’s because while science is vital, government bureaucracy is all the things we do together, stupidly.

On Friday, when Minnesota had 14 cases of the virus, Governor Walz announced schools would remain open because health care workers needed daycare so they could go to work and fight the virus.
 On Sunday, when Minnesota had 35 cases of the virus, Governor Walz closed the schools except for children of health care workers who need daycare so they can go to work to fight the virus.  Everybody else’s kids, stay home. But not to halt the spread of the virus – no, it’s to give administrators time to figure out how to teach kids who aren’t in school. 

Basically, this is another “in service” week, when teachers and administrators try to recreate the wheel that Phoenix University already invented, what every home-schooled parent already uses: distance learning.

Now.  In the middle of the pandemic.  Now, you start thinking about the possibility of doing something different.  Now, after all those years of criticizing and belittling home-schoolers as ignorant and fearful racists, afraid their kids will catch cooties from The Other; now, you’re adopting their methods without admitting they were right all along.

And the Twin Cities media praised keeping the schools open as bold leadership on Friday; and praised the decision to close the schools as bold leadership on Sunday; without ever mentioning the two decisions made two days apart are completely contradictory.

Here’s an alternate possibility.  St. Paul teachers were on strike last week.  If the governor had closed the schools, they wouldn’t have been paid.  So they quick settled the strike and now they’re back to work at full pay when the schools close.  Lucky for them, they settled.  Almost as if they were tipped off.

Joe Doakes

The DFL and the Teachers Union…connected?

Say it isn’t so!

That’d be like saying “progressive” journalists had a sub rosa agenda or something.

And that’s just crazy talk.

Even if the FBI had a good faith basis to open the inquiry, it did not have one to continue the inquiry.  
And what about all those unmaskings? FBI wiretaps Trump campaign, gives information to Susan Rice in the White House, and it ended there? Nothing got forwarded to the Hillary campaign? Do we believe that?
Joe Doakes

If The People can’t trust the institutions that ostensibly protect democracy, then democracy is in trouble. 

Chicago teachers are on strike.

Again.

But it’s not just for them, this time. Nosirreebob.

In the last two contract fights, the union brought up these issues, but they also had to concentrate on protecting their members whose jobs were being threatened by school closings and the opening of charter schools. The school district also had a budget deficit that made it difficult to argue for more resources.
This year, they saw an opening to try to win big on these social justice issues. The school district has more money after a change in the state’s funding formula and Lightfoot has said she believes schools need additional resources. The union also feels compelled to push these demands after years of budget cuts that led to staff losses in schools .
Many teachers say conditions in schools are unacceptable.
Lightfoot and her team have maintained they are committed to adding 250 more nurses, 200 social workers and more special education case managers to schools. But they say putting these promises in the contract would limit their flexibility.

Between the lines: it’s a weath transfer, from Illinois taxpayers to Chicago public employees.

Special “Elite” Media Messaging Bonus: Listening to MPR discussing the story this morning, “Morning Edition” host Bill Inskeep, talking with a Chicago NPR reporter, emphasized (and I’m very closely paraphrasing here): “Just to make sure we’re clear on this – the union is doing this for the kids’ well-being…”

The thing about “progressivism” is that while it flaps its jaws about “helping” the vulnerable, it inevitably ends up harming them.

Give them a $15 minimum wage and mandatory sick time? Get them laid off!

Attack landlords for the “quality” of housing they provide? Make housing unaffordable!

Kamala Harris, in her celebrated (by the media) record as a prosecutor, did more than her fair share of being unfair.

. Her crusade against the scourge of parents whose kids skip school, for example:

The good news is that post-CNN town hall, although much of the media lauded Harris and posted adoring articles about her acumen and likability, several took it upon themselves to resurface videos of Harris’s recent support for cracking down on truancy violations.
In 2010, for example, video shows Harris saying, “I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.”
“Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco,” Harris noted, with a folksy giggle.
Another video showed Harris bragging about her power: “As a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have huge stick. The school district as a carrot. Let’s work together in tandem…to get those kids in school.”

Have I ever mentioned how much I love prosecutors who are drunk with their own power?

Her policies involved $2,000 fines, and even jail time, for parents whose kids missed “too much” school.

Which, people who actually pay attention to this issue will tell you, is a stupid, stupid plan, unless your goal is to paint yourself as “tough”:

…the people hurt by this carceral approach are the very people who are most likely to be financially crippled by a few fines. We’re not talking about wealthy people here, and generally speaking, criminal justice reform advocates fear using punitive means to “help” poor people because it can be so easy for them to get trapped in a cycle of unpaid fines that leads to jail time, which leads to time forcibly taken off of work, which leads to even less money and even less ability to pay outstanding debts.
None of this, you can imagine, helps children get a more stable home life with more attention from parents. 

With junior high and high school kids, truancy often isn’t something parents can control (while still holding down jobs, anyway).

With younger kids? If they’re missing school regularly, it’s usually not a matter of “truancy”; it’s problems at home, more often than not problems stemming from one personal or social pathology or another.

In what other area of society do we try to address this sort of thing with fines and jail time?

Kamala Harris is a public cancer.

A “Shoprite” store in Philadelphia is closing due to Philadelphia’s pop tax. 

Or so says the owners – someone with years of experience in the field, for what that’s worth:

Store owner Jeff Brown says this location has lost approximately 25 percent of its business over the last two years because of the tax on soda and sweetened drinks. 

The city, not to be “Mansplained”…er, “Bossplained?” “Enterepreneursplained?” Anyway, not to be taken to task by a mere prole, the city responded:

The mayor’s office responded with a lengthy statement pushing back against Brown.
“It is no surprise that Mr. Brown has decided to scapegoat the Philadelphia Beverage Tax, but neither he nor the beverage industry have yet to present any evidence that the tax has had any impact on sales. Here’s evidence to the contrary: an ongoing study by three of the most reputable academic institutions in the nation (Harvard University, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania) finds the beverage tax has not affected overall store sales, contrary to other public claims by this supermarket chain.”
Brown says the 111 employees will be transferred to his 12 other supermarkets.

Anyone but me suspect hat Mr. Brown’s going to get an audit letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue sometime soon here?

Up next: a Harvard Study on how taxes have nothing to do with “Food Deserts”, no way, no how.

Yesterday, I started telling the story of Dr. Massoud Amin – a man who came to the US as a teenager with his parents after the Iranian Revolution, became a citizen, and rose to the highest levels not only of academia, but of national security, as one of the nation’s foremost experts in cybersecurity.

And then, in the middle of a rancorous divorce with more than a whiff of academic backstabbing mixed in, an overzealous prosecutor turned a paperwork discrepancy in a civil divorce filing into, literally, a criminal case.

Pursuant to that case, the prosecutor and the police searched Dr. Amin’s house, and confiscated Dr. Amin’s firearm collection,  planting the story of “The Iranian professor who collected a bunch of guns and swindled his soon-to-be-ex” – simultaneously defaming him to the left (“Serves the gun nut right!”) and the less-bright parts of the right (“Probably a terrorist!”).

The trial?  It was a comedy of errors – but not remotely funny.   All exculpatory evidence was suppressed, and that was just the beginning.   The ending?   A conviction – aided  by bizarre courtroom antics and some sketchy lawyering on both sides.

The prosecution is asking for a ten year prison sentence for a conviction that normally carries a years’ suspended sentence and probation for a first-time offender – which Dr. Amin, who held a top-secret security clearance until the conviction, most assuredly was.

Why so much irregularity in what started as a typical ugly American divorce?

We’ll be talking with Dr. Massoud about that this Saturday on my show.   Tune in, and call in if you havre questions.

Last year, a story broke that had a little something for everyone – where by “everyone” you’re referring to “incurious, uncritical consumers of shabby information”.

It involved a professor from the University of MInnesota, Dr. Massoud Amin.   Amin was convicted of “Theft by Swindle” for, it was alleged, concealing funds from his soon-to-be ex wife during a nasty divorce.

We’ll come back to that.

The story got liberals exercised because Amin was a gun collector (with, dare I say, a penchant for finding bargains).   That is a classic dog whistle for the left.

And for the, shall we say, less bright on the right?   A middle-eastern sounding name like Amin’s is enough to get the “WATCH FOR TEH SHARIA” crowd into a froth.

And the media coverage of his divorce proceedings – including the swindle allegations – were decidedly unsympathetic.

Sentencing in his trial is scheduled for November 9.

The client is obviously guilty – right?

Not so fast.  And according to sources with close knowledge of the case, the charges and conviction are well beyond a miscarriage of justice; they were the tip of an iceberg of shenanigans – borne of malice up against incompetence at best, cynical ambition at worst, all  slathered with a layer of legalism.

And when you peel back the onion, you still have something for everyone – among critical thinkers, this time:

• A divorce from hell
• City bureaucrats hamfistedly persecuting a law-abiding gun owner
• A legal process that reads like something between Michael Crichton and Franz Kafka, tainted by racism and amoral careerism
• And, at the end of the day, an American who has done decades of groundbreaking work defending this country from cyberterrorism, facing ten years in prison for something that, even if it were a legitimate conviction.
• Which, given the evidence I’ve encountered, it was not.

More tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Got this email from HR today:

“We are happy to announce that Ellie Krug will be coming to provide a professional development opportunity on “Gray Area Thinking”. Ellie will share her personal story as we learn about human inclusivity. This will be first of a series of professional development opportunities available throughout the year. We value employee development and will make sure opportunities are available for all employees. This is mandatory and all employees are expected to attend one of the sessions.”

Somehow, I missed the mandatory half-day training on how horrible Minnesota white people are, what with having white privilege from slavery and all. I sure hope I can make it to this mandatory two-hour training session so I can learn how horrible straight people are.

It would be a shame if government employees accurately processed paperwork in a timely fashion, without being sufficiently sensitive to the plight of the mentally ill. Wouldn’t it?

Joe Doakes

In a system built on rent-seeking, consultants are going to seek rent.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Astonishingly, Hawaii does not have enough hurricane shelters for all its inhabitants. Reminds me of New Orleans. And Puerto Rico. And pretty much every other burg run by Democrats who have plenty of money for illegal immigrants, street mimes, diversity coordinators and homeless bums but not enough money to patch the streets or shelter citizens from disaster. I wonder if their Resilience Officer spent all his time organizing garbage collection, as St. Paul’s has? I’m sure that will be a big help when a tornado rips through the heart of town, or a blizzard knocks down the power lines.

Joe Doakes

Given our last brush with “Protect” Minnesota, it seems they consider genuine resilience to be a bug, not a feature.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason that cases like this infuriate people is we know what’s going on behind the curtain.

The public wants to be protected from impure food.  The customers in the lobby can’t see what’s going on in the kitchen.  Commercial food preparation is hidden from view, it’s not transparent, we can’t evaluate how much risk we’re taking.  So we empower the government to inspect food preparers, to make sure they are sanitary.  Safe food preparers get a permit to sell to the public.  The $30 fee is supposed to cover the cost of inspections.

A kid selling bottled water from his porch is different because his food preparation is transparent.  We can see the seal on the lid.  We know the risk we’re taking.  And even if it’s a kid selling Dixie Cups of Country Time lemonade poured from a pitcher, we can see the kid and judge the likelihood he’s infected our drink with salmonella or E. Coli.  We can decide whether to take our chances.  In that case, we don’t need the government to inspect the kid’s kitchen and the kid shouldn’t need a permit to sell to the public.

If the public can make that distinction, instinctively and automatically, why can’t the bureaucrat?  Because the food preparers who had to pay for the permit will complain that letting the kid sell without a permit is not fair, the kid is cutting into their business, the bureaucrat should level the playing field.  That’s not a public health issue, that’s rent-seeking and it pisses people off.

People learn.

Bureaucrats and bureaucracies, it seems, never do.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

First half property taxes are due May 15th. When I arrived at work this morning, customers were already lined up outside, waiting for the doors to open at 8 AM.

Retail stores open at midnight on Thanksgiving to serve customers. Banks are open on weekends to serve customers. Why aren’t we having extended hours when we know demand will be heavy?

Why doesn’t government have customer service?

Joe Doakes

It doesn’t need it.  While in the private sector “Service” means, well, service, in government it’s a euphemism for “showing the proles who’s boss”.

Tesla – intended originally to be a “disruptive” force in the automotive industry – is getting disrupted…

…by – what else? – the State of California.

…reading stories of anti-gun politicians and their staffers owning the guns they desperately want to deny the little guy.

Mark my words:  Any police official who refers to citizens as “sheep” (and, perforce, to police as “Sheepdogs” or “Lions”) needs to be escorted from public life, sans badge, gun, and power, with extreme prejudice.

Like Broward County sheriff Scott Israel – whose office didn’t have time to investigate nearly forty contacts with Nikolas Cruz, but has had time to act like…

…well, a Democrat pol in office:

Israel had been a Republican but ran for office as a Democrat. He was first elected sheriff in 2012, then re-elected in 2016. According to the Sun Sentinel:

The outreach workers, who mainly attend community events, are in addition to political activists and others Israel hired into community affairs roles, writing and designing printed pieces about the agency, and sharing it on social media. The employee log shows six hired into community affairs roles, their salaries totaling $388,729.

Israel’s opponents say he’s built a publicly funded political machine, paying back supporters with jobs and using them to keep him in office. They say the money could be better spent, particularly after the sheriff complained about not having enough funding to secure the county courthouse, where a murder suspect recently escaped.

Sound like the priorities in a city rhyming with “Every schmiberal city in the schmunited shmates” to anyone but me?

Oh, yeah – and this next bit?

Asked about the allegations, Israel responded, “What have I done differently than Don Shula or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Ghandi?”

He also said, “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” That’s a paraphrase of a quote from the Game of Thrones character Tywin Lannister, a villainous public administrator known for promoting his family’s interests ahead of the government’s or the people’s.

Sheep.

That’s what he thinks of citizens.  Not unlike way too many cops.

It’s time for some changes in Broward County.

…the bureaucracy – any bureaucracy – runs by rules of its own.  Those rules usually have  more to do with sustaining bureaucracy itself than to solving whatever problem or administering whatever service that bureaucracy is supposed to be doing.

On the other?  Read past the bureaucratese in this report and it appears that the Minneapolis Police Department has been shaving a lot of corners on psychological testing of its new recruits.

Does this have anything to do with, among other things, the Damond shooting?  Bureaucratic checkbox-checkers running amok?

Maybe a little bit of both?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Scene:  a cluttered office, a fat, balding man chewing a cigar, reading a script and scowling at it.  A young man steps into the doorway and raps on the door, three times, quickly.

Writer:  Boss, I’ve got a great idea for a new show.  It’s a political thriller, got action, intrigue, it’s great.

Boss:  Yeah?  Siddown and lay it out for me.

Boss tosses the script he was reading onto his desk and leans back in his chair, studying the young man.  Young man sits down, butt on the edge of the seat, and leans forward, speaking eagerly

Writer:  okay, there’s the guy, see?  And he works for the FBI.  He’s a true patriot, he hates the way the country is going and he wants to help a good candidate get elected.  He makes a donation like everybody in the office, but he wants to do more.  All the sudden, he finds himself assigned to investigate his favorite candidate for breaking the law.  But he doesn’t want to do it, see?  But he has to, see?  So there’s dramatic tension.

Boss: yeah, but the law is the law.  What’s he gonna do?

Writer:  that’s the cool part.  He interviews the candidate but he “forgets” to put her under oath.  So none of her answers can be used against her, right?  And there’s a suspicious death tied to the charges but he knows this candidate has a long trail of suspicious deaths and shady dealings so he’s afraid she might be involved with this one, too.  So he doesn’t want to investigate that, see?  But he’s torn about it, see, because maybe she really is as crooked as the rest of them.  But maybe she’s not, and besides, her opponent is a real jerk.  So he calls the death a “robbery gone bad” and when his boss is going to make a press announcement saying the candidate broke the law, our guy changes it to say she did NOT break the law.

Boss: wait, why wouldn’t the boss notice the change?

Writer:  the boss isn’t a cop, he’s a political hack, a time-serving moron.  So he goes along with the charade and the candidate gets away with the crime and stays in the election.

Boss: okay, weak, but we can work with it.

Writer: wait, it gets better!  His candidate loses the election.

Boss: what the hell?  How’s that help?  The show’s over.

Writer: no, no, it’s just getting started.  The candidate was supposed to win, see?  All the polls said so. All the experts said so.  She was so far ahead, she didn’t even campaign the last week, the election was in the bag.  She booked a hall and ordered fireworks and had her victory speech written and when she lost, it was stunning.  The talking heads on tv were stunned.  The losing candidate was drunk two days, couldn’t give a concession speech.  Total disaster.  And meanwhile, the smug jerk who won the election is all over Twitter rubbing it in, offering her five cents on the dollar for the fireworks she doesn’t need anymore.

Boss: yeah, so?  Sounds like a depressing show.  Nobody wants to watch that.

Writer:  Yeah, yeah, but our guy, remember him?  He’s in the FBI.  They see all kinds of wacko stuff, all kinds of nuts and goofballs with conspiracy theories.  So he’s devastated that his gal lost and the jerk won and he’s sitting at his desk moping when he glances at this file on his desk.  Some kook claims the jerk was in cahoots with the Russians to help him steal the election and he stayed in a Russian hotel where a team of hookers gave him a golden shower right on the hotel bed.

Boss: whoa, whoa, we can’t put that stuff on television.  Not in prime time.

Writer: okay, so maybe we don’t show it on screen

Boss: but maybe a special episode on cable?  Pay per view?  Hmmmm.

Writer: yeah, yeah!  Like that.  And anyway, so our guy, he sees this folder and he knows it’s bullshit but he thinks “If only the public knew what a jerk that guy is.”  Just then his boss walks by and says “I’m headed to brief the President-Elect, anything new I should know?” And all the sudden, on impulse, our guy hands his boss the folder and says “You might want to warn him this stuff is going around, so he doesn’t get blind-sided.”  The boss, being a dope, doesn’t realize it’s a set-up, he thinks our guy is being all noble and professional, so the boss goes right along.  But one of the long-term staff people in the President’s briefing sees the dossier is political dynamite and leaks it to his buddies in the press.  Ka-boom, huge political outrage, our guy’s losing candidate gets cheered up, the president-elect looks like an idiot, our guy is grinning like crazy.

Boss: and then?

Writer:  and then things get interesting.  The losing candidate’s political party seizes on the Russian Collusion angle and demands an investigation.  The new Attorney General is a another political appointee, not used to how the game is played in the bureaucracy, so he recuses himself.

Boss: excuses himself?

Writer: no, recuses.  He steps aside and lets the long-term staffers handle it.  And they all hate the new President.  So the staffers convince the new President the only way to clear his name is to appoint a special investigator.  And they recommend their old boss, who they assure him is a straight shooter, which he is – straight in your back.  But the new President doesn’t know that, see, so the new President goes along with it.

Boss: inside baseball.  boring.

Writer: no, wait!  The special investigator hates the new President, too.  And he hires a team of assistants to help him, all of them hate the new President.  And here’s the best part – he decides that for his top assistant on the team, he needs the guy who knows the most about the collusion.  He needs the guy who discovered the folder.  He needs OUR GUY!  Our guy is now the top assistant on the team investigating the new President.

Boss:  okay, more interesting.  Keep going

Writer:  so our guy is only part of the investigation, he can’t go after the President directly.  But he remembers that during the campaign, his team used a little “creative phrasing” to convince a judge to let them wiretap some people in the jerk’s campaign.  And one of those people is now the new President’s aide.  Our guy drops by the aide’s office to chat and just happens to ask some questions about one of the wiretapped conversations.  He doesn’t tell the aide he’s under investigation, the aide doesn’t have a lawyer present, the conversation isn’t recorded, but our guy goes back to the office and dummies up some notes in the file as to what our guy claims the aide said.

Boss:  so?

Writer: so our guy walks into the special investigator’s office and says “Hey, the President’s aide lied to me.  Here’s what he said on the wiretap and here’s what he told me in person.  He’s a liar.  We can prosecute him for lying and maybe get him to roll over on his boss, testify against the President.”  So the special prosecutor is liking that and ready to run with it but our guy screws up.  See, he’s married but he’s also having an affair with an FBI lawyer – that’s the love interest and we can get some steamy scenes out of that, too – and our guy sends his lover some texts bragging about his scam.  But somehow the texts leak

Boss: how?

Writer: I’m working on that.  But anyway, the texts leak and the special investigator finds out our guy is bent so his testimony is worthless,  but the special investigator really hates the President so he quietly reassigns our guy out of the way for a bit while he tries to finesse the aide into pleading guilty so he can get something to use against the President.

Boss: wait – what happened to our guy?  I thought this show was about him?

Writer: he’s reassigned to Human Resources to lay low until it blows over.  The special investigator temporarily becomes the star of the show.  It’s like when the main star is pregnant so the co-star gets a few episodes, you know?

Boss: yeah, okay.  Then what?

Writer: well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  But it’s great, right?  It’s got everything – sex, crime, politics, drama . . . so when do we start shooting?

Boss;  I gotta hand it to ya, kid, I really do.  Ya got a terrific imagination.  But this stuff, it’s too much.  It’s over the top.  One guy at the center of a conspiracy to take down the President?  Nobody would ever believe it.  And what the hell kind of name is Strzok?  Fuggedaboutit, kid.  Get the hell out of my office.

End scene

Joe Doakes

It’s only fiction if you ignore the real world.

It used to be that when you waited for the Green Line train, a little billboard on the platform told you how many minutes away the next train was.

Today?

The time is nice, if you have a schedule and the trains are on time (which you don’t and they’re not).

The track number?  There’s one track going in that direction.

But along with the news that mere citizens will be barred from the trains on Super Bowl week, I suspect it’s just another way of telling the peasants “be happy we grant you this much largesse, peasant! Be grateful!”

While MInneapolis’ mayor Betsy Hodges has spent four years diffusing her efforts over a bewildering jumble of social-justice virtue-signals, the poor woman will never top the list of “Mayors with Bizarre Priorities” list while New York’s Bill DiBlasio is in office.

Hizzoner’s latest target?  In a city with rising crime, infrastructure that’s crumbling faster than an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of Seven-Up, and a financial situation that is rapidly decaying, DiBlasio is…

…confiscating electric bicycles – which are booming in popularity, especially among delivery riders for stores and restaurants; they are in fact the most efficient way of navigating the most street-space-starved city in America:

On Thursday, de Blasio announced the nation’s largest city would start fining restaurants in addition to operators, expanding and formalizing a style of broken-windows policing favored by the NYPD, which has confiscated 900 e-bikes this year. His justification? E-bikes are “just too dangerous,” the mayor said at a press conference.

How dangerous are they? Nearly 70 pedestrians (and 13 cyclists) have been killed by cars, trucks, and buses in New York City this year. No one has been killed by a bicycle. As for e-bikes in particular? The NYPD has no data on e-bike accidents or complaints. Nor does the city have any information about how the crackdown affects restaurants or riders. De Blasio was acting on instinct: The crackdown began when a local cyclist, Matthew Shefler, called into his radio show to complain.

Slower, more expensive deliveries; more congestion; yet another handicap for small business, even the ones that don’t get fined.

Betsy has some huge shoes to fill in the “bizarre priorities” deparatment.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State of Minnesota is suing President Trump for ending payments that a federal judge has already ruled must be ended.  Attorney General Lori Swanson’s argument: President Obama started giving us illegal payments and President Trump continued the illegal payments while Congress worked on the problem.  We budgeted based on receiving illegal payments.  To suddenly end the illegal payments would inconvenience us by making us live within our own means, so therefore we’re entitled to continue receiving illegal payments, forever.

It’s illegal to follow the law.

Joe Doakes

To be fair to the Attorney General, it’s how the DFL has handled budgeting for the past six decades or so.

Eagan has a new city logo:  a more expensive version of the old city logo:

[The old] symbol, a more realistic green tree outlined in black, was in use since 2004. It was sometimes compared to a stalk of broccoli.

Eagan’s new, non-cruciferous-vegetable-looking logo. $75K. Not sure if that included the new city font.

A prominent graphic designer who lives in Eagan, Allan Peters, designed the updated logo for $75,000.

But practice makes perfect:

The city is on its fourth logo since the 1970s, each featuring what the city called a “strong, independent tree.”

This is what happens when a formerly sensible suburb gets overrun by DFLers fleeing DFL policies in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but who bring their DFL politics with ’em.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

There is a crisis.  People who are prescribed drugs containing opioids can become addicted to them.

There is a problem.  People who receive medical treatment have privacy rights.  We don’t know who’s doing the prescribing, who’s doctor-shopping, who’s obtaining prescriptions only to sell them.

There are proposed solutions, but they’re mostly paperwork regulations that have no more effect on real-world issues than putting up a Drug Free Zone sign on a schoolhouse door.  More warning labels won’t help: people take the medicine doctors prescribe because we trust doctors.  Restricting prescriptions won’t solve the end problem: no doctor prescribes heroin and people who self-medicate their personal problems with drugs will obtain them illegally, as they always have.  Adding a new federal registry of sensitive information on individuals – does the word “Equifax” ring any bells?

“Opioid” is simply the new word for “narcotic” which has been a staple in the War on Drugs since Coke took cocaine out of its soft-drink 100 years ago.  The problem isn’t the tool, the problem is the tool user.

Joe Doakes

As with any plan, philosophy, worldview or kind of government – the problem is people.

A bunch of journos are apparently getting ready to sue the President for blocking them from his Twitter account.

I’m about ready to send money to their plaintiff’s fund.

Wny?

Because the journos are right.  Why should pols get to decide whose speech to restrict, and from whom they can restrict access to their public speech?

It’s downright un-American.

And I’ve got quite a little list of DFL pols who’ve done exactly the same to me, and I’d guess most every conservative pundit in Minnesota.

In some cases – like Kim “Profile in Courage” Norton – it was because I publicly called out her lies over “criminal protection” laws.

And yes, I may have actually broken the story of Alondra “The Industrial Engineer” Cano distributing personal information on Twitter about people who’d criticized her privately  (or so they thought() on the City of Minneapolis website to try to bully them into silence.

Both of these politicians blocked me almost immediately after I publicly ate their lunches.  Waah waah waaah.

Likewise, the Twitter accounts of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and “Protect MN” have long since blocked me – because I crush them every time I turn my attention to them.

But others – Rep. Melissa Hortmann, Senator Tina LIebling, as well as several DFL-xupporting non-profits – already had me blocked before I ever attempted to write/tweet about them.

I know that there are apps that can systematically block all social media from authors matching some lists or algorithms – which is why I suspect the blanket block from DFL pols.

But I don’t care.  If it’s fair for CNN, it’s fair for me.

Remember that in all cases, while I am a stone-cold purveyor of unassailable fact, I am also scrupulously polite to a fault.    Anyone who wants to claim otherwise is welcome to prove it – and yes, there I AM more than willing to file a test case.  I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, but I’m way smarter than that.

So yes, “journos”.  Sue Donald Trump.  I beg of you.  Indeed, there’s some legal grounding already starting to happen:

So let the courts court, and the juries jurr.

Then get it incorporated onto all the states.

And hurry.  Some MN Pols need some freaking free speech already.

And we’ve got some lost time to make up for.