Shot: Vandals of sorts “attack” Lisa Bender’s house:

Chaser: And in response Bender filed a…

…well, let’s look at the Channel 5 story:

The Minneapolis Police Department told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS there is an incident report filed concerning an act of vandalism that occurred at the home of Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender last week.

Bender declined an interview request from KSTP.

I smell some more private security for the more-equal animals.

And I’m not the only one, if you read between the lines:

Three Minneapolis City Council members, Andrea Jenkins, Alondra Cano and Phillipe Cunningham recently received threats that prompted safety concerns, and the city paid for private security companies to provide extra protection.

Jenkins told KSTP there have been protests outside the homes of several city council members in recent weeks. After the vandalism at Bender’s home, she said she has never seen this type of vitriol aimed at the city council during her 16 years of work at city hall.

And remember – there are two Betg’s Laws in effect here; the 18th Law covers the media’s reaction, and let’s not rule out the 20th Law in re Councilwoman Bender or her staff themselves.

And you? The citizen of Minneapolis? Presuming you’re not part of the political class?

You’re a loser.

Minneapolis mulls a proposal to supplant police with “citizen patrols”.

And its primary mission – transfer money from taxpayers to favored “community” organizations – is front and center:

The Minneapolis City Council Budget Committee has approved moving $500,000 from the police budget and putting it into the Office of Violence Prevention to help pay for civilian safety patrols.

Jamil Jackson is a paid consultant with the Office of Violence Prevention and he told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS he’s been asked to put together a proposed plan to implement the civilian patrols.

“It would have to be multiple groups that get the money,” Jackson said.  “But, how the money is going to be disbursed hasn’t been decided at this point, because those are things that are still being tweaked and worked out.”

The – for sake of argument – proposal involves groups of 20 civilians each, patrolling the North and South sides, and another in downtown.

And when – not if – danger sprouts up?

Jackson says the civilian patrols will not be doing any police work and they will not be out in the community fighting crime. The group will not be armed, but men with permits to carry will be allowed to do so if they choose.

Ooof – acting as a surrogate cop in a climate of hatred for cops and their surrogates, with none of the legal protections a cop gets? Thanks, but no.

The possibilities are endless:

• What a wonderful place for people with latent Dwight Schrute-like tendencies to exercise their need to control others?
• Could there be a better springboard for corruption, both for the ‘patrols’ as well as the organizations sponsoring them?

Anyone in for a pool on how long the patrols last before they dissolve in a welter of corruption and scandal?

Like a lot of Twin Cities residents, I’m eyeing next spring – sometime after the scheduled March opening of the Derek Chauvin trial – nervously, remembering that the LA riots (at least the ones everyone remembers) began not with the pummeling of Rodney King, but with the acquittal of the four officers involved.

And here’s a fearless prediction (one I’ve already made): Chauvin will be acquitted of Second Degree Unintentional Murder – not because of any legal cop-fu, but because while I’m not a lawyer, I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to see why it’s going to be very hard to show that Chauvin was – check the emphasis, taken from the statute for 2nd Degree Unintentional Murder…:

(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or

Is a cop responding to a call “the commission of a felony?” I can see Alondra Cano believing that – but Ellison? Someone who’s ostensibly been to law school?

Unless there’s some bodacious lawyer-fu in store, or the Attorney General’s office plans on tampering with the entire witness pool, I’m just not seeing it.

But does the concept of qualified immunity mean there could be yet a third adverse verdict for George Floyd’s supporters and the Twin CIties’ far left’s many professional and amateur hooligans?

Was it “clearly established” on May 25 that kneeling on a prone, handcuffed arrestee’s neck for nearly nine minutes violated his Fourth Amendment rights? The issue is surprisingly unsettled in the 8th Circuit, which includes Minnesota.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit blocked civil rights claims in two recent cases with broadly similar facts: handcuffed detainees who died after being restrained face down by several officers. Unlike those detainees, Floyd was not actively resisting at the time of his death, except to repeatedly complain that he could not breathe.

While that distinction could make a difference in the constitutional analysis, we can’t be sure. Even if the 8th Circuit concluded that Chauvin’s actions were unconstitutional, it could still decide the law on that point was not clear enough at the time of Floyd’s arrest, meaning Chauvin would receive qualified immunity.

The 8th Circuit could even reach the latter conclusion without resolving the constitutional question, as courts have commonly done since 2009, when the Supreme Court began allowing that shortcut. To defeat qualified immunity in this case, says UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, a leading critic of the doctrine, Floyd’s family “would have to find cases in which earlier defendants were found to have violated the law in precisely the same way.”

The whole piece is worth a read – and the whole concept of seriously reforming qualified immunity is something conservatives need to take an enlightened lead on.

Because it’s for damn sure the other side won’t.

The feds turn down Governor Klink’s disaster funding request:

The federal government has denied Gov. Tim Walz’s request for aid to help rebuild and repair Twin Cities structures that were damaged in the unrest following George Floyd’s death.

Walz asked President Donald Trump to declare a “major disaster” for the state of Minnesota in his request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on July 2. More than 1,500 buildings were damaged by fires, looting and vandalism in the days of unrest that followed Floyd’s May 25 death in Minneapolis police custody, racking up more than $500 million in damages, according to Walz.

“The Governor is disappointed that the federal government declined his request for financial support,” [Walz spokesperson Teddy] Tschann said in a statement. “As we navigate one of the most difficult periods in our state’s history, we look for support from our federal government to help us through.”

The “disaster” was, of course, caused by sixty years of DFL governance that is swerving exponentially to the left, decades of mismanagement, a toxic culture run by white liberals more concerned with virtue-trumpeting than competence and justice, and of course by a city that simultaneously rolls out the red carpet for young, largely white, largely upper-middle-class radicals (the direct action arm of the DFL) which the city was packed full of when Mayor Frey made his ill-fated decision to evacuate law enforcement from East Lake Street.

Why should the American taxpayer – especially those who work hard to support competent government, almost invariably in red states – pay for the DFL’s decades of depraved indifference to their own incompetence?

You break it, you buy it.

I don’t have a lot in common with former Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges. I took my fair, and justified, share of shots at her during her four years in office.

It seems the former Mayor and I share only two things: our mutual love of Darkness on the Edge of Town…

…and criticism of white “progressives'” unicorn-dust approach to social issues, especially racism:

As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.

These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.

In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.

Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing. Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town (where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience) and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live — where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death.

Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and our property.

Is there a certain amount of “I Told You So” on the part of a mayor who wasn’t rated a whole lot better on dealing with crime in those lazy, innocent days before Minneapolis became the new Los Angeles, Baltimore and Saint Louis? A little inter-party tit-for-tat?

That’s fine. Any energy they spend at each others’ throats is energy they can’t spare for the rest of us.

To: President Trump
From: Mitch Berg, Irasicble Peasant and Scott Walker supporter
Re: Disaster Request

Mr. President,

This past week, Governor-For-Life Walz asked you to declare Minneapolis and Saint Paul “disaster areas”.

Make no mistake – they are.

But they are a disaster entirely due to generations of DFL policy, decades of mismanagement, and a week of seemingly assessing the situation during the various riots and seemingly selecting the stupidest, most self-destructive response.

• Standing idly by while looters ravaged East Lake and other areas.
• Evacuating the Third Precinct hours before the rioting re-started.
• Sending in a token force of National Guard, nearly a day and a half after Mayor Frey’s half-hearted request, and basically hiding under the table as that force and the few Minneapolis cops left along Lake got chased all the way to Nicollet.
• Responding days late with effective force.
• Giving the rioters “space to destroy” at their will.
• Trying to fob the blame on “white supremacists” when anyone looking at the graffiti can tell you it was the white, radical far-left – “Anti”-Fa – meaning “the children and nephews of the state’s and America’s leftist elite” – knowing that even if Minneapolis is burned to the last vertical stick and the earth is salted beheath the city’s feet, keeping the Minnesota DFL’s “progressive” wing fat and happy and unmolested is the real priority.

So – just as insurance companies won’t cover damage to your house if you take a sledgehammer to your walls and countertops, there is no way the taxpayers of the United States – or Greater Minnesota – should be on the hook for the Minnesota DFL’s stupidity.

As they point out whenever they win an election, they “…own these towns”. Paying federal tax money to ameliorate the stupidity of Walz, Frey, and generations of DFL politicians before them is throwing good money after bad.

But I’m nothing if not a uniter. So I have a suggestion.

Tell Minneapolis to start rebuilding with whatever’s left of the $500,000 Mayor Frey charged your campaign for the nonexistent “security” at your rally at the Target Center last year. You know – the one where mobs of leftist droogs (including at least one City Council member) attacked your supporters out in the streets (usually five or six of thugs, and their soi-boifriends, ganging up on an old guy, or a woman, usually from behind), all but cheered on by the Mayor. There is no way any of that “security” money got spent. Tell the DFL to use that.

Please don’t let Real America down on this. Please, please tell the Governor-for-life and Mayor Frey to go f*** themselves. Preferably in as many words, preferably on national TV. Until there are consequences for their, and their party’s, crimes against their positions and the people they govern, nothing will ever improve.

That is all.

Shizzle just got way too real:

This is getting personal.

Keegans was where I met some of the favorite arcs in my social circle: the NARN guys (Brian, Chad, Ben, Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Michael Brodkorb), John Stewart and Marjorie Farnsworth Stewart and their kids Patience Stewart and Faith Worley , who at least started the process of meeting her husband Ben Worley (long story) there at a Trivia night one summer. It’s where I first met (socially, at least) David Strom and Margaret Martin, and Christopher K. Senn and Chris Neugent, where we were trivia regulars with Brad Carlson and Nancy LaRoche and Bill Charette and Guy Collins and Peg Kaplan and so many more, a place where Gary M. Miller and Bob Collins shared a table over a couple beers and some sports talk, where I met the likes of Tracy Eberly and Julie Hanson and Mark Heuring and Jacq Smith and Sean Michael and Diane Napper and Bridget Cronin, where I met Don Lokken after 20 odd years. where celebs like Mike Nelson and Lynn McHale’s husband rubbed elbows with a bunch of my other closest friends, and the last place I saw Joel Rosenberg and Sarah Janecek before their untimely passings, and…

…well, so many memories, it’s hard to catalogue them all.

Keegans – and the Savoy next door, both owned by the redoubtable Marty Newman – is closing after Tuesday night. Marty, like Terry (a Marine vet from Vietnam) and Virginia Keegan before him who founded the place, is a classic small businessman, is pretty much SOL.

The place was always jam packed – always – so let’s hear none of this “bars and restaurants close all the time” bullsh*t. This place was killed by the Governor’s ham-fisted quarantine combined with Minneapolis’ unicorn-driven small business policies.

This is a kick in the teeth.

I will be heading there Tuesday night. I guess that would be tonight…

Minneapolis voted last week to change its police force into…

…well, something.

And if that makes you nervous, don’t worry – accountability for the results of this sweeping change is going to be split 14 ways. Because we all know the stories of successful enterprises in the worlds of politics, business and ideas that’ve had 14 co-equal chief executives.

What it does mean, so far, is a transfer of power from the mayor to the City Council, a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the myriad “community” groups and non-profits that will be part of the system – a system that feeds money, influence and people to the DFL…

…and a transfer of accountability for public safety from a police chief and a mayor (both of whom flunked the test terribly this past month) to…well, leave a message and someone will get back to you.

But hey – if you’re really worried about your safety, there are other options…

…provided you’re part of the class that actually matters

Some Henco Commisioners want to declare racism a public health crisis:

Hennepin County Commissioners Angela Conley and Irene Fernando plan to introduce a resolution on Tuesday declaring racism a public health emergency in the county.

“We need to be explicit about racism,” Conley said. “We need to say that at the root of the disparities is systemic racism . . . and we need to do it now while this conversation is ripe.”

Nearly a dozen other counties across the country have passed similar resolutions, many doing so in recent weeks as governments and businesses aim to address racism within their own organizations in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis…The move to declare racism a public health crisis is symbolic, but would also direct the county to consider racial equity in all of its decision making.

When you mix politics and science, you don’t get scientific politics. You get politicized science.

It is a strong contender to be Berg’s 21st Law.

Norm Coleman – former Senator, and more appositely former mayor of Saint Paul – jumps back from retiredment to pimp-slap Mayor Frey and his City Council for demanding the defunding of the Minneapolis Police.

They’re defunding the wrong part of government:

Remarkably, the same mayor whose lack of leadership led to the ruinous riots and burning of his city, doesn’t agree with dismantling the Police Department. Yet in endorsing the governor’s investigation, Frey said:

“For years in Minneapolis, police chiefs and elected officials committed to change have been thwarted by police union protections and laws that severely limit accountability among police departments. … Breaking through those persistent barriers, shifting the culture of policing and addressing systemic racism will require all of us working hand-in-hand.”

What is it about the culture of politics in Minneapolis that failed time and time again to address what is now labeled “systemic racism” in the city’s Police Department?

Blaming the police union is, no pun intended, a cop-out.

Blaming Republicans isn’t an option as there isn’t an elected Republican in the city as far as the eye can see.

With their city in ruins from lawbreakers who burned it down, the same elected officials whose failed leadership did nothing to eliminate the racism they now lament have seized upon the solution: to disband their Police Department.

Mayor Frey didn’t condemn rioting and looting in his city when he should have but encouraged people intent on looting and burning to wear face masks and stand 6 feet apart from one another.

When a couple of news conferences professing his love for Minneapolis and delivering stern stares at the camera failed to stop the violence, he abandoned the police headquarters in the Third Precinct.

He left citizens and businesses alone to fend for themselves amid marauding mobs who claimed their prize by burning it down and the neighborhood along with it.

The members of the Minneapolis City Council didn’t step up either to protect their citizens. Now they purport to have the best interests of their city in mind with the idea that defunding and dismantling the Police Department is really a better way to ensure public safety.

The lawless always want less law.

Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender claims that calling police during an emergency is an act of “privilege.”

On the contrary, the first responsibility of government is to protect its citizens — all its citizens.

It’s depressing that a bit of common sense like this in the public domain feels so extraordinarily wise.

A friend of the blog writes:

I don’t know who re-worded this Villager article, but it was a white woman who thought she was pretty clever on Twitter. I haven’t actually looked at the Villager article yet, but did have fun making the “clever” woman’s edits more real-

A man died while in police custody May 25. The four officers involved are now in custody awaiting trial and charged with 2nd degree murder. The death sparked protests to highlight that police brutality still exists. Others took the opportunity to loot and commit arson in two marginal neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. The neighborhoods, which have higher populations of people of color, have been the target of DFL endorsed politicians for years as DFL endorsed mayors and councilmembers pushed through light rail construction, zoning changes, house developments, soccer stadiums and bike lanes despite calls from residents that those were not the priorities for their neighborhood. 
“They’ve been wanting to get rid of our community for years, and this is the last straw,” says one black resident who only gave a first name of Tyrone.
Other local business owners of color are saying, “we survived the 2008 recession, the never ending construction, the zoning changes since we weren’t immediately remodeling, but this is the absolute end. We’re packed and already moving.”

Hope springs eternal that black, Latino and Asian voters will figure it out: the riots the DFL wanted, condoned, celebrated and in many cases DFLers (or their idiot children), participated in, in the city whose entire economy has been jiggered against them by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets, just might not deserve their continued loyalty…

Minneapolis CIty Council president Lisa Bender thinks having something worth protecting is…

…well, you know how this goes by now:

Minneapolis is Maoist.

There’s really nothing else to be said.

Watching Mayor Trudeau crying with all the convincing grace of a rented mourner over the casket of George Floyd, at the not-remotely-socially-distanced funeral (violating the Mayor’s own directives, after a week during which he abandoned a fifth of the city to looters, reigned over press conferences that looked like outtakes from “Reno 911”, got caught like a deer in the headlights when asked what his “plan” was, got bailed out by the marginally-less-incompetent State administration, blamed the destruction (accompanied as it was by thick layers of left-sympathetic graffiti) on nearly nonexistent “White Supremacists” (who managed to somehow leave a thick layer of leftist graffiti and leave an amazing number of clearly labeled “black owned” stores more or less unscathed), I have to wonder…

,..is there some level of unintentional comedy below which the voters of the City of Minneapolis won’t go?

A friend of the blog emails:

The Walker Art Center is just one of several venues and school systems that are just now discovering the benefits of privately funded security. They can hire their own private security, do background checks, control unwanted behavior a little better.

Wonder if there will be more support for private funding of other systems that take advantage of all of us- health insurance, school, etc?

I wonder if the cognitive dissonance will ever actually dawn on any of the parties involved?

By the way – I’m gonna guess that spending all day Tuesday putting black backgrounds on every bit of social and traditional media will fix it.

In which Mike Freeman drops a banana peel in front of Keith Ellison while saying “Hey, join the team,” and chuckles as Ellison eagerly rushes in.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/05/31/keith-ellison-prosecutions-george-floyd

Freeman is a jerk but he’s also an experienced prosecutor.  Remember the Somali cop who shot the little White woman in the alley?  He got convicted of 3rd degree and got 12 years, nothing close to what the mob wanted. Freeman survived that fiasco and he intends to survive this one.  
He’s read the autopsy report.  He knows Floyd didn’t die from lack of air (obviously not, or he couldn’t have been talking).  Freeman knows the victim was stoned and had other medical issues that may have been exacerbated by the arrest, which might possibly make the officer careless or negligent, but Freeman knows there’s no way to make Murder 1 stick and that’s the only thing that will satisfy the mob.
So how’s he get the mob off his back?  He asks Keith Ellison for help.  Ellison – who has no prosecution experience – will now “take the lead.”  Which means whatever goes wrong with the case from here on out, Freeman points at Ellison and says “Don’t ask me, he’s in charge.”
Early in my career, I spent a few years as a prosecutor.  A criminal case isn’t won by clever speeches or Twitter comments, it’s a s***load of hard work.  Ellison has no idea.  He’s being set up to take the fall when the cop walks.  Freeman will shrug and carry on.  Walz will remind us what a great job he’s done on Covid.  Charlie Foxtrot all around.
Joe Doakes

More on this later today.

One’s outrage over George Floyd’s death varies depending on one’s definition of normal.
If you’re just going about your business, acting in an ordinary and normal way, the cops shouldn’t hassle you and certainly shouldn’t kill you. So what is “normal?”
Philandro Castillo was driving and carrying a pistol while high on marijuana. The Black community considered that normal. His death was an outrage… to them.  The rest of us could understand why the officer panicked and shot him. Driving and carrying while stoned is not normal…for us.
I don’t know how hard it is to restrain a 6 ft 6 in tall, 250 lb former NBA player, who is drunk and passing counterfeit money. Does that take a polite request? Or three cops kneeling on his neck? I have no idea. But to me, getting arrested for committing a crime would be normal, and you sort it out later in court. For the Black community, passing funny money while stoned is normal and the cops should have left him alone.
The autopsy report shows George Floyd did not die of asphyxiation. He had an underlying medical condition. His arrest may have contributed to it, but the cops didn’t murder him. His death was merely incident to the arrest which makes us question whether the arrest itself was justified, which brings us back to whether his behavior was so unusual and abnormal as to justify an arrest.
This difference in perception – what is normal and acceptable behavior – is the heart of the dispute, not just for this one fellow, but for Black lives matter, antifa, achievement gap, racial reparations, affirmative action …
Joe Doakes 

And the perception gaps among so many different, parts of society are so radically different, it’s hard to see how any of it squares up, ever.   Especially since arriving at some sort of consensus is both absolutely vital…

…and utterly impossible given not only our current political, social and media state, but the opposite of what most of Minneapolis’ ruling class wants.  

Yesterday, along East Lake.

This is life in a one party town.

According to a very reliable source, a Minneapolis police officer reports that all Minneapolis police have been moved out of the Third Precinct to the Fourth, and told to “sit tight, do nothing”.

And the police are – according to my source’s source – “pissed”.

When the DFL wins yet another one-party election in one of their one-party towns, Minneapolis or Saint Paul, they are – or, not too long ago – were wont to chant “We own this town”. They may not be quite so loud about that anymore.

And yes, Minnesota DFL – you own Minneapolis this morning. Every one of you, from Duluth to Worthington , from La Crescent to Moorhead. Minneapolis is all of your town. Your responsibility. Every death – by cop, by gangster, by overdose in the increasingly hopeless communities, by accidents on the streets whose “calming measures” have ramped up the road rage.

Minneapolis is your city. Every scorched brick and broken window and looted business on East Lake and in Uptown belongs to you.

There’s not a single person with a soul worth worrying about that didn’t blanche at the video of George Floyd dying literally under the knee of a Minneapolis cop. The fact that the union didn’t demand the usual cooling off period after officer-involved killings indicates that they felt the same way.

But this is nothing new in Minneapolis. The cops had a reputation for brutality when I moved to Minneapolis – just down the road from the infamous Third Precinct – in 1985, when the last Republican mayor was twenty years in the rear-view mirror and the last Republican city councilman was still in living memory. The reputation carried on during the “Murderapolis” years, when Dave Sauro was a household name – kids, ask your parents about both.

And so it is today, after two generations of single party rule.

Two generations after Plymouth Avenue burned, taking whatever economic viability North Minneapolis had with it, the North Side is still a warehouse for the poor.

Because the DFL owns Minneapolis.

Crime has been on the rise – against the trend and tide in the rest of the state (which has the lowest crime in the nation for a state with a major metro area) and the nation.

Because the DFL owns Minneapolis.

The schools have the worst achievement gap in the nation. Because the DFL owns Minneapolis.

The city has been stocking up on desperate underclasses, imported to Minneapolis explictly or implicitly, drawn by tax-funded goodies, kept here to serve as votes on the hoof by a one-party city that cares about remaining a one-party city more than anything else.

Because the DFL owns Minneapolis.

And East Lake is burning – still, at 6 AM – and the National Guard and the Saint Paul cops are on the way to try to put the greased squirrel back in the shopping bag.

Because the DFL owns Minneapolis.

Every fire. Every murder. Every homeless person wandering their life away, up and down, whether on Lake Street or Eat Street.

Proud?

So among all the bad news about the pandemic, it seems there is a silver lining: the administrations in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are being forced to stop playing Sim City with real money and people, and actually do he things city governments are supposeed to do.

Or, well, try. Emphasis added by me:

In Minneapolis, meetings to discuss the hotly debated Upper Harbor Terminal redevelopment have been postponed. Discussions about millions in funding for neighborhood organizations and reimagining the city’s transportation networks have been pushed to the summer.

In St. Paul, the pandemic prompted the city to postpone public hearings on a tenant protection ordinance and a ban on conversion therapy. A community meeting on the future of Ayd Mill Road was canceled and replaced with an online video.

The coronavirus is causing a major slowdown for the two cities, which have in recent years raised the minimum wage, overhauled zoning and made other changes consistent with a progressive policy agenda for workers and the environment. Now, they’re scrambling to find ways to meet the immediate needs of struggling residents while protecting their own workers.

In bold, you almost literally see a shopping list of “progressive” virtue-signals – gone (until the spigot turns back on).  

I’ve said it for years – especially since the Walking Dead was the most popular show on TV:  catastrophe makes everyone a conservative, one way or the other.   

“It’s nice to want to change the way things happen, but we don’t have the luxury of promoting change at this point,” said Minneapolis City Council Member Lisa Goodman. “We have the responsibility to make sure we provide the basic services of the city.”

And, when conversations on those more ambitious goals resume, they won’t look the same.

And one can hope that the people of MInneapolis and Saint Paul, when they see how badly the Cities take care of the basics after a decade of no practice, react to that change in the “conversation” by changing the way they’re governed.

Likely? Absolutely not. But if we don’t have hope, why bother?

I stepped in a puddle of vibrancy on the Green Line this morning.

Vibrancy claims one.

West Saint Paul man pleads guilty to vibrancy.

Vibrancy almost claimed someone over by the U of M the other night.

Man vibrates into tent, rapes woman.

Vibrant attacker finds bad vibes.

Human vibrancy charges in the East Metro.

I clearly read it all wrong. If A-Klo’s candidacy was the narcissistic joke I always assumed it was, she’d have never warranted a Iowa-Caucus-eve hit piece smackdown like this:

She told a story that she has cited throughout her political career, including during her 2006 campaign for the U.S. Senate: An 11-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet while doing homework at her dining room table in 2002. And Klobuchar’s office put Tyesha Edwards’ killer — a black teen — behind bars for life.
But what if Myon Burrell is innocent?

The Tyesha Edwards shooting was an iconic event in urban life and Minneapolis crime; I’m not sure anyone who lived here, then, doesn’t remember that episode and what happened around it. It motivated the Minneapolis Police to get serious about crime (including a serious clean up of the Phillips neighborhood). (It also provided the DFL a template for their messaging on 2nd Amendment issues; Sen. Wes “Lyin Sack of Garbage” Skoglund claimed reforming “Shall Issue” laws would lead to thousands of such episodes, since gang bangers would be getting, yes, he said this, carry permits. But I digress).

A black teen, Myon Burrell, was arrested and eventually got a life sentence – a capstone in the career of a rapaciously ambitious county attorney, Amy Klobuchar.

If this was a movie, you’d know what’d happen next:

The AP reviewed more than a thousand pages of police records, court transcripts and interrogation tapes, and interviewed dozens of inmates, witnesses, family members, former gang leaders, lawyers and criminal justice experts.
The case relied heavily on a teen rival of Burrell’s who gave conflicting accounts when identifying the shooter, who was largely obscured behind a wall 120 feet away.
With no other eyewitnesses, police turned to multiple jailhouse snitches. Some have since recanted, saying they were coached or coerced. Others were given reduced time, raising questions about their credibility. And the lead homicide detective offered “major dollars” for names, even if it was hearsay.
There was no gun, fingerprints, or DNA. Alibis were never seriously pursued. Key evidence has gone missing or was never obtained, including a convenience store surveillance tape that Burrell and others say would have cleared him.
Burrell, now 33, has maintained his innocence, rejecting all plea deals.
His co-defendants, meanwhile, have admitted their part in Tyesha’s death. Burrell, they say, was not even there.
For years, one of them — Ike Tyson — has insisted he was actually the triggerman. Police and prosecutors refused to believe him, pointing to the contradictory accounts in the early days of the investigation. Now, he swears he was just trying to get the police off his back.

Read the whole thing, make up your own mind. Unlike most modern journalism, it’s worth a look.

Here’s the real question. Forget about the presidency – A-Klo was always running for VP anyway.

But if these allegations are borne out, and she comes around for her next Senate run in 2024, why would any black Minnesotan who doesn’t settle for being a permanent DFL vote ever think of voting for her?

One man stabbed to death in an incident on the Ventura Trolley (Blue LIne) by the Mall of America Wednesday night:

tro Transit police and Bloomington police were called to a Park & Ride just north of the Mall of America station shortly before 1 a.m. 
Metro Transit spokesperson Howie Padilla said video shows a fight between two men on the Blue Line ended after one of them pulled a knife. 

Will the city’s “Resiliency” Department handle this? Or will it be the Bikeability director?

Not sure the people who run these cities realize what “quality of life” problems are going to do to this city’s future.

Minneapolis: fighting the battles that matter.

Crime? Achievement gaps in terrible schools? Disposable bags? Gentrification and zoning causing housing to become unaffordable to the middle-class?

Nope. Minneapolis is tackling the scourge of fur.

The ban would not force any Minneapolis businesses to close. Instead, companies which currently sell animal fur will have a phase-in period, during which they can transition to selling fur-free products. There is also an explicit exemption in the ordinance which protects the rights of Native American tribes to sell fur for traditional and spiritual purposes. Secondhand stores too are exempt from the ban.
According to the Humane Society, more than 100 million animals are killed every year for the primary purpose of using their fur. It is estimated that 85% of these animals are raised in factory fur farms, while the other 15% are killed in the wild.
If the ordinance passes, Minneapolis would join Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and West Hollywood, which have taken similar stances. New York City has also introduced an ordinance to end the sale of fur.

Why, yes – now that you mention it, it was sponsored by Alondra Cano, the intellectual standard-bearer of modern MInnesota progressivism.