Never thought I”d see the day.

In one of the highlights of last week, all nine justices of the SCOTUS united across ideological lines to beat Hennepin County like a pimp beating one of his girls.

Geraldine Tyler owed a $15,000 tax debt on a one-bedroom Minneapolis condo; to pay the debt, Hennepin County sold her home for $40,000 — and kept the extra $25,000 beyond what was owed. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the opinion of the Court that the taxpayer must “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more,” effectively ending the practice of home equity theft.

How clear-cut was Henco’s abuse? This clear-cut (emphasis added):

Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a concurring opinion, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, adding that the county’s action also violates the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause.

“Economic penalties imposed to deter willful noncompliance with the law are fines by any other name,” he wrote. “And the Constitution has something to say about them: They cannot be excessive.”

Any day that Henco gets clobbered is a wonderful one.

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

It starts at the :33 mark:

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

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

…is making vigorous noises about violbla beingbla bla unacceptibiblablabla.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting mobsters off the street is a good start.

But this is also a very bad sign.

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

It’s cowardice, and political expediency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What must it be like to be Jackie Rahm Little (who also goes by Joel Arthur Tueting), the guy arrested for a wave of arson and vandalism at mosques, a police car and Ilhan Omar’s office?

To commit one of the very few types of crimes that the Minneapolis law and order apparatus bother to investigate and prosecute – crime against Muslims?

If he’d burned down a bar in South Saint Paul, or a barbershop in North Minneapolis? He’d be a free man.

No, even if he had somehow gotten himself arrested. Because Big Left looks out for the insane and depraved:

By the way – I hope Nancy Nord Bence will go public with any knowledge she has of this criminal’s activities.

… on top of the property crime charts.

When I moved to the Twin Cities, not all that long ago, one of the key reasons was that I, a 22 year old with an English major and no marketable skills outside of a radio career I’d already given up on, could plausibly afford to live here.

The Twin Cities, particularly Minneapolis in 1985, was economically thriving, crime wasn’t especially scary (to a 22 y ear old 6’5 guy with a firearm or two), and in 1986 a writer for Fodor’s Travel Guides (kids, ask your parents) dubbed the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”

Today? It’s hard to live in Minneapolis if you make anywhere below high five figures. My inflation-adjusted income from 1986 is likely around $35K, today. Not sure I could do it today.

Would I want to try? Well, that’s a great question. I suspect places like Nashville, Dallas and Phoenix would resonate, today.

As far as that “Modern Day Athens” thing?

Minneapolis in 1985 didn’t have any “stigmas” to deal with. Pretty much the opposite; there was a veneer of desirability about the place, for me and an awful lot of other kids my age.

If I were getting out of college today with the same background I did back then, would I make the same call?

Up until 2020, DFLers could respond to conservative concerns about the state of the Twin Cities with “Hey, at least they’re growing”.

And yes, both Minneapolis and Saint Paul grew, after a fashion, between 2000 and 2020.

But all that has come to a screeching halt, and reversed:

Unstated: most of the people hitting the doors are the productive, taxpaying ripe suck class. Whatever growth is happening is among the class that consumes government revenue – in particular, the non-profit industrial complex and its clients.

Former Crystal city councilman and slap target emeritus Jeff Kolb responds, as usual, economically and precisely:

The Met Council has been running a demographic ponzi scheme, trying to plump up the numbers of the productive class to justify spending, taxing and playing infrastructure games like the cities are healthy and growing.

Like Detroit, I suspect Minneapolis and Saint Paul are about to find out what happens when the productive class hits the exits.

A different friend of the blog emails:

I wonder why this was canceled?

I dunno. Great question. Some things are just un-knowable.

Seems to be what the world needs now is a laugh, though.

A friend of the blog emails:

The tides seem to be changing. 

I remember when a similar editorial was written about downtown Minneapolis and the man who wrote it was basically canceled. And the Star Tribune took it down.
It’s interesting to note how the writer says, “I don’t raise these opinions in certain rooms, because I am deeply enmeshed in the progressive ecosystem of belief, and have adapted to those spaces for much of my life.”

Glad he finally feels brave enough to raise these concerns. Hope we can get some real enforcement nationwide on Fentanyl use, crime, etc. 

Hope springs eternal, I suppose. But that would involve admitting there’s a problem – and what the causes of those problems actually are.

Baby steps, maybe.

A billion dollar train with nobody on it runs a stop signal and rams a car that had the right of way pinning it between it and another LRT train.

Is there a more perfect bunch of parallels for government in the Twin Cities these days?

Mayor Frey and Chief O’Hara announced last week that Minneapolis will be much better prepared the next time there’s a major crisis.

For starters, all rioters will get a free lunch, courtesy of Minnesota taxpayers.

“Hell is other people”, said the French existentialist philosopher.

Close, but no cigar.

Hell is, however, most things “public”.

Like the behavior in public waiting rooms on public transit lines by certain members of the public.

Metro Transit is shutting down the indoor waiting area at the Hennepin Avenue transit station due to what I’m going to start referring to as Southside Cardio: Drug Abuse, Prostitution and Street Crime”. :

“Over the last couple of years, these places have become more and more of a problem for us,” [MTC spokesman Drew] Kerr said. “There aren’t a lot of locations like this that are open right now for the public to just be and to stay warm. And that’s not what they’re intended for.”

Metro Transit officials said in an announcement Tuesday the closure of the Uptown station is also due to property damage and litter. The space will be reopened later in the year when contracted security officers are in place at the station and five other locations. Those stations include the Vertical Circulation Building/Central Station in downtown St. Paul, the Blue Line Lake Street/Midtown and Franklin Avenue stations, the Chicago-Lake Transit Center and the Brooklyn Center Transit Center.

The building near the Central Station in St. Paul already closed in December after a double homicide…”The amount of open drug use is the largest thing right now. Homelessness, as well. And we’re not social workers,” Timlin said.

Across the transit system, crime rose by 54 percent between 2021 and 2022. Metro Transit officials said last year, about a quarter of the calls for service were at the six stations where they’re bringing in security.

The crime will move to the neighborhoods, of course.

That wave of right-wing terror they’ve been warning us about for the past fifteen years is apparently nigh, and coming for Jacob Frey:

The progressive mayor of Minneapolis is fearing for his life since receiving an uptick in death threats…

Well, yeah. After giving free reign to leftists, including all but inviting “Anti”-Fa to attack Trump rallygoers, of course all those right-wing MAGA hat-clad goons are going to threaten a puling left mayor…

…from left-wing extremists, nearly three years after the unrest over the police-involved death of George Floyd…

.

Wait, what?

The wave of terror is coming from the left?

Why, yes – we’ve commented on this before.

Tens of millions of dollars of daycare assistance, bundle up in cash and sent overseas. Same with hundreds of millions of dollars of food assistance.

And now…

The city of Minneapolis is a huge graft machine. Same with the state, under DFL control.

To: Lieutenant Governor Flanagan,
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Glad You’ve Discovered Light Rail Crime!

Of all the people who’ve been beaten, robbed and murdered on Twin Cities light rail platforms, it’s good to know you’ve paid attention to one of them, finally:

But clearly, you do not ride the light rail. I suspect you hitch a ride to the office with the state patrol, just like the governor. I’m gonna guess you haven’t ridden a train since long before you became Lieutenant Governor.

Just a quick tip from someone who rode the Vomit Comet (aka “Green Line”) day and night for a year and a half; when you’re out there on that platform, late at night, in the city you and the DFL created, you are absolutely, completely alone. Nothing there but you and God. None of your ex post facto happy talk is of the faintest bit of protection against The DFL’s Minneapolis.

To my credit, I figured it would be a victim like this, that got you to finally pay attention to street crime.

Sort of.

That is all.

To: The Minneapolis City Council
From: Mitch Berg, Unruly Peasant
Re: Threats

Minneapolis City Council Members,

In this Channel 4 story, you are individually and as a body shocked, shocked, that “activists” are getting more angry, even borderline-violent, in their interactions with…the City Council.

In this case, it was over a vote re…it doesn’t matter that much, except it’s something moderately routine, except for the “activists” involved.

Anyway (with emphasis added by me):

After the failed vote, protestors began to shout and scream at councilmembers and approach the dais. The meeting had to go into recess and the protestors were removed before it continued.

During the shouting, an aide for Councilmember Michael Rainville says specific threats were made against Rainville’s family. Councilmember Emily Koski joined Rainville in filing a police report against the protestors.

“You can’t have democracy if you don’t allow the democratic process to happen and if you have someone that is fearful for their lives or that of their families because of a vote that they took, that is wrong,” said Mayor Jacob Frey.

Anyone but me remembering when Mayor McDreamy all but told the police to stand down in the face of threats to Trump supporters when they rallied at the Target Center?

Democracy didn’t matter so much then, I guess…

…but that’s a matter for another rant.

The answer comes from Economics 101 – a class no Minneapolis City Council person passed before the class (like the City Council) was taken over by the people from the Grievance Stuidies department; when you reward, or fail to provide negative consequences for, negative behavior that someone sees as benefitting them, you will get more of that behavior.

The Twin Cities “activist” class blocked freeways – and those who objected got the negative consequences.

They attacked Trump supporters at rallies – and were practically feted by the city.

Then, after they ran riot after the death of George Floyd, and the Mayor and Governor decided to follow Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s dubious example and give the mob “space to destroy” Baltimore, they threw the mob a bone; not just an entire (majority black, Latino and immigrant) neighborhood, but an entire police precinct, thinking the mob was some toddler that needed to work out his aggressions, and was shocked, shocked that they just kept going?

In confrontation after confrontation, the city o Minneapolis, and the Walz Administration, has shown those who were willing to resort to violence that not only would there be no consequences, but it would positively help them get their way.

You sowed the poo-storm. You are reaping the poo-storm.

Well, you’re starting to. You’re discovering that, in a Minneapolis (and Minnesota) run by the Grievance Studies department, expecting to be safe is a privilege.

Unexpectedly

That is all.

1950: The “Expert” class pushes “Urban Renewal” – the freeway system was part of it. Neighborhoods destroyed, downtowns gutted, replaced with inorganic bauhaus canyons – because Big Government and the Expert class said it was for our own good.

But it sure transferred money into the hands of the political class!

2023: Sure, let’s try it all again.

Big Government is the problem behind every other problem.

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.

You might look at Minneapolis, and silently wonder to yourself “how did that city become like it is? How do people like Jacob Frey and Alondra Cano and the City Council keep getting elected? What is with those voters“?

And then you read…:

And you turn your mind to productive things.

After twenty years on Eat Street, “Bad Waitress” – as perfect a metaphor for life in a city run by Democrats – has abused its last customer.

“When we opened The Bad Waitress, we set out to serve our friends and neighbors better food with a fresh approach. We’ve believed since the start that brunch makes everything better – but this time, it couldn’t save the day,” the Cohens wrote. “We hope you’ll join us for one last lunch date, boozy brunch, mid-morning coffee, or to use your Bad Waitress gift card before we close our doors on Sunday, January 29.”  

They actually had two locations. The other one, up in Northeast, closed…

…oh, just you guess when. 2020. You got it.

But remember – don’t you dare say Minneapolis is in a death spiral.

While I wish the folks at Hell’s Kitchen all the best, after some of their wokiness, I can’t help but wonder if the wolves aren’t circling the door.

The goal of the Soros-funded district attorney is to make people distrust the system – by punishing the law-abiding and coddling the depraved – to the point where they demand a dictator to keep them safe.

We warned Hennepin County that that was Mary Moriarty’s goal.

The Good News: The tl:DR version of the story found in Alpha News’s tweet isn’t a great summary of the case.

The Bad News: the actual facts are even worse:

Her campaign was opposed by 32 senior Hennepin County prosecutors, including Catherine McEnroe, who is now under investigation by the Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility, according to the Star Tribune.

McEnroe was leading the prosecution of 35-year-old Marco Tulio Rivera Enamorado, who was charged with one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. He allegedly raped his 14-year-old cousin when he was invited from Honduras to come live with her family in the summer of 2019.

McEnroe is accused of fabricating the contents of a note that was passed to her by a victim advocate during Enamorado’s trial Jan. 6.

So – so far, what we have is a prosecutor who went on record opposing Moriarty (bad career move) lying to a judge (bad legal move). Hard to tell, to a layman, if this is incompetence, revenge, or both.

But it gets worse; rather than take the hit and go forward with a different prosecutor in this rape case, Moriarty dismissed the chargfes:

A source with knowledge of the situation said there was no reason for the case to be dismissed, especially since two other prosecutors offered to take over the case.

“The conduct of the county attorney trying the case had nothing to do with the substance of the actual trial,” the source said. “That attorney absolutely could have continued on with the case. If there was concern about her candor to the court, then a supervisor could have acted as co-counsel to ensure the court that there would be truthfulness.”

Moriarty said her priority from the beginning was “trying to see if we could continue to prosecute this case, whether now or later after a mistrial might be declared.”

So Enamorado is free, can never be tried for the case again, and Mike Freeman is looking better and better.

You voted for this, Hennepin County.

Last February 9, in response to the shooting of Amir Locke, schools around the Twin Cities let their students walk out of school “in protest”.

Let’s be clear – these protests are about as spontaneous and organic as a Nuremberg Rally. The “student activists” who “plan” these walkouts are puppets. Muppets, really.

But I digress.

Amid all the hysteria over school shootings, one facts that gets lost is that schools are generally, statistically, the safest place for kids to be, there days, especially in places like North Minneapoli.

As Minneapolis discovered.

One of their students, DeShaun Hill – a football player and honor student – was shot while walking home.

A court has ruled that this was negligent, and awarded Hiill’s family $500K. I’ve added emphasis:

North High principal Mauri Friestleben was put on leave by the Minneapolis School District for her decision to let students walk out of class Feb. 9 to attend a sit-in at Minneapolis City Hall to protest the police shooting of Amir Locke. Friestleben was later allowed to return to her position.

Hill family attorney William Walker maintains Friestlben’s decision ultimately led to Deshaun’s death. 

“If that principal had not released these children over the instruction of the district… D. Hill would be alive today,” Walker told KARE 11 during a phone interview Tuesday, just hours before the vote. “They (Hill’s family) are devastated… You can talk to a mother who cries every day. D Hill Jr. was loved by everybody. He was the hope for this family.”

Walker said particularly disturbing is the fact that North families and caregivers were not informed about the decision to let students leave early, saying the Hills would have picked Deshaun up at school rather than let him walk home or to a public bus.  

The alleged killer – an apparent psychopath with a 12 year long criminal record – allegedly shot Hill for bumping into him on the street.

So, to sum up:

• Keep kids in school: $0
• Release them out onto the street, unsupervised, without telling families? $500,000
• Remaining at the leading edge of the social justice fashion curve: Priceless.

On Friday morning, someone tried to jack a van in the Phillips Neighborhood.

The would-be victim tackled the suspect and held him til the cops arrived.

Point of order: in a Minneapolis where Mary Moriarty is the district attorney, is the suspect…:

• The vanjacker, or
• the guy who tackled the vanjackier?

With Mary Moriarty in office as Henco “prosecutor”, one must not assume.