It was a rough day for the DFL yesterday. One we’ll be talking about on Saturday at some length.

First: a Trafalgar poll showed the Governor’s race tied, and Jim Schultz and Ryan Wilson ahead in the Attorney General and Auditor’s races:

After the cold bucket of water from SUSA three weeks ago – showing the whole GOP ticket hopelessly out of the running – this poll is…bracing?

Governor:

And the news down-ticket is even better. Kim Crockett solidly in the running for Secretary of State:

Ryan Wilson has nosed ahead of Julie “White Claw” Blaha – of whom more below:

And nosing into “shock the world” territory, the poll shows Jim Schultz leading Keith Ellison:

I haven’t seen crosstabs – more on Trafalgar’s reliability below – but if those stack up, it’ll explain why the DFL and ABM’s TV ads are getting so shrill-sounding. With public opinion polling, the devil is always in the details; sampling, turnout models, methodology, all of them can distort numbers, and we really won’t know until election night for real, anyway.

But If these are close, I can’t wait to hear about Angie Craig’s internal polls .

If the chorus of calumny from DFLers about the Trafalgar poll (which Nate Silver rates as an “A” for methodology and accuracy) shows us one thing, it’s that Minnesota DFLers aren’t used to getting bad news. They do it with all the grace of toddlers who don’t get their ice cream cone.

Speaking of law and order, that brings us to the next story:

DFLers are of the opinion that Keith Ellison is a legal giant compared to challenger Jiim Schultz.

Here’s an example from a repeat Point Chanter:

The truth is, Ellison was a very junior litigator for three whole years, before becoming a “community organizer”, non-profiteer and politician. Ellison was a very junior attorney, when he was an attorney at all. Schulz has vastly more experience – and when you’re talking becoming an attorney general as opposed to a courtroom practitioner, the type of law isn’t especially relevant.

And “he” didn’t prosecute Chauvin. Either, for the most part, did the Attorney General’s very thinly-staffed criminal division. The list of the prosecution team includes lots of free-lance Biglaw attorneys, lawyers from social justicelaw firms working “pro bono”, Henco prosecutors (apparently some of them do something other than write wrist-slapping pro forma plea agreements – who knew?) and pretty much everyone at the AGO who had ever closed a case against a traffic offender.

Schulz has actually practiced law his entire career, unlike life-long trough-diner Ellison.

Glad we could clear that up.

They’ve been in office a combined total of thousands of years.

Two months before the midterm elections, the three of them erupt in a spurt of tweeting about needing to reform congressional stock trading laws.

Gosh, I wonder why?

The good news for the three of them? This is the last that will be heard of it. Because they are DFLers.



I’m going to guess some internal poles give representatives Angie Craig and Dean Phillips a bit of a wake up call.

2022: representatives Craig and Phillips have a bit of a change of heart, just in time for midterms:

I’m going to guess that all those soccer moms in Lakeville and Wayzata aren’t amused at the news of carjackings filtering out to the burbs.

The governor – hurriedly switching from a T-shirt to some sort of suit, and from chucklehead fairgoers to “tough on crime“ governor – wants extra special consequences for the apparent gang banger who fired shots in the “gun free zone“ that is a Minnesota State Fair:

“If someone’s going to use a firearm in a crowded area where there’s innocent people and children, there needs to be a heavy penalty for that,” said the governor, calling on judges to get tougher.

Of course, the means to do that exist; the state already has a sentence enhancement – not only for people who shoot up the states biggest public relations vehicle, but for people who use guns in crimes at all.

Of course, the Ramsey County attorney John Choi, who would have jurisdiction in prosecuting the state fair shooter (if he’s ever arrested, much less prosecuted) has never, ever, not once sought that enhancement; at best, he’s dropped it as a sweetener for a plea deal; mostly – as in this shameful incident in 2015 – he doesn’t even bother.

Either did Susan Gertner, the prosecutor before him.

Either did Tom Foley, the prosecutor before her.

That’s 30 years worth of DFL prosecutors who have never, not once, applied in the sentence enhancement that governor “Dirty Harry“ Walz suddenly wants.

The new head of Planned Parenthood Twin Cities is Ruth Richardson.

Who also happens to be a Minnesota state representative:

Wonder if she plans on recusing herself from votes on Planned Parenthood funding if the media would say anything about it even if she didif the media would say anything about it even if she did or BWAHAHAHAHAHhHhaaaaa sometimes I say the dumbest things.

The Twin Cities media did its darndest to make the story go away.

But Tom Behrends – retired Command Sergeant Major in the Minnesota in National Guard unit, and the man who replaced former provisional CSM Tim Walz in that position when our current governor abruptly left the guard to run for Congress, a departure that just happened to coincide with a deployment to which he had committed – is speaking out again.

And this time he’s really angry.

The riots of 2020 – especially the burning of the third precinct – confirmed everything Behrends tried to warn us about:

“Allowing that to be burned down was just like having the Alamo be burned down. It was like, you defend that to the last man,” Behrends said of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct.

“If he would have went to Iraq, he’d still be hiding under his desk over there because that’s just, you know, just the cowardice that I see portrayed with him,” Behrends added.

Walz’s August 2020 description of National Guard members as “19-year-old cooks” added to Behrends’ anger.

“I would take any 19-year-old cook before I’d go to war with him,” he quickly replied.

“I don’t know how he could even utter such a statement. I mean, it’s just absolutely sad,” he added.

And beyond all that? Waltz is still referring to himself as a retired Command Sergeant Major.

“He was saying that and there were campaign letters coming in the mail saying that. They said, right on therehe’s a retired command sergeant major. Just tooting his own horn, hanging on the coattails of people that actually are command sergeant majors that went through all the process and put all the time in,” Behrends said…Documents show the Army corrected Walz’s service record. He was reduced in rank to an E-8 master sergeant after retirement.

And yet there it is:

The media is going to memory hole this story – just like they did before:

A spokesperson said this has been in the news before and pointed Alpha News to a past story where Walz said “normally this type of partisan political attack only comes from one who’s never worn a uniform.”

Like stories about Mark Dayton‘s physical and mental health – which reported on in the most cursory way possible, nine months before anyone was paying attention to the 2010 election – nothing that reflects badly on a DFL politician will be allowed for the next 60 days.

You should read the whole thing, and pass it around, since God knows the Star Tribune and MPR aren’t going to do it.

In the first 150 odd years of the Minnesota State Fair, law abiding citizens were discouraged, and perhaps even told in as many words not to bring guns to the Minnesota state fair.

And yet they did. From statehood until 1974, law-abiding Minnesotans didn’t need a permit to carry a firearm, so it’s completely preposterous just say not a single law abiding citizen brought their firearm to the fair.

And we know that in the “shall issue” era, people might have brought a gun or two. In fact, I know of at least one radio station where every single staffer at the fairgrounds may have had a legal firearm, and a clean criminal record to go with it.

 And in that 150-odd years, there were countless fights…

… and exactly one incident with a gun, an armed robbery probably five or six years ago – an incident that happened about the time the fair stepped up the “gun free zone“ signs and rhetoric. If you guessed that the perpetrators were legal gun owners, actually entitled to hold, much less own, a firearm or carrier in public legally, you would have guessed wrong.

So that’s the first 160 years of Fair history..

Then, last year (before the Covid-addled 2021 Fair), the Minnesota State Fair announced that they were going to put some teeth behind the “gun free zone“ designation, putting up metal detectors and searching fairgoers. They took that policy to court, and prevailed (so far).

The official policy of the Minnesota State Fair is that law abiding citizens should be defenseless against whatever miscreancy any ne’er-do-well wants to carry out.

After about 160 relatively tranquil years, it took exactly 10 days for some party pooper to settle his argument – probably over a fish story or a bet on a Gophers game, I bet – with a gun that just couldn’t possibly have been there, because it’s a gun free zone.

There is a lesson here that we can, and should, apply to the sort of spectacular violence that has the white middle-class part of our society so exercised, the mass shootings in places like schools and government offices and schools and grocery stores and schools.

If you want to deter violence, nobody actually needs to carry a gun. All that’s needed is the knowledge that nothing prevents good people from protecting themselves.

Criminals aren’t as a rule the brightest people – but they have a sense of self preservation.  in the months after Minnesota past its “shall issue“ carry permit statute in 2003/2005, something weird happened: an alarming number of bars that posted themselves as “gun free“ wound up getting robbed. Most of those signs – especially in the less than posh neighborhoods – disappeared from bars by about 2006.

There are two lessons in last nights story:

1) The Minnesota State Fair board values the anxieties and aesthetics of its white, upper middle class governing board and political circle more than your safety.

2) an ounce of prevention is worth all the self righteous politically correct hubris in the world.

160+ years of law abiding citizens carrying firearms on the fairgrounds: zero shootings.

Two years (one of them after Covid) of security Cedar and at law abiding citizens: the first ever shooting on the fairgrounds (an increase in violence around the fairgrounds).

Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. But in this case, I’m pretty sure it does.

The line of people looking to find out more about Scott Jensen at the State Fair yesterday:

The crowd outside the Tim Walz booth:

I’m not saying crowds at the fair translates necessarily to results at the ballot box; the state fair is sort of like red Minnesota’s daycamp in the city, and Republican booths pretty routinely draw better crowds.

But I’ve never seen it quite this unbalanced, before.

I make it a matter of principle not to heckle other peoples personal healthcare decisions.

Do you want to wear a mask? Go for it.

Want to stay rigorously up-to-date on vaccines and boosters? That’s your call.

But this photo?

Is there anything that sums up “Peak Minnesota DFL “more than a boothful of “volunteers “, sitting outdoors, wearing masks, better than this?

Releasing a story the Friday before the Labor Day weekend?

Wow. This must be a real disaster:

The southwest light rail, the biggest civil engineering project in state history, is shaping up to be an epic disaster.

And if, after all the terrible news of this last year, they’re still doing their news dumps before the weekend when literally everyone is doing something else?

Fearless prediction: Governor Klink won’t be going to the fair this weekend.

According to the Strib, there’s almost no difference between the two attorney general candidates!

I mean, an honest report would note that, for the incumbent Attorney General, this (if true, which you can never really assume with the incumbent attorney general) would be a 180° reversal of course…

… but no worries. It’s not like people are concerned about law and order, this cycle…

To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Priorities

Your Highness:

You wrote this on Twitter yesterday:

Let’s look at this past four years:

• Crime wave, abetted by DFL policy
• Riots, encouraged by your administratiion’s passive-aggressive bureaucratic gamesmanship with the National Guard
• Collapse of respect for the rule of law, as a result of DFL policy
• Educational outcomes for minorities, already terrible, collapsed
• State divided between “essential” and “non-essential” workers – meaning dividing people
• “Science” bastardized by your administration hiding the code for the “model” “predicting” tens of thousands of dead from Covid by July 2020, as a best case. That’s how how science is done,

To the extent Minnesota is doing well, it’s in spite of you.

Hope we’ve settled that.

That is all.

Governor Klink (or one of the chirpy 20-somethings in his communications office) writes:

So let’s make sure we’ve got this straight. The governor whose party says:

• public safety is a “privilege”
• We need to ban most/all guns
• The police should be defunded or radically reorganized
• Parents should just shut up and let teachers and school administrators do their thinking for them
• A five-year-old can pick their own sex
• entire (politically favorable) classes of debt should be eliminated without consequencedebt should be eradicated without consequence
• Society needs to be radically rebuilt from the core outward
• fetuses should be abortable until birth, if not after

… feels the need to warn us about “extremism“?

To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Debates

Governor,

You pretty terrible performance in his debate with Scott Jensen at FarmFest last week.

Which is, I suspect, why you’ve backed out of the traditional debate at the State Fair:

Governor Walz: Don’t like the noise, heat and humidity?

After doing like 14 years at the State Fair, I totally get it.

So I’d like to formally invite you and Dr. Jensen – either or both of you, honestly – to join me either Sunday afternoon, or any Saturday between August 27 and election day.

Of course, we’ll be talking about your response to Covid and the riots, as well as you propensity for naming giveaways for self-glorification (“Walz Checks”) and claiming credit for tax cuts you opposed, and the like.

But it’ll be cool and quiet.

Have your people call my people.

That is all.

I wouldn’t say there was much in the way of “surprises“ in the primaries last night. Mostly confirmation of existing hunches, and a brief stab of hope followed by waves and waves of confirmation that Minneapolis is not only screwed, but seems hell-bent on participating in its own screwing.

The marquee race, Don Samuels tackling Ilhan Omar, ended up a lot closer than I, or anyone, I suspect, figured it might.

That is painfully close. A few hundred people who kvetch about crime turning out? A few hundred Republicans crossing over? An errand thunderstorm? All could’ve affected the results enough to retire Omar.

I have to expect the results surprised congresswoman Omar as well; she ran almost no television, and a fairly languid campaign up until the frenzied (and occasionally tone deaf) tour with The Squad this past week. Primaries usually draw the party’s loyalists to the polls – the hard-core who also go to caucuses and the next layer outward. In Minneapolis. that generally means white, upper-middle-class progressives, and public union employees. I haven’t looked at the precinct results yet, but I have to suspect Samuels started getting people to the polls who normally wait ’til November, if at all, to vote.

Omar pulled it off by two points. If she doesn’t focus on crime, and Minneapolis continues to deteriorate, someone else – Samuels, or some new law and order DFLer – might have a shot.

Which is probably the closest thing we can find to a silver lining on the next two races.

In Hennepin County races, the top two finishers in the primary go onto the general election. and if the choices of the county voters gave themselves last night are any indication, there is going to be a big opportunity for a “law and order“ candidate in two years.

It’s hard to come up with an adjective phrase even softer than “soft on crime” to describe the choices that will move to the November ballot. Mary Moriarty and Martha Holton Dimick will be the “options“ this fall for Hennepin county attorney. Mori

And for sheriff, committed progressive Dawanna Witt will square off against Joseph “Who?” Banks. When Witt wins, she will make Dave Hutchinson look like Ted Nugent.

Last night – at least as re the CD5 DFL primary – was a little spasm of common sense and protest voting in the highest profile race in the city, the results are fairly clear; the people who come out of the primaries are fine with Minneapolis’s status quo.

On the other hand, the DFL finally cut itself loose from its biggest public relations boondoggle of 2020; John Thompson got pummeled, with a level of voting that suggests orders went out from party HQ:

And in house district 52 a – the area around my radio station – the reliably moderate, center left Sandy Mason got pummeled…

by…

Liz Reyer.

Liz who?

I don’t know who she is, but she pulled off the exceptionally difficult combination of “ELCA hair“ and pink. Not just literally, but figuratively and morally:

So Eagan has moved from center left to “Alandra Cano“ territory.

On the GOP side: Jim Schultz beat back a challenge from Doug Wardlow, to advance to run against Keith Ellison for Attorney General this fall.

Every time I see these, I have to ask – who are the 12 freaking percent of people who vote for Sharon Anderson?

I’ve got nothing against Wardlow; I’ve emceed or spoken at five of his fundraisers over the years. but I’m having a bigger and bigger problem with people defying the party endorsement. Especially after saying they would honor it.

Speaking of honoring endorsements: in the new 33B, endorsed candidate Mark Bischofsky prevailed over Tina Riehle, a candidate supported by most of the GOP brass (including Kurt Daudt and Karin Housley, who took a break from opining for the sanctity of the endorsement to float Riehle against the endorsed candidate, for reasons I am just not advanced enough an intelligence to figure out)

Here’s hoping the GOP can pull it together enough to get behind the primary winner, and flip that very winnable seat.

To: The Hon. Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03)
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Burning Daylilght, Bucko

Rep. Phillips.

You recently tweeted this:

Well that’s great.

But I’ve got some questions.

For starters: you’ve had two years with control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Why, 2.5 years into this period of complete control, are you suddenly concerned with jobs leaving, prices rising, debt skyrocketing, the price of medicine and “climate change”?

Did you used to wait to do your school projects to 9PM the night before they were due? Did your entire conference?

Also – as I asked your colleague Rep. Craig the other day – what powers to you, a Congressperson, have to affect any of those issues via your votes?

To: Rep. Angie Craig
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Your Superpowers

Rep. Craig,

The other day, you tweeted this:

Please tell us what ability you, a Congressional Rep and member of the Legislative Branch, have to influence the price of commodities, like gasoline?

Also – you’re aware that gas prices are falling because the market is reacting to the recession that your party is trying to tell us doesn’t exist, right?

That is all.

Last week, after a brief campaign by the DFL‘s noise machine too spin remarks by GOP lieutenant governor candidate Matt Birk out of context, to local restaurants – the nook and Shamrocks, both owned by the same company – removed the “Matt Birk“ burger from their menus.

The petition reportedly got 176 signatures. And the restaurants caved.

I think it’s high time they realized that the vast majority in Minnesota does, in fact, stand for a free market of ideas, where everyone can and should be heard without having to worry about having their livelihoods clobbered by the mob.

The first step of pushing back? What the heck – a counterpetition. If they got 176 signatures? We are going to get 352.

There’s a pretty good chance this is going to be followed by a group of people who like burgers, and who tip well, going down to one of those restaurants just to make sure they’re getting the message.

Go ahead Dash sign up. And pass the link around to everyone who is sick and tired of cancel culture and doesn’t want to take anymore.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about yesterday‘s New York Supreme Court ruling:

The New York State Supreme Court struck down a New York City ordinance allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. What a bunch of haters.

The Boston Tea Party was based on “no taxation without representation.” The Declaration of Independence affirms that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. The Constitution lays out the formula to determine consent, through voting. The consistent underlying principle is that the people who will be affected by the rules imposed by the government ought to have a say in who makes up that government. And illegal aliens hiding in the city are affected by the rules adopted by the City Council as much as anybody else, so they ought to have a say in who sits on the City Council as much as anybody else.

And why should it end there? Citizens of foreign nations are affected by laws made in the United States Congress: foreign aid payments to their nations; wars waged in their countries; immigration encouraged or not. Why doesn’t every citizen of every nation get to vote for our Congress?

Why should they have to vote at all? That’s a heavy burden for someone who doesn’t read or speak the language, can’t complete the Request for Absentee ballot, can’t afford postage to send it back on time. Why not let US-based voter advocates cast ballots for them? They could bring ballots by the suitcase full, helpfully completed on behalf of all the citizens of the world.

And why bother with paper ballots for all those people? Think of the expense and wasted time, running them through the machines again and again until the right guy wins. Why not simply program the machine to give the desired result and be done with it?

It’s a slippery slope the court has chosen, this notion that only certain people should be allowed to vote. Probably a bunch of MAGA Trumpers on the court. Or worse, Open Borders Libertarians.

Joe Doakes

Don’t be giving Steve Simon any ideas.

Goivernor Klink on Twitter over the weekend, commemorating Juneteenth:

“…work to dismantle unjust systems of oppression”

Like open-ended emergency powers that can be extended endlessly at the whim of a political party in power?

Like arbitrary authority that allows a governor to crush businesses at a whim, but spare the ones that donate to his campaign?

Those sorts of systems of oppression?

On it.

The Pioneer Press, apparently knowing (what little is left of) its audience, says:

Now, I don’t pry into other peoples personal healthcare decisions, and I’m pretty merciless to any idiot who tries to yap about mine.

But it’s worth noting that Dr. Jensen, though not vaccinated, appears to have missed zero days of work or campaigning due to Covid.

In the meantime, the people who run this state – Lt. Governor Flanagan and her figurehead, the…uh, somewhat comorbid Tim Walz – have both had Covid and been off the job in the past couple years.

Correlation – especially with three data points – isn’t causation.

But it’s a better correlation than the one data point the PiPress ran with.

2020: His reelection bid coming up short in the face of democrat turnout and allegations of fraud, Donald Trump claims Dominion voting machines are rigged.

The establishment tut-tuts, call Trump a sore loser. Social media censor thousands of people who repeat and extend Trump’s claim about the voting machines

2024: Uh…

Every election, and GOP primary, is a “referendum on Donald Trump”.

Just ask the Democrats and media (ptr), who want and need every election to be a referendum on Orange Literal Hitler.

Of course, as a conservative who wants to see DeSantis mop the floor with whomever the order of succession puts up against him – Harris? Pelosi? Buttigieg? Beto O’Rourke? – in 2024, I’d very much like the whole “referendum on Trump” thing to shut up and go away.

The Youngkin victory in Virginia last fall should have put that to bed – he was elected while the Democrats tried to make the vote about Trump, and still try to retroactively apply him to the race – but then, our media being dishonest about this sort of thing is hardly Man Bites Dog, now, is it?

This past week has given both sides evidence.

The primary in Pennsylvania earlier this week had Dr. Mehment “Doctor Oz” Oz winning the Senate primary – but by a narrow enough margin that Trump reportedly may start swearing off endorsing people.

On the other hand, in Georgia, Trump’s bete noir Governor Kemp cruised to a comically easy victory over Trump-endorsed Perdue in the race against Stacey Abrams, the unelected real president of the US and EU.

In the meantime, a week that saw Madison Cawthorne exit his race, saw Marjorie Taylor Greene winning her contest handily.

My two cents: The battle will center on the GOP fight against the depredations of Obama’s third term, versus the Democrats trying to stretch Donald Trump’s relevance two years beyond his exit from office.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the CD1 primary ended in a recount-worthy race between Brad Finstad and Jeremy Munson…

…and a blowout of Jim Hagedorn’s widow and, uh, controversial former MNGOP chair Jennifer Carnahan.

Who may still seek a recount, for all we know.

In addition to a number of primaries that may or may not be referenda on Donald Trump, depending on who you ask (more tomorrow, hopefully), today is the first of four drama-clogged elections in Minnesota’s First Congressional District.

As the Strib notes, there are twenty candidates in the running. The DFL (8 candidates) and GOP (10) ones are vying for a significant shot on the ballot in a special election coming up on August 9.

You can fairly feel the media, practically begging for a strong performance by Jennifer Carnahan, widow of the late Rep. Hagedorn and controversial former state GOP chair. It’d guarantee a couple months of soap-opera drama before a DFL victory – a win-win for the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy). Matt Benda has the money; State reps Jeremy Munson and (to a lesser extent) Nils Pierson have the political name recognition.

Tomorrow’s going to be a fun one.