The New Vile Vulgar Aristocrats

One of the few saving graces to Minnesota’s legislature – even when it’s not dominated by the DFL – is that it is part-time. It meets for a couple of months a year, and then the members go back about their business.

Which, for most DFLers, means back to job somewhere in the non-profit-industrial complex.

But that’s just not good enough:

Currently, the Constitution of the State of Minnesota says the Minnesota Legislature cannot meet for more than 120 “legislative days” per biennium. Additionally, the legislature is required to adjourn in May every year. As such, the Minnesota House and Senate do not typically meet from June through December. However, occasional, short-term “special sessions” can be called by the governor for certain situations when the legislature is not in regular session.

Therefore, the Minnesota Legislature is typically referred to as a “part-time” or “citizen” legislature. The vast majority of state legislatures in the Union do not operate on a full-time basis. Only a few states, such as California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, run full-time legislatures.

Should HF 4598 be passed into law, voters would be asked if the Minnesota Constitution should be amended to remove the requirements that the Minnesota Legislature only meet for 120 legislative days and adjourn in May. Specifically, the proposed law would put a constitutional amendment on the ballot proposing this change. The registered voters of Minnesota would decide whether to keep the legislature as it is, or change it.

Currently, the legislature meets for 120 days out of every biennium, barring special sessions.

Assuming they’ll take plenty of time off, assume they’ll triple their “work” year, and at least triple their salary.

And, sooner than later, their taxation and spending.

Further Evidence…

…that the DFL knows its voter base believes its own press and has no critical thinking ability whatsoever:

So – we’ve got a straw buyer problem, but DFL county attorneys would pursue charges “because the penalties aren’t high enough”, so the DFL demands more penalties to the camera, but then leads his entire ghouish, creepy, Orwellian caucus in voting against a bill that’d do just that.

We’ll need a whole lot of Minnesotans who are tired of being treated like gullible children to turn out this November.

Ever Wonder What A Sled Dog Feels Like?

If you’re a working or middle-class taxpayer in Minnesota, the DFL wants to show you:

They took $17 billion dollars extra from you, and gave you $260 back, maybe. But they want to give illegals a Universal Basic Income.

This is a complete inversion of anything plausibly close to “Justice”.

EdMinn’s Curious Self-Indictment

Wait – didn’t the DFL in the Legislature spend most of April and May of last year doing the endzone happy dance celebrating having “fully funded” education?

I do believe they did.

So – what is up with this?

Now, when you asked a DFL legislator or an EdMN partisan what “Full Funding” meant, the “answers” should have come with a side of blue cheese for all the word salad. It was gibberish. And that was just the ones that didn’t ignore the question entirely.

As we see now, pretty much intentionally so.

The Racket

Walter Hudson asks a great question:

Once I get Juan and Goncalvo to cough up the money…

…I think it’s time to guy that 1960 Les Paul Standard.

What are you doing with your cut from the illegals?

Retirement Planning

I think this’d be what the kids today call “saying the quiet part out loud”…

…except it’s really saying the part they keep yelling at the top of their lungs, even louder, really.

Senator Erin Maye Quade thinks parents shouldn’t be bringing their children up with any sense of basic morality when it comes to sex:

That’s right – just cast them out into the world, and let the teachers and Planned Parenthood do the teaching for you.

Which will help keep the meat coming through the doors at Planned Parenthood, who most generously supports her political career (and, one suspects, will be providing amply for her when she one day “retires from politics”).

History Rhymes

Shot: AOC, three and a half years ago:

Chaser: AOC, over the weekend:

So – the left is starting to eat its own.

My main question: will AOC call this a hate crime, a sexual assault or a GOP psyop?

Primary Motivations

On the one hand, I think optimism is extremely premature for Republicans. While some polling is showing deep divides in the Democrat party, we’ve heard this tune more that “Freebird” on KQRS. Democrats may kvetch and moan – they whined about Bill Clinton – but they, being essentially herd animals, always “come home” at election time.

But it looks like a lot of them will have to come home a looooong way this fall:

“Uncommitted” takes almost 20% of the DFL primary vote.

And that was only the half of it:

Looks bad for Biden?

For now, sure.

But don’t get fooled – they’ll get goaded, logrolled, gaslit, threatened, or just talk themselves back into line this fall. Trump (who easily skated through the GOP contest) will have a hard go it it, nationwide and here in Minnesota.

At A History Conference, 2174 AD

SCENE: A conference room in Zürich, Switzerland. An international team of historians is gathered in a conference hall. Behind the panel tabel, a large “Powerpoint 2170” holographic slide displays the title for the session: “Origins of the Second American Civil War”.

PROFESSOR A: Welcome, one and all, to this discussion on the origins of the Second American Civil War. We’d like to start with this presentation from PROFESSOR B.

PROFESSOR B: Thank you. As you know, the origins of the Second American Civil War, 150 years ago, are shrouded in mystery. But we found this exchange on “X”, a “social medium” popular around 2024, that sheds some light on the subject.

(B swooshes his hand in the air, and the holograph advances to show a “Twitter thread”i)

ProgressiveDuke1332: ReTHUGlicons have no policies to fix Minneapolis’s problems.

Mitchpberg: Of course we do. Arrest, prosecute and incarcerate actual dangerous criminals. Make life better for law-abiding citizens. Get rid of impediments to affordable life, like rent control, the Met Council’s idiot zoning policies and city policies about “driving density”. Have a a sales tax holiday. Cut spending, and cut taxes, especially some of the more niggling, punitive taxes like parking meter rates and hospitality taxes, to simulate traffic and business.

ProgressiveDuke1332: Hahaha, mitchpberg think you can eliminate crime by lowering parking fees!

PROFESSOR B: This, I hold, was the beginning of a pattern where nobody in society could communicate about anything.

PROFESSOR C: So, part of America lashed out at the other part as a matter of…

PROFESSOR D: Intellectual self-defense?

PROFESSOR B: Precisely.

(Brow-furrowing and beard-scratching follows)

PROFESSOR E: I mean, it doesn’t not make sense…

(General assent breaks out).

And SCENE

Life During Wartime

From the “it could be comedy, if it weren’t for what they actually mean” files: Minneapolis representative Brion Curran took some time off from driving hammered through Central Minnesota while thinking she was in the Twin Cities to tell us what’s what:

It’s tempting to respond “we know you exist, Rep. Curran. It’s just irrelevant to our actual lives, and don’t bother forcing us to see this your way”.

But about that last bit:

Under the DFL proposal that reps FInke and Curran are talking about..

…and talking, and talking…

…churches can be sued into obedience.

This is like those lawsuits against the bakers and florists and photographers, but in statute, and everywhere.

If this isn’t enough to get you to hold your nose and support even an imperfect Republican for the legislature, I’m really not sure what to tell you anymore.

This Is Today’s DFL

Christians are the same as slaveholders.

No, that’s what Rep. Luke Frederick of Mankato says:

He’s responding to an amendment that would protect churches and their members freedom of conscience about transgender issues.

The MNDFL is at war with the Constitution.

UPDATE: Harry Niska sums up the, er, debate:

I’ll be talking with Rep. Niska on the NARN tomorrow.

It’s Caucus Night In Minnesota

And for our DFL friends, I present this note from Chairman Ken Martin:

Just a quick reminder:

  • Martin and DFL leadership primaried the candidates endorsed by the caucus and convention process in 2018, jamming down Tim Walz (who came out of the endorsement process in third place).
  • In addition, Keith Ellison was another jamdown; the party pushed him over Matt Pelikan, the candidate that oozed up through the caucus and convention process.
  • Before that? The party made sure Mark Dayton prevailed over endorsed candidate Margaret Anderson Kelliher in 2010.
  • The last endorsed DFL goober candidate to make it through the primary was Mike Hatch. Given that he was the party’s choice over the hapless but (for the time) “progressive” Becky Lourey, that was not a big stretch. I suspect Lourey would be to the center of any choices today.
  • It’s been 18 years since the caucus-endorsed DFL governor candidate got through the primary.

If you’re a DFL caucus goer, your “voice” matters only if it agrees with whoever’s got Ken Martin’s ear.

The Case For Letting The Mainstream Media Burn To The Ground

This – letting major but utterly corrupted institutions burn to the ground – is becoming kind of a theme, isn’t it?

OK – so read this entire AP piece on the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.

And when you do, tell us what’s missing:

Ready?

No mention that the alleged murderer, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was an illegal alien with a rap sheet as long as a Walgreens receipt.

It’s almost like someone wants this sort of thing – unrestricted illegal immigration by people whom no country wants – to be the norm.

Somone, like…:

“hEeY! ThaT’S fRoM sIX yEArS aGO!” Yes, and now she’s the Senate Majority Leader, and arguably (!) more powerful than the Governor whose shock collar remote her “progressive” movement controls. Think she’s changed?

So many institutions.

So little fire.

Everything’s Fine

In the 1960s and ’70s, the Peoples Republic of China had, very nominally, the world’s largest “army”, listed at the time in the Guinness Book of World Records as being 200 million strong.

Of course, those were CCP numbers, ginned up by adding up the nominal numbers of the “Peoples Militia” – basically most of the nation’s able-bodied people impressed (dare we say, “Shanghaied”) into a putative “fighting force” armed with antiques, spears and dogma.

The reason, of course, was to project a mien of power, resolve and invincibility, at a time when China was three decades removed from subjugation, warlordism and indolence.

Today, China is none of those things (other than perhaps run by the modern warlords, the CCP’s regional apparatuses).

And yet…:

Chinese companies are doing something rarely seen since the 1970s: setting up their own volunteer armies. At least 16 major Chinese firms, including a privately-owned dairy giant, have established fighting forces over the past year, according to a CNN analysis of state media reports.

These units, known as the People’s Armed Forces Departments, are composed of civilians who retain their regular jobs. They act as a reserve and auxiliary force for China’s military, the world’s largest, and are available for missions ranging from responding to natural disasters and helping maintain “social order” to providing support during wartime.

The reason?

Arguably, because all is not well in China. The pandemic exposed some of the internal fault lines that are perking up the ears of some China watchers; social unrest that’d been repressed or satiated for decades came boiling up to the surface (although you’d have to talk with those China watchers to know it, since the US media will never cover it until it’s too late).

“The return of corporate militias reflects Xi’s rising focus on the need to better integrate economic development with national security as the country faces a more difficult future of slower growth and rising geopolitical competition,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

“Corporate militias under military leadership could help the Communist Party more effectively quell incidents of social unrest such as consumer protests and employee strikes,” he said.

This being CNN, the audience needed to be reassured that this wasn’t anything associated with the big, bad American right:

The forces, which do not currently operate outside China, have more in common with America’s National Guard than its militia movement, which refers to private paramilitary organizations that usually have a right-wing political focus.

Red China may or may not end up being a viable enterprise for purposes of governing itself, much less conquering the world. But given CNN’s performance, that ship may have left the docks.

Initially

Someone asked me if this was a deep fake.

More specifically, “AI”

Pretty sure they got the “I” wrong.

The House Hip Hop Caucus has 99 problems, but being in command of the nation’s priorities ain’t one.

Continue reading

The Problem

Cellist and medical student attacked in the New York subway:

Look for Mayor Adams to call foe a ban on metal water bottles.

Inconceivable

Joe Doakes, formerly from Como Park, emails:

The most common rejoinder to my concern the 2020 election was stolen is: “It’s not possible.  The conspiracy would have to be too large.  Someone would talk.”  What if it’s not a conspiracy? What if it’s a shift in attitude?  What a significant portion of the public believes crime is no longer wrong?

Have you noticed the way people drive?  Stores closing because of rampant shoplifting?  Carjacking rates through the roof?  Why now?  Why are all the rules being ignored?  What changed? I posit a general attitude shift.  The rules don’t apply to me.  I can speed, shoplift, rob people at gunpoint, and you know why? Because F-U, that’s why.

It’s even more pronounced in the “legal” system.  The New York judge with his bullshit $350 million fine.  The defamation jury with its $83 million verdict.  The Hawaiian judge who decided the Aloha spirit is superior to the Second Amendment.  These are examples of the same attitude that makes ordinary people think it’s okay to commit crimes.  I suggest that same attitude made election workers think it was okay to help steal the election. They didn’t need a centralized bureaucracy giving orders to minions.  Everybody just did a little extra by themselves, ran a few ballots through twice, disqualified a few Trump ballots or shifted them to Biden.  Why not?  Who’s going to stop them?  Keep counting until we have enough – it’s the Al Franken model (and the basis for the recent joke that the 49er’s found 3 mail-in touchdowns so they actually won).

The lawless attitude is getting worse and more focused.  Donald Trump is the new Emmanuel Goldstein from the book “1984.”  He’s the designated enemy.  He’s the one person it’s okay to hate. There is no punishment, no insult, no disgrace too vile for him and it’s okay for anybody and everybody to play the game, even using taxpayer money to hire your lover to bring baseless charges against him.

RINOs say “you better not change the rules, you won’t like living under the new rules” but that’s a bluff and Liberals know it. Trump didn’t prosecute Hillary because our side is ‘better than that,’ we don’t ‘stoop to their level.’  Yeah, but that also means there’s no penalty for cheating, lying, stealing, rigging, perjuring . . . so why not do whatever it takes to win?

That judge who imposed the $350 million fine and banned Trump from owning any business for three years, feels safe.  He knows he won’t get overturned and even if he does, he’s still the hero of the courthouse back corridor and the bar association luncheon. He’s not afraid of being impeached, his house won’t get burned down, he won’t lose his pension, he’s safe, same as the cheating election officials and crooked businesses paying off Hunter. Hillary and Biden won’t even be charged, must less railroaded, the way Trump has been.  And they know it.  And we know it too, which may be part of the reason people feel like the rules don’t apply anymore.  Certainly they don’t apply to the big-shots.  Why should they apply to me?

There is no remedy for a pervasive lawless attitude within the Constitutional system.  The Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, the Judicial Branch, they’re all in on it.  The Administrative Deep State, they are, too.  The Fourth Estate – the legacy media – up to their eyeballs.  Running for school board, voting harder, boycotting Budweiser – none of that can overcome the pervasive bias in the system.

The only way to shift the attitude back is to go outside the Constitutional framework of government to restore respect for law and order.  That’s the destination too many Conservatives are afraid to reach.  Because once we conclude the system is broken and cannot be fixed from within, the only conclusion is we must throw out the system and replace it.  That’s insurrection.  That’s a revolution.  That’s a civil war.  It’s the end of the nation as we know it and it would throw the entire world into an economic depression if not a literal Dark Age.

I’m terrified there’s no other way to stop the slow-motion train wreck, because I can safely predict I’ll be one of the first people rounded up and shot for my opinions.   The only questions are which of my “conservative” friends will rat me out, and which of my liberal friends will be helping load me into the cattle car?

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

The US – especially the rural US, but even the bigger cities – used to be a relatively high trust society. It’s not anymore. I’d say “the consequences will be dire”, but they pretty much already are.

Days Of Future Passed

Minnesota, 2024: The DFL says 46 days of early voting and “no excuses needed” mail in voting doesn’t make voting (for the DFL) easy enough; demands more:

Given that young adults are least likely to own a car, and many 18- and 19-year-olds do not even have a driver’s license, it can be very difficult for them to reach early voting and Election Day voting sites,” Pursell said as she explained the parameters of the legislation, which is being backed by Secretary of State Steve Simon.

The House Elections Committee voted to place the bill on the general register on a party-line voice vote. The bill has no companion in the Senate. No Republicans in the hearing expressed support for the bill, which one member said amounts to a fiscally irresponsible “unfunded mandate” for counties.

Minnesota, 2030: The Minnesota DFL, claiming early voting and polls that come to you if you’re a prog kid at Gustavus is still not easy enough, proposes to simply enter votes for all newborns for the rest of their lives, on birth (or when they would have been born, if the mother “reproductive freedomed” the baby).

Informal Yet Rigorously Scientific Survey

So – given the facts that:

  • Big Left has been supporting Trump for the nomination, indirectly and directly
  • Among the top-tier GOP candidates – DeSantis, Haley and Trump – Trump performs most weakly against Biden.
  • Notwithstanding that, Trump is all but cleared for landing as the nominee, months before the convention
  • Democrats – at least, the ones that aren’t gaslighting us that the President is in fine fettle as evidence by his immense accomplishments – seem to be “suddenly” confronting the notion that the President isn’t all there. But not many of them.
  • But some Republicans are calling for someone to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from office.

Am I the only one who thinks the Democrats would love the GOP to lead the defenestration of Biden?

And So It Begins

The Legislature is back in session. And the DFL lost no time trying to extend last session’s jamdown.

Gun control? Yep, they got it:

Details here.

Of course, the bill will get dissected in court, if it gets passed. Best to make sure it doesn’t – which means if you’re not a member of the MN Gun Owners Caucus, you should be.

Senator Isa Perez-Vega may be a contender to pass Erin Maye-Quade as the most cloyingly annoying DFLer in the Senate.

Possible saving grace for this session? It’s an even-numbered year – and DFLs from Greater Minnesota are getting nervous about how the Faerie Raenbow Agenda from last session is going to go over in Eveleth. In this case, Sen. Hauschild – who currently occupies Tom Bakk’s old seat – and a clear case of nerves over making Minnesota a “sanctuary state”:

And with a one-vote majority in the Senate, it’s making a bit of a difference.

The DFLers in Greater Minnesota have to be looking at…:

  • Joe Biden’s escalating unpopularity. Trump doesn’t have to win the national election for them to still lose their seats in counties that are, or are drifting, red.
  • The disproportionate impact of DFL policy on rural Minnesota

…and thinking it just might be time to reel in some of the worst excesses.

Hope Hauschild takes the hint on Isa Perez-Vega’s idiot bill.

A few phone calls and emails might certainly help him make up his mind.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a coney at the Gopher. Lost in the flavor, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE walk in.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhiiiiiure is a wonderful day for a Coney…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. You’ve been slandering President BIden.

BERG: Nope. I’ve been pointing out that his behavior reminds me of my mother during the first year or two of her battle with Alzheimers. I take no partisan joy in saying that whatsoever…

LIBRELLE: Joe BIden is the most on-top-of-it intellectual giant we’ve ever had in the Oval Office…

The Television over the bar is broadcasting the news.\

BERG: You were saying?

LIBRELLE: Joe Biden has always been senile, and was actually a GOP black op against the Democrats.

BERG: Of course it was. (Yells) Hey, guys – carry opponent here!

(A crowd of regulars chases LIBRELLE from the bullding as BERG finishes his coney.

And SCENE.