Once nice thing about being a conservative these days…

…is that all your “conspiracy theories” turn out to be true.

The Minnesota DFL Regime. 

They don’t talk with the press, unless they’ve been vetted as utterly innocuous (Esme Murphy, Jason DeRusha) or affirmatively friendly (Rochelle Olson).

No, the sum total of the regime’s “transparency” is this time of the summer, when you get video of them wandering about the State Fair in their “Just Plain Folks!” costumes, eating junk food on camera. 

I mean, I suppose it’s easier than answering actual questions…

This can’t be good news for Democrats:

I’m waiting for the inevitable ACLU lawsuit in response. 

I have a hard time describing the contempt this bit here makes me feel:

She left the windows open (presumably at the Governor’s mansion, safely dug in down on “old money” Summit Avenue, miles from the actual rioting) and “smelled the tires burning”, because it was a “touchstone to what was happening”. 

I smelled it a little closer up. 

It was less a “touchstone” than it was my neighborhood – the one I’ve invested a few decades in – getting looted and burned by DFL voters. 

Like all communists, Gwen Walz sees everything in theoretical terms.  She’s one of the ones who is literally in the dacha, now.  She can afford to. 

The rest of us?  Not so much.

Tim Walz loves him some Chinese Communism. 

Well, at the very least he loved it, back when he was teaching kids “social studies”:

There appears to be precious little evidence that he changed anything but  his surface decorations (during 12 years as a “moderate” while campaigning in the rural 1st CD). 

Dear “Democrat Governors Association”:

Perhaps this isn’t the image  of  “energy” you want to attribute to “the Midwest”:

A couple of obese politburo members with a penchant for authoritarian shenanigans?

Please see to this.

The Entire Midwest

When Governor Klink and the DFL legislative majority were making the case to squander the “surplus” [1], they put “cutting poverty by 30%” as one of their goals. 

So – how is poverty in Minnesota doing?

Well – we don’t know. 

Official poverty stats conveniently trail real time by a couple of years. 

Official poverty rates trail real time by a couple of years. In 2022, the official poverty rate in MN was 9.6% – up from 9.3% in 2021, and an even 9% in 2020.

So at some point – 2023? 2024? 2025? – the poverty rate needs to drop to 6.4% – a rate the state hasn’t seen in recent memory.

I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess the rate isn’t dropping to a historic low next year.  

Any action on that bet?

[1] Which, let’s not forget, wasn’t really a surplus

We’ve known it in Minnesota for a while.  But the rest of the nation needs to know. 

Governor Walz has a tenuous relationship with the truth on topic after topic.

I want to put together the ultimate compendium of Tim Walz’s lies. And I need your help .

If you can recall an episode about which the Governor lied, drop it in the comments.  If you’ve got a link to “the receipts”, so much the better.  

I want this to be a resource for everyone who needs to prompt everyone to remember – or learn for the first time – what a, er, creative fella the Governor is. 

Pass the word. 

“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
 — P.J. O’Rourke

So I’ll be a little stupid.  This was the DFL Monday night:

The party that gave us MNSure, MNLARS, and the entire parade of MN IT hits…

…is heckling the grownups about software glitches.

These are the people calling Republicans “weird”.   In this case, the Democrat party’s leading public intellect, James Carville. 

Here’s his measured, Socratic response to Fox’s Jesse Waters’ attacks on Tim Walz:

Has anyone told him that is, er, suggestion is actually what “trans men” are supposed to do?

He might not do lunch on K Street again…

Long ago, there were a couple of regular-ish commenters who felt the need to reinforce their claims by invoking information “from neighbors” living nearby them, who just happened to be world-class experts on the subject – but couldn’t be named, because they didn’t want to get pelted with questions from people from a blog. So we’d just have to take their word for it. 

It’s easier than looking up data to support your case, and it sounds more credible than just saying “in my opinion, yadda yadda”. 

It comes, I think, from being either being insecure in one’s own capability to hold up their end of the argument, or a need to stretch six square feet of factual tablecloth to over ten square feet of table. 

Governor Walz has been having a week of it.  We talked yesterday about his episode butting his time in the MN Guard up against a trip to Afghanistan he took as a congressman, without adding that little change of context in there. 

But it goes on:

Like Walz, I grew up on the Great Plains.

There are plenty of terms for “a blue-collar or ag-class person from a physically and/or socially isolated place”.

That term is never “Hillbilly”.   That term doesn’t occur organically on the Plains.   It comes via the media (“Beverly…”, “…Elegy”, dozens of country songs), or from the occasional transplant. 

But not organically. 

Walz is trying to appeal to the blue-collar white guy vote with which Harris is incredibly weak, and doing it with all the grace of an Australian break-dancer. 

Calling Republicans “weird”, and demanding “Joy”, is about as substantive a policy discusion as you’re going to get from a 2024 Democrat. 

As Richard Fernandez reminded us in 2016, it’s largely Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s fault:

The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.

As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them. But as Christopher Hitchens learned on Bill Maher’s show, people don’t want to consider that possibility:

I – and many smarter than I – have been observing for well over a decade that the Democrat party’s messaging seems to be aimed exclusively at people who might have an MA or PhD, but left their critical thinking skills at graduation.

…that amazes me about this “interview” with the loathsome Senator Smith…:

…is that Acosta actually called her on her lie. 

My expectations of the media have fallen that low.

On the other hand, Esme Murphy wouldn’t have done even that.

SCENE:   A small postwar “starter” home in New Hope, Minnesota.  It is about 10PM.  Josh McGILL, 35 year old estimator and sometimes technician for a family HVAC business, and Cassie McGILL, 33 and an office manager for a real estate firm, have finally gotten their kids to bed for the evening.  They are working on the bills as the evening news plays on the TV in the background.

JOSH:  Well, if we just had $100 more, the budget would be balanced.

CASSIE:  But Junior is going to need new skates for hockey soon.

JOSH:  Ugh.   I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get a lot over overtime.

CASSIE:  And then there’s the elephant in the room – this house is just too small for three kids. 

JOSH:  The way mortgage rates are going, we can’t afford to move.

CASSIE:  And with food up 30%, gas and heating up…

JOSH:  …don’t forget taxes on everything going up…

CASSIE:  …that too – I don’t know how we make that work. 

JOSH:  And with our commercial customers dropping like flies, we are going to wind up laying people off at this rate. 

CASSIE:  (sighs heavily). We’re still paying for that catalytic converter that got stolen.  What are we going to do?

(The TV mysteriously gets louder, and Kamala HARRIS and Tim WALZ dart their eyes to CASSIE and JOSH, through the screen)

HARRIS:  Feel joy!

JOSH:  DId you say something Cassie?

CASSIE:  It’s…the TV. 

HARRIS: 

WALZ:  Do it for One Minnesota!

CASSIE:  Oh, Madame Vice President and Governor Walz.  Hi.  It’s just that things are kinda…stressful…

(The sound of Beyonce’s song “Freedom” turns up, and HARRIS and WALZ start dancing)

JOSH:  It’s kinda like, prices have gone up way, way faster than our incomes, and business is slowing, and interest rates for my business are crazy, and whatever savings we have are getting bled out, and our kids school just isn’t doing the job, and…

(The music stops abruptly.  HARRIS and WALZ’s eletronic gazes fix upon the McGills)

WALZ:  Perhaps you weren’t listening.

HARRIS:  Don’t be weird ,Josh and Cassie.  Feel joy!  Because joy is what you should feel if you don’t want to be the weird person who isn’t feeling joy.

JOSH:  Er, that’s great, but it doesn’t…

HARRIS:  (Scowling). I said feel joy. . 

WALZ:  Now.  For One Minnesota.

HARRIS:  And One America, not weird America, a joyful America, unburdened by the weight of what has been.  

(And just as suddenly as they appeared, they are gone, as KARE 11 shows TikTok videos of the Saint Paul City Council dancing.)

CASSIE:  What was that?

JOSH:  I have no idea.

And SCENE.

The Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum is a non-partisan, private museum located inside Camp Ripley, up near Baxter.

It published a book referencing MInnesotans’ involvement in twenty years of the Global War on Terror. 

It includes Governor Walz’s comments at a 9/11 address the the Capitol.

I’ve screenshot this quote from those remarks:

Let’s forget for a moment that Bagram is in Afghanistan; people flub things when speaking in public. Let’s just let that slide for the moment.

He said “he was in the Guard – and one night, he stood on a ramp at Bagram”.  

Was this yet another cutesy turn of phrase – “I said I was in the Guard, and that I was at a Ramp Ceremony; I didn’t literally say my Guard service and this ceremony intersected, you weird Repubulican”.

But it sure does look like he’s saying he was in the Guard in…er, someplace in action, doesn’t it.

Ilhan Omar won er primary against Don Samuels last night.

And boy, was she a class act afterwards:

So, if you’re a Don Samuels supporters in MInneapolis – a moderate, or just someone who’s sick of crime – I’ll invite you to take a look at Dalia Al Aqidi. 

She’s smart,  She’s sane.  She’s never called anyone’s voters “nazis” unless she was describing German voters in 1932. 

What do you have to lose?

UPDATE:  When you look at the world through the lens of Berg’s Seventh Law, it starts to make sense:

Maybe she was just deflecting away from the DFL’s support of actual Nazis in advance…

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is boxed in in at a stoplight.  Avery LIBRELLE rides up in between cars on a recumbent e-bike.  BERG ponders getting away over the sidewalk, but figures it’s not quite worth it.

BERG: (dejectedly, resigned to the inevitable). Hey, Aver…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up, Merg. Republicans like you are slandering a good man who served honorably for 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard. 

BERG:  So you dispute…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up!  There is no overriding or exception to the honor that must be bestowed on people who serve .

BERG:  Unless it’s George W Bush.

LIBRELLE:  He was a silver-spooned coward!

BERG:  Right.   (Checks traffic.  No joy).  So, to recap, Governor Walz served…

LIBRELLE:  …with impeccable honor.  For 24 years. 

BERG:  Right. Now – you do realize it’s not me saying this. 

LIBRELLE:  It’s a bunch of political hacks!

BERG:  It’s his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kolb:

And it’s his battalion’s chaplain, Captain Bjertness:

The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.

“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.

Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq. Walz has said he did so to run for Congress, and he was elected the next year.

And it’s the guy who replaced him as the Command Sergeant Major at the virtual last minute before they went overseas.

“He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States. That’s not who I would pick to run for vice president,” Thomas Behrends, one of the retired officials who signed the letter, told the New York Post on Tuesday.

They have between them, if I’m doing my math correctly, a bare minimum of 55 years of honorable service among them.

Does that not make their point of view not merely dispositive, but above reproach? 

By your logic?

LIBRELLE:  (Looks around, quietly rides away).  

BERG:  Recumbents look stupid…

And SCENE

I was “yesterday years old”, as the kids say, when I learned about this:

Truly we live in a time of miracles; there is now a pro-skyrocketing debt, pro-foreign-policy collapse, pro-Middle East war, pro-weaponization of the institutions against political opposition, pro-censorship, pro foreign policy of “losing slowly”, pro packing the SCOTUS, pro-crime, pro firearm confiscation, pro collapse of education, anti-federalism, pro redefinition of bedrock societal institutions, anti free speech, pro-rule-by-executive-decree, pro-open border, anti-sovereignty, pro-untrammeled bureaucracy, pro-socialism wing of the GOP.

We truly live in a time of wonder.

I mean, for those of you for whom “Duck Hunters for Gun Safety” isn’t enough.

UPDATE:  I see Michael appropriated Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” title. 

Among the choices Reagan put forth in his speech, Michael chose the wrong one. 

The wrong choice 60 years ago, the wrong choice now, the wrong choice always.

I didn’t know this until this morning-  but Governor Klink still has a House of Representatives twitter account.  

It’s in effect a zombie account, but it’s out there.  

And as of this 0445 this morning, it’s still “mis-speaking” for the Governor: 

It’s all right there – for the time being, at least.  

If he “misspoke”, he’s been doing it for a very long time.  

Judd Hoff is the DFL endorsed candidate running against Mary Franson in HD12B, the Alexandria area. 

He’s also a convicted felon, having threatened someone with a machete and served prison time. 

He’s also made a public display of stalking Rep. Franson, even moving in across the street from her to carry out his mania…

…against his opponent. 

And now:

Alexandria cops reportedly found hundreds of lawn signs – one supposes Franson signs – in his garage. 

Remember – they are the party calling Republicans “weird”.

Wonder if Mike McFeely will be contributing to Hoff’s defense fund?

Harris, unburdened by what is, has a plan to deal the border.

Or so we’re told:

Thing is, she is in power now.  She and “President” Biden could do all of this today.

How, “unburdened by the facts that have been” are Democrat voters?

Now that Tim Walz is enjoying the first of his fifteen minutes, it’s high time we revisit some of his greatest hits.

Here’s Gwen Walz – who seems more and more like a Jill Biden character lately, and that’s not a good thig – talking about her, uh, odd perspective on the 2020 riots:

As someone who didn’t need to leave any windows open to smell the smoke – it came from three blocks away – I want to make sure this clip sees a nice, wide audience. 

So, Governor and Veep Candidate Walz supports censorship of “misinformation” (which is defined by his sycophants in the media) and “hate speech”, which is defined by…him.

I’m gonna guess this gets called “hateful misinformation”.

One heartbeat away from the presidency, if America doesn’t wise up this fall.

Rochester DFLer Kim Hicks reports her home has been vandalized:

Representatives for Hicks confirmed with FOX 9 that on Aug. 3, political signs in her yard, plus the siding on her home and a shed on her property were all vandalized by the masked intruders.

“My family was a victim of racist vandalism at our home this weekend. It has been a difficult two days, but then our community showed up,” Rep. Hicks said as part of a statement. “My family felt so much love and support from our friends, neighbors, and even strangers who came to lend a hand.”

If true, then lets hope the masked (?) men are caught and prosecuted.

Now, just so we remember – Berg’s 20th Law reads:

All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

 There’ve been so many blown-up hoaxes in Minnesota – especially, curiously, southern Minnesota – in recent years that you’d think even DFLers would realize it’s a bad idea. 

You’d also think they’d have known that breaking and entering and confessing to the crime on camera, or stalking your political opponents while having been convicted of attacking someone with a machete, or driving drunk with piles of edibles with loose ammunition for your service revolver strewn about your vehicle were all bad ideas, too.

Again – here’s hoping the vandals are caught.  The victim is a DFLer, so it could actually happen. 

I’m just a little bit overjoyed that Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz. 

How do I put this?  Tim Walz is Bernie Sanders in an Elmer Fudd costume. 

Kamala Harris felt the need, for whatever reason – we’ll come back to that – to to whatever sliver of the Democrat Party that is to her left, to a governor of a state that is only academically in play.

I’d been thinking Josh Shapiro was a lock – there’d even been some “congrats” videos “leaked” last weekend of various Democrat dignitaries congratulating Shapiro. 

He would have been a formidable choice.  That, too, we’ll come back to.

Walz?  He’s got baggage.  And I”m going to keep reminding the world of that baggage:

So – why not Shapiro?

Because he’s a JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, and the Democrat party has a bit of an antisemitism problem.   They don’t want Chicago looking like, well, Lake Street. 

Anyway – to all the Dems chanting “Hahaha!  He’s America’s fun uncle!  Cope!”, I say “his place on the ticket is all the ‘cope’ I need, thank you very much”. 

So it’s Walz:

Bring on the fall!

UPDATE: Ben Shapiro captures a lot of what I’ve been thinking: