Shot: Kamala Harris denies supporting the MN Freedom Fund, a group that opposes cash bail by bailing out “indigent” often-violent offenders, with occasional disastrous results…
…after gleefully supporting it two years ago:
“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.
Chaser: Ellison runs away from the “Defund” movement he and his son championed last year.
This email was – ostensibly – leaked by a DFL operative.
If true, it indicates that the DFL is having a hard time getting people out on the street for the DFLin the Metro and ‘burbs:
I’m both pessimistic and a little tiny bit…not “paranoid”, per se, but I tend to try to assume that one’s opponents is smart enough to play mental games with you.
Still – if true, it explains a lot of things:
Remembering how the DFL acted in all of their statewide races since 2012, sitting on leads that their internal polling showed were pretty comfy in hindsight?
It wasn’t like this back then.
SCENE: Mitch BERG has found a cache of hard-to-find chili paste at a Vietnamese grocery store, and is putting a half dozen in his basket. Distracted, he doesn’t see Avery LIBRELLE rounding the corner, wearing an N95 mask.
LIBRELLE: (Muffled behind mask) Mrrg.
BERG: Oh, ffffaaaaercrying out loud, how ya been…
LIBRELLE: (Muffled) Jw Shlll hm nmmr prfmkmmd m kem in crm.
BERG: Jim Shultz, the GOP candidate, has never prosecuted a case in court?
LIBRELLE: Ylm .
BERG: Huh. OK. Got a list of cases that Keith Ellison has prosecuted?
LIBRELLE: Hm pm Drmk Shmvm m prmm.
BERG: He put Derek Chauvin in prison? Sure – in exactly the same way that I fixed the plumbing in my bathroom. I hired a professional. The prosecuting attorney of record was a private practice lawyer that Ellison hired.
LIBRELLE: Hm rm thm cmmm!
BERG: He ran the case? Sure – the same way the MNDOT Commissioner runs a road construction project. MNDOT guy manages. He doesn’t do the surveying, engineering, or driving the steamrollers. Ellison managed the lawyers. But if he ever went into the courtroom, he was there as an interested spectator.
LIBRELLE: Thm Slmstm gmrm um fm Unumfm stem thmm “hm brm hm ekfpmfmm em m lorr tm br emrm deh”!
BERG: The Solicitor General of the United States said he”brought his experience as a lawyer to bear every day”? Perhaps. But that didn’t make him a prosecuting attorney. He has never sat at the prosecution table in a trial.
Long story short – do you list of cases where Ellison has been an actual lawyer of record for the prosecution in a criminal case?
LIBRELLE: Duh ym hem umm frm Schlmmm?
BERG: Do I have one for Schultz? No – but he’s never claimed to have one, and he’s not the one using his vaaaast courtroom experience to try to separate himself from Schultz.
So – you have that list of cases for which Ellison has been the prosecutor of record?
(Brief pause. Then LIBRELLE’s face goes red, and steam starts shooting from under the N95).
STORE CLERK: Did he…er…sh… (BERG shrugs shoulders) did this person try the chili paste?
BERG: You’d think.
And SCENE
Mike Freeman on why he doesn’t bother prosecuting straw buyers:
So let’s sum it up.
Minneapolis has an epidemic of shootings because:
The common factor is the DFL.
Shot: Representative Omar with a devastating riposte to Jim Schultz, GOP candidate for Attorney General, giving us all a civics lesson:
Chaser: Keith Ellison, himself giving, in turn, a, uh, civics lesson of his own:
Which is it?
Is prosecuting violent local crime a job the AGO does when asked? Or is Keith Ellison a caped crusader patrolling the streets and heading off crime…
…badly and half-heartedly, and not at all until a month before an election?
Ted Nugent/Oathkeepers poll shows a supermajority of Americans blame “woke” politicians for the crime wave.
Wait – did I say Ted Nugent/Oathkeepers? I meant Harvard:
The correct answer to the poll is “yes’ to both, of course.
Rebecca Brannon – one of about seven or eight actual journalists in the Twin Cities – went to downtown Minneapolis Friday night/Saturday morning.
Or so she would have us believe:
Of course, it can’t be; I’m reliably informed that “downtown is back“, and that anyone who disagrees is a suburban tourist who gets his entire world view from Tucker Carlson.
But boy, if it weren’t fake news, it would be pretty grim, wouldn’t it?
To: Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan
From: Mitch Berg, Irasicble Peasant
Re: Judging A Book By The Cover?
Lt. Governor Flanagan,
Two data points aren’t a trend – but you do seem to be trying to make your attire a campaign issue.
We talked about this a few months back – your, um, exchange with “Baaaaahb from FRID-ley” over your, well, attire:
As I noted at the time, I found the whole thing implausibe at best, gratingly classist at worst: you are, after all, one of the four most powerful people in MInnesota. You are arguably the most powerful Lieutenant Governor in recent Minnesota history, since the Governor only serves at the pleasure of the extreme “progressive” caucus you lead, and to court whom Governor Walz put you on his ticket in the first place.
And it scarcely needs to be said, you’re a member of the political class, from a social echo chamber in you can do pretty much anything you want, without any consequences whatsoever (and, indeed, have done just that). You could wear aluminum foil pants and a 2LiveCrew t-shirt, or pretty much anything but a MAGA cap, and nobody significant would say “boo” about it.
Indeed – since you’ve never worked in the private sector, I have to ask – have you ever worked at a job where your attire was even a factor?
But no matter – because while neither I nor anyone but the (apocryphal) Baaaaahb from FRID-ley cares what you wear to, uh, work, you most certainly seem to:
I’m going to go out on a short and sturdy limb and guess that maybe half of Minnesotans know what the Lieutenant Governor is.
A little further out? Of that half, maybe 25% could pick you out of a lineup, whatever your attire, unless you were wearing a T-shirt that said “I’M PEGGY FLANAGAN, THE SITTING LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR” in big letters.
And of that (checks figures) 12.5% of the state, I’m going to hazard a guess than maybe 10% would have an opinion, positive or negative, about what you wear.
If I may be so bold, it strikes me as if you, one of the four most powerful people in Minnesota, are trying to find some little bit of grievance, however contrived, to wrap yourself in, to generate “sympathy” in the home stretch of the election.
But then, I’m just a middle-Minnesotan taxpaying schmuck, so nobody cares what I think, either.
That is all.
Whenever a Democrat campaign ad features a “lifelong Republican” who has, mirabile dictu, changed affiliation over whatever the issue du jour is, my first reflex is to reply “no, they most likely are not”.
Angie Craig seems to have a particular facility for finding these miraculous “Lifelong Republicans” who nonetheless agree with her completely on one divisive issue or another – like this self-termed “NRA Sharpshooter” (who trashed all of the rules of gun-handling, on camera, in the on-air ad Angie Craig ran in 2020) who agreed, as luck would have it, with Craig and Michael Bloomberg on every point of their gun control agenda (which made sense, given that he’d been a gun control activist for quite a while).
So when a “lifelong Republican” – and biker, no less! – popped up on a Craig ad to talk about how Craig was singlehandedly making insulin affordable, I thought “there is just no way”.
And I was right. It’s a lie.
“When Dave [Vesledahl] called me to share his story, I promised him that I would continue to do everything in my power to lower prescription drug costs for Minnesotans,” Craig said in a statement. “Everyone deserves access to high-quality, affordable health care—and I’ll be fighting back against the pharmaceutical companies every step of the way.”
But Vesledahl no longer lives in Craig’s district since Minnesota redrew its congressional map this year. He lives in Nerstrand, Minn., which is located in the state’s First Congressional District. Vesledahl’s claim that he’s a “lifelong Republican” is also contradicted by the fact that he voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, according to voter files obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
But thats OK – he identifies as a former Republican:
“Dave describes himself as a lifelong Republican, and his voter file registers him as a ‘Lean Republican,’ Craig’s spokeswoman told the Free Beacon.
And I’m a “former Democrat”. When I was young and impressionable and not very bright and, let’s be honest, the perfect Democrat voter.
Tulsi Gabbard is sick and tired of the Democrat party, and she’s not going to take it anymore:
A few thoughts:
The Key Log: As Berg’s Seventh Law foretells, one of the reasons that Democrats like to harp on the “extremism” of the GOP is to deflect away from their own. One can hope the popular Senator from the very blue state might be the crack in the dam that brings out this century’s “Reagan Republicans”.
Speaking of Reagan: There’s at least some conventional wisdom that Gabbard has made this move to put her name in the VP stakes for 2024.
“She’s a LIBERAL”, some of my conservative friends say.
Let’s back up a moment.
One of Ronald Reagan’s great bits of genius was his ability to reach across the aisle to get people to pull together on the issues that mattered to his agenda. His agenda, by the way, was two items: right the economic ship, and destroy communism. He used his bully pulpit to push others to make headway on other issues – abortion, 2nd Amendment, the border – but he kept his own political powder dry to get the deals he needed made with Dems like Tip O’Neil on the 1982 Tax Cuts, and with the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland on assisting the Eastern European labor movement against the USSR.
So – could a future Republican president focused on our society’s current enemies – the deep state, stagflation and China – benefit from reaching across the aisle to a center-left “libertarian” Democrat who shares those concerns (in as many words, in her statement above)?
It’s worth a look.
Keith Ellison, after three years and 9 months of glorifying, aiding and abetting crime and the collapse of the rule of law…
…is “tackling gun crime“.
The lawsuit, filed in Hennepin County District Court, alleges Fleet Farm sold at least 37 firearms to two straw purchasers over the course of 16 months, despite red flags that some buyers were trafficking the guns to criminals and those otherwise prohibited from legally purchasing guns themselves.
But – is it really “tackling gun crime”.
Pay attention. It’s Keith Ellison. Of course it’s a cynical artifice.
The alleged straw buyers were already arrested, tried and sentenced…
…by the Feds. Not by Mike Freeman, John Choi or Keith Ellison, none of whom cares about straw buyers, since it’s not a “sexy” crime (until five weeks before the election, anyway); nobody ever got elected Senator for chasing down a gang-banger’s grandmother.
It’s their job – but none of them are doing it.
Rob Doar at the MN Gun Owners Caucus explains the stuff the media won’t re Ellison’s deeply cynical action. Read the whole thread:
This lawsuit is just for show – to deflect away from three years and nine months of sloth and indifference…
…no. That goes too easy on Ellison.
He’s trying to deflect way from almost four years of using crime as a campaign prop.
Henco Sheriff David Hutchinson continues to get concierge service from the “criminal justice” system.
Minnesota’s Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) has suspended the license of Hennepin County Sheriff Dave Hutchinson for 30 days, starting next month…The board voted to suspend his license for 180 days, however 150 days are stayed on the condition he doesn’t commit any similar offenses in the next three years.
So – he got his whiz test delayed, he got a VIP booking involving no jail time, he got the lightest possible charge, low enough not to cause his cashiering from the Sheriff’s Department, and now he’s getting a slap on the wrist from the POST board.
Think a GOP politician, to say nothing of a private schlub, would get this sort of treatment?
Legitimate (as far as we know) food non-profits are concerned that the Feeding our Future scandal will make it harder for them to fundraise.
I can see why. If it became harder to launder money through non-profits, the DFL would have nothing but “progressive” billionaires to fund them.
Speaking of laundering money, Bill Glahn – one of about ten actual journalists in the Twin Cities – has a list of political contributions from those indicted in the “Feeding our Future” DFL money laundering scam…
…so far.
Any guesses as to who the money went to?
Any guesses as to why the DFL noise machine is wall to wall abortion and litter pans?
No reporter in Minnesota has covered the Feeding Our Future scandal like Bill Glahn. (Few have tried, but that’s another issue all together).
With that in mind, rather than trying to recap all the facts we know, I’m just going to attach this video of Glahn talking with John Hinderaker at the Center of the American Experiment:
It’s easy to see why Big Left has been swerving the hate machine toward the CAE lately.
One day, he’s launching snitch lines, open-ended “emergency orders” and sending mask inspectors out to restaurants (once he’s allowed them to open).
The next?
Well, hey, that’s an improvement, isn’t it?
The DFL really does depend on voters being low-information, having no critical thinking skills or historical context (even since 2018), but being pretty darn impressed with themselves…
Senator Amy Klobuchar thinks the stakes of this election are very, very high:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar was slammed Tuesday for appearing to suggest that voting for Democrats in the November midterm elections could help thwart hurricanes and the effects of climate change.
The evidence is all around us: Democrats not only think their voters are stupid, they are counting on it.
Keith Ellison – a year ago this week – op-edding to endorse the “Defund” Amendment in the MInneapolis city elections:
Keith Ellison today: “I’m so a law and order, I make Dirty Harry look like a soy-boi cuck; just ask Mike Freeman!.
No, really. Check out his latest TV ad:
It is is the most artlessly blatant campaign lie I’ve ever seen.
It opens with…
…Mike Freeman (?!?!?) talking about the Ellison’s crime-fighting chops – which is a little like getting your coaching skills recommended by Les Steckel. The ad name-drops Freeman – without (if I recall the ad correctly) mentioning he’s the Hennepin County attorney who’s been letting robbers, carjackers and shooters go free, over and over.
The ad claims Ellison has “…never lost a criminal prosecution” – which is true, in the sense that I didn’t f**k up my bathroom plumbing when I replaced it – because I’m not a plumber, and I hired someone who was to do the job. Keith Ellison contracted the job to outside counsel…
…because his next statement, “he added criminal prosecutors”, is technically true and still a lie. The criminal division at the AGO was tiny, and is now a little less tiny. Which was why he had to farm out the Chauvin prosecution!
Ellison‘s ad is further proof that DFLers think they can count on their voters – or swing voters – being too gullible and uncritical to look past the lies.
Experience shows it’s not a bad strategery. Frankly, if he’s wrong I think it’d shock the world.
So let’s shock the world.
The “Feeding Our Future” (FOF) scandal just keeps getting better and better.
Let’s sum up where we are so far:
Then, yesterday, this came out; its an extended thread from Fox9 producer Seth Kaplan, and I urge you to read the whole thing:
Money shot:
There was never a mention by Judge Guthmann of criminal contempt and jail time being a possibility. It was always civil/financial contempt and penalties. There is a footnote on page 6 of the June 24, 2021 order reading: “The court’s order does not include a jail sanction so there is no need to address purge conditions.” It also reads “imposing financial and penal consequences for constructive civil contempt of court.”
So the fraud occurred on the administration’s watch – and when caught, Walz tried to throw a judge under the bus. The judge grabbed Governor Klink by the lapels and got his head wedged in there just a little further.
The media will memory hole this but good. But it’s got to be getting harder and harder to do.
Ryan Wilson – who’s running for State Auditor, and is leading incumbent DFLer Julie Blaha in the latest Trafalgar poll on Minnesota statewide races – did a whirlwind tour of Minnesota yesterday, as recounted in this twitter thread.
Read the thread, and notice what’s missing:
At no point in the tour did he drive of the road in a cloud of White Cloud cans, like incumbent DFLer Julie Blaha and her sidekick, Melisa Franzen-Lopez. There was no need for MNGOP chair Dave Hann need to pull up to the scene in a converted Scooby Doo “Mystery Machine” and rescue Wilson from the cops.
At no point did Wilson crash and roll his vehicle leaving a trail of beer cans and ammo, like Dave Hutchinson, the retiring DFL sheriff of Hennepin County and, possibly, the only sheriff in the state that would endorse Keith Ellison.
“No driving off the road in a cloud of empties” would seem to be a low bar…
…oops.. Wrong term. Sorry.
I should say – I assume that Wilson didn’t drive off the road leaving a trail of empty beer cans. If a Republican had done any such thing, we’d have heard about it in the media. endlessly, between now and November. Sort of like when Tom Emmer’s DUI at 20 got wall to wall media coverage, Tim Walz’s at age 31 was completely ignored – that’s how I know .
Anyway – the GOP: the candidates who don’t drive off the road.
Keith Ellison presided over, and in someways encouraged, the greatest outbreak of lawlessness, and certainly the greatest collapse in the rule of law, in Minnesota history.
But never let it be said he doesn’t know who his real enemies are:
After this past two years, your attorney generals real targets are the law abiding gun owners of Minnesota.
…is “doing the same thing, over and over and over, and expecting a different result”.
Apropos nothing:
Tax money will be shifted from taxpayers to non-profits that are, themselves, run and staffed by junior members of the city’s DFL political class. They’ll do studies, write reports, have events, and mostly cash checks, and crime will rise and (maybe) fall on its own rhythm (or, like Detroit and Newark and Baltimore and Saint Louis, not fall at all, ever) – but the DFL will be able to claim with a straight-ish face that they are “Dooooooing Something” about crime.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Perhaps the biggest story of all dropped last. US Attorney Andy Lugar released indictments against 47 (and later, 48) suspects in the Feeding Our Future scandal – the scam funneling $250 million in federal COVID relief into, it’s alleged, the pockets of a series of local non-profits.
he 48th indictment was allegedly a woman who was just about to head to Ethiopia on a one-way ticket – one who’d had the distinction of being the only one of the indicted who’d actually fed anyone.
The indicted include major donors to DFL candidates up through Ilhan Omar – and some key staffers for (as far as we know so far) Jacob Frey and others.
Beyond that?
This all took place on the watches of Keith Ellison and, especially, State Auditor Julie Blaha – who listed her main qualification for the job as “teaching kindergartners how to count”, four years ago. She may just be out of her depth.
Strong hunches bordering on fearless predications:
It was a very bad day for the DFL. I needed that.
It’s about six weeks until the election. And with polls showing Governor Klink seven points up on Scott Jensen, it’s time to remind minnesotans, with their famously short attention span‘s, about what this last couple of years have been like.
The Twin Cities media desperately wants to memoryhole this episode:
Governor Klink created a three class society:
But then, his administration added injury to insult. while you couldn’t visit your family in hospitals or nursing homes, or whole funerals if they passed, somehow the Klink administration made a “scientific“ exception for demonstrations and riots – which, according to the “party of science“, were actually good for health, since science.
The Twin Cities media is going to go out of its way not to remind you of any of this, or of the prosecutions of business that, desperate to stay solvent, defied the ham fisted and unscientific emergency orders.
Don’t let this go down the memory hole.
The sentence from the title isn’t officially in whatever passes for a “constitution“ for the city of Saint Paul.
But it might as well be.
The neighborhood – southwest of Allianz Stadium, south of the freeway and west of Snelling – is the home of an awful lot of ELCA-haired “progressive“ with boundless spare time for nattering on about politics.
Most everything corrosive and stupid about politics in Saint Paul gestates in Merriam Park. It was where the smoking ban – which crushed bars in Saint Paul, before the ban went state wide Dash was conceived. It’s where the decades of waffling about what to do with the old Snelling Avenue bus barn got the energy behind its lack of energy (before giving the property away to a billionaire to build a soccer stadium). Support for light rail down the middle of University Avenue, with stops every half mile (as opposed to a route that would’ve made more sense)? Ranked choice voting?
Rent control?
If it’s a stupid idea that benefited only upper middle class, college educated white progressives, it started in Merriam Park.
“Including Saint Paul’s “Tony Soprano“ trash collection system?
What do you think?
A friend of the blog emails:
Illegal dumping did not go down, it went up in Saint Paul’s mafia organized trash collection system. Some say the promise of city wide trash collection was not met, but I still remember the promise of city wide trash collection was so that the elite, privileged Merriam Park residents wouldn’t have their deck sitting, coffee sipping morning ruined by the awful sound of 2 trash trucks running down their alley. To that end, the promise has been met.
But, illegal dumping hasn’t gone down? Huh, did anyone seriously believe it would? I know that I didn’t. The dumping that I see tends to be by renters moving out who aren’t dumping, per say, but offering free on curbside, oexcept no one wants the free on curbside stuff. It is mostly college student renters, since they move the most. Maybe the city should start requiring landlords renting to college students to have fully furnished apartments. (Strike that, let’s not give the council more ideas on how to restrict landlords).
Then there is President Brendmoen who tells is that equity demands we all pay into the system so that the elites continue to have a peaceful coffee sipping morning, er I mean she says it is so that trash remains affordable to the rest of us. She also thinks city staff and city owned trucks will do it even better.
I mean, trash was affordable back when we had less illegal dumping, back when Merriam Park residents were free to organize their neighbors around one trash hauler while the rest of us either used our skills to get cheaper prices or shared with our neighbors. Tell me again how getting the city even more involved will make it even better? Oh, yeah, they’ll probably screw us even better than the trash consortium mafia is.
Many of us tried to warn the city of St. Paul – or, at least, the parts of the city that weren’t the Merriam Park NIMBYs – “Minneapolis has had municipal trash collection paid for (and paid, and paid and payed) out of property taxes, for decades. And if you drive through Minneapolis, there is all sorts of trash illegally dumped on the street, even though trash collection is “free“”.
“ The rule of law has collapsed so badly in a city we used to proudly brag about “owning“ that crime flourishes openly and without fear in the streets“
“And if you don’t accept an invitation to come see this collapse face-to-face, it is you who is the problem!”
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