Esme “Rabid Bulldog” Murphy, the dowager dean of Minnesota political reporters and tenacious, utterly impartial reporter on all things political in the state of Minnesota, who has never, ever been fairly or accurately accused of softballing DFLers, twote in re Rep. John “Burn Hugo Down” Thompson and allegations that he snuck out of a not-generally accessible back stairway from Minneapolis City Hall to avoid reporters who, to my amazement, seem curious about his verbal claims of racism and written but unacknowledge claims of multiple residences:

Well, that settles that.

If there’s one thing no DFL pol ever needs to worry about, it’s Esme Murphy violating their privacy. Or asking them anything more involved than their favorite flavor of ice cream.

But let’s pump the brakes – I’m all for respecting peoples’ privacy.

With that in mind, all I really want to know is, which of Thompson’s residences should I plan on not protesting at – the one on the East Side of Saint Paul, the one in Superior, some other residence not yet publicly discussed, or any or all of the above?

Thanks.

It’s almost a year and a half until the next elections. But I’m starting to think that things aren’t polling nearly as well for the Harris (or, haha, Biden, sure, whatevs) ticket as the media says.

Reason?

Because the “Christian boogeyman“ is already making headlines.

Am I the only one to whom this looks like a press release from the North Korean press office?

It’s a senior official in the Biden administration.

Am I the only person who hopes the protesters in Cuba didn’t choose the wrong Administration during which to break cover?

John “Burn It All Down“ Thompson, (DFL, HD67) got pulled over with a valid, Wisconsin license, to replace the Minnesota license that had been suspended quite sometime ago.

He’s getting dragged pretty hard in Minnesota social/political media.

I’m going to break with the crowd, And defended Thompson.

It’s true, he moved to the Twin Cities 18 years ago. And and yet he kept up his Wisconsin drivers license.

I totally get it. When I moved to the Twin Cities, and first encountered metro drivers, I wanted to keep some sort of document that proved I knew how to drive, too.

E

It’s been 12 years since we last updated “The DFL Dictionary” – the official guide to translating from “leftist” to English.

And in today’s politics, that’s a couple of eternities, pureed to a fine sheen.

Looking back at the Second Edition, last updated in 2009, it almost looks like a trip back to a more innocent time, doesn’t it? Like an archaeological artifact when it seems like the languages were just a difference in argot, rather than rapidly diverging dialects of English?

It’s high time for an update.

I’ve got my suggestions. I welcome yours in the comments.

My Proposed Additions

Cancel Culture: It doesn’t exist, and never existed. And if you suggest otherwise, a mob will come after you, your employer and your family, as a consequence for saying things that aren’t and were never true.

Gender: (Noun) A social construct that is simultaneously dispositive on Intersectional matters, and doesn’t exist.

Hate: (noun). Any political thought that isn’t covered in the Democratic platform at the appropriate level of government.

Orwell, George: A British author who, despite his decades of activism on the left, and his own admissions, really wrote 1984 and Animal Farm about Republicans. Not leftists. Nosireebob.

Privilege: A set of class entitlements that one invokes in an argument against someone else to pre-empt them doing the same with your own class entitlements.

Racism: Systemic power. Not classism – no way, no how. And it has nothing to do with hating someone for having a different ethnicity.

Woke: The acceptable substitute for critical thought.

…when using crosshairs in political messaging was an incitement to terrorism?

Either does the DFL.

I’ve observed, with tongue half-heartedly about a quarter of the way into my cheek, that you could tell there not a significant number of “white supremacists” in last year’s riots, because as the Midway burned, vandalized and/or caked with graffiti, Allianz Field, the playground of upper-middle-class white progressive Europhiles and, we were once told, immigrants, protected by not so much as a row of barberry bushes, had not so much as a squiggle of Sharpie on it.

So the notion that “white supremacists” were behind the riots seems…far-fetched.

But it’s interesting that the owners of Allianz Field and “Minnesota United” would seem to be the only people who stand to profit, maybe immensely, from the riots.

So why did the Democrats back off the whole “Election Refoirm” thing in Congress so hard?

Oh.

Fearless prediction: being able as they are to count on the fact that the typical Democrat voter thinks Samantha Bee is “news”, they’ll keep talking about “voter suppression” anyway.

As the state heads toward a mid-term election with the control of both the House and Senate, to say nothing of the Constitutional Offices, at stake, a poll shows MInnesotans are un-thrilled with government’s handling of events:

Considering opinions on Gov. Tim Walz’s approach to handling crime, the results have virtually flipped since last year in terms of approval. In June of 2020, 59% approved and 35% disapproved of the governor’s approach to crime, but in June of 2021, 55% disapproved and only 39% approved…Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they visited Minneapolis less than normal in the past year, compared to 4% who said they visited the city more frequently than in the past.

Despite this, a majority of Minnesotans do trust law enforcement to keep the city safe — far more than they trust elected leaders in the state to do the same.

Ample reasons for dissatisfaction are obvious. And some are not so much . More tomorrow in this space.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Trigger warning – clear thinking ahead.

If you’ve never thought “perhaps it’s time to just re-boot the whole thing”, you might start.

I talked about this on the show on Saturday. Climatelitigationwatch.com has evidence that progressive plutocrats with deep pockets – the Rockefeller Foundation, Michael Bloomberg – are not only pouring money into Minnesota elections (as is their First Amendment right), but apparently paying for two attorneys in Keith Ellison’s Attorney General’s office to run the office’s “climate” litigation:

New documents obtained under state open records laws
reveal important details about the expanding, and arguably
improper, deployment of law schools by or on behalf of donors
in the climate litigation industry. That latter, national effort,
which we now know is being coordinated by donors out of
New York, enlists local activist groups, faculty, and attorneys
general to bring lawsuits in state courts against traditional
“fossil fuel” energy companies, as well as others involved in
energy production and transport. As described by the plaintiffs’
lawyers and advisors, these suits have been brought to impact
public policy and to find new sources of revenue for activists
and state budgets.
Numerous schools including public universities now have
donor-funded faculty advising the tort firms and AGs. They enlist
students to assist, and they serve in the media to support the
litigation campaign, often without disclosing relationships with
the litigants or their funders. Law schools are described as a
“secret weapon”1
in the litigation campaign targeting companies.
The roster of schools assisting the donor-driven campaign
has expanded beyond elite universities, to public institutions
in jurisdictions where the national coordinator has arranged
for an allied state attorney general to target industry. Newly
obtained documents show a much broader group of faculty
quietly assisting this litigation industry.2
They also show faculty
being quietly advised and guided by activist attorneys engaged
by financiers of this campaign. This extends even to allowing
the activist attorneys — described as “the lawyers advising the
Rockefeller family fund [sic]” — to ghost co-author supposedly
academic pieces published on university letterhead, apparently
in violation of rules governing these public institutions

You’d think there’d be a law against people buying executive branch officials. And you’d probably be right.

So what are you going to do – go to the Attorney General’s office?

Minnesota’s level of corruption is creeping toward Chicago levels.

“Government is run by those who show up” – apparently with a checkbook.

This video’s been making the rounds. I’ve had at least a half dozen people refer it to me. It’s Brad Taylor, speaking last week at the Rosemount School Board, on how his education has already been given over to indoctrination:

I give speaker points: the kid is excellent.

All you folks moving to the third-tier burbs looking to escape the lunacy? The lunacy is following you. Running away ain’t gonna work. You’re going to have to stand and fight.

And a few thousand more like Mr. Taylor and his like (I’m looking at you, Kyle Kashuv, wherever yo88u are) it may be a fair fight.

As re getting him on the NARN? My people are already calling his people.

Lede: ZOMG 29% OF REPUBLICANS THINK ORANGE HITLER WILL BE “REINSTATED”.

Buried: So do 13% of Democrats.

. . . right up 38th Street:

For the second time in less than a week, Minneapolis city crews worked to reopen the area around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue to traffic and activists have returned makeshift barriers to the area.

Minneapolis city crews, at around 4:50 a.m. Tuesday, were removing items from George Floyd Square in an attempt to reopen the intersection to traffic.

Once crews were done removing items, they left the area.

Later Tuesday, a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew reported activists had returned makeshift barriers to the streets near the intersection.

Our friends in Minneapolis have turned fecklessness into an art form.

Seriously, what’s the point? Either you clear the intersection and ensure it doesn’t get blocked again, or you admit you are too weak to run your city and let the local warlords run the show. This is a stupid game. 

I got my start in radio.

My first full-time job paid $700 a month – after inflation today, probably more like $1,400. Which would translate to $8 an hour in 2021 dollars, except that in small-market radio back then, “full time” meant 48 hours a week. You had to pick up a weekend shift – meaning that in today’s dollars, I was making $6.75 an hour, for running the music playlist, reporting a bit of news, doing some baseball play-by-play, and being on the air from 8-noon and 3-6PM weekdays, plus the eight hour weekend shift.

I did it because, at the time, that’s how one got into the business. Before one could apply for the job making $20K (in 1985 dollars), which could lead you to the job in Minneapolis making $30-35, which could lead you to Chicago and $50-60 – maybe even that major-market morning guy or program director job that would get you into six figures.

Most of us, myself included, never got that far, of course. Oh, I made it to the big markets – in my case, KSTP in the ’80s, where I think my best year was $12K (1987 dollars) plus a whooooole lot of freelance voice work and news reporting. It actually went downhill from there; when I left radio in ’93, I’d been making $7 an hour and 20-25 hours a week at WDGY, as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity gutted the market for 20-something guys doing afternoon talk shows.

I moved on to other dreams.

One of which has never been to be the Political Class’s middle and senior management.

Which is the dream for an awful lot of people who go into political staff work.

Starting with a four-year degree in Political Science, they move on to internships, and then to entry-level staff jobs – with legislators, congresspeople, executive branch departments – that, like a lot of entry level white collar jobs with immense supplies of applicants and few positions (even in government), which (even in government) limits the wages.

Oh, yeah – these “kids” who are plugging away for peanuts are all betting on the long term – a senior staffer, a civil service management gig with the six figure salary and the government pension, a consultant job making the serious money, or like AOC an elected office with the boundless wealth that brings (for Democrats) – the big payoff for those who have the talent, the marketing acumen and the persistence to get there.

But even given all that? There’s no field so with so much upside that someone can’t wrench some victimology out of it:

They “help pass trillion dollar legislation” in the same way an Amazon delivery driver is “part of the world’s largest corporation”.

But just you watch – this sort of “story” doesn’t appear in a vaccuum. There’ll be a push to address the standard of living, “diversitiy” and pay of political staffers. None of it paid for by the senior staffers the “victims” want to one day become.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Richard Fernandez asks the right question.  Nobody in the Garden Administration seems to be listening. The Vegetable can’t figure out what flavor pudding to have today and The Hoe, well, she’s a ho and that’s about it.  Maybe the problem is the people running things behind the scenes are just plain evil so it isn’t that they aren’t listening, it’s that they don’t care.

Joe Doakes

Don’t care?

Or “it serves their interests?”

Do you remember Kate Knuth? When we last heard from her, she was cashing checks as a resilience officer for the city of Minneapolis. It didn’t end well:

Knuth, an environmental educator and former DFL legislator, spent her first months in the job interviewing people and conducting a survey, but had not delivered any finished work product before she resigned.

So what happened? Tell me if you can figure out what happened:

Mychal Vlatkovich, a spokesman for Mayor Jacob Frey, said they’ve begun looking for a replacement and hope to hire someone by the end of March who will focus on the mayor’s goals. He said the mayor’s office did not ask Knuth to step down, but declined to answer whether she was allowed to continue in the position and referred further questions to Knuth and former City Coordinator Spencer Cronk, who is now the city manager of Austin, Texas.

Go ask the guy who moved to Texas. We aren’t sayin’ nothin’.

As you might imagine, this unceremonious departure didn’t sit well with Knuth, who has been rent-seeking for the better part of her career. And unsurprisingly, after her tussle with the tousled mayor, she’s looking for revenge:

Frey’s contentious relationship with the city’s elected representatives, among other issues, got Knuth thinking in January about running for mayor. “Especially in the last year, especially in the last six weeks, there has been an absence” on the part of Frey, she said. “I also haven’t seen as strong of an interest in the basic running of the city that I would like to see from my mayor.”

In theory, revenge is a better motive for running than monomaniacal incoherence, which is what usually delivers the goods around City Hall. But is Knuth coherent? Let’s check out her Jack Handey imitation:

“The thing that I bring is this really strong commitment to moving through the work of structural transformative change, particularly when it comes to public safety, particularly when it comes to climate change,” she said. “Pairing that with [my] experience in, and just liking working within, big public institutions and working with them and through them to make sure they’re serving what we deserve as a city is potentially really powerful and I think something people in this city would really value.”

Dude. But there’s more. Oh my yes, there’s more:

Climate change intersects with progressive economic policies for Knuth. “I think one of the best resilience strategies we could accomplish is if every family had $500 in the bank,” she said. “Whether it’s a car breaking down or the power going out and losing some food, they’re better able to handle that. Does that sound like a climate policy? No, but if climate change increases risks in the most vulnerable [communities] now or even more vulnerable [communities in the future], decreasing vulnerability overall is super important in terms of dealing with climate change.”

That’s just super.

Will Knuth have a chance? Given the puzzle palace structure of elections in Minneapolis, it’s entirely possible. Frey has been weighed and found wanting, but the current competition has Mos Eisley Cantina written all over it, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Coming on like a amalgam of Marianne Williamson and Rachel Carson may just work. 

Value propositions:

The Ukrainian energy company that was paying President Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year cut his monthly compensation in half two months after his father ceased to be vice president.

From May 2014, Burisma Holdings Ltd. was paying Hunter $83,333 a month to sit on its board, invoices on his abandoned laptop show.

But in an email on March 19, 2017, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to sign a new director’s agreement and informed him “the only thing that was amended is the compensation rate.”

The board member’s access to the White House had been amended a bit, too, and it’s difficult to imagine Hunter’s, ahem, skill set was particularly valuable to a Ukranian energy company when his dad was a private citizen. There’s more:

Documents on the laptop also show that Hunter invited [Burisma executive Vadym] Pozharskyi to meet then-vice president Biden at a dinner in Washington DC in April, 2015.

That would be the laptop that dare not speak its name about seven months ago. While we’re not sure what was on the menu at that dinner, there were just desserts:

In December 2015, Biden flew to Kiev and strong-armed the Ukrainian government into firing its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time, including seizing four large houses and a Rolls-Royce Phantom belonging to the company’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

And there was more:

Three months later, Shokin was forced out of office, and nine months later, all legal proceedings against Burisma were dropped. Joe Biden has said in the past that Shokin wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption and that the push had nothing to do with Hunter’s position.

And the future Leader of the Free World said this:

In a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, VPBiden bragged that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees for Ukraine unless Shokin was sacked.

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” he said.

Correlation is not causation, but son of a bitch, it sure has an aroma.

The DFL put this out on social media over the weekend:

“In partnership with the USDA?”

Isn’t there some kind of rule against using taxpayer money (or things bought with taxpayer money) to directly benefit a political party?

I mean, they put this event at their headquarters – down an obscure little side road along the river, far from where most of the hungry people are – for a reason, right?

It was interesting, a few years back, watching the retrospectives of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Here’s a sjhort one:

It’s as fun to watch now as it was otherworldly and unbelievable back then: after decades of complete control, a government official’s inadvertent slip causes and uproar; another official’s resigned ad-libbed decision opens a single gate; from there, the entire Eastern Bloc, the Communist world that all the experts reminded us was here “forever”” disappeared inside a couple years.

I thought about that last week, as CDC director Rochelle Walensky abruptly changed course on masks. One week after President Harris was “inadvertently” photographed trying to french-kiss her husband through paper masks on an airport tarmac in front of a random mob of press cameras, one week after “President” Biden did a press conference wearing a mask standing 20 feet from other people, the CDC flipped.

And people started ditching the masks. Major retailers jumped off the Karen Train, joining vast swathes of the country that have changed course, to protecting the vulnerable.

And just like that night at the Bornholmer Straße gate over the Berlin Wall, many – but not all – people ditched the masks. Roughly 10% of the entire population of East Germany roamed the streets of West Berlin, at one point that glorious night, tasting and smelling and buying freedom.

The Communists spent a few years trying to put that genie back in the bottle, and failed. Their distant cousins here are trying to do the same thing.

Promptly, Big Karen – a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Left – leapt into action.

Some cities, and other subsidiaries of Big Left, clung to the ban. Given that the ongoing mask mandate had nothing to do with science – the CDC said so – the only logical conclusion is that “Masking Up” is a statement of faith, almost a religious exercise in self-abasement and rule following.

And Big Left, being the Curia of this particular church, is all about keeping people following rules.

And that explains a lot about Karen, whoever he or she is; they seem to be people whose connection to logic, fact, even “science”, involves logrolling others into following the rules they’ve mastered. It’s the ugly side of the Scandinavian culture to which so much of Minnesota traces its roots – the flip side of close-knit communitarianism is passive-aggressive rule-lawyering.

And that passive-aggression seems to have worked. A casual count of people at newly-mask-free Target in Shoreview yesterday showed about 80% of customers, and probably more among employees, still wearing masks. We know that at least half of those people, likely more, are vaccinated, so the exercise is more or less pointless.

It’s been 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell. There are still people who pine for the days when the Stasi and ZOMO kept things nice and tidy and in order.

And watching some of the urban social media groups, plenty of little Karens are already feeling pretty bereft.

Remenber the old japes about both Presidents Bush, and for that matter Trump, were utterly safe from threat of assassination, because their various Vice Presidents, Quayle and Cheney and Pence, were “even worse?”

Given Vice President Harris’s performance so far, I’d call that a retroactive case of Berg’s Law.

Power Line on the little veep who just can’t:

Harris caught a major career break when Joe Biden more or less committed to having a black woman as his running mate, leaving Harris as the obvious choice, but she didn’t seem to take much advantage of it. With the elderly, frail Biden making few campaign appearances, one might have thought that Harris would be more visible on the campaign trail. Then again, maybe the Democrats didn’t want her to expose the hollowness of Biden’s excuses for staying out of sight. In any event, her vice-presidential run seems to have done little or nothing to enhance Harris’s standing with the electorate.

Now, a YouGov poll finds Harris under water, with 41% viewing her favorably and 48% unfavorably. The Washington Examiner points out that this negative perception contrasts strongly with other recent vice presidents. Dick Cheney, Mike Pence and Joe Biden himself, in 2009, all polled quite a bit better at a similar stage.

Harris has never shown much skill or appeal as a politician. Her path to the top in California, essentially a one-party state at this point, was paved by her illicit relationship with Willie Brown. I am not sure what it is about Harris that repels voters, but it should scare the Democrats. 

The current theory is that Biden will hold on until at least mid-terms,, so that Harris can run on her own twice.

Barring massive fraud and retroactive doctoring of her record, I think she’s a one-and-done, whenever Biden shuffles off.

I’ll just leave those qualifications hanging htere.

They never would be missed:

Vice President Kamala Harris keeps a list of reporters and other political types who might be racist, according to a profile published in the Atlantic on Monday.

“The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere. “And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience.”

In important ways, the less said about Harris’s life experiences, the better. But while most may not consider her an old school politician, her little list is straight outta 1885:

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!

List keeping is kind of a thing for our current leadership and their mentors. Consider this exchange from a previous administration:

“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother,” Obama told [Oregon Congressman] DeFazio during a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, according to members afterward.

I don’t doubt it for a second. Nor should you.

For someone who we were told was a “compromise” candidate that was “too far to the center” for our left, it sure seems “progressives” have warmed up to Biden, doesn’t it?

Weird.

Every desktop should have a link to The Devil’s Dictionary, the masterwork of Ambrose Bierce, who had his primary success in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. Bierce’s cynical lexicography still rings true, a full century after he wandered into Mexico to meet his Maker circa 1914. To use one example, Bierce defines “adherent” as follows:

ADHERENT, n. A follower who has not yet obtained all that he expects to get.

All politicians are on the lookout for adherents, especially a guy like Gavin Newsom, the upmarket Jacob Frey who is (a) governor of California and (b) facing a recall. Newsom is a man in a hurry, so he’s looking to get some adherents in bulk:

Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a second round of $600 state stimulus checks on Monday to hasten California’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, hoping to expand the payments from low-income residents to also include middle-class families, and noting that doing so would ensure benefits for 2 out of 3 state residents.

The proposal to deliver $8 billion in new cash payments to millions of Californians is part of a $100-billion economic stimulus plan made possible in part by a budget that has swelled with a significant windfall of tax revenues, a surplus the governor put at $75.7 billion.

You might wonder where the money came from, but never mind that, because ol’ Gavin’s not done — he’s also rent seeking, er, offering rent assistance: 

Newsom also proposed $5 billion to double rental assistance to get 100% of back rent paid for those who have fallen behind, along with as much as $2 billion in direct payments to pay down utility bills, proposals that were supported by legislative leaders on Monday.

This is hilariously corrupt but hey, who doesn’t love a stimmy? And since California is famously a one-party state, no one is gonna stop Newsom from buying his way out of a recall. Recall elections in Minnesota are essentially impossible, so Tim Walz doesn’t need to do this sort of thing, but there’s little doubt he’d pull the same stunt were it required. I think it’s safe to assume all Dem officeholders who find themselves in trouble will make it rain next year.  

I’ve got a lot of Catholic friends who are also conservatives.

I keep asking them – “when is your bureaucracy going to start enforcing the church’s supposed beliefs, like publicly supporting the right to life, or at least not being pro-infanticide, on “Catholic” politicians?

“We will. We will”.

But they don’t. Never.

But is the specter of Joe Biden, a publicly practicing Catholic, being called “the most faithful President in recent history” (by a chattering class that generally regards Christianity as a den of know-nothjing ignorance) and a representative face for Christianity and Catholicism in public, finally goading the Bishops into action?

Maybe, but don’t bet your mortgage payment on it:

But we now hear from a few murmuring bishops that the Church must address Biden’s unworthy reception of Communion. “US Catholic bishops may press Biden to stop taking Communion,” reads a recent AP headline. Nothing concrete, however, is likely to come from these complaints. The U.S. bishops, as a whole, lack the will to withhold Communion from Biden, even though canon law says that they not only have the right but the duty to do so. Canon 915 “obliges the minister of Holy Communion to refuse the Sacrament” to those in “manifest grave sin.” If Biden’s direct facilitation of the killing of unborn children doesn’t fall into that category, what does?

Not being Catholic, I’m not hip to the vagaries of intra-curial politics, but the American bishops strike this Orthodox Presbyterian as not a whole lot more concerned about such things than the ELCA.