John Stossel has a column up called “Free Stuff,” where he adds up the cost of Democrat presidential candidates’promises. They run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and he points out that the nation could ever afford to tax everybody enough to pay for it.
Except that’s not the plan. Democrats like AOC honestly believe money is obsolete. The government doesn’t have to print paper bills, ship them to warehouses, stuff them into ATMs and distribute them to the poor. Instead, government simply makes an electronic entry in the computer, which is electronically loaded to your EBT card, or electronically credited to your bank account, and suddenly, everyone has money.
There’s no need to balance a budget, it’s all electrons and electrons are free.
It’s like having a credit card with no limit and they never send you the bill.Why wouldn’t you spend as much as you could, buying everything you can imagine? What’s the downside?
Joe Doakes

When Margaret Thatcher said that the problem with progressivism is that you always run out of other peoples’ money, the unspoken corollary was that they never believe they’ll run out of other peoples money…

MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch says Democrats should spare no effort to “put Trump in jail”.

Zzzzzzzzzz. That’s not “dog bites man”. That’s not even “dog licks dog”.

The iinteresting thing here is Deutsch’s…er, permissive and selective self-image. Emphasis added:

Deutsch … implored Democrats to use “fear” to campaign against Trump to paint a picture of a “dystopian society” that will follow a Trump second term.

“The one tool we have to use that the Democrats never use is fear,” Deutsch said on ‘Morning Joe’ Friday. “Start to stop talking about Donald Trump today and yesterday and start to paint a picture of what the next four years would look like. Maybe even the next 8, 12 years because he doesn’t think he’s going anywhere of the possible path to a dystopian society. There is no more playing. We cannot bring a knife fight to a bazooka gunfight.”

Democrats “never use fear”.

Other than

• climate change (or at least the parts they claim will require bigger, richer government to “fix”
• Gun violence (it’s dropping, not rising)
• White guys (we’re in year 11 of Democrats assuring us that there’s a wave of “white nationalist violence” around the corner. Any day now. Honest.
• Racism
• Sexism
• Homophobic violence
• Women being turned into robots, a la Handmaid’s Tale

I’d hate to see what it’s like when they do start appealing to fear…

As crime plummets in the rest of Minnesota, violence creeps ahead in the Metro – most of it using mundane, stolen conventional handguns.

And suicides claim 80% of the gun deaths in Minnesota – mostly unfashionable older guys with depression and frequently terminal illnesses. And with suicide, magazine size is utterly irrelevant.

But Keith Ellison – former Congressman and current Attorney General with, one suspects, aspirations to the office of Governor of Minnesota, has filed an amicus brief in a state case seeking to limit magazine sizes.

Of course. limiting magazine sizes has no effect on violent crime – not even mass shootings. Especially not street crime or suicide.

But that’s how he’s wasting his time and your dollars.

You need to help fix that.

Go here and email his office; there’s an email form (please rewrite the boilerplate message to suit). You can also call – leave a polite but firm message.

We need to blow his inbox and switchboard to shreds with belt-fed reason and indignation.

…is to be anywhere off the mainstream. To say nothing of getting arrested.

of getting arrested.

“Danielle Stella”, of whom nearly nobody in the Fifth CD GOP has ever heard, and who has absolutely no chance of getting the nomination to run against, much less beat, Ilhan Omar, is making all sorts of international headlines:

A pro-Trump Republican candidate for Congress who is aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar in Minnesota has been charged with a felony after allegedly stealing from stores.
Danielle Stella was arrested twice this year in Minneapolis suburbs over allegations that she shoplifted items worth more than $2,300 from a Target and goods valued at $40 from a grocery store. She said she denied the allegations

And with that, Danielle Stella’s miscreancy just got more publicity than all of Ilhan Omar’s allegations have gotten in the Strib’s.

I’ve been saying that the Democrat nomination – and most Democrat elections – will go to whichever candidate dishes the hopey-changey with the most enthusiasm, from the most intesectionally-correct platform.

And events seem to be bearing me out on that.

But it brings to mind something I’ve been joking about for a while. When it comes to progressive politics, yesterday’s jokes are today’s slogans and tomorrow’s campaign promises.

It’s on the brink of becoming Berg’s 21st Law.

Watching Maureen Dowd fret over the catfight between Gramma Nan and Tide Pod Evita is…

…well, deliciously life-affirming:

Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.
“What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.
“We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
In the age of Trump, there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy Pelosi is the problem. If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity.

On, Nan and Evita – I hate it when you fight.

No. Wait. I love it when you fight. My bad.

This is why we need universal background checks. Because only federal law enforcement officials can be trusted to scrupulously follow the law at all times, keeping the rest of us safe from criminals who would buy illegal firearms over the internet.

Joe Doakes

Don’t question the king or his knights.

SCENE: It’s the “Morgue” at the Star-Tribune’s “Morgue” – a room full of file cabinets, deep underground, where no light has penetrated since the Kennedy administration.

The door opens, and the MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY, wherein mismanagement under two DFL administrations led to hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, including credible allegations of welfare money being transferred to terrorists – is tossed into the room, which is crowded with other news stories.

ILHAN OMAR’S APPARENTLY FRAUDULENT-MARRIAGE STORY: Hello.

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: Hi. Where am I?

WELL-CONNECTED DEMOCRAT KIDS GET OFF WITH A WARNING FOR MASS AGGRAVATED ASSAULT AND HATE CRIMES AGAINST REPUBLICANS STORY: This is the Star-Tribune’s “morgue” file.

STEVE SIMON IS STONEWALLING THREE COURT ORDERS DEMANDING HE RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT VOTING IRREGULARITIES STORY: It’s where news stories that the DFL establishment doesn’t want covered go to…

KEITH ELLISON’S HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM STORY: …for a nice long break.

(The other stories chuckle)

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: So when do we get out of here?

(The question is met with a few guffaws)

ILHAN OMAR’S ANTISEMITISM STORY: When the Strib reports about Minnesota having “paradoxically” liberal gun laws and the lowest crime rate in the nation for a state with a major metro area in it.

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: So – a long time?

KEITH ELLISON’S HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM STORY: You have no idea.

(And SCENE)

If I walked into your store with a sawed-off shotgun, demanded you hand over all your money, turned to leave with the loot, slipped on a banana peel, and cracked my head open, gushing blood all over the floor and rating a trip to the ER, would the local newspaper say I’d “donated blood” and “brought extra income to the local hospital?”

Only if I were a “progressive” who was the vessel of all the area’s media and Big Left felt about themselves.

At the end of a dismal midterm broadcast last November, I wrapped up the show by observing that the one thing in which conservatives and other Real Americans could take comfort was the inevitability of Democrat overreach. They would take the normal first-term mid-term surge as a mandate to go crazy.

Progressive gonna progressive, in other words.

As Peggy Noonan notes, all is going exactly as foretold – and among the symptoms are Minneapolis’ own Ilhan Omar. I’ve added a bit of emphasis here and there:

The more serious Democratic Party problem with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Omar is not that their great talent seems to be for political manipulation, or that they constantly set fires, portray the universe as consisting of angels and demons, and put people off with their arrogance while exciting them with their ferocity—though all these things are true.
It is that in doing these dramatic things, and amplifying them through their impressive social-media skills, or compulsions, they have fully broken through and made their mark. In their fame and celebrity they altered the face and feel of the party into something that appears more radical, more hissing and accusatory, more hard-left.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s success last June scared fellow Democrats across the country into thinking she is the future, that they must get aboard and get with her program, which many of the party’s presidential nominees have. She has very effectively changed the ideologicalshape of the Democratic Party with her de facto open-borders policy and other extremisms.
Mature liberals and moderates know this will come back to bite them.
She does this from a completely safe district. She can’t be primaried from the left. She feels a job security no Democratic moderate can feel. Nancy Pelosi said a glass of water could be elected in her district if it were a Democrat, and it’s true.
For all these reasons Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been destructive to her party’s chances in 2020. She is a one woman Committee to Re-Elect the President.

As embarassing and toxic as Ilhan Omar is, she is a gift that will keep giving to conservatives for …

…well, being in the Fifth CD, for as long as she wants.

Democrat candidates for President are in a bidding war for votes. Free college, home ownership for blacks, Medicare for everybody, the new green deal, universal basic income, slavery reparations… trillions of dollars and they haven’t even got to the good stuff yet.
Not one candidate has offered me bread and circuses, the traditional bribe for ignorant voters. To hell with them, I’m sticking with Republicans.
Joe Doakes.

Democrats gonna democrat.

I’m picturing DFL Representative John Lesch – he of the Capone suits and the junior-high demeanor – apparently believes that “legislative privilege” immunizes one from being a ghastly little entitled jagoff.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals, to my boundless amazement, disagrees:

State Rep. John Lesch is not protected by “legislative immunity” in a defamation case brought against him by St. Paul city attorney Lyndsey Olson, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Monday.
The decision allows Olson’s case to proceed.
Olson sued Lesch last year after he sent a letter to incoming St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter criticizing her work history and judgment, saying she has a “track record of integrity questions and management problems.”

If you’re a commoner and you make statement of fact about someone that are false, that can damage their reputation and living, and are done with malicious disregard for fact, it’s actionable.

Lesch apparnetly believes that being an elected DFLer in a one-party city confers divine right.

To be fair, there’s not much about any urban DFLers experience that would teach ’em otherwise, under normal circumstances.

So maybe, just maybe, Lesch’s arrogance and stupidity went outside the norm?

Lesch, a Democrat who represents part of St. Paul, has sought to dismiss the suit, arguing in part that he has legislative immunity. He will file a petition in the next month with the Minnesota Supreme Court, his attorney Marshall Tanick said.
“The Appellate Court construed the legislative immunity of legislators extremely narrowly, and we think that it’s more proper to take a broader view of what legislators do,” Tanick said.
He said he hopes the Supreme Court decides to take up the case to provide “clarification and guidance” on legislative immunity.

If the SCOM rules that “legislative immunity” protects any (DFL) pol’s statement, anywhere, for any reason, no matter what the context, then it is time for someone to take a can of Raid to the whole enterprise.

On the one hand, Ilove it when two of the darlings of Big Left start eating each other.

As the fairly inexcusable and heinous Piers Morgan did in a sociall-media jape so colossally tone-deaf that I suspect it might have been a paid communication on Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez’s behalf.

Morgan, commenting about Tide Pod Evita’s previous job:

“Could be worse … Ivanka could have been a bar-tender 18 months ago [sic],” Morgan wrote on Twitter.
Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender and as a waitress at a restaurant in Union Square before she defeated Joe Crowley in the June 2018 Democratic primary race to become the youngest congresswoman in United Stateshistory.
The 29-year-old responded to Morgan’s gibe with a tweet of her own, writing: “Actually, that would make government better – not worse.
“Imagine if more people in power spent years of their lives actually working for a living,” she continued.

She’s not completely wrong – our Federal government would be a much better thing with more Mr.and Mrs. Smiths, and fewer Guys and Glans In Dark Grey Suits.

Of course, that’s predicated on the Mr. and Mrs. Smiths not being a bunch of pollyannaish neo-socialist stooges. To wit:

“We’d probably have healthcare and living wages by now.”

So maybe she’s not the “regular guy / gal” we need, here.

I’ll admit it. I’ve never much cared for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Even when I was much younger, the idea of pledging allegiance to a government skeeved me out. Governments should get the loyalty they deserve.

Starting in my teens, when I was for any reason involved in saying the Pledge, I’d hold a clenched fist over my heart, by way of saying my allegiance had best not be betrayed – because my real allegiance is to freedom, to government of by and for a free association of equals, ruling by consent of the ruled – to the ideals, not the bureaucracy headquartered in DC with branches close to wherever you live.

But the Saint Louis Park City Council, having solved all the west-suburban town’s other problems, has voted unanimously to stop reciting the Pledge before City Council meetings.

And I’m not impressed with the rationale:

“In order to create a more welcoming environment to a diverse community, we are going to forgo saying the Pledge of Allegiance before every meeting,” said Council Member Tim Brausen. At the meeting, Brausen said members might recite it in the future if there’s an appropriate opportunity, like if Boy Scouts are there.  

Any parts of that “diverse community” that are uncomfortable with the fact that this is America should perhaps re-evaluate why they’re here. Stat.

To: Sen Klobuchar
cc: the entire Minnesota DFL party
From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re: Impeachment Now!

All,

What Senator Klobuchar said.

You owe it to progressivism, to the children, and to all the hopey changey to start working on impeachment now, to make it your only priority, and to spend your every waking moment between now and November 2020 working for it with your every waking breath, and some of the sleeping ones.

Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar says she would support impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump “beginning now.”
The Minnesota senator’s comment to CNN Friday followed Trump’s statement this week that he’d take information from a foreign power that offered dirt on an opponent.

Accept nothing less than impeachment!

NOW!

The Ghost of Paul Wellstone will cry if you waste any time or effort on lesser causes!

A refugee who wants to come to the United States can apply and wait for approval.  May take years.  Meanwhile, you sit in the refugee camp overseas.
A person who sneaks into the United States can apply for asylum.  Your approval also may take years.  But meanwhile, you’re released into the United States and given a work permit and relocation benefits. 
A person who sneaks into the United States and claims to be an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum, gets all of that plus extra cash and benefits. 
A person who sneaks into the United States and claims to be an unaccompanied minor trans-gender seeking asylum, gets all of that plus extra cash and benefits and now might receive even better preferential treatment.
No documentation is required for any of this stuff.  In fact, if you have it, it can be used against you.  So nobody has any papers when they arrive, the entire system is based on verbal claims.
Now I ax ya . . . if you wanted to get into the United States plus maximize your benefits, what story would you tell?   

The story that was given to you by those who want your vote in exchange, that’s who.

If it could be said the MInnesota DFL party has three intellectual standardbearers – the people who define the full depth and breadth of today’s DFL’s worldview, belief structure and moral parameters – they’d be Minneapolis Congressoman Ilhan Omar, Minneapolis city councilwoman Alondra Cano, and William “Robespierre” Davis.

You might recall Mr. Davis from before the 2018 elections, when he “joked” about hauling Republicans “to the guillotines”, the sort of thing that would have gotten a Republican staffer fired and exiled, but seems to have only cemented Davis’ reputation as a (ahem) thought leader.

And you know what they say – thought leaders’ gonna lead thoughts:

“Ope, sorry about that cruise missile” https://t.co/f1TuT8jNuE

— William Davis (@WilhelmDavis) June 15, 2019

“Ope, sorry about that cruise missile” https://t.co/f1TuT8jNuE

— William Davis (@WilhelmDavis) June 15, 2019

“Murder boats”.

Got that, veterans? Forget Tim Walz’s hopey-changey; this is what the Minnesota DFL actually thinks about you.

Vote accordingly.

By the way – I think it’s fascinating how every time an elected DFLer is in a self-inflicted jam, some DFL staffer says something dissociative and inflammatory.

This hit twitter yesterday; Ilhan Omar’s spin doctor, Ben Goldfarb, caught in the emailed act of trying to fix media and pundit coverage of the perennially-scabrous Ilhan Omar:

My God. Props to @bloisolson for sharing.

From @IlhanMN’s crisis manager Ben Goldfarb:

“Does anyone in the team have a relationship with Blois? Someone should probably reach out to talk off the record and shut it down with him AS WE DO WITH THE STRIB” [emphasis added]

THREAD pic.twitter.com/cFx49KxZCm

— Nick Solheim (@NickSSolheim) June 13, 2019

“Someone should probably reach out to talk off the record and shut it down with him as we do with the Strib“.

Not that this is a mystery to anyone, but it’s still a little jarring to see it in black and white from one of the co-conspirators.

The downside, of course – if the DFL does in fact primary Omar, and manages to replace her (doubtful), they’ll only come up with someone worse.

Maybe it’s just me – but I think I sense some backing away going on.

I’m referring to the faint air of “we got dragged into this” in Melissa Hortman’s op-ed about the just-ended legislative session in the Strib.

Remember – in 2018, the DFL wrapped itself around gun control, claiming that the issue flipped the metro, and that “90% of Minnesotans” supported their agenda of Universal Registration and Red Flag Confiscation.

Fast forward to April and May, when Ryan “Uncle Tom” Winkler’s DFL majority didn’t have the votes to bring either to the floor as stand-alone measures – which, if Minnesota were behind the measures by a ratio of 9:1, would be kind of unthinkable.

Fast forward still more, to paragraph 10 of her op-ed – the very last graf about policies discussed during the session, the one before the closing, the graf about the measures that supposedly swept the DFL into power last year.

Smell the distancing:

Beyond our core values of education, health care and economic security, Minnesotans have called on legislators to make communities safer by addressing the epidemic of gun violence. Republicans have said “no” to common-sense gun violence prevention measures that have become law in Republican-led states — criminal background checks for all gun sales and red-flag laws to prevent people who have indicated an intent to cause harm from possessing firearms until the danger has passed. These measures would save lives. DFLers will continue efforts to enact these provisions into law.

Catch that? “Minnesotans called…”. “Republicans said no”.

As if Hortman is saying “don’t look at us! MInnesotans asked for it, and the GOP said no! We are just simple vessels of others’ will!”. Of course, they get so much money from Michael Bloomberg that they have to keep making with the hopey-changey.

But – and it could be just me – it doesn’t sound like her heart is in it.

One could almost say you can detect the faint aroma of that albatross around their neck starting to go bad.

…in his entire career, ever, that Joe Biden hasn’t lied about?

Former President Obama continues his life’s worth – sliming the United States at home and abroad. This time, it’s in Brazil:

Barack Obama told an audience in Brazil that “our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense” and claimed machine guns could be bought legally online.
The former president, 57, said the most difficult day of his eight years in the White House was after the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., when 20 elementary students and six staff were shot dead.
“And my daughters were only a little bit older than these young children that have been shot, and I had to go and comfort the parents. And some of you may be aware our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon any time,” Obama said to an applause.

So Obama is lying about guns.

Unexpectedly.

Of course, in Brazil – which until recently had a strict ban on civilian gun ownership – violent crime, especially with guns, is vastly higher than in the US; Brazil suffered 64,000 homicides in 2017, 45,000 of them with firearms. That gives “gun free” Brazil a homicide rate roughly 12 times that of the United States – dwarfing even Democrat-run American cities like Obama’s Chicago.

Given his record, and the record of his pet policy, it’s probably not a surprise he’s lying.

What we did to you wasn’t “spying.”
“Spying” is when you do it to us.
Joe Doakes

It’s a fascinating piece – and a look into the painstaking training lawyers get in the art of obfuscation.

Rep. John Lesch wrote this on Facebook yesterday, in response to a post about Shoreview DFL gun-grabber rep Kelly Moller:

“Child Murder Apologists”. And he’s not referring to his own, Stepford-Eunuchs-like support of Planned Parenthood, here.

He’s talking about you, Ms. and Mr. Law-Abiding Gun Owner.

It’d be a mistake to call this another oe of the gaffes for which Rep. Lesch is famous. This is the mindset of today’s DFL – that you, the law-abiding citizen, are rooting for spree killers. Lesch only let his guard down.

Never, ever forget – they want the 2nd Amendment. And that’s just an appetizer.

It’s depressing that anybody would fall for such an obvious diversion. Trump was a rich man during the entire Obama administration, whose IRS was famous for auditing people Democrats didn’t like.  The holdover liberals who make up the Deep State have no problem leaking damaging information.  If Trump had any possible secrets in his tax returns, they would have been leaked and investigated long ago.
Democrats know that, they know there’s nothing to find, they don’t care. They simply want Trump to deny the demand so they can complain that he’s obstructing justice, which diverts attention away from the Attorney General’s investigation into Hillary colluding with the Russians to influence the 2016 Presidential election.
But you know Minneapolis liberals will swallow it, hook line & sinker.  Depressing
Joe Doakes

They’re holding on to the idea that there’s “something” out there like an eight-year-old holding onto Santa.

I’m old enough to remember when the American political and media establishment wracked itself into knots over the fact that the executive branch had been using the CIA and Hoover’s FBI to spy on domestic political opposition.

Among my earliest memories of politics and news – after Watergate, naturally – were the Church Commission hearings, which clamped down on the use of intelligence and law enforcement for domestic shenanigans.

For a while, anyway.

Seems like everything old is new again:

Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign.

In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan Halper was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Trump campaign, the Times story details how a woman was sent overseas under a fake name and occupation to oversee the spy operation. The woman’s real name is not mentioned in the article, though the Times says she went by “Azra Turk” and has a relationship with an unidentified federal intelligence agency.