Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
“ . . . new employees are seen as crucial to ensure ample funding for the wave of retiring baby boomers . . . .”
This is the exact definition of Ponzi Scheme but the Post doesn’t seem to notice that the union’s position is absurd and in any other context, illegal.
Read the whole thing.
This is what people with half a brain are up against: people with less than half a brain.
David “Boss” Hogg, head of the Bloombergjugend, is taking a “gap year” to “work in the midterms“.
I figure that’ll be with half a point in every red District.
Republicans just don’t want to work across the aisle.
This, the Democrats say about a party that’s nominated John McCain, Mitt Romney, Dubya, Tim Pawlenty, Mike McFadden…
…well, you know the list.
But on the far left, chucking even Big Left’s current unconvincing veneer of “bipartisanship” is becoming outré:
In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.
In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.
To which their response is – let’s not compromise in any way ourselves!
The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party…California today provides a model for America as a whole. This model of politics and government is by no means perfect, but it is far ahead of the nation in coming to terms with the inexorable digital, global, sustainable transformation of our era.
You could say Cali provides a model for the rest of the country…
Wonder if Lori Sturdevant is going to give Leyden and Texeira a stern talking-to?
UPDATE: Not sure if Sturdevant’s read it, but Kurt Schlichter has.
California is a bankrupt failed state that is essentially Illinois with palm trees and better weather. Outside the coastal urban enclaves where Jack and his pals mingle, drinking kombucha and apologizing for their white privilege to their baffled servants, it’s a crowded, decaying disaster. Bums wander the streets, littering the sidewalks with human waste. Crime is rising. Illegal aliens abound, more welcome in the Golden State than actual Americans. California is an example all right, but a cautionary one.
Read both of ’em. The Second Civil War is underway. Not a shot has been fired (well, not many of them anyway) – call it the Civil Cold War if you’d like.
…reading stories of anti-gun politicians and their staffers owning the guns they desperately want to deny the little guy.
SCENE: A recording studio. Mitch BERG is recording a voice-over for a video about Minnesota politics.
BERG: Democrat activist and former candidate Lindsey Port, whose allegations of sexual harassment against Al Franken led to his political demise…
PRODUCER: (breaks in) Er, let’s cut there.
BERG: Is everything OK?
PRODUCER: Yeah – but Port didn’t actually file charges against Franken. Franken was never alleged to have harassed her.
BERG: Ah. So – do it again?
PRODUCER: Yep. Take two!
BERG: Lindsey Port, whose condemnation of Al Franken led to his resignation..
PRODUCER: Er, cut.
BERG: OK, what’s up?
PRODUCER: Port didn’t condemn Franken. She never even mentioned him.
BERG: OK, so what happened?
PRODUCER: Democrats think the fact that she talked about sexual harassment at all helped lead to Franken’s resignation.
BERG: Really?
PRODUCER: Really.
BERG: That’s just crazy.
PRODUCER: I know, right?
BERG: Minnesota Democrats, right?
PRODUCER: Yepper. Take three?
BERG: Lindsey Port was attacked by Minnesota Democrats for standing for something they claimed to believe in…
PRODUCER: Perfect. That’s a wrap.
And SCENE
SCENE Mitch BERG is checking out the savory muffins at Whole Foods when Avery LIBRELLE notices him.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Er, hey, Avery.
LIBRELLE: You’re on my home turf, here!
BERG: I certainly am. Just picking up a couple of…
LIBRELLE: Conservatives are bigots, Progressives are not…
BERG: I’m gonna stop you right there. A very Democrat DC councilman just blamed snowfall on the Jews.
LIBRELLE: Well, that’s absurd.
BERG: I know, right?
LIBRELLE: They control the organizations that practice weather control. To oppress the PLO.
BERG: Speaking of which – is it raining literal cats and dogs out there?
LIBRELLE: Huh? (LIBRELLE looks – which is just enough time for BERG to escape)
And SCENE
SCENE: Mitch BERG is grabbing a bag of Banh Mi at iPho on University Avenue when Avery LIBRELLE walks in behind him.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh… (seeks a way out, doesn’t see one) Hey. How’s things?
LIBRELLE: The ReThuglicons are going to get crushed in the mid-terms!
BERG: Do tell.
LIBRELLE: Because it looks like Conor Lamb is going to win the Pennsylvania special Congressional election.
BERG: Ah. So a former Marine and 2nd Amendment supporter who is a lot more like the type of people Democrats used to elect fifty years ago than anything east coast or metro Democrat party has nominated outside the Iron Range and West Virginia in decades, and who’d get doxxed into receivership or beaten into a coma if he tried to run for office in Minneapolis or Chicago or Manhattan, is your big bout of good news?
LIBRELLE: You’re racist.
BERG: Naturally. (Pays for his order, then notices somethingi) Er, Avery? Are you going to order something.
LIBRELLE: Oh, heavens no. I’m just taking readings on the owners’ privilege.
(and SCENE)
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails
All the polls showed Hillary winning in a walk. When she didn’t, her original claim was the Russians must have hacked into electronic voting machines to change vote totals. When that was disproved, it changed to collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign to steal Hillary’s emails and thereby persuade Americans she was a crook. When that didn’t pan out, it changed to Russian “meddling” in the election by placing Facebook ads and fake news stories to mislead voters. If the Democrats lose in the midterms, they’ll insist it wasn’t their fault, it was the Russians.
When Liberals lose, they have three arguments: we must not have gotten our message out because if we had, sensible voters would have agreed with us [see also “What’s The Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Franks – Ed.] ; we did get our message out but the voters are stupid, racist, haters bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles; or we got our message out and persuaded the voters but due to some outside force like weather or confusing ballots, we wuz robbed.
The Russian hack and Russian collusion claims are variations on We Wuz Robbed. The Russian Meddling claim is Voters Are Stupid (because they fell for fake news). Frankly, it’s all a bit insulting. I got their message, I understood it, and I rejected it because their policies are bat-s**t crazy and their candidate was an evil witch. And that’s the real problem – Liberals can’t acknowledge those as valid reasons to vote against them because doing so would mean Liberals themselves are crazy. Nope, can’t be that. Must be the Russians.
Now, about the recent fiasco in Texas, where Democrats were predicting a Blue Wave and had a record turn-out only to find Cruz had an even bigger turnout . . . which excuse will Liberals use?
Joe Doakes
Russians. If only because the shelf date on Serbs passed 15 years ago.
The “crisis” over school security (which isn’t – schools are a quarter as violent as they were 20 years ago) may be causing all sorts of problems…
…but to Patricia Torres Ray, Susan Kent and Chuck Wiger – Metrocrat senators – it’s a fundraising bonanza for DFL public sector union constituents.
Go ahead – read the bill. It’s got more pork than a Wrigley Field concession stand.
I gotta wonder – when there’s a spree killing, do DFLers hear “Cha Ching?”
Last week, after the collapse of the DFL effort (for now) to ram through a couple of gun control bills (including Rep. Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill, HF 3022), the names of several DFL legislators quietly disappeared from the “jackets” – the cover sheets that accompany the bills and list the signatures of Representatives who are “co-authoring” the bills.
We’ll come back to that.
Honesty Is For Non-Patricians!: We’ve encountered Erin Maye Quade before. Before she was an ultra-left DFLer from Apple Valley, she worked for “The Uptake”, the far-left media outlet. There, she got busted years ago for giggling about her ability to edit video footage to make people appear to say things they hadn’t .
She squeaked into office – where she’s become a fixture in the DFL’s shrill Gang of Four – along with Peggy Flanagan, Jamie Becker-Finn and Ilhan Omar. She’s also married to a “Moms Want Action” paid organizer – so her anti-gun credentials would appear to be solid.
Maybe too solid.
Last week, her name disappeared as a co-author of Slocum’s gun grab bill. When quizzed about it, she responded that her inclusion was a clerical error by House staff.
The DFL Memory Hole: Rob Doar of the MN Gun Owners Caucus went down to the Capitol to resolve the mystery. Was it clerical error?
He shot a video. And unlike the younger Maye, there was no editing involved to get the truth out:
https://youtu.be/4tXVfldIHAA
Here’s the signature (reversed from the video):
So many questions, here:
Stay tuned for more.
Erin Murphy – DFL bot rom Saitn Paul – declared that:
“Something is going to happen I don’t know if it is going to happen this legislative session,” she said. “I think Minnesotans understand the reach of the buy lobby and the NRA, I am happy to say that I have always gotten an ‘F’ from them and have never taken their money.”
The other DFL candidates for governor, state Rep. Tina Liebling, State Auditor Rebecca Otto and congressman Tim Walz, all are calling for tougher gun control measures, including limits on assault style weapons.
The next time some liberal hamster condescendingly coos “nobody’s coming for your guns”, just play them that video. Or read them House File 3022.
They are coming for your guns. It’s just not politically safe to say so (outside liberal enclaves like the Twin Cities and the WCCO newsroom) yet.
California Dems refuse to endorse…
Riven by conflict between progressive and more moderate forces at the state party’s annual convention here, delegates favored Feinstein’s progressive rival, state Senate leader Kevin de León, over Feinstein by a vote of 54 percent to 37 percent, according to results announced Sunday.
That whole “California secession” ting is looking better and better to me.
Mark my words: Any police official who refers to citizens as “sheep” (and, perforce, to police as “Sheepdogs” or “Lions”) needs to be escorted from public life, sans badge, gun, and power, with extreme prejudice.
Like Broward County sheriff Scott Israel – whose office didn’t have time to investigate nearly forty contacts with Nikolas Cruz, but has had time to act like…
…well, a Democrat pol in office:
Israel had been a Republican but ran for office as a Democrat. He was first elected sheriff in 2012, then re-elected in 2016. According to the Sun Sentinel:
The outreach workers, who mainly attend community events, are in addition to political activists and others Israel hired into community affairs roles, writing and designing printed pieces about the agency, and sharing it on social media. The employee log shows six hired into community affairs roles, their salaries totaling $388,729.
Israel’s opponents say he’s built a publicly funded political machine, paying back supporters with jobs and using them to keep him in office. They say the money could be better spent, particularly after the sheriff complained about not having enough funding to secure the county courthouse, where a murder suspect recently escaped.
Sound like the priorities in a city rhyming with “Every schmiberal city in the schmunited shmates” to anyone but me?
Oh, yeah – and this next bit?
Asked about the allegations, Israel responded, “What have I done differently than Don Shula or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Ghandi?”
He also said, “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” That’s a paraphrase of a quote from the Game of Thrones character Tywin Lannister, a villainous public administrator known for promoting his family’s interests ahead of the government’s or the people’s.
Sheep.
That’s what he thinks of citizens. Not unlike way too many cops.
It’s time for some changes in Broward County.
For 12 years, now, Tim Walz was perfectly happy to bamboozle his district by accepting the NRA’s endorsement – pretty8 much a requirement in the rural south of Minnesota.
Now – running for the DFL endorsement for governor against impeccably-Metrocrat Rebecca Otto – he’s calling for all sorts of gun controls, including gun bans.
You read it here first, two years ago:
It may look like a Nazi women’s prison camp guard re-union, but in fact it’s Rep. Walz meeting with Moms Want Action – a subsidiary of Everytown, Michael Bloomberg’s group, which outspent all pro-gun groups 17-1 in the 2016 election.
Is he after all that Bloomberg money? All those Metrocrat votes?
Who cares? All we know is, he’ll be back looking for shooter votes once the DFL convention is over.
He’s cast his lot. Will it cost him? He doesn’t seem to think so.
Paddy Coolican did a piece dissecting how the DFL’s gubernatorial nomination race may be Tim Walz’s to lose, as this point.
We’ll come back to that later.
To me, the interesting part was near the bottom, in an aside about one of the special elections last week and What It All Means to the DFL in Greater MInnesota:
Jeremy Munson won the special election in southern Minnesota last week to replace fellow Republican Tony Cornish in the state House, and he won easily, running about even with President Donald Trump’s 2016 result.
Not a huge surprise; Cornish’s district has a pretty solid reputation.
Maybe more solid than the facts warranted, at least recently, according to Coolican; Dayton and Obama ran just a couple of points behind the votes their GOP opponents – but Munson won in a snoozer, with double digit advantage.
This points up a problem for the DFL: The House GOP’s ruthless greater Minnesota messaging — DFL equals city slickers who don’t care about you or your people — continues to work.
It absolutely does. It’s not that I don’t think the “elites” in StPaul and DC dont’ get how much distrust and downright emnity there is for them out in the rural areas, as that they think they don’t need to care about what a bunch of rubes think.
Which was easily my favorite part of Trump’s election. And as we’ve been pointing out on this blog for the past year, the left doesn’t get it (and here’s hoping they don’t). There’s a current on Big Left that believes that Red America / flyover land / the square states are not only cultural, social and intellectual wastelandns, but financial drags on Blue America – freeloaders, if you will. Much of that is based on Paul Krugman’s deeply dim op-ed from about ten years ago – which compared discretionary spending in states to the amount of tax revenue states provided. Krugman – and the even dimmer lights that parrot his findings – didn’t bother to mention that
The “F” in “DFL” – “Farmer” – has been a misnomer for probably 40 years, now. It’d be great if rural Minnesota made it official this fall.
MInneapolis’ “Resilience Officer” has departed, after seven months, after submitting no work product of any kind:
[Former DFL legislatore Kate] 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.
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.
I’ve always wondered what a “Resiliehce Officer” does. Reading the job title, I assumed it covered things like network security, hardening city communications against hacking and terrorism, and coming up with plans for responding to things like natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and winning college hockey titles.
The position is designed to reflect the priorities of the administration, and in this case we’re going to be focused more narrowly on expanding access to affordable housing, and the impact that would have on our other goals, including building an inclusive economy and strengthening police-community relations,” Vlatkovich said.
In other words, a “Resilience Officer” is in charge of making the city look like it’s trying to dooooooooo something about progressive “dog whistle” issues.
Kniuth’s job was apparently funded by a grant. But Saint Paul, not to be left behind by an urban progressive fad, is jumping on the hybrid bandwagon:
While St. Paul is not one of the 100 “resilient cities,” the city has hired former Council President Russ Stark as chief resilience officer. Stark, who starts on Thursday, will be paid a salary of $105,000 through the city’s general fund. The city of St. Paul says he will “promote sustainability strategies aimed at protecting Saint Paul families from the effects of climate change.”
People on social media have commentned “That doesn’t seem all that resilient”.
They miss the point.
The resilience is in the concept – which is “to transfer taxpayer dollars to the DFL’s political class”, keeping the likes of Knuth and Stark paid and fed and involved in “progressive” politics. It’s a part of institutional life in Minnesota, and the reason most “community non-profits” exist, and the reason getting elected as a DFL pol means never having to look for work again as long as you live.
And that is resilience!
PS: Kate Knuth is the daughter of the Saint Paul school administrator at the end of this episode. Yep, “public service” runs in families, doesn’t it? )
This flyer was apparently slipped under peoples’ doors in Cedar Riverside – a Minneapolis neighborhood with a large Somali population – “an hour before the caucuses” this past Tuesday:
Give it a read.
I don’t know about you, but to me it reads like someone who wants to caricature what they think an ignorant Republican might write like (and who perhaps isn’t nearly as literate as they think they are, themselves).
And I’m trying to wrap my heads around the idea of a bunch of (clearly white) bigots running around Cedar Riverside stuffing things “under peoples’ doors”…
…according to the person who posted the offending flyer…:
…who, as luck would have it, just happens to work for a DFL-affiliated Somali community group.
Slipping under doors? Not distributed at caucus sites?
I dunno. Seems fishy to me.
UPDATE: Suffice to say, I have my questions:
Five’ll get you ten I get blocked forthwith.
UPDATE 2: And one day later, it’s in an Ilhan Omar fundraising letter? That was quick, verifying it’s not a hoax and all. .
Nothing fishy at all.
A friend of the blog writes
Can #metoo now remove her from the council for sexual misconduct, please?
I think one of the offshoots of the Franken controversy is that the DFL is now giving its own people outside the presidency a pass on sexual harassment.
But t’s Amy Brendemoen – the City Councilor last known for shutting down a successful restaurant in the city-owned Como Pavilion to give the lease to friends of hers (whose high-gloss concept restaurant closed last fall).
And she’s upset, now, about cheerleaders:
After watching the Super Bowl Sunday night, St. Paul city council member Amy Brendmoen took to Facebook to vent her annoyance at seeing bikini-clad cheerleaders rush the field with players.
“Once again, when are we going to address the cheerleading scene in pro sports?” she asked her friends and followers, intending to stir conversation.
She included an upskirt selfie of a U of M cheerleader as evidence.
Will anything happen?
It’s Chicago. Saint Paul on the Mississippi. What do you think?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The US unemployment rate is the lowest in 45 years. The US Black unemployment rate is the lowest ever. Trump has invigorated the “animal spirits” to turn around the economy. America is headed in the right direction. Therefore . . .
Obama is getting back into politics.
You didn’t think it could last, did you?
That noted political analysts Bette Miller and Chelsea “The Drearily Unfunny Comic” Handker sounded off on the Senate District 56 special election on Twitter yesterday:
The funny part? Endorsements from hothouse flower/has-been celebs really matter to Democrats.
Remember this when some DFLer sniffs down their nose about the influence of Fox News.
2013: “The IRS Scandal is just fake news!”
2018: The IRS apologizes for turning its weaponized power on the Tea Party.
Submitted without comment.
For now.
As a Republican for over 30 years, I’m sometimes guilty of succumbing to the idea that the GOP in Saint Paul and DC are “The Stupid Party”. It’s learned behavior; they’ve fulfilled the prophecy all too often.
There are times that the GOP, at least in legislative bodies, feels like the Minnesota Vikings; great in concept, but they will always let you down when the chips are down.
It’s not true, of course – but the media, and the GOP’s own tendency toward circular firing squads, doesn’t help much.
But it’s encouraging to see the Dems have that problem, sometimes, too:
The turn of events Monday marked the most serious cracks in the unity Schumer has painstakingly built within his caucus since he became Democratic leader a year ago. After holding almost all Democrats together through fights over the Supreme Court, health care, taxes and even Friday’s vote that shut down the government, Schumer is now under attack from the left and confronting pointed criticisms of his negotiating skill.
His performance resulted in a Democratic-led shutdown — and an agreement with McConnell that provided no guarantee of a new immigration law. But multiple Democratic senators and aides told POLITICO in the aftermath that it might have been Schumer’s only way out: He couldn’t go against the bulk of his left-leaning caucus in fighting for DACA recipients. But he also could not allow the shutdown to drag on for so long that it began hurting his vulnerable incumbents.
When you’ve got Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer bagging on Chuckles Schumer, you know you’ve into comedy gold.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re Matt Lauer:
The biggest name on your most popular program routinely engages in sexual assault in his office but nobody in the world’s largest news organization knows anything about it? Is everybody in management related to Sergent Shultz?
And yet the media insists I should trust them to fairly and accurately report the news because they have legions of professional investigative reporters and editors with layers and layers of fact checkers.
Joe Doakes
Funny, isn’t it?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails
60 million receiving Social Security, 120 million paying into it, a 2-to-1 ratio of workers to beneficiaries. We’ve reached the level of the Ponzi scheme pyramid where the scam becomes unsustainable.
How to save it? Maybe start by eliminating payments to non-citizens. Why not, they can’t vote you out of office and the rest of us certainly will. Side benefit – money is fungible. Every dollar we don’t send to non-citizens living in Mexico is a dollar to Build The Wall and have Mexico pay for it. Campaign promise kept!
Joe Doakes
I can hear the sputtering already.
Dogs at Los Angeles’ animal shelters may be going vegan:
The idea was proposed by Commissioner Roger Wolfson, a Hollywood screenwriter who cited research that he contended shows vegan diets “eliminate” many health problems in dogs, which are omnivores. But he said rethinking the dogs’ meals is about far more sweeping matters — the environmental effect of a meat industry that produces the main ingredients in lots of dog food and the ethics of feeding animals to animals.
“We have to embrace the fact that the raising and killing of animals for food purposes must only be done if we have absolutely no other choice,” Wolfson said at the meeting, according to a recording published on a county website. “This is about the long-term survival of every man, woman and child in this room, and all of the people in our lives.”
While “progressives” are all about “science” when it comes to smooching Bill Nye’s hindquarters or browbeating fundamentalists, it’d seem they’re swimming against the scientific current here…:
The city’s chief veterinarian, Jeremy Prupas, was not convinced. In a report to the commission, he recommended rejecting the proposal, saying that it could deprive dogs of sufficient protein, calcium and phosphorus and that it could be inadequate for injured, pregnant or lactating pups. Prupas said he’d consulted three clinical nutritionists at veterinary medical schools, one shelter medicine specialist and a veterinary toxicologist who works with a pet food company. None endorsed vegan dog diets, he testified.
Oh, yeah – and vegan dog food, not unlike vegan human food, costs four times as much as the regular stuff.
Which is all fine, if you’re just playing “government dress-up” with other peoples’ money.
Which is another way of saying “California”.
Although if it passes in LA, look for Alondra Cano to propose it in short order in Minneapolis.
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