The Twin Cities Social Justice militia has been carping about Henco sheriff Rich Stanek “sending” Henco deputies to help North Dakota law enforcement deal with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

This, partially at the behest of Governor Lieutenant Governor Tina Flint-Smith, who has been using her position to flog the issue on Facebook:

I do not support Sheriff Stanek’s decision to send his deputies to North Dakota, nor did we approve his decision to begin with. I do not have any control over the Sheriff’s actions, which I think were wrong, and I believe he should being his deputies home, if he hasn’t already. I strongly support the rights of all people to peacefully protest, including, tonight, the Standing Rock protest.

Of course, the Governor Lieutenant Governor and former state chair of Infanticide R Us is lying:

In a blistering letter of his own, Sheriff Stanek schooled the legislators on how the mobilization materialized when state homeland security officials responded to an urgent request from North Dakota.

The Governor’s Office and the State of Minnesota authorized the mission, signed the contract, secured the reimbursement agreement and approved the plan two days before deputies departed for North Dakota.

The request came in under the Emergency Management Assistant Compact (EMAC) system adopted in all 50 states to make sure essential personnel and resources are made available for any catastrophe that occurs anywhere in the country.

The Governor’s office – Tina Flint-Smith and her audioanimatronic puppet Mark Dayton – are playing both sides of this issue for political gain.

Oh,  relax. It’s just a photo meme.

Or… Is it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hillary ran a private email server and deleted emails.  She has variously tried to claim that everybody does it, that Colin Powell said it was okay, that nobody ever told her it was wrong.  Newsweek chimed in with: Bush Did it Too! 

 So that makes it okay?  No – wrong is wrong, no matter how many other people did it.  Whining that He Did It Too is the old False Moral Equivalence defense.  Most people quit using it after Third Grade.

 Raising that defense is worse than childish, it’s incriminating.  Hillary left the White House to join the Senate in 2001.  She was a member of Congress while they were investigating the Bush Administration’s use of email.  That means she knew damned well the private server was a problem, but she went right ahead and did it anyway.

 I always knew the mainstream media was biased but it has dropped all pretense of objectivity in its desperate struggle to drag Hillary across the finish line.  Hillary won’t be the only loser in this election.

 Joe Doakes

With all due respect to my friends and acquaintances and former colleagues in the media (whom I hope land on their feet, pinky swear), one can only hope so.

SCENE:    At the garden center.  Mitch BERG is taking advantage of late-season blowouts when Avery LIBRELLE, carrying a lawn flamingo, steps around the corner, catching BERG by surprise. 

LIBRELLE:  Merg!  You keep claiming there’s vote fraud.  And yet there is not.  There never has been and there never will be.

BERG:  Well, the evidence in  California and Chicago and Philadelphia and Maryland and Florida and a key and very swingy district in Virginia and Mississippi and of course right here in Minnesota says you’re wrong.

LIBRELLE:  But the Brennan Center said there is no voter fraud!

BERG:  Leaving aside the fact that the Brennan Center is pretty much devoted to undermining self-government and making society safe for our “elite” better to govern as they see fit, their “sources” were pretty much all election authorities confirming that nothing is wrong, nosirreebob.  In most states where the fraud happens, it’s almost impossible to convict anyone for even the most bald-faced vote fraud.

LIBRELLE:  But there’s more evidence!

BERG:  Aaaand what’s that?

LIBRELLE:  You’re racist.  Hah!

(LIBRELLE turns and runs for the door)

BERG:  Clearly.

(And SCENE)

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Oooh, look there; an article about vote fraud.  Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section.

Unless, of course, you are one of the commenters who’s made a habit of leaving extremely long, usually off-topic, usually condescending comments, purporting to “fact-check” my content, but usually proving only that you’re a terrible researcher with no command of logic:

You’ll need to respond in depth to this question in a previous thread.  And respond to the responses.  And then I will start letting your comments out of moderation.  And only then.  Your call.  No skin off my teeth).

When you’re a conservative/Republican in Saint Paul, you get used to having your campaign lawn signs stolen or vandalized.

“It’s just kids”, the local DFLers say – but then you notice your neighbors’ Obama and Hillary and Betty McCollum and, probably as late as 2010, Wellstone signs are utterly unmolested.

And ideas – dreams, really – form in your head.  Dreams that are probably illegal.  Given that it’s Saint Paul, they’re likely illegal to dream.

In Michigan, a woman got tired of tolerant liberals driving on her lawn to knock over her Trump signs.  So she took direct action.

And boy, did it pay off:

She put a homemade spike strip under one of her signs.

One tolerant liberal wrote a check she couldn’t cash; after blowing out a tire, she couldn’t actually change the tire.  She had to call for help.

Giving me idea?  Oh, heck yeah.

To: James Comey, Director, FBI
From: Mitch Berg, Concerned Citizen
Re:  Re-opened Email Investigation

Director Comey,

Just a reminder; drapes don’t have shoes.

That is all.

Preya Samsundar continues to beat the stuffing out of the Twin Cities institutional media in reporting on Minneapolis DFL legislative candidate Ilhan Omar’s fuzzy marital history.

Only this time, she may have done it with the unwitting help of the City Pages’ DFLer-with-byline Cory Zurowski:

Whether or not Mr. Zurowski realizes it, he has shed new light into the Omar case. The story, which was originally published on Wednesday, October 26, Mr. Zurowski wrote that Ilhan Omar’s father is named “Nur Said Elmi Mohamed”. A day later, Zurowski’s article was changed and now Omar’s father’s name appears in the article as “Nur Omar Mohamed”.

Read the whole thing.

And then ask yourselves why nobody in the Twin Cities media is covering this story.

To use a Glenn Reynolds line, it helps if you think of reporters as Democrat operatives with bylines.  Who, in this case, don’t want to be barred from the Saint Paul Grill.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We base public policy on data.  But what if the data are wrong?  The computer science law GIGO predicts the result will not meet expectations.

 What if the data are intentionally altered to provide seeming justification for political programs?

 Joe Doakes

“What if”, Joe?

You know better than that.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Democrats claimed Hillary’s emails were not classified when sent, they were retroactively changed from unclassified to classified to make Hillary look bad.

 That always seemed a bit odd to me.  Why would the Democrat administration be trying to harm the Democrat candidate? 

 Now, it turns out the opposite was true – the Democrat administration pressured the FBI to un-classify emails that already were classified, trying to make Hillary look good.

 More confirmation of the wisdom of Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection.

 Joe Doakes

It never fails.

Never.

GOP office in heavily-Democrat suburban Durham, North Carolina was firebombed over the weekend…

…and sprayed with crude, threatening graffiti.

Hillary Clinton and NC state Democrats condemned the attack – and the police currently have no suspects (although if anyone wants to take the bet that they were Democrats, most likely college-age, feel free to write the check in advance).

The incident rated only the most cursory coverage in the national media, if any.

Is anyone as shocked as I am?

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking into the Russian Tea House on University Avenue for some piroshki and borscht.  As he walks up the steps, Avery LIBRELLE is walking out.  BERG can’t avoid LIBRELLE; the meeting is inevitable.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Er…hey, Avery.   Didn’t know you liked Russian food.

LIBRELLE:   I don’t.  I was just going door to door looking for contributions to my new PAC.

BERG:  Huh.  Did you get anything?

LIBRELLE:   Not yet.

BERG:   Well, hey, I’m just gonna grab some…

LIBRELLE:  So shame on your for accusing Hillary Clinton of spreading the “Birther” rumor!  I fact-checked you by going to “AllTheFactsYouNeedToKnowAboutPolitics.com”, a production of the Non-Partisan Center For Non-Partisan Progress, and they said that Hillary never, ever, personally used the word “Birther”.

BERG:   Nobody said she did it personally.  Her campaign used surrogates to do it.

LIBRELLE:  But she didn’t do it personally, so you’re a liar and a hypocrite!

BERG:   So if someone’s campaign spreads information, but the candidate doesn’t do it himself, then the candidate is blameless.

LIBRELLE:   Right!

BERG:   By that logic, the Holocaust never happened, since Hitler didn’t personally kill a single Jew.

LIBRELLE:   Let me check with AllTheFactsYouNeedToKnowAboutPolitics.com when I get to the library.

BERG:   Right.  And the fact that Hillary’s campaign spread the “Obama is a Muslim” rumor never happened, since the words “Obama is a muslim” never crossed Hillary’s lips?

LIBRELLE:  That’s correct.  If the candidate doesn’t say it, it never happened.

BERG:  Gotcha.

LIBRELLE:  Hey – wanna donate to my PAC?

(And SCENE)

Alan Schulkin, Democrat member of NYC’s voting commission, admits that vote fraud is rampant in New York, and that some sort of ID requirement would be a great idea:

While discussing the potential for fraud, Schulkin volunteered that in some parts of the city, “they bus people around to vote . . . They put them in a bus and go poll site to poll site.”

Asked which neighborhoods, Schulkin said, “I don’t want to say.”

When the undercover mentions black and Hispanic neighborhoods, Schulkin responded, “Yeah . . . and Chinese, too.”

At another point in the conversation, he discussed potential absentee ballot fraud.

“Oh, there’s thousands of absentee ballots . . . I don’t know where they came from,” he said.

He later claimed that he made his responses to placate the reporter.  Which makes sense, because it’s highly doubtful he’s used to reporters asking him actual questions.

Also; he doesn’t want to wind up a “suicide” in the East River with four shots in the back of his head.

Remember when Democrats couldn’t stop talking about the Koch brothers (who aren’t even among the top fifty political donors in the country) and the American Legislative Exchange Committee, a “think tank” utterly similar to an array of such groups on both sides of the aisle?

And you – a smart person – asked “why all the fuss?”

Simple – provided you remember Berg’s Seventh Law.

Because it really does explain everything, every time.

Democrats behave pretty atrociously around women.

JFK had a thing for banging interns less than half his age.

LBJ was a philanderer who had a thing for letting the cow out of the barn in deeply inappropriate places.  Indeed, he seemed to be fairly obsessed with, er, Lyndon Baines’ johnson – which, it occurs to me, may be one of the reasons so many liberals’ arguments inevitably swerve back toward genitalia today.

And of course, Clinton – a serial mass philanderer who harassed, groped and raped women with the assurance of a conquering Mongol – and his wife, who actively used her power to shut his victims up.

Now – pointing out the true facts of fifty years of Democrat presidents’ abuse of women (often with the nodding, grinning compliance of the major media) doesn’t excuse Donald Trump’s piggish comments and behavior over a (I am flabbergasted)  open mic during his 2005 video with (ugh) Access Hollywood.   As I pointed out on the show Saturday, this wasn’t entirely unpredictable; when the interview was recorded, Trump had been a “Master of the Universe” for over 30 years; party to the kind of wealth, power and access that allows people like him to get away with things (or at least think so) that’d have had most people drummed out of polite society.  His marital record shows it hasn’t been entirely without consquence.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve been a vocal non-fan of Trump’s public persona for over 30 years.

But saying “Democrats did much worse, and did it first” doesn’t excuse Trump, any more than “they started it!” excused me when I was a kid, or my kids when they were.

But…

To support Hillary Clinton for president, one has to ignore, or rationalize, or plead ignorance of, decades of her aiding and abetting her husband’s predations; at least one rape, several cases of blatant sexual harassment, constant philandering, and predation on younger, star-struck women who were – let’s be clear, here – his employees and staff (the kind of behavior that’d have any responsible corporate board ushering a CEO toward the exits faster than you can say “grab that cat” in this litigious age).

So, Clinton supporters?  I’m not saying this to attack Hillary and Bill’s character.

I’m attacking your character.

Probably the best explanation for this.

…and for those who’ve never understood why, and for those who’ve never gotten a hint of it from the media?   Here’s why Hillary’s email hi-jinx actually matter.

Assange’s Infodump On Hillary will be utterly devastating – to a regular citizen.  The media will bury it, developing a sudden and utterly transient interest in storm damage in Haiti.

Black Lives Matter will be a huge force in the 2020 election, as George Soros and other plutocrats with deep pockets continue to fund it with gusto.  Unless Hillary wins.  Then, it’ll disappear from the public eye, unfunded and unmentioned in the media, by February 2017.

The continued collapse of the state health exchanges will garner more and more media publicity leading up to Hillary Clinton’s inaugural address, which will prominently feature single-payer healthcare as a national priority on the order of the New Deal or defeating Naziism.

Did Chelsea Clinton take a private jet to a “clean energy” conference that was a mere five hour drive (or one-hour commercial flight) away?

Oh, what do you think?

The Clinton campaign promised during the Democratic primary that their entire operation would be “carbon neutral” and had some friendly reporters write stories about how even campaign manager John Podesta took the bus.

The campaign doesn’t talk about that pledge much anymore, given the how much the Clintons love flying on private jets, presumably out of class envy.

Here’s the problem; after 15 years of writing a blog, I’m running out of synonyms and other ways to write “some animals are more equal than others”.  One can only quote Solzhenitsyn so many times, if only because one only rarely spells Solzhenitsyn correctly.

President Obama unveils an unseemly snobbery:

On Sunday’s season premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” the president discussed food and foreign policy over noodles with the celebrity chef in Vietnam…“Is ketchup on a hot dog ever acceptable?” Bourdain asked the leader of the free world in an episode taped in May.

“No,” the president quickly responded. “I mean that … that’s one of those things like, well, let me put it this way, it’s not acceptable past the age of 8.”

Bam. Obama out.

Mr. President; you’re eating a hot dog.   Pretension is misplaced.

It was once said that the only thing that could hurt the career of a Chicago Democrat was being caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.

But in this blog’s comment section earlier this week, Mark “Mr. Dilettante” Heuring may have tripped onto something potentially more damning in re Angie Craig, the DFL-endorsed candidate taking on Jason Lewis in the Second Congressional District.

And she barely bothers to hide it. See if you can find it between the lines:

For the last 10 years of my career, I was a member of the leadership team at Minnesota start-up St. Jude Medical. At St. Jude, I was focused on supporting those employees who supported our business – so patients ultimately could benefit from their work.

Beneath all the executive verbal camouflage, it’s pretty clear.

Angie Craig works in HR.

Citizens of CD2 – think about life in your office.  Think; do you want to be represented, have your taxes set, have policies governing your life and livelihood…

…set by an HR person?

In a sane world, that would shut out the lights right there.

CD2, you can have better.

“So what is it that makes half of Trump supporters so ‘deplorable’, to put it in Herself’s own words”, I ask some of my “progressive” friends.

Is he anti-immigrant?  Well, anti-illegal-immigrant, yadda yadda, sure.

And there’s a shopping list of other complaints.  And I may even echo a few of ’em.

But the one I hear – whispered conspiratorially, as if they’ll get spanked if they’re heard saying it – is “some of them are birthers“.

To which I respond “Then he’s in splendid company”.

The screen grab below is from a 2007 memo from Clinton strategist Mark Penn, essentially urging her to go “birther” on Obama, who was still well behind in the polls.

Clinton was the original “birther”.

Oh, the “fact check” industry among the media’s pet Democrats says it’s not true – by dint of the fact that Hillary has never physically been busted at a Birther rally, herself, in person.

But even “Factcheck.org” admits that it was Herself’s supporters who were the original…

…well, deplorables.

MNDFL chair Ken Martin, in re the MN Supreme Court’s decision to toss his attempt to remove Trump/Pence from the ballot:

If they can’t competently follow the rules…how does anyone expect them to run the country,” said Martin.

Yes, Ken.

How.

How indeed?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota election law requires party delegates at the convention to designate electors and alternates.  Minnesota Republicans failed to do that at their convention so party big-shots designated some afterwards.  Democrats correctly pointed out this duct-tape fix failed to comply with the law and asked the Supreme Court to strike Trump’s name from the ballot.

The Secretary of State objected that early voting starts in 11 days and they’ve already printed a million ballots so it would cost a fortune to change the ballots now. The Supreme Court decided the Democrats had waited too long to bring the challenge and ruled against them based on the ancient equitable doctrine of laches.

 Laches?  Laches?!? That’s Republicans’ ace in the hole?  That’s their big defense? 

 Laches is one of those kitchen-sink defenses you throw into the Answer when you’re totally desperate and have no defense on the merits of the case.  It’s for losers and scoundrels and weasels.  A major political party trying to get a Presidential candidate onto the ballot shouldn’t be relying on laches.

 They really are the Stupid Party. 

 Joe Doakes

But why did the DFL file the suit – which, but for logistics and the appeal to, ahem, laches, might have succeeded?

Michael Brodkorb, newly at MinnPost, breaks that down.   Short story short; there are people who get paid to be cynical about things like rules.

One of the great lessons in leadership?  Express caricaturish contempt for those you’d like to have follow you:

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton said, according to CNN. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

For “the most qualified candidate in history”, she seems to have a fuzzy grasp on how you lead people.

I don’t recall Ronald Reagan referring to a quarter of the people as “irredeemable government teat-suckers”.