Category: Great Plains and Midwest
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One Degree Of Separation
For the first time, I’ve got one degree of separation from two members of the Trump cabinet. Well, one and a half. Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth was the first guest ever interviewed on the NARN, back in March of 2004. I think I’ve interviewed Hegseth 2-3 times over the years. And closer yet, the wife…
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A Modest Propousal, Eh?
To: CanadaFrom: Mitch Berg, Obstreporo<i>u</i>s PeasantRe: Fires Canada, The haze in the air tells us it’s gonna be a big fire season. May I propose the following: That is all.
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PhD Thesis On Berg’s Seventh Law
Remember during the oil boom in North Dakota? When the Strib and every prog pundit with a blog was patronizingly intoning how dangerous all that unseemly oil money was going to be for all the hayseeds out on the prairie? When our cultural elites prowled the prairie looking for the evil that lies at the…
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Do It Yourself
Back in high school, there were two radio stations in Jamestown. Up above White Drug was KEYJ, my station, a little 1,000 watt AM station whose boss, Bob Richardson, always made a point of hiring local kids and showing them how to do radio. Across First Avenue, above the jewelry store, was KSJB and KSJM.…
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False Flags
“Public is to art as it is to rest rooms”— PJ O’Rourke, I think. Among the less overtly but more insidiously stupid things the DFL controlled legislature sent the state chasing after this past session was redesigning the state flag. The initial submissions are in and range from the adequate to the sardonic to the…
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Inconvenient, Energy-Dense Fact
A friend of the blog emails: I was at Pheasant Fest last week and the American Petroleum Institute had a booth. Not sure why, but I believe it’s because so many pipelines cross pheasant country. Well I told the guys I want a tee shirt that says ” I like fossil fuels!”. He told me,…
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Ritual
Yesterday, I…: If we wind up getting half an inch of snow, you have me to thank.
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In Cold, Alcohol-Thinned, Probably Mentally Ill Blood
UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Power Line fans! Let’s talk about Cayler Ellingson. “Berg’s 18th Law” says that after any politically and emotionally fraught event – mass shootings, police killings, riots, pretty much any event over which people disagree – we need to wait at least 72 hours before taking anything we hear seriously from the media,…
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Possibilities
Let’s talk about the Cayler Ellison case. Berg‘s 18th law normally takes affect for the first three days after a politically charged event, since our main stream media is more concerned about ratings and “scoops“ than getting facts straight, especially in politically charged events.since our main stream media is more concerned about ratings and “scoops“…
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This Oughtta Be Good
Caught this on social media over the weekend: Sort of the opposite of the “Free State Project” – the “idea” would be to export Manbuns from slave states to free states to tip the Senate. And part of me would love to see 85,000 Manbuns trying to move to North Dakota. To survive in North…
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Point Of Light
My high school and college classmate Pennie Werth died from Covid a couple weeks ago. Pennie and me go way back – elementary school, anyway. In high school, we did the various high school plays together. And she played piano in the first band I ever got onstage with. It was in tenth grade, for…
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When You Think Moonshine…
,,,you most likely think about the deep South or the Appalachians, of stills talked way back into mountain haulers and people driving boxes of plain white whiskey to sell out of the backs of their cars behind bars and in dusty back allways. I’m just here to say that my rural North Dakota homies, 90…
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Freedom
North Dakota has not only become a Second Amendment Sanctuary… ..they’ve caught up with a lot of other solid-red states in some areas where they’d lagged a bit: “Both the U.S. Constitution and North Dakota Constitution recognize our citizens’ inalienable right to keep and bear arms, and designating North Dakota as a Second Amendment Sanctuary…
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Been Travelin’
I just got back from North Dakota. I had to take care of some family business. Other than driving on roads made greasier than Kamala Harris’s ethics by a spring snowstorm, it was a lot of fun. Mostly observing the differences between government in a free state, and Minnesota. There is no mask mandate. Some…
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A Little Bit Country
I left North Dakota for a lot of good reasons. Pretty much everything I wanted in life, especially back when only Al Gore had the Internet, was in a major metropolitan area; a place to try to be a songwriter, a musician, a writer, or something just different than I could be back in one…
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Blue Fragility, Part VIII: Unequal Risk
If you remember the 1980s, you might recall the early years of the AIDS epidemic. While it was clear fairly early on that the disease particularly targeted gay men and IV drug users (leading to the overnight extinction of what had been a fairly thriving “bathhouse” scene in Minneapolis), government health authorities kept hammering on…
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Surprising Nobody (Who’s Been Paying Attention At All)
“Unexpectedly”, Minnesota’s neighbors – well, at least the ones run by people who came up through the world of business, rather than public employment or the non-profit/industrial complex – are kicking Minnesota’s passive-aggressive tush at dealing with Coronavirus. You could look at it in terms of deaths per million (South Dakota is 1/3 Minnesota’s rate;…
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Wake Me Up When December Ends
I hate December. It’s cold. It’s dark. And all my year-end bills come due. Annual attorney recertification, vacation condo maintenance fee, hangar rent, Christmas bills plus all the usual expenses. It’s that wallop at the end of the year that annoys me. I hate to see money going out of the checkbook, it should be…
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Suckin’ On A Chili Dog Outside The Tastee Freeze
OK, so Jamestown never had a Tastee Freeze. Even better – we had Polar King! The home of all things cool and delicious on hot, dry, windy summer days… …provided you were willing to work for it. It was north of the college on the way to the airport – a solid mile and a…
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-1
North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp seems to be on the path to political palookaville even before this week; polls were showing her trailing republican Kevin Cramer by two digit margins. A fiasco over the weekend would seem to have not only put the final nail in her political coffin, but if there is any justice…
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Ooops
The Air Force loses a box of automatic grenade launcher rounds in western North Dakota: A 91st Missile Wing Security Forces team from the Minot Air Force Base lost the ammunition container on May 1 while traveling between missile sites in Mountrail County, according to a news release the Air Force issued late Friday. The…
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Spiral
Heidi Heidtkamp’s poll numbers are looking about the same as the rest of the North Dakota Democrat Party’s.
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No, WaPo, By Your Indulgent Leave…
…I’m going to yuk it up like it’s 1999. Kudos, by the way, to the ACLU of MInnesota’s response: Dear Washington Post, The ACLU of Minnesota politely asserts our constitutional right to boast about our superior ability to withstand the cold. Low today is -13° but we’re still out here fighting for civil liberties. Well, the…
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Now Be Thankful
I’m so thankful I live in a DFL-led workers paradise where unemployment is a fraction of that found in the GOP-run dystopias in North Dakota, Wisconsin and South Dakota!
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Friends In Low Places
You might ask yourself; how does someone like Heidi Heitkamp – a liberal Democrat Senator, in a party that is almost extinct outside Fargo, Grand Forks and Minot, and whose state legislative caucus doesn’t have enough elected members to fill all the party’s committee assignments – keep getting elected in a state that Trump carried…