Category Archives: The Racket

The Midway: Nothing Here But Us Hipsters

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A friend of the blog emails:

This has to be the most depressing, let them eat cake piece on the “success of the soccer stadium” that I have ever read.
“There’s been some smaller businesses moving into the stadium area to serve soccer fans, but much more work is needed to boost the area.”

Excuse me? To serve the soccer fans? What about those of us who live here. This was a community long before the stadium and the light rail came along to break it up.
Nothing is going to be built there for a long time. But, hey, as long as the city keeps dealing out the money, McGuire doesn’t have to really do anything.

The fabled “memory hole“ is full of narratives that don’t match those of Big Left, locally and nationally.

Playbook

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Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

A friend explains how The Big Steal will work.

Joe Biden is senile, the election was stolen and everybody knows it, whether or not they admit it. Kamela Harris is incompetent and hated more than Hillary. Neither of those buffoons is the real Usurper whom The Big Steal was intended to install in office. The Usurper is secretly running things now but can’t officially take office until the placeholders are gone. How do they do it?

Harris is already dead but they’re hiding the body waiting for Afghanistan to blow over. The Usurper is waiting in the wings to be confirmed as Vice President. As soon as he is, Biden will be removed as senile. The Usurper moves into the Oval Office, some other patsy takes the Veep job, Congress goes back to debating how many helicopter loads of money to dump into the economy to maintain the illusion of economic success, and the new administration goes to war on the American way of life.

Who is it?

Joe Doakes

It’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard this week.

That would be “Joe Biden is doing a great job”.

What’s The Difference?

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Garden Administration will take in refugees from Guatemala but not Cuba. Why not? They are all Latinx. They’re all fleeing poverty and persecution. Why take some and not the others?

Perhaps because Cuban-Americans vote Republican? Could Democrats really be that crass, that callous, that low – sorting refugees by political affiliation?

Joe Doakes

Rhetorical question, Joe?

The Fix

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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.

Minnesota: Government For Sale

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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.

Deferred

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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.

Bagman’s Groove

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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.

Pork-Barrel. Almost Literally

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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?

Of Dictators And Religions

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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.

Try Some, Buy Some

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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.  

This Is What Screwed Looks Like

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Governor Walz yesterday morning, as he got ready to head into the studio for his ritual toenail-painting with Esme Murphy:

Ever notice how the press never cares about civil rights being trashed until its their civil rights being trashed?

He’s wrong, of course. A press that holds power accountable is “foundational to democracy”. So we’re screwed.

By the way – not holding “emergency power” long after the emergency has passed is also “foundational to democracy”.

Just A Quick Note

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A few regular-ish Democratic commenters have taken umbrage at my occasional statments along the lines of “Democrat voters have no critical thinking skills”.

Let me explain.

I say it because…’

…well, it’s true. Universally. Without exception.

Case in point:

“Shots in arms” – thanks to Trump.

Billions for schools – that, with the DFL calling the shots, are still squabbling about reopening.

And every dollar in the pocket paid for by five dollars taken from someone else – including your own grandchildren.

But no – don’t you dare assume the party that would write tripe like this can’t safely assume their voters are a lumpen, bovine mass.

#Unexpected

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President Biden admits the nation is powerless to change the trajectory of the virus.

He did not specifically concede President Trump was right all along, did everything he could, and nobody could have done anything better.  But giving up the fight two days after taking office means President Biden has no plan to defeat the virus because a virus cannot be defeated, it can only be endured.

It would have been nice if he had said that before the election but hey, better late than never, right?

Joe Doakes

It’s worse than that. Throughout the campaign, he croaked “I have a plan” for Covid.

He knew is was BS.

The people who wrote, and continue to write, everything he says, and control his “administration”, knew it too.

They could all count on one increasingly irreducible fact – a majority of Democrat voters are emotion-driven muppets with the critical thinking skills of barn-raised turkeys.

Government By Platitude

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Governor Walz released…

…well, he called it his “education plan”, earlier this week.

Those of us who work in business – which significantly, has never included anyone in our executive branch – can identify what this…thing, is.

It’s a two page list of platitudes. One and a half when you leave out the header.

None of it has specifics. None of it is testable to see if it’s working or isn’t, in any way. And while we are assured that there’s more “plan” coming, mark my words – there’ll be no more substance in the thousands of pages of institutional gobbledigook that are surely to come.

But let’s translate the terms from their current Educational/Bureaucratic dialect – the form of English with the lowest signal to noise ratio of all our many argots – into actual English:

  • “‘Caring and Qualified’ Teachers” – Get ready to get logrolled with a few years of sob stories about how underpaid teachers, especially in the Metro, are.
  • “Expand opportunities and mental health staff” – Full employment for soft-science and non-profiteers in the school system.
  • “Statewide Mentor Program to help retain teachers” –
  • “Expand full service community school model statewide” – We need to expand the system’s efficiency at transferring taxpayer dollars, not just to Education Minnesota, but to the non-profit/industrial complex that’s attached to it like a remora fish – and all you schools in greater Minnesota need to step up and do your bit.
  • “Establish an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Center” – Because why should we pay Pacific Consulting Group millions to screw up our schools when we’ve got PCG-trained career bureaucrats who can do it for us. Although we’ll still be transferring plenty of wealth to PCG.
  • “Expand rigorous coursework options” – You bought an education system! Now, for just a few billion more, you can have one that actually teaches stuff to kids! Maybe!
  • “Prioritize school funding to the students that need it most” and “Guarantee that compensatory aid funding supports students traditionally left behind” – jigger the various knobs and levers to move more money to the Metro.
  • “One time investment to ensure pandemic enrollment loss does not negatively affect students.” – parents and students are bailing on the public schools in record numbers. We need a bailout.
  • “Strengthen community and school partnerships” – No “community” non-profit left behind.

Hope that helps.

A Day In The Biden Administration

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“Know what’d be better for halting Covid than wearing a mask? Wearing two masks. Let’s all do it.

But wait – you know what’d be better than wearing two masks? Three masks! Let’s get on board…

Hang on – you know what’d be better than wearing three masks? Four masks! That’s like four times the protection! So…

Jst a doggone minute – you know what’d be better than wearing four masks? Five masks! Bam!

Whoa, dudes, dudettes and non-binariliy-duded – you know what’d be better than wearing five masks? Si masks! Let’s smoke this brisket…

But…ay caramba – you know what’d be better than wearing six masks? Seven masks! Holy cow, we got the virus on the run now…

But hold your horses, hombres – you know what’d be better than wearing seven masks? Eight masks! Can you smell the victory…

Wow – wow wow wow – you know what’d be better than wearing eight masks? Nine masks! This must be what Jonas Salk felt like…

Oh, maaaaaan – you know where I’m going, right? 10 masks! Let’s get on board…

D’oh – I’m such a silly. Why stop at 10 when 11 masks are sitting right in front…no, wait, 12! 12 masks!…

Student Senate Is Haaaaaard

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Minneapolis police note that they were kept from the crime scene of a recent shooting near “George Floyd Square“ near 38th and Chicago in south Minneapolis, and that parts of the “citizens committee“ that have turned the area around the intersection into a de facto “autonomous zone“ contaminated the evidence that could be used to try to prosecute the perps, if they are ever found.

A couple of the inspectors involved have emailed a few members of the student Senate… um, City Council.

To give the minimum possible credit where it is due, and indicate how very low the actual bar is, Councilman Andrea Jenkins seems to have a veered close to something within rifle shot of common sense in her response:

Jenkins told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS she supports the memorialization of George Floyd Square and wants it to become a permanent fixture as she and others on the City Council pursue racial justice and police reform. But she does not condone any action which inhibits police investigations.

‘We want justice for everybody and it concerns me and I am not happy with what I read in the email,’ said Jenkins. ‘To somehow disrupt or delay that kind of response is completely irresponsible and an obstruction of justice.’

My fearless prediction; Jenkins will be castigated as a conservative reactionary, and will have a primary opponent from the left. be castigated as a conservative reactionary, and will have a primary opponent from the left.

House (Of Representatives) Poor

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Ilhan Omar has been paying her husband’s firm $2.7 million in campaign donations.

Under most of your community property laws, that means she’s been paying herself a whole lot of money.

And yet while prospering mightily from Omar’s campaign (they grossed $4 million in the 2020 cycle, a nearly 25-fold increase on the firm’s 2018 billings), they received Covid payroll stimulus money:

Public records show that E Street Group, co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans. …

Public records show that E Street Group, co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans.

Federal Election Commission filings also show that the firm received payments for other campaigns, including $175,000 from the committee of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and nearly $130,000 from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

When Democrats say “never waste a crisis”…

The Non-Profit/Industrial Complex

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Joe Biden’s “Cancer Charity” appears to be about as legitimate as the Clinton Foundation.

President-elect Joe Biden‘s cancer charity spent the majority of its money on staff payroll and gave none to research, it has been revealed.

First reported by The New York Post, tax filings viewed by DailyMail.com showed that The Biden Cancer Initiative amassed $4,809,619 in contributions, but spent $3,070,301 on salaries.

Joe and Jill Biden founded The Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 to help find a cure and ‘solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention.’

This might’ve been a great story to have gotten out there, I dunno, a couple weeks ago…

Forget What We Said…

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It’s been my thesis for some time that Democrats know they can say anything they want, because they know their audience are, shall we say, not critical thinkers, and that the media and education systems will do nothing to fix that.

To wit: Democrats who called for defunding the police now say that they never called for defunding the Police, Winston.

Emphasis added by me:

“Not a single member of Congress that I’m aware of campaigned on socialism or defunding the police in this general election,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said on CNN’s State of the Union. “These were largely slogans or they were demands from activist groups.” The congresswoman, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, added that “Republicans levied very effective rhetorical attacks against our party” by linking Democrats to the movements.

Next, to continue the narrative that “democrats didn’t call for defunding the police”, is Ilhan Omar, who called for defunding the police:

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who called to “completely dismantle” her city’s police department this year, went further and said it was a Republican “narrative” that radical movements doomed Democrats in swing districts.

I’m fairly convinced that if Red America seceded from Blue America, within a decade the good guys would have to intervene tell the Blues not to water their crops with Brawndo.

Not The <I>Babylon Bee</I>

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Talking about Hunter Biden’s addiction is mean to addicts.

Do you know what’s really mean to addicts?

Enabling them

Giving a separate justice system to the powerful.

(Notice how NPR “fact checked” the assertion that Biden was kicked out of the Navy? he got an “administrative discharge” – as if he’d have gotten that had he been a kid from Oklahoma…)

Using them as a misapplied political point.

That’s mean to addicts.

Some Memorials Are More Equal Than Others

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My brother died one month ago today.  No funeral – they were illegal.  Covid. It was SCIENCE!

Then the Covid rules changed: we could have a 10-people funeral.  That wasn’t enough for both our side and the widow’s side of the family to attend.  No funeral.  SCIENCE!

Then the Covid rules changed again: we could have a funeral, 25% capacity, social distancing, masks for all.  SCIENCE!

We’re burying my brother tomorrow.  Afterwards, we’ve rented a picnic shelter in the park to eat box lunch, watch a tribute video and share memories.  Well, some of us are.  The picnic shelter is open on three sides but has roof and one wall so it’s considered a “structure.”  There’s a 10-person limit in the picnic shelter.  The rest of us must stand outside and take turns rotating through, with masks, and social distancing.  Because Covid, you know.  It’s SCIENCE!

I can’t help noticing the crowd at the George Floyd memorial.  Capacity, social distance, masks – whatever happened to all that Science? 

Maybe it’s like rock, paper, scissors: Fire burns Science; Fire wins.  Instead of following the rules like a good little boy, I should have burned down a Black neighborhood. 

I’ll keep that in mind.

Joe Doakes

Well, torching any low-income or immigrant neighborhood will actually do…

While The Cat’s Aw…Isolated

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“States of Emergency” are like catnip for government. Transparency rules get “relaxed” in “everyone’s best interest”, so government can “get things done”.

Of course, it’s not all “Emergency” stuff getting done. The Saint Paul City Council is jamming down an exquisitely expensive rework of Ayd Mill Road – a road that rides like an Andean goat path, whose repaving has been held hostage as the Right Crowd tries to get it turned into their pet path, a bikeway with one lane of car traffic in each direction rather than the current two-ish, at at least quadruple the cost.

And…whatdya know, the dog ate the public hearings.

This is life in a one-party town with an “emergency”.

Get The Pitchforks

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Is “ICU bed” a technological term, a medical definition, or a billing code?

I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not something like: “In order to receive reimbursement at ICU rate, the facility must pass a Level Three inspection and be certified as having X equipment and Y level of dedicated staff holding Z certificates, and located in a licensed facility.”

If that’s the reason there’s a hard limit in ICU beds – Medicare reimbursement rules instead of medical treatment requirements – then the politicians better hope word never gets out to the people laid off under this fake-martial law, or the next shortage will be pitchforks and torches.

Joe Doakes

I suspect an awful lot of people will be looking for pitchforks and torches when the word gets out about the bureaucracy’s bungling.

If it ever gets out.

Fortunately, as Treacher notes, media’s job is to cover the important stories – with a pillow, until the struggling stops, if the story affects the Democrat establishment.

Sycophants

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On Friday, when Minnesota had 14 cases of the virus, Governor Walz announced schools would remain open because health care workers needed daycare so they could go to work and fight the virus.
 On Sunday, when Minnesota had 35 cases of the virus, Governor Walz closed the schools except for children of health care workers who need daycare so they can go to work to fight the virus.  Everybody else’s kids, stay home. But not to halt the spread of the virus – no, it’s to give administrators time to figure out how to teach kids who aren’t in school. 

Basically, this is another “in service” week, when teachers and administrators try to recreate the wheel that Phoenix University already invented, what every home-schooled parent already uses: distance learning.

Now.  In the middle of the pandemic.  Now, you start thinking about the possibility of doing something different.  Now, after all those years of criticizing and belittling home-schoolers as ignorant and fearful racists, afraid their kids will catch cooties from The Other; now, you’re adopting their methods without admitting they were right all along.

And the Twin Cities media praised keeping the schools open as bold leadership on Friday; and praised the decision to close the schools as bold leadership on Sunday; without ever mentioning the two decisions made two days apart are completely contradictory.

Here’s an alternate possibility.  St. Paul teachers were on strike last week.  If the governor had closed the schools, they wouldn’t have been paid.  So they quick settled the strike and now they’re back to work at full pay when the schools close.  Lucky for them, they settled.  Almost as if they were tipped off.

Joe Doakes

The DFL and the Teachers Union…connected?

Say it isn’t so!

That’d be like saying “progressive” journalists had a sub rosa agenda or something.

And that’s just crazy talk.