Category Archives: The Racket

They Take Care Of Their Own

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With redistricting, former senate minority leader With the “party of women“, Melissa Lopez Franzen, got pushed out to make sure Ron Latz didn’t wind up unemployed

But no worries about Melissa. She’s DFL. Once they are elected to something, the system takes care of them:

The University of Minnesota on Wednesday announced it has hired former Senate Minority Leader Melisa López Franzen as its next chief lobbyist at the State Capitol.

Beginning Aug. 28, López Franzen will be the U’s executive director of government and community relations, where she will oversee lobbying efforts for all five of the U’s campuses and lobby her former colleagues.

I did say they take care of their own, right?

With her new role with the U, she will join a growing list of former Minnesota lawmakers turned lobbyists, including former Sens. Tom Bakk, Patricia Torres Ray, Chuck Wiger and Jeff Hayden.

By the way, – go ahead and read the story, in the “Minnesota, Reformer”, yet another publication, sponsored by progressives with deep pockets.

See if party affiliation is mentioned even once.

UPDATE: but I will give this to the reformer: some of the inconvenient facts did make it in:

https://x.com/andrewwagner/status/1692194248697720844?s=46&t=NQICV0vfnJ7ol-tsbeTj-A

Nothing weird there at all.

Remember – it’s the most transparent regime in history.

Deathless Art

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Oh.

The art dealer representing Hunter Biden said the president’s son had the potential to be one of the most influential painters of the modern era, but declined to say whether he’d cooperate with a congressional investigation into sales of the art.

Georges Bergès, who has been overseeing the sale of Biden’s paintings, said the 53-year-old would ‘become one of the most consequential artists in this century.’

His comments came as the New York Post pressed him on whether he would comply with requests from the House Oversight Committee, which asked to see the names of individuals who purchased Biden’s artwork and the price they paid for it.

It’s art. You wouldn’t understand, peasants.

When The Post asked Bergès whether or not he intended to cooperate, the art dealer declined to comment and instead waxed poetic about the heights of Biden’s artistic prodigy.

‘I represent Hunter Biden because I feel that not only his art merits my representation, but because his personal narrative, which gives birth to his art, is very much needed in the world,’ he said. 

‘His is a story of perseverance; Hunter’s story reflects what I believe is the beauty of humanity, judged not by the fall, but by having the strength to rise up, by having the character required to change and the courage to do it.’

The worst thing about current events is, unlike books, you can’t skip to the end to see how i t

Tuesday’s Gone

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Fleshing out my first thoughts on the most recent election:

In Minnesota, the age-old wisdom prevails: money talks, bullshit walks. Tim Walz is sputtering fool, but he will be governor for the next four years. Unless his A1C level approaches triple digits, it’s highly likely he’ll complete his term and step aside for another sideshow act once he passes his sell-by date, some time around 2027. The DFL has the money and the infrastructure to control this state for the foreseeable future and the GOP has nothing. The DFL proved they could elect any droolbucket with a brand name when they pushed Mark Dayton across the line in 2010 and 2014. A guy with Walz’s skillset and mien wouldn’t get beyond middle management for any respectable company in the state, but he’s won twice. We can see all see it for what it is, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest — for the fourth election running, the DFL showed Team Rocks and Cows their ass. I don’t doubt they’ll find another standard bearer who is (a) absurd and (b) likely to win in 2026.

Keith Ellison is corrupt as the day is long, a 30-year grifter. He let a $250 million fraud run without interruption for the better part of two years. He’s now won statewide office twice. We’re pretty far gone if he can’t be defeated. I don’t doubt Jim Schultz is a competent lawyer, but his affect was of a guy who doesn’t get out of the conference room nearly enough and he was too nice a guy to run against a bully. To take the AG’s office back, the Republicans need a crusading litigator type who can prosecute the prosecutor and expose the rot within. There has to be one of those out there.

On the national level, it has to be said: Donald Trump didn’t help. He was and continues to be horribly wronged by what he’s gone through at the hands of his persecutors. And since civic education in this country is essentially dead in the water, most citizens can’t recognize that Trump is living example of why the Founders were against bills of attainder. Having said that, Trump will never get a sympathetic audience. He’s an obnoxious boor and he can’t get past his own solipsism; if he had even a scintilla of self-awareness, he might understand where he is, but we’ve been watching him for well over 40 years and that’s not in his skill set. Trump fancies himself the indispensable man, the conquering hero, but if he sincerely loves his nation, he’d recognize that martyrdom is a better career move. Not a chance in hell he’ll accept his fate, though.

Aside from the utter domination of Ron DeSantis in Florida, election results did not go well as one might have expected. Even so, the Republicans could still flip the House and the Senate. Based on reports from Arizona and Nevada, the Republicans could get over the line despite the Fetterman debacle in Pennsylvania. It appears likely that Adam Laxalt will win his seat in Nevada and there’s reason to believe Blake Masters may squeak by with Kari Lake becoming the governor in Arizona. Meanwhile, Herschel Walker will be going to a runoff in Georgia and has a good chance of prevailing this time. Even if the Senate ends up 50/50 again, I can imagine Joe Manchin may try to cross the aisle to save his ass in 2024. What will be interesting is whether Mitch McConnell would want him. I am not convinced McConnell enjoys being majority leader; he has more opportunities for self-enrichment in his current position.

Meanwhile, the Donks own the next two years. And they are going to hate that. There is still an urgent need for them to ease out Biden before too long, but they aren’t going to have an easy path to removing him, unless they decide to use Hunter Biden’s depredations as the pretext. Still, they will need a plausible successor. Kamala Harris impresses no one. Gavin Newsom is an empty suit. Pete Buttigieg? I don’t think so. Maybe it will be time for President Fetterman. 

Feeding Our Benefactors

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Legitimate (as far as we know) food non-profits are concerned that the Feeding our Future scandal will make it harder for them to fundraise.

I can see why. If it became harder to launder money through non-profits, the DFL would have nothing but “progressive” billionaires to fund them.

Speaking of laundering money, Bill Glahn – one of about ten actual journalists in the Twin Cities – has a list of political contributions from those indicted in the “Feeding our Future” DFL money laundering scam…

…so far.

Any guesses as to who the money went to?

No Republicans? Whaaaaat?

Any guesses as to why the DFL noise machine is wall to wall abortion and litter pans?

Sick And Broken

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The fact that the news media is, today, writing stories lauding the administration for its panicky handling of the baby formula crisis that it created, tells us a little about the sick state of both our executive branch, our bureaucracy and our news media.

President Joe Biden authorized the use of Air Force planes for the effort, dubbed “Operation Fly Formula,” because no commercial flights were available

Well, that’s mighty big of him, given that it was an executive branch bureaucracy – the Food and Drug Administration – whose inexplicable, and as yet unexplained, closing of a formula plant in Michigan, not to mention Byzantine importation restrictions on formula from Third World hellholes like Switzerland in Germany, caused the crisis in the first place.

I’ve never been the worlds biggest Donald Trump fan – but if this had happened on his watch, a series of peevish and borderline inscrutable tweets would have been followed by executive orders expediting the reopening of the plant and trashing the import restrictions that prevented the free market from doing what it does best Dash getting resources where they are needed, when they are needed.

The fact that our news media is allowing government to treat itself like heroes for “solving” a problem it created (at absolutely sinful and bizarre expense – have you seen how much military aircraft flights cost these days?) is a little bit like giving a medal of valor to an arsonist for putting out a fire they set.

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

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Let’s start with a little music:

The facts we hate
We’ll never meet
Walking down the road
Everybody yelling, “Hurry up, hurry up!”
But I’m waiting for you
I must go slow
I must not think bad thoughts
When is this world coming to?

Can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s tough avoiding bad thoughts these days. The larger question isn’t having bad thoughts, but whether you can express them. John Hayward, a/k/a Doc Zero, notices something important — the calls are coming from inside the house:

There is a part of the conservative sphere that has always felt populism is the ultimate sin, only the Left should be allowed to fight culture wars, and genuine conservative grassroots movements should be immediately run down with rhetorical lawn mowers.

There are different reasons why some conservatives gravitate to this way of thinking. Some are paid grifters. Some live deep inside the left-wing information sphere and inherit its prejudices, such as the notion cultural combat is toxic for conservatives but OK for lefties.

It’s always about the rice bowls. But there’s more:

For these timid elements of conservatism, the worst offense of the Right is questioning the motives of the Left. Nothing makes them spring into action against other conservatives faster than insinuations of bad faith or sinister motives against the Left.

Bad faith has been a growth industry on the port side since, I dunno, Rousseau maybe. It’s certainly not a recent development. Continuing on:

Run through the list of top issues: if you want border security, you must be a xenophobe. If you oppose abortion, you must be a blind religious fanatic or misogynist. If you want smaller government, you’re cruel and greedy. Question global warming? You’re a tool of Big Oil.

We are rat bastards, aren’t we? I must not think bad thoughts. But there’s more:

But as soon as any head of steam builds among grassroots conservatives for questioning the motives of the Left on similar grounds, the timid conservatives leap into action. Tut tut! That language is out of bounds! How dare you imply Lefty’s agenda is deliberately destructive!

They’ll tell you it’s paranoia and slander to talk about the destructive agenda of the Left even as hyperventilating lefties are busy laying out their agenda with hundreds of social media videos and vowing to destroy anyone who gets in their way.

I believe Mel Brooks had a number in Blazing Saddles about this, calling it the French Mistake. In modern parlance, that would be David French. But we’re not done:

Too much of the conservative commentariat is exactly that: commentators. They were comfortable remarking on the passing scene, not changing it. “Activism” was a dirty word, something the OTHER guys did. Tossing harmless Nerf footballs of theory around op-ed pages was good enough.

Change is hard and things are pretty cozy in the covens along the Potomac. And most of all, dudes wearing tricorner MAGA hats are not our kind, dear. We must not think bad thoughts. I’ve pulled a lot out of Hayward’s thread, but there’s even more. You should read it in full. But while his cri de coeur is compelling, it is clear our betters remain in their sinecures. And we’ll come back to that topic in the coming days.

 

Honor Among Bureaucrats

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Report apparently leaked last week shows – to the surprise of nobody – that the City of Minneapolis just was n ot ready for the George Floyd riots – or much of anything else:

An independent audit of Minneapolis’ handling of protests and riots following the police murder of George Floyd found city leaders and police ignored emergency plans in place, instead making decisions on the fly, according to Council Member Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who saw a draft report.

One line in the report Wonsley Worlobah pointed to reads: “We learned that MPD does not adhere to the principles of the ICS (incident command system) but rather addresses emergencies and crises with an ad hoc command structure.”

Of course, the fact that Minneapolis wasn’t ready was on display worldwide, almost two years ago – including the fact that Minneapolis’s administration had no idea how to ask a passive-aggressive governor how to get the National Guard onto the streets.

I’ll take a moment to air this tweet, by “Dr.” Katie Knuth, 2021 Minneapolis mayoral also-ran and..

…well, we’ll delve back into her resume in a moment.

The administration has “no clue about basic emergency operations”?

Now, it seems that at one point the CIty of Minneapolis had a full-time bureaucrat, a “resiliency director”, whose vague and unaccountable brief would seem to the untrained eye to cover things like “making the city resilient”.

Now, I’m just an untrained, unlettered peasant, but one might think it’d be part of a “resiliency director’s” brief to make the city…resilient?

So who was city’s first “resiliency director”, two scant years before the riots?

Oh.

Bureaucratese Translated Into English While You Wait

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The curiously omnipresent Lt. Governor Flanagan:

Let’s translate:

“Empowering communities to lead with state support” = “transferring public funds to ‘community’ non-profits who do nothing bout crime, but who do serve as the DFL’s farm team and ‘enforcers’ in the community’.

“Be good partners” = keep transferring state money to that political class.

Once you understand the language, it gets so much easier.

Leave Bad Enough Alone

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Our cities are a little like Charlie Brown.

Every time Lucy puts the ball on the ground, Charlie remembers all the times she’s pulled the ball away. And yet, he has faith; maybe this will be the first time.

Lucy’s back:

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this – the only “fans” of this idea are the members of the non-profit/industrial complex and the consultant class, who’ll benefit handsomely from it.

As they did from light rail, and the “urban reimagining” of which it is a part.

As they did from the Saint Paul Port Authority’s grandiose, costly, failed urban utopian visionmongering.

As they did from “Urban Renewal”, which did the opposite of renew urban life, replacing old downtowns with sterile, brutalist concrete canyons (see also – Downtown Saint Paul, from Minnesota to Jackson).

A friend of the blog emailed:

I94 was built to “revitalize” middle class Black neighborhood and poor white neighborhood. Historically, it is now said to have destroyed the Rondo neighborhood businesses. 
But, people were not defeated. Black businesses persisted. Businesses by Immigrants from Asian countries also moved in. Perhaps I94 worked. It revitalized!
How dare they. So the Green Line was built to “revitalize” marginalized neighborhoods of working class Americans (of all races, ethnicities).
It kind of worked-businesses closed or left to areas that were no longer on Green Line. Many Black owned, Asian American owned, and immigrant owned businesses left.
Any hope of retail that appealed to work class neighbors was squashed by Allianz Field construction. It was further solidified once the remaining businesses were allowed to be destroyed in the 2020 riots.
Yet, our elites must believe there are still too many of the wrong people lurking around the neighborhood. We need to be further revitalized out of the community. Maybe Bill McGuire and his soccer fans are scared of us. Thus, people like Councilmember Mitra Jalali and urbanist activists propose to once again destroy what communities have built around. 

In a city destroyed, over and over, by urban planning dilettantes, this is yet another fun project for the urban wonk class, which will be paid for literally by taxpayers, and figuratively by generations of the urban miserable yet unborn.

The Hennepin County Way

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He drove with a .13 blood alcohol content (as of test time, hours later, indicating he had closer to a .17 at the time of the crash).

He drove 126MPH down 94, up until he went off the road.

He drove, thus hammered, carrying his service firearm (or at least a .357 magnum revolver in a holster), at a blood alcohol level 3-4 times the level at which a civilian would lose their permit.

He lied to officers about the crash; he didn’t invoke his 5th Amendment right to remain silent (which is legal, constitutionally protected, and good); he actually lied.

The story of Sheriff Hutchinson’s DUI and crash just keeps getting worse and worse:

https://twitter.com/RebsBrannon/status/1484167367462584324

The Governor and Lieutenant Governor asked for his resignation.

But that’ll be the end of it.

Not because the DFL is out to protect Hutchinson; the “progressives” have a hand-picked candidate even more “progressive” than Hutchinson waiting for November. The DFL will endorse her, and Hutchinson will be shunted aside like last year’s model.

But until then? If the DFL let it he known that driving drunk was a real problem, they’d endanger the prospects of one of their candidates, in a year when the DFL expects to have enough problems.

That’s how life, and politics, in a one-party autocracy works.

A Thought Experiment

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Let’s say you had a couple bumps at a bar – like, say, 8 to 12 of them. And then decided to drive home.

You were carrying a gun, and a car full of loose ammunition.

You drove down the freeway, until you didn’t – you swerved off the road, rolled your car, scattering ammunition all over the place. You had to be extricated, in no condition for a field sobriety test. When you finally took a whiz test at the hospital, you tested at a .13 BAC – 50% above the legal limit,and a level that indicates you were likely at a .17 during the accident itself.

And you’re a civilian.

Do you think the county attorney is going to let you plead out to fourth degree DUI?

I’m referring of course to Henco Sheriff Dave Hutchinson.

Or course. you wouldn’t. At the very least, the County Attorney would put you through a legal wringer, and make sure you settled with charges that involved serious time in jail.

So – is it just county employee mutual backscratching?

Maybe.

Now ask yourself – would Rich Stanek, the previous Sheriff and the last elected Republican of any kind in Henco, have gotten the same treatment?

Remember how the media covered his adult son’s behavior. before you answer that.

Oh, yeah – the media. The only media actually covering this story are the conservative alternative media here in MInnesota:

So perhaps we call it “DFL Privilege?”

Customer Service

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 A recent experience (last night, actually) in the northern suburbs, but repeated elsewhere with alarming frequency.

My family traveled to our friendly local neighborhood Culver’s for dinner. We arrived at 6 p.m. We could see people sitting in the dining room and customers at the counter, so we assumed the restaurant was open for dine-in.

We got to the door and saw a sign mentioning that the restaurant would be closing at 8. This is a typical scenario — we are all getting used to labor shortages causing a variety of businesses to curtail their hours or even close on certain days. But as we attempted to enter the restaurant, the door was locked.

At the time of our arrival, four other groups were converging on the location. I knocked on the door, hoping one of the workers would hear it. They didn’t, but a customer did and came to the door to talk with us. “I think they’re closing the dining room,” the customer said.

A woman on the outside said, “but the sign on the door says they are closing at 8. It’s 6. Why are they closing?”

Another potential customer said, “this is ridiculous. It’s not 8. They should change the sign.”

“Perhaps they think they’re in Nova Scotia. It’s 8 there,” I offered. That got a chuckle out of yet another customer.

After a moment, a manager who appeared to be a year out of high school appeared at the door. “We’re very short staffed so we’re closing the dining room because we can’t provide the expected level of customer service.”

The woman who had noted the sign on the door said, “well, if you aren’t open, you should have a sign on the door.”

“I’ll go get a sign for the door,” the manager said. Then, reading the faces of the customers he was turning away, said “do you want me to get the general manager? I’ll go get the general manager.” He walked back in to the restaurant, but by then all of us decided to take our business elsewhere.

A few observations:

  • As a rule, it’s never optimal to maintain a level of service by providing no service at all. I would guess the people who departed without a meal last night would have spent between $150-200 at the restaurant. Turning away customers is always a bad idea.
  • At the same time, what could the manager do? He was trying to protect his workers, who were clearly getting swamped. If the workers who are willing to show up get abused, they will quit. The poor kid was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. 
  • I have never worked in a restaurant — a desultory semester of work-study in the college cafeteria is my closest experience to that. I have family members who have spent many years in the hospitality industry and they have many, many stories to tell.
  • Many restaurant jobs are entry-level work and the pay is generally not great. I see plenty of signs around town with fast fooders offering $15/hour or more, but most locations find themselves short-staffed anyway. People respond to incentives, and most of the incentives are pointing away from the hospitality industry. That could be changed, but the folks who could drive that change are responding to different incentives.
  • Our MSM supremos are trying to spray paint the turd. A WaPo columnist tells us to lower our expectations. It’s just this pandemic and that lying son of a bitch, Trump! They would never hurt you. You know that.

Federal Bureau Of Idlers

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you are the elite law enforcement agency in the world but you are always holding back, waiting for the giant break to roll up the entire network and capture the ringleader, you not only fail to achieve the grand objective, you allow people to suffer as you sit idle.

Has the FBI had ANY victories since they shot John Dillinger? Any at all?

Joe Doakes

Well, there’s always that whole “wave of right wing terror, Coming along any day now, honest!” thing that has made them indispensable to the Democrats…

Federal Bureau Of Idlers

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you are the elite law enforcement agency in the world but you are always holding back, waiting for the giant break to roll up the entire network and capture the ringleader, you not only fail to achieve the grand objective, you allow people to suffer as you sit idle.

Has the FBI had ANY victories since they shot John Dillinger? Any at all?

Joe Doakes

Well, there’s always that whole “wave of right wing terror, Coming along any day now, honest!” thing that has made them indispensable to the Democrats…

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.