A friend of the blog emails:

These amendments wouldn’t have changed my vote, but I wonder if it would have even passed if rent control as defined through the council’s amendments had been on the ballot?

Not likely, which is how it should have been in the first place – not passed.

I ask, as if in a vacuum, will this teach voters a lesson, change how they vote? The answer to that question is also not likely. 

Indeed, I’d wager a shiny new quarter that this will be used by the hard left to push for even more “progressive” city councilbeings.

A friend of the blog emails:

I had read a while back that some garbage collectors in Saint Paul were not meeting their obligation to customers and were not collecting trash. Mine was consistently being picked up, so I felt fortunate, especially since I was never a supporter of city wide trash collection, at least not the inefficient way Saint Paul was doing it.

With the heat, I had avoided a great deal of yard work during June, but towards the end of the month, I finally had enough yard waste to put out at the curb.

No collection.

I didn’t worry about it much. I just left it out for the next week.

Still no collection.

I finally contacted my hauler who told me they were contracting with another hauler to collect yard waste and to contact them. Ok. I would guess this wouldn’t be my job, but I did it anyway. That hauler told me they had never heard of me and that is why my yard waste wasn’t collected and they’d investigate more.

So, I reached out to my own hauler again. This time, they told me my yard waste wasn’t out by 7am on collection day. (It’s been out for two weeks.) But, they insisted that this other hauler was ultimately responsible.

I called the other hauler back. This time, I was told that actually, in my part of town, my own hauler is responsible for yard waste collection and that they aren’t contracted to collect yard waste for that part of town.

So, my head is spinning. Yard waste is not important to me. It will break down in the container. I’ll have more space and when they get it figured out, it will get collected one way or another. But, this is very poor practice. As we all know, if we let trash collection happen in a free market, as it should, then the original hauler would be cancelled and I would go with someone who could actually provide the service that I pay for. Since Saint Paul took this control from me, I sit here, with very little option.

The only satisfaction that I get—knowing that those whiny Marshall Avenue people who fought for this exact system are also getting the same poor service as me. And it’s only a slight bit of satisfaction because they’ll still support the same city council and mayor that allowed this to happen.

The only results they really care about are getting government to do exactly what they want

Saint Paul notched its 19th homicide over the weekend:

The city of St. Paul recorded its 19th homicide Friday night after officers conducting a welfare check in the city’s Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood found a man dead from a gunshot wound.

A statement released by SPPD said officers were dispatched to a senior living apartment building on the 700 block of East Seventh Street just before 7 p.m.

They arrived, made entry into the apartment and found the man, who is believed to be in his late 50s. Initially, it was unclear to the officers if the injury was self-inflicted or caused by someone else, but after members of the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office and our forensic services unit responded and gathered more information and evidence, it became clear that someone had shot the man.

Just for reference, Saint Paul had 38 homicides – the worst butcher’s bill in 25 years, and an alarming death toll in its own terms.

If we continue at our current pace, the city will have 43 in 2022.

Great job, Melvin.

So what happens to the “Lime” scooters – The popular electric scooter rentalsthat used to see around Saint Paul?

When you remember that st paul is “Chicago on the Mississippi“, the answer pretty much sorts itself out:

Among the details, Lime will pay the city a trip fee of 10 cents per trip for every trip that begins or ends within the city. Those fees are paid to St. Paul on a monthly basis.

In addition to regular trip fees, Lime will pay a “park impact fee” of 20 cents per scooter for all trips that begin or end on city parkland. The city will also be reimbursed for staff time spent relocating or removing scooters from prohibited locations, at the rate of $35 per scooter, as well as a $20-per-day storage rate at the city’s Dale Street Public Works facility.

Everything in St. Paul must transfer money from the productive parts – the few that are left – to the government.

A friend of the blog emails:

This is the 2nd time this year that a driver has driven into a utility pole on St Anthony Ave in Saint Paul and has caused power outages in the city. St Anthony Ave is a street that has been “traffic calmed”- bike lanes added, parking removed in some places, speed limit “reduced”.

It’s funny, because before we started calming traffic, I don’t recall things like this happening with as much frequency.

Yet, I am seeing people on social media asking for more traffic calming, speed bumps, bump outs, etc and I am seeing CM Jalali agreeing.

What are they not asking for? More traffic violation enforcement, more enforcement of impaired driving violations, more enforcement of drug and crime laws- you know, things that would actually help solve problems like these.

“Traffic calming“ is to “calm”, what a straitjacket is to “sane”.

St. Paul man shoots daughters boyfriend after he allegedly barges into his house with a very bad attitude:

A 56-year-old man told investigators that his daughter’s boyfriend broke kicked in his front door, threatened his daughter, and he shot him.

Paramedics pronounced [“boyfriend” Kaleef] Barnes dead at the scene.

According to police, this killing marked the 13th homicide in St. Paul this year. Last year at this time, the city’s homicide count was at nine. Barnes’ shooting happened just hours after an unrelated shootingThursday evening in the North End neighborhood where one man was killed and another seriously wounded.

The case is still with the Ramsey county attorneys office. Coming weeks after the Hennepin county attorneys office declined to charge a woman for a self-defense shooting in her own home, and apparently declined to press charges against it would be car jacking victim, one might be tempted to feel encouraged that citizens are cleaning the cities up, just a little bit.

But Berg’s 18th law is still in full affect. We don’t know all the details, and if anything, John Choi may be worse at dealing with civilian self-defense shooters than even Mike Freeman.

So your metaphysical appeals in whatever form your worldview recognizes on behalf of the homeowner/citizen are encouraged.

The St. Paul school board voted to keep masks on kids.

Bear in mind, the districts “Director of public health and wellness” recommended dropping the mandate:

“Effective 12:01 a.m. on March 28, that we move forward with the following changes: Masks are not required with low- to medium-community case rates in Ramsey County,” Langworthy said while presenting a slide with numbers.

One of the boards members responded (with emphasis added):

Concerned board members argued taking action, based on numbers that would be delivered with a delay, would be too late.

“If it was from the previous week’s data, we receive it the following Thursday and then we implement masks on Monday, we’d be implementing it from previous weeks’ data though, correct?” board member Chauntyll Allen said. “So, the surge would be happening, basically. It would already be happening — we wouldn’t have masks, we would find out about it on Thursday, and we would implement masks Monday — but from Tuesday or Wednesday the week before until Thursday, students would still be walking around without masks as the surge is existing.”

Ms. Allen has done an admirable, If inadvertent, job of illustrating Kevin Williamson’s thesis that politics is the least efficient possible way of getting anything that matters done.

As far as making public health decisions there anything but reflections of the current state of political logrolling?

You know where I’m going with this, right?

…about this kind of thing, City of Saint Paul?

Building permits in Saint Paul are off 80% since “rent control” passed:

The rent control ordinance passed in St. Paul last November is having exactly the consequences that were predicted before it was passed. If you set a price below a market price, you increase demand relative to supply, worsening the very shortages the price control was meant to fix.

From a MinnPost piece:

With three months of data on the books since the passage of the rent control measure in November, results are rather grim for anyone hoping for new apartment buildings in St. Paul. Compared to the same period during the previous year, multifamily building permits are down over 80 percent. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis overall construction is up as the economy has rebounded.

And it’s worse than that. Landlords are jacking up rents, fast, because they know that with inflation gutting the rest of their budgets, they’re not going to get another chance.

And yet the rent control advocates – highly schooled but uneducated drones that they are – still say this is about making housing affordable.

The CVS store that has served for the past few decades as one of the anchors of the MIdway’s “main street”, at Snelling and University (but for seven months after the George Floyd riots, of course, where it stood boarded up, a monument to the perfidy of the metro DFL) is closing in a couple of weeks.

A friend of the blog emails:

CVS is keeping the store in a residential neighborhood on Fairview open, but not the one on a busy urban corner next to transit and a “world class” soccer stadium? Why would they ever not want to do business there? We’ve been told over and over again how precious that real estate is, how the train and the stadium were going to be a boon.
http://www.twincities.com/2022/03/09/longstanding-st-paul-cvs-at-snelling-and-university-to-close-at-the-end-of-the-month/

Perhaps boon is in the eye of the beholder- it certainly has been a boon for vagrancy, crime, and vacant lots. I shouldn’t assume that that wasn’t the goal.

Expect apologists for the Carter, Walz and Biden administrations to claim “It’s not our fault! Look at this:”.

In mid-November, the Rhode Island-based pharmacy chain announced a major realignment of its national retail footprint, with a heavy focus on consolidating retail locations operating in close proximity to each other. The closures amount to 300 stores per year for the next three years.

Of course, the fact that that location is in an increasingly crime-ridden area, and has a record of being looted from wall to wall, couldn’t have possibly.affected the decision to close this store, rather than the one in Mac-Groveland, Crocus Hill, the Target on Uni, or the two at the University of Minnesota, nosirreebob.

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.

A friend of the blog emails:

LOL at all the Yes In My Backyard Karens who have suddenly become Not In My Backyard when University of St Thomas is concerned.

I know many of these same people argued against and successfully fought off any kind of retail that could have happened in the former Bus Barn site that is now Allianz Field. In fact, they fought against neighbors of the former bus barn site, fought against any retail that would have added to the tax base (because the proposed retail asked for parking!), and then unironically fought against neighbors of the bus barn site to advocate for a soccer stadium that did not only receive tax exemptions (as all stadiums do) but was also granted a variance to add more parking than allowed in that area of the city. And they still champion their “success” at what they did for a neighborhood that they don’t even relate to. They still pretend to believe that all soccer fans take transit, the the soccer stadium isn’t surrounded by more parking than what was there before.

But now, St Thomas wants to put a sports complex near them? The horrors. It’ll bring cars! (Well, yes, any development would and don’t people already drive to Town and Country? I doubt many who pay to be members take the bus there.) It’s a stinkin’ sports complex rather than something that I’d rather live by. (Well, yes, but you’ve been bragging for years how much your property values have gone up because of your work, so cash in-move to where you want to live, somewhere guaranteed never to change, if you can find such a place.) Did I mention it’ll bring cars and we thought we solved that problem by getting rid of parking minimums? (Once the Karens give up their cars, I will believe that the issue is solved.)

Honestly, I don’t care one way or another, but those neighbors certainly deserve to have a little change happen to them that makes them a little uncomfortable for all they’ve done to others via advocacy for tear downs to build big apartments to Allianz Field. I understand that there is some money involved for some Town and Country members should the deal go through. It will be interesting which group of wealth wins out- Karens like Mary Morse Marti and Sean Ryan or St Thomas, or maybe the only winners will be the Town and Country club members

On the one hand, official hypochondria along with privileged lawlessness is polling very badly for the DFL this fall. So the vaccine mandates (and the whole “public safety is a privilege” thing) have got to go.

On the other hand, if DFLers abandon hypochondria, the Karen vote (social, not ethnic) will rebel.

So the mayors chose the middle path: end the useless mandate, keep the useless masks.

Dear Saint Paul bars and restaurants,

I get it. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Many of you know how stupid the mayor’s vaccine mandate is – someone who got the Pfizer vaccine a year ago can come into your establishment, hacking their brains out and contagious as can be, while someone with natural immunity a month old is kept out. And your employees have no vaccine mandate, even though they’re the ones who will be standing around the place for hours at a time – which, the science shows, is where the real risk comes from.

And it’s not like I don’t take this pandemic seriously. I’ve got very vulnerable relatives. I’ve had Covid, donated all kinds of convalescent plasma, been vaccinated, and take all the care necessary. I’m not laughing this whole thing off.

But even the CDC and other public health authorities are starting to admit that vaccine mandates and lockdowns are completely counterproductive, that masks are about as useful at public health as aluminum foil pants, that eventually everyone is going to get Omicron, and that the right approach is likely going to be to protect the vulnerable, but go on living our lives.

Which is the exact opposite of the approach the Mayor is taking with this idiot mandate.

So I’ll tell you what.

If you agree with the mandate? Feel free to make your sentiments public. My response should be obvious by this point. You needn’t worry about making room for me.

If you want to go along with the mandate because you have to, that’s fine. I won’t be patronizing your establishment for the duration. I get the bind you’re in, but at some point people have to say enough is enough. Feel free to tell the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, and all the other people who support this idiot policy I said so. Do you want me to help you put pressure on them? I’m there. And I hope we can get together when the crazy is over.

If you don’t want to go along with the policy, but you need to be discreet? Pass the word around – under the table, discreetly, obviously. I will do my best to be there, and bring friends. I get it, you don’t want to be made an example of like the places that stayed open last year. “Test cases are for other people”, in public health as in self-defense. I’m not going to ask you to be a hero. But pass the word; I will do my best to make it worthwhile.

Enough is enough.

To: Mayors Carter and Frey
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Your Hostages

Mayors,

You just announced your new and, if I may be frank, moronic Covid restrictions:

Let’s make sure we’re clear here.

I had the OG Covid, way back in 2020. Back before it got easy to catch and less virulent.

I’ve donated convalescent plasma. As much as I could, in fact.

Got vaccinated – not out of any ideological drive, but because I’ve got some exceptionally vulnerable relatives.

Pretty sure I just got over Omicron.

I’ve been contributing to herd immunity since most of you, my “Karen” neighbors, were hiding in your basement and dunking your food in rubbing alcohol before eating it. I am likely the immunologically safest person you will meet anytime soon.

And I will not be spending one dollar in Minneapolis or Saint Paul until this is over. And if I get completely out of the habit of spending in Saint Paul?

Oh, no.

Bear in mind – I’ve been trying to spend more money in harried Saint Paul establishments over the past 20 months; I’ve tried to help my neighbors out.

No more. You people voted for these hamsters. You all can go down with the ship.

Not another dime.

A friend of the blog emails:

I’m beginning to think that the developers and those councilmembers who get donations from developers supported rent control in order to make the case to eventually exempt developers from rent control, thus allowing them to purchase more property as they pushed out small landlords.

Scratch that- I knew it all along. It was pretty obvious that was the goal. What I don’t understand is all the complaints about the developers pulling out of projects right now, until they get their exemption. People ought to proudly tell us that they voted for this since they were pretty proud of themselves when they were campaigning for rent control, you know, because it helps those poor POC or some such other thing that we don’t quite understand, but gosh darn feels good.

Mid stage single party “progressive“ government is when its stakeholders still haven’t figured out their sense of “charity” is being manipulated.

End stage single party “progressive“ government is when the government doesn’t have to go through the pretense of caring what its stakeholders, to say nothing of voters, think..

Outstate Republican: “Minneapolis and Saint Paul are a mess”

DFLer from Crocus Hill/Linden Hills: “Ack-shu-ally, you never come here, so who cares what you think?”

People from Midway, East Lake, NoMi: “No, he’s right”

DFLer from Crocus Hill/Linden Hills: …

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It snowed Friday night. Saturday morning I was running errands and was so excited to see a snowplow, I took a picture.

Then I remembered I don’t live in St Paul anymore. 
Joe Doakes

I live on a snow emergency route. I hear them go by in the night.

Almost like I live by a city council rep.

A friend of the blog, from (this is an important to the story) Saint Paul, emails:

A couple who currently rents on my block are looking to move. Not that unusual. Renting isn’t typically a long term goal of professionals. They want to move out of the neighborhood versus buying in the neighborhood. Again, not unusual. People move up, have their dream home preferences.
They are like typical woke liberals with their various signs about being welcoming, #resist, etc. They proudly voted for rent control. They proudly give money, food to the homeless and believe the homeless belong on our lawns. We don’t agree on everything politics, but they are neighborly, so I shrug off the differences.
Until I had an interesting conversation. They are looking for elsewhere because it is too chaotic here. There are too many renters and more are moving in. There is too much change. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to get better.
OK. But, do they see how their votes made this happen? Of course not. 
I know I may be accused of being too optimistic here. But, maybe when people who voted for this move away, we’ll have more power to vote for things that will actually improve things again. 

As we’ve seen on policy after policy after policy, the left seems to think:

• There is no such thing as unintended consequences
• They’ll affect other people if they happen.

Many of them moved to Edina, Roseville and Bloomington about the time they had the epiphany – utterly unrelated to the inevitable effects of their policies, naturally – described above.

Weird.

A friend of the blog and fellow Midway resident writes, in re last week’s piece on being shamed by the Shiny Happies for telling the truth about what’s going on in the city:

Saw your blog today. In My neighborhood, we’ve felt like we’ve had ghetto tourists since they started building the stadium. They remind me me the young suburbanites you talked about.

As far as us, we too want to stay here. It’s getting harder.

As I was walking [Redacted] home from school the other day, we were half a block from the intersection where two cars were having a shoot out. They were just a little east of the intersection, so didn’t see it, but definitely heard it.

[Redacted] , somehow, knew it was gun shots. I kept saying it was a car backfiring until all the neighbors came out to check on us. This happened at the end of my alley.

Zillow bought the house next-door to me and now is just letting it sit vacant. So far, one of their storm doors has been removed and the other is broken. I reported it as vandalism, but I anticipate much more happening to the house, which actually was one of the better kept house’s pre-Zillow.

All down University on my side of town businesses are moving, leaving vacant buildings.

I told my family that we still like it here, but my moving criteria is if several houses become long term vacant, then we’re moving.

That’s the point I keep trying to make to the Shiny Happies – it’s not like I’m stating, or overstating, the situation in the city to add drama and gravitas to my life.

I’ve invested nearly three decades in my house, my neighborhood and my city. It’s a little depressing to see it run by people who don’t value those tens of thousands of investments as much as they value their demented ideology.

A friend of the blog emails:

On Tuesday, St Paul voters will vote on rent control.

Several council members are surprisingly against it. Of course, no surprise that CM Jalali is in favor of it. She tweets about how much she has supported development, and how even that development has not been enough to help tenets who continue to face high rent increases.

If she were really honest, she has mostly supported the tear down of single family houses in order for one developer to build apartments on Marshall Avenue. That particular developer was identified in The Villager as someone who donates to Jalali’s campaigns. She has opposed developments of decades long vacant lots elsewhere.

As for the rent control measure on the ballot, I don’t see how it turns out any differently than the garbage collection- small, local landlords bought out by bigger, corporate landlords. They would be the only ones able to afford the rent control. And Jalali probably won’t stop until all the privately owned homes are bought out by corporate landlords so we all become renters, so we can all feel like one, you know. (So we can all be indebted to the whims of our overlords).

Like most everything in Saint Paul politics, this is a group of upper-middle-class progressives in Crocus Hill and Merriam Park playing “let’s build a utopia” with a real city – more or less – as their lab. Just like the indoor smoking ban, or the Tony Soprano Trash Collection “system” [1], or Minneapolis’s “Public Safety” charter referendum, there is no thought to unintended consequences, and plenty of reason to believe it’ll just be another money transfer to the city’s political class.

Given that the inevitable result of “rent control” is rent becoming inexorably less affordable, the developer class – which is finaincially joined at the. hip with the political class. – stands to benefit handsomely.

Saint Paul. Chicago on the Mississippi.

Turns out the man charged with murder in last weekend’s west end Saint Paul shoot out had never, ever committed a crime of any sort.

No, that’s a lie. I couldn’t resist.He had a rap sheet longer than John Thompson’s list of social offenses, and at least as long a list of judges who kept letting him skate:

The man charged with murder and attempted murder in the St. Paul bar shooting last weekend has a long criminal history, and court records show 33-year-old Terry Brown should never have had a gun.

It appears that at every turn Brown was given breaks by the system, breaks that allowed him to be free to go into the Seventh Street Truck bar Saturday night.

In 2018, Brown was charged with a felony for violating a no-contact order in a domestic case. He had a long record, with felonies including a 2016 conviction for violating the same no-contact order. In the 2018 case, he twice missed court dates and warrants were issued

If the system had done what it was supposed to do with convicted felons, Brown would have been in jail last Saturday night.

Perhaps you’ve heard – it’s been in all the headlines; a shooting in a Saint Paul bar left one dead and 14 injured.

It took place in one of the many bars along West Seventh that suffered horribly with the shutdown of all events at the XCel Center, Ordway and the Science Museum, and the concertgoers and hockey fans and general tourists that used to crowd the area on a beautiful evening.

And the crowd that replaced them, when they could open at all, was a little…edgier? More likelly to cause problems? Bars in the area, and up on Cathedral Hill, had a much different atmosphere. Charged. Jumpy. Ready to blow.

And at the Truick Park – across from Cossetta, where the Seven Corners Hardware store used to be – things finally blew up.

Now, most of the politicians in Saint Paul – a city controlled by the DFL for over 60 years, and where county prosecutors have all but given up, well, prosecuting, had the good common sense to shut the hell up.

Not Carlos Marianil, the DFLer who “represents” the neighborhood.

But the three perps that where arrested all had lengthy felony records – so they wouldn’t have taken any background checks, whether “Universal”, or for that matter ‘intelligent and meaningful”, or not.

And who would have entered a “Red Flag” order on them?

Rep. Mariani’s next statement wasn’t especially intelligent – but it was meaningful, albeit in a sinister way:

So here’s the message; if you start a business in Saint Paul, after the state tried to kill you off with the hamfisted lockdown, and the Karens that make up the majority in your neighborhood decide to keep hiding in their basements and not go to bars and hockey games and shows at the Ordway, and you have to take whatever clientele you can to stay afloat, and problems erupt, your government will try to stuff you under the bus.

But! If you see that the clientele might have the potential to cause problems, and they’re not conveniently politically neutral (like people wearing motorcycle “club” paraphernalia)? Well, then the locals in and out of government will stuff you, on the other hand, under the bus: when the late, great “Bar Louie” chain tried to see to its own security, in exactly the way Mariani demands, the Karens from the Non-Profit/Industrial Complex were waiting to stomp on that as well. If it walks like a gang member and talks like a gang member, apparently you’re a racist.

So to take Mariani, and both city councils and both county prosecutors at their words:

1. if you try to pre-empt trouble, you’re racist.
2. If you make the the best of things and the crowd causes problems, they’ll throw you under the bus.
3. The county attorneys won’t touch the petty criminals, and even the not so petty ones can’t seem to get put in jail no matter how they try.
4. And if you say that that you expect the government to which you pay taxes to see to public safety? That’s your privilege talking.

Starting a business here sounds like. a great bet, doesn’t it?

Fearless Prediction: The media will start running even more “thjink” pieces on how it’s “Racist” to demand law and order.

From a letter to the editor:

And, in cozy bungalows in Highland Park, and Victorian proto-mansions in Crocus Hill, and condominiums down by Raymond, dozens of smug, cosseted nonprofit employees no doubt chortled “Good! More city for us!”, too snugly molded in their ideological bubbles to see what this means.

During the Twin Cities marathon yesterday, former Viking and former Minnesota supreme court justice Allen Page…

…cheering on the runners by playing the sousaphone.

Got to say, Page is looking pretty good for a 76-year-old guy, especially for a former NFL lineman from back in the “concussion? We don’t care about no stinking concussion“ stage of the game.

Hold this thought:

“When people don’t trust the institutions in authority to uphold order fairly and justly, they create their own institutions to do it, to a more self-centered standard of “Fair and Just”. That’s almost always a bad thing”.

This just in from Ramsey County. Read the whole Twitter thread (available here in one convenient page):

Mr. House would seem to be a regular guest of Ramco law enforcement – but not a long-term one. Even with his long record of not using his indoor behavior, he just can’t seem to get a charge to stick enough to matter.

Why, it’s almost like he’s above the law – in a city that fines homeowners whose grass gets too long.

“When people don’t trust the institutions in authority to uphold order fairly and justly, they create their own institutions to do it, to a more self-centered standard of “Fair and Just”. That’s almost always a bad thing”.

Now, it’s nothing new that Ramsey County, while bellowing on cue about “gun safety”, goes nerfy on actual criminals using guns. Three straight Ramco Attorneys, going back thirty years – Tom Foley, Susan Gaertner and John Choi – have had access to a significant set of sentence enhancements to use on gun criminals, tools that have had measurable effect on crime over the past three decades, where they are applied.

Which they are not, in Ramsey County (or Hennepin, either). Foley, Gaertner and Choi, at best pled it away, and at other times didn’t even bother applying it, sometimes for the very crimes for which the measures were designed.

But don’t you dare put a security shutter on the window of your small business.

“When people don’t trust the institutions in authority to uphold order fairly and justly, they create their own institutions to do it, to a more self-centered standard of “Fair and Just”. That’s almost always a bad thing”.

It’s almost like they want public order to collapse.

That’s absurd, of course.

But if it were true, what would they do differently?