“Show Me The Conservative And I’ll Show You The Terrorist”

I started banging this drum in 2009, when the Obama Administration and its camp followers started moving the Overton Window of authoritarianism to encompass basically every variety of conservative group, to gin up hysteria for (as a former commenter used to refer to it) a coming “tidal wave of right-wing terror that’d dwarf 9/11”. This bit of social slander started in 2009, had hit close to home when the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed the Taxpayers League of Minnesota was a “hate group”.

Some have taken to the change in tone with alarming facility – some of them private citizens

…and some, er, not so much.

Two peaceful pro-life students appear to be listed by a University of Maryland’s terrorism center database.

UMD did not respond to inquiries from The College Fix, but a pro-life group said its attorneys would review the research to consider legal action.

The university’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has endeavored to track alleged “extremism” from 1948 to 2021 through a database titled, “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States.”

PIRUS lists mainstream pro-life organizations, like Pro-Life Action League, among threats such as the Ku Klux Klan and Al Qaeda. Moreover, two subjects affiliated with Students for Life of America appear to be peaceful protesters who were cleared of charges, The Fix found.

Of course, Big Left knows and operates according to Mark Twain’s aphorism “a lie will travel around the world while the truth is waiting for its Keurig to warm up”. It’s easier to call an innocent person a terrorist, white supremacist, “Christian Nationalst” or “hate group” falsely, knowing that gullible or depraved “Journalists” and influencers will hammer it home like a bunch of monkeys on espresso for eternal preservation on the internet, than it is for the victim to un-call it.

I Read Deena Winter In The “Minnesota Reformer” So You Don’t Have To

Earlier this week, the Minnesota Reformer – a news outlet financed by “progressive” plutocrats iwth deep pockets – did its review of AlphaNews’s “Minneapolis Has Fallen”.

The claims – well, I’ll let the tweet do the talking for the piece, entitled “I Watched Minneapolis Has Fallen So You Don’t Have To”.

Let’s go briefly through Winter’s claims.

Restraint

The biggest hit Winter has against Collin is that, according to her, the movie’s revelation that Chief Arredondo and his training officer lied about whether “Maximal Restraint Technique” was part of the MPD’s training and policy. Collin showed cops, and Chauvin’s mother, opening the manual to the exact section, and showed multiple current and former MPD officers saying they’d been trained in the technique. The movie also said the jurors were not allowed to see the body cam footage that showed that Chauvin did the technique correctly – with his knee on the shoulder blade, rather than on George Floyd’s neck.

Winter claims that yes, the jury saw both.

OK – so if that’s true, and the jurors saw the same training that the officers had, then could someone explain to me why Chief Arredondo still lied about it?

Neither reporter has clarified that for me, so someone else has to.

UPDATE: Danger Close

And as I wrote this in a hurry, I forgot this. But as “Bigman” noted in the comments – why the fact that Cahill failed to sequester the jury – who came to and from a courthouse that was being fortified like the Green Zone in Baghdad, and who were being told more or less directly that if they reached the “wrong verdict” that they were in huge trouble – not being discussed?

I’ll ask the question because Winter didn’t think she had to.

White Riot

Winter goes on to discuss the parts of the film dealing with the riot, most specifically the evacuation of the Third Precinct (on which. apropos nothing much, I scooped the entire Twin Cities media), I’m trying to figure out what Winter’s point is.

I’ll dispense with the fact that Winter…lacks a certain amount of empathy, or at least insight outside her own apparently narrow experience (emphasis added):

Collin also spends considerable time questioning why the MPD and local and state officials were slow to take action as protests devolved into riots and arson that destroyed hundreds of buildings across the metro.

Retired MPD officer Jason Reimer tells Collin what bothered him the most is “they let people throw rocks and bricks and firebombs and we’re supposed to just put on a helmet and take that.”

Well, helmets, but likely also bulletproof vests and eye-irritant spray, handcuffs, Tasers and semi-automatic pistols.

Bulletproof vests don’t keep you from burning to death. Spray and tasers are useful to get control one on one, not against a mob.

And I’ll let Deena Winter’s idea of shooting into a crowd of rioters hang out there, because I sure didn’t want to have to do it for her.

Winter cites some fairly wrenching scenes in the movie (that reflect what I reported in May of 2020), to which I’ll add some emphasis:

“We were in the middle of a war zone,” Herron said. “We were ordered not to do anything.”

She said the fire department wasn’t responding to calls, and officers were “wandering around aimlessly, waiting to be told what not to do next.”

They weren’t doing anything to control the riot,” she said. “They wouldn’t let us do our jobs.”

All true – but keep the emphasis in mind – the “they” that left them wandering around were the city and MPD leadership. We’ll come back to them.

Winter adds:

The city and state’s failed response and inability to quell the violence and arson are well documented, but it’s inaccurate to claim police were standing down. 

They went on joyrides, fired rubber bullets at protesters (see Jaleel Stallings); an officer, who went on to run an actual banana stand, was caught on video by a journalist macing protesters for no discernible reason; lots of cops in riot gear teargassed crowds

They shot protestors like Soren Stevenson with a rubber bullet and blinded him in one eye. They maced a journalist from Vice News in the face. They fired rubber bullets at journalists, including Reformer reporter Max Nesterak and Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix.

Side note: anyone but me notice how journalists only get really irate about injustice and official overreach when it’s other members of the Journo Club who are affected? Lake Street – and a fair chunk of the Midway, my neighborhood – got burned. The Minneapolis Police Department was, and remains, gutted. Crime soared, and is still double what it was as recently as 2018 – enh. But journalists got attacked ZOMG!

Not that Winter’s article tells you, but the main contention of the cops in the movie was that the city and the. MPD leadership – the “they” in the emphasized text in the first round of quotes, above:

  • Had no plan to deal with the riot
  • More specifically, abandoned the Third Precinct (apparently to “give the rioters ‘space to destroy'”), without having the foggiest idea about what the officers marooned there were supposed to do.

So when Winter snarks:

To the people on the other end of a rubber bullet or tear gas or mace, the police response sure didn’t feel like “standing down.” 

Stop me if I”m wrong, but everything she cites supports the cops contention. Some cops, operating in a complete vacuum, followed the normal human inclination to fucking hit back.

Either way, there was no plan. They were left danging in the breeze.

Winter doesn’t write about that, so I have to.

Who’s The Boss?

Winter goes on (and I’ll add emphasis):

[retired MPD cop Jason] Reimer says the weak response was all a deliberate attempt by politicians to use Floyd’s police killing to their advantage.

“The elections were coming up,” he said. “They were gonna use this incident for a political narrative, and they did.” 

Let’s hope Reimer was a better cop than he is a political analyst: The riots were a political disaster for the mayor, the governor and the entire DFL establishment. DFL political operatives blamed the riots and the defund/abolish police movement for key suburban losses that prevented a 2020 DFL trifecta. 

Although both Frey and Walz won reelection, they did so in part by hitching themselves to police during their reelection campaigns and would soon be accused by partisans on the left of being too cozy with cops.

I’m tempted to get cute and “hope that WInter is a better political analyst than Jason Reimer” – because it’d be more accurate to say the riots were a disaster for one city political establishment; the one where Jacob Frey and Andrea Jenkins and Lisa Bender were the “middle” and Alondra Cano was the loony left.

And for them, the riots were a disaster. For the new establishment, the one that gained huge ground in the ’22 elections and is poised to take the city over, the one led by the Democrat Socialists of America, against which Frey and Jenkins barely survived, and Bender and Cano retired lest they be seen as “too conservative” (literally the language the DSA droogs use to refer to Jacob F*cking Frey and Andrea Jenkins – the riots, and the aftermath (including the far far far left’s well-funded and well-organized response to whatever backlash there was in the ’20 elections) were a prime organizing opportunity.

But I won’t call Winter a myopic political analyst. Someone else will have to.

A Bonus I’ll Answer So You Don’t Need To

“Minneapolis Has Fallen” refers to quite a number of former MPD cops. Winter reminds us that a number of them are living on disability pensions and workmens comp settlements.

Someone needs to explain why that’s relevant (as opposed to, frankly, kinda pointlessly bitchy) since Winter will no doubt say she doesn’t have to.

Shots Fired

In the wake of his move to Twitter, some bad news for Tucker Carlson.

He’s been banned from…

…uh…

“Tribel”.

Because apparently nobody’s banning people on Mastodon.

Or Air America, apparently.

Fifth Column

The Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco is hosting the “Third Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,” – discussing the “needs of transgender patients in healthcare,” 

Just kidding. It’s the “Sanford Research Center”, in Sioux Falls.

Sanford Health – the titan of rural healthcare, and one of the biggest employers in the upper midwest – is pushing the very “blue” trans agenda in the very red northern Great Plains:

Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States — a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign’s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. “No one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,” Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota, boasted in February. “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”

Sanford, which purports to be “the largest rural health system in the United States” — it currently employs nearly seven times more South Dakotans than any other business in the state — has played a pivotal role in orchestrating those conservative failures. In 2021, a National Review investigation detailed the medical giant’s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year — a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she hastened to reintroduce an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.

The Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) agenda is being pushed into very red places by very blue big business – as a project to try to “convert” red parts of the country.

And in the case of Transgender ideology in South Dakota, it’s working:

Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU drew conservative criticism for hosting a “kid-friendly” drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state’s prohibition on “show[s] or other presentation[s]” deemed “harmful to minors.” Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state’s Department of Corrections signed a new “Management of Gender Dysphoria” policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their “gender identity” rather than sex — and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.

But no set of institutions in South Dakota has embraced gender ideology more than the state’s Sanford-dominated business community, which sits well to the left of the state’s political center of gravity. (In November 2020, Sanford replaced its CEO of 24 years after he informed employees that he wouldn’t be wearing a mask around the office, arguing that he had recently recovered from the Covid virus and therefore posed no threat of spreading it.) The state’s Chamber of Commerce chapters, which are closely tied to Sanford, regularly lobby against social-conservative bills, including medical conscience rights, the prohibitions on sex changes for minors, birth-certificate gender changes, transgender locker room use, and bans on men in women’s sports.

This is happening as other civilized countries are having intense second thoughts about the excesses of Big Transgender.

This shows how Big Left gets incrementalism in a way conservatives are having a lot of trouble with.

Buyin’ Time

You knew it was coming. And here it is — student loan “forgiveness,” baby:

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he will forgive $10,00 in federal student debt for most borrowers, fulfilling a campaign pledge and delivering financial relief to millions of Americans.

Biden will cancel up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants.

“Both of these targeted actions are for families who need it the most,” the president said in remarks from the White House on Wednesday afternoon.

I love the smell of moral hazard in the morning. But if there’s a cohort of our society that really loves this sort of thing, it’s the folks who assumed their “Studies” degree was their ticket to the carriage class. The donks long ago realized they have neither reason nor incentive to bestow other people’s resources on the working class or the small business dudes, because they aren’t picking up the check at Le Diplomate. The “S” in an S corporation now stands for suck it.

At this point, the game is evident even to those who’d rather not think about politics — helping the commonweal is right out. Higher education is the best thing the donks have going and subsidizing their efforts is the highest and best use of other people’s money. And if you look at the price tag, you’re probably a denier. And if you paid your own way to go to trade school, you’re a chump. The rewards go to Derrida, not derring-do.

The timing is crucial here — there’s no question this move will piss off millions of potential voters, but there’s also no question that we’ll all be getting a steady supply of ether from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and the constellation of like-minded political action groups flattering the Studies majors from Olaf and Kenyon and Swarthmore (and Eau Claire and Bemidji, too) that despite everything, they are actually part of the in-crowd. The checks will clear in plenty of time for the clientele, but the unwilling benefactors will be too busy trying to make payroll to get out and door knock.

But hey, have a nice day!

 

 

 

 

 

Just The News!

The “MN Reformer” is yet another effort to start a news organization by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets – because after the Minnesota Monitor, the Minnesota Independent and MNPost, certainly the fourth time’s the charm.

They’ve actually done some decent reporting over the last year.

Emphasis on “in the last year” – when there wasn’t an election on the way.

But there is.

The Reformer ran an op-ed by Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn calling for the state medical authorities to revoke Dr. Scott Jensen’s medical license. Jensen is, by the way, the GOP candidate for Governor. He’s also been an out-front skeptic of our state’s hamfisted, tyrannical public health response.

Neither the op-ed, the Reformer’s bio-blurb about Dr. Lichtsinn, nor any of the Reformer’s social media traffic makes any mention of any political bent that she might have.

Anecdotally – and I’m the one with the anecdote, here – Dr. Lichtsinn has been pretty much the polar opposite of Jensen; on social media, she was a positively strident proponent of lockdowns, mandates of every kind, and draconian enforcement.

And the reason for that is, she’s every bit as much a Democrat activist with portfolio as she is a doctor:

It’d be fair to say that, when not playing nice and empirical in op-eds intended to be marketed to the unconvinced center, she’s a “groaningly strident” progressive

Apparently the Reformer didn’t think the reader needed to know that.

Which is why the Reformer – unlike the MN Monitor and the MN Independent before it – bothered with all that “decent reporting” last year; to put up a veneer of legitimacy around what was intended to be yet another DFL PR operation during the 2022 campaign season.

Everything’s A Wedge

According to Dana Milbank…

…dissenting from Big Left/Big Media/the Brandon administration is “fascism”..

Not sure if they’re trying to foment a civil war.

If they were, what would they be doing differently?

(And how is the Brandon Administration “salvaging democratic norms?” Labeling everyone that disagrees a “white supremacist?”)

Bagman’s Groove

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.

Try Some, Buy Some

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.  

Bad News / Good News

The bad news: As I observed with Ann Bauer while filling in for Brad Carlson last week, lockdowns are killing kids – especially kids who are, like so many these days, predisposed to mental illness:

Millions of American kids are struggling, and their chances for long-term improved mental health is predicated on the notion that we will now prioritize their emotional well-being, which our society has tragically shown it has no intention of doing.

Our hope for raising an emotionally healthy and mentally stable generation is dissipating with every day kids are kept locked in their bedrooms and out of schools. Skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety are in no small part due to the fact that children feel neglected and forgotten, and they are not wrong to feel that way.

Our society has abandoned them and treated them as disposable. The damage caused by this abandonment is incalculable, and compounding every day we allow inertia, irrationality and the craven priorities of teachers unions to rule our decision-making.

The good news?

What, are you new around here? This is progressivism at work, operating through its wholly owned subsidiaries “Big Education” and “Big Karen”. Short of turning our culture around, there is none.

The Usual Suspects

Trump supporters on the Mall

“Trump Supporters” who stormed the Capitol.

We’ve seen the horned-hat guy before:

Wasn’t there a famous incident a centuray ago, a fire blamed on innocent people which gave a certain politician the excuse to seize power?
Are we absolutely certain the troublmakers were ordinary Trump supporters, same as the rest of the crowd outside, and not infiltrators hoping to cause a backlash against President Trump and his supporters protesting the stolen election

Joe Doakes

Whether the riot was launched by provocateurs or not, plenty of Trump supporters did participate with great glee. There’s a dilemma, of course – if there’s one thing we learned during the Tea Party, at gun rights and pro life and tax-protest rallies, it’s that conservatives need to behave impeccably, because the media and the Dems oppo research staff (pardon the redundancy) will pick over every utterance, visual and thought for wrongthink).

(If there’s another thing we learned it’s that the left’s slander machine and control of the administrative state makes perfect behavior irrelevant. Lefty social media today is awash in claims that the Tea Party was racist, violent, and a tool of the Koch Brothers, who (we’re told) bought all of American politics for a few years).

But whoever turned the demonstration into a riot, and whatever the reasons, the left is responding to last week’s events with a technique they’ve mastered; not wasting a crisis. Whoever did what, it will be spun relentlessly to their advantage.

Fair Is Fair

Liberals insist Citizens United was wrongly decided and must be overturned.  Really?  The Supreme Court made a mistake?  A mistaken decision must be overturned? 
Okay, I’m good with that.  But Citizens United concerns a narrow area of free speech as it applies to political campaigns. Let’s start with cases that have broader societal impact, because the errors those cases cause are much greater.  
Miranda v. Arizona
Roe v. Wade
Obergefell v. Hodges
Each of these stole the power of self-government from the states, where it rightfully belongs.  Let’s reverse all of them, then we can discuss why Hillary should be exempt from criticism. 
Joe Doakes

You notice, over time, how “logical consistency” isn’t much of a prioriity to Big Left.

The 12th Commandment

It’s an oldie but a goodie. And as we head toward another election sure to be driven by Big Left’s narratives and Trump’s responses to them, this bit here is worth committing to memory:

Courtesy Instapundit

Journalism is always about “asking the questions that matter” – where “matter” in this case means “furthers the narrative”.

Thirty Million Dollars Worth Of Nothingburger

I could try to write something about the denouement of the Mueller investigation.

But why bother, when this thread by left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald does it better than anything I’ve read over the weekend.

This thread is the “pull quote”, if you will – but there’s stuff worth reading before and well after it; I suggest looking over the whole thing via Twitter. And that will be the last time I urge people to read anything in Twitter.

But I digress:

I Love Watching Liberals Rip Each Others’ Hair Out

The board of “Wellstone Action” has voted the sons of the late Senator off its board; the Wellstones had too much affinity…

…for rural white deplorables who forsook the Democrat party.

And like all apostates, they get no love from the Big Left:

Founded after Wellstone’s death in a plane crash in 2002, Wellstone Action has trained thousands of progressive candidates, campaign operatives and community organizers throughout the country, with alumni serving in local and state offices and in the U.S. House. In 2016, the last year for which tax filings are available, the group reported providing training to 2,135 data and digital strategists, 723 nonprofit leaders and community organizers, and 854 aspiring political leaders.

David Wellstone and other Democrats close to his father began objecting last year to what David Wellstone described as Wellstone Action’s abandonment of disaffected Democrats in the rural Midwest — the rural poor were an early focus of the late senator — with an increasingly narrow focus on gender politics and people of color.

“I said, ‘After Trump, we’ve got to figure out how we are going to go back after those Democrats that we lost,” David Wellstone said. “We can do all the stuff we do. We do great stuff on communities of color; we’re doing great stuff on gender identity politics. But we need to do some of these other trainings. … Nobody wanted to have a discussion about that.”

To all my Democrat friends – I say “this is the way true progressives should approach the world”.

Market Discipline

While Academia is a vast holdout against the free market in countless ways, it appears to be exerting some hint of market discipline in at least one case:

Hillary Clinton’s take on the speaking circuit is not even on par with a reality TV star like Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, nj.com reports.

Clinton reportedly received $25,000 for a Thursday speech at historic Rutgers University that promised the skinny on “politics, American democracy and her role in shaping women’s political history,” but Snooki, of “Jersey Shore” fame picked up a $32,000 pay check for her analysis of American academia, suggesting that potential graduates “study hard, but party harder.”

Snooki may actually bring more value to students’ lives…

Hillary Clinton’s take on the speaking circuit is not even on par with a reality TV star like Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, nj.com reports.

Clinton reportedly received $25,000 for a Thursday speech at historic Rutgers University that promised the skinny on “politics, American democracy and her role in shaping women’s political history,” but Snooki, of “Jersey Shore” fame picked up a $32,000 pay check for her analysis of American academia, suggesting that potential graduates “study hard, but party harder.”

The Back Door

It’s been my theory for a long time now that Federal law enforcement, not the military, have become the “Standing Army” that the Founding Fathers worried about.

Likewise – who needs a surveillance state, when you can can get over-wealthy, under-wise nerds to build it for you?

Where, a decade or so ago, the tech world’s products served to liberate us from the control of big institutions — I wrote a book on that! — now they seem designed to keep us under the thumb of big institutions. People used to start blogs to express themselves. Now they communicate via giant quasi-monopoly “social media” sites that mute and ban users over their politics. Your computer and phone used to be ways for you to learn more about the world than had ever been possible before in human history; now your devices have turned into tools for governments and corporations to keep tabs on you in ways that have never been possible before in human history.

And now we have the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica allegedly scraped data from Facebook users — apparently in accordance with Facebook rules at the time — but that has a lot of people hot and bothered. To be fair, if someone working for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump had done this, there’d be less outrage in the press (in fact, when Obama’s campaign collected Facebook user information in 2012, the press mostly praised their ingenuity). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an issue.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Mission Accomplished, Dumb*sses

It’s 2009.

Barack Obama is president – elected in part by a biblical wave of support from black voters and novelty in the general election, and identity-mongering in the primaries.

You’re a Democrat strategist, planning ahead to the next two elections.  You need to keep women – Hillary Clinton voters – engaged enough to vote for Obama again in four years.  Child’s play; engineered a fake “war on women” and assign the media to run it.  Which they will.  They always do what you tell them.  It doesn’t always work – NPR was trying to make “Occupy” a thing for a solid year after the last rat-infested rape camp was carted to the landfill – but often enough, it gets the ignorant riled up enough to move the dial.

But look ahead four more years.  Obama will be termed out.  The Democrat bench is painfully shallow; the buffoon Biden, Fauxcahontas, the photogenic failure Martin O’Malley, and a few other governors that (you can’t possibly know or believe, yet) will be turned out of office next year…and the donkey in the room, the inevitable Hillary Clinton.

Who you gonna call?

Of course Hillary’s the front-runner.  She’s been painstakingly grooming herself and building a machine since 1998; but for the tsunami of identity that carried the freshman Senator Obama into office, she’d likely have already been president already.

But – but, you think she’s going to be like 200 years old in 2016.

So how do you get a tsunami of African-Americans to turn out in the same kind of numbers for a geriatric honky?

Create a race relations crisis, and send the order down the chain of command to the mainstream media to create a national issue of it.  Then, exploit it with a presidential campaign that was about virtually nothing but identity politics.

Well, as re the crisis, it’s mission accomplished:

Unfortunately (for Hillary), the relentless identity-mongering backfired, turning blue-collar honkies into an identity group in its own right.

And so today we have Hillary still out of office, a lingering race relations crisis that’s killing hundreds of people a year in our inner cities…

…and a media awaiting orders for the next national politically-based squirrel chase.

In The Not Too Distant Future

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Grocery checkout clerk:  I’m sorry, sir, your sale has been declined.
Liberal:  What?  My card is declined? Fine, I’ll pay cash.
Clerk:  No sir, the card is fine.  But the manufacturer won’t allow us to sell certain items to you.  I’ll have to remove them from the conveyor and you can buy the remaining items.
Liberal:  That’s ridiculous.  How can the manufacturer refuse to sell to me?  I demand to see a manager.
Manager:  Sorry sir, you’re the latest in a long line of customers who are having this problem.  You see, the manufacturer is engaging in a reverse boycott against certain people.  We’re prohibited from selling their products to the people being boycotted.
Liberal:  They can’t do that! They can’t refuse to do business with me.  I have rights!
Manager: Actually, they can.  The law says they can’t refuse to do business with people for discriminatory reasons like not baking a cake for gays, but they can refuse to do business with Liberals the same way the Liberals are boycotting Trump hotels.   Discrimination against people in the opposite political party is perfectly legal and since Liberals started the trend, it’s catching on everywhere.  They probably got your name from a mailing list of Democrat contributors or MPR members.
Liberal:   But I didn’t donate to any of those things.
Manager:  No?  Maybe you signed an on-line petition?  Or maybe one of your family members or Facebook friends did so you’ve been flagged because of that?  It could be a secondary boycott, same as when Liberals refuse to buy from Ivanka’s business because of her Dad’s politics.
Liberal:  This is bull.  I demand you sell me my items.
Manager:  I can sell you everything that’s not on the boycott list.  Let’s see, you can have, well, actually, sir, I’m afraid everything on this conveyor is on one list or another.
Liberal:  How is that possible?  How many boycotts are there?
Manager:  Only a few, but companies like Nestle own many brands and those are the brands you’ve chosen, like, for instance, Coffee Mate, Kit-Kat, Perrier, Honey Nut Cheerios, Friskies cat food.  You’ve also got Land O Lakes milk and butter, those are on another list.  Oh, here, you can have the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, they aren’t boycotting people like you.
Liberal:  People like me!!  Fine, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll take my business elsewhere.
Half an hour later . . .
Whole Foods Clerk:  I’m sorry, sir, your sale has been declined.
Joe Doakes

There are companies I’d be happy to have boycott me.

Very, very publicly.

Good News, Bad News

Good News:  After five years of “economic growth” under Obama, the economy might actually take off again.

The US economy will grow by 2.3 percent in 2017 and 3.0 percent in 2018, said the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, revising its earlier forecast.

That compares to gross domestic product growth of 1.5 percent this year, according to the OECD.

Bad News:  Because Keynesianism:

The Republican property tycoon’s team has said he will devote $550 billion to rebuilding decrepit infrastructure.

Really Bad News:  And that’s all presuming the Democrats don’t call in their markers with Janet Yellen.