Hopkins School Board Vice-Chair Chris LaTondresse – did he tell you he’s an “Obama administration alum” yet?

The Defund the Police movement hitches it’s wagons into the western suburbs.

In the apparently halcyon days of April 2018, students and school officials of the Hopkins School District gathered together in what was called “National Walkout Day” in memory of the horrific tragedy of the Columbine school shootings 19 years earlier.  Students spoke of issues of gun control and school safety.  And while none of the student speakers were even alive when Columbine occurred, a common theme of seeking safety at school echoed in the various speeches.

A time-traveler from that April day in 2018 would have a hard time reconciling the Hopkins School District of just two and-a-half years later as the School Board voted to keep guns out of their schools – guns in the form of local police protection:

The Hopkins school board on Tuesday night embraced a student-led call to remove police from Hopkins High School — with the action to come at year’s end.

The 6-1 vote brings a suburban voice to a national movement that has sought to end the use of school resource officers, or SROs.

The move to defund Hopkins School Resource Officers comes after several months of intense online lobbying by a group calling themselves “CopsOutHHH” and a poll of Hopkins students in favor of the movement – a poll in which only 183 of the District’s 1,600 students voted.  By the end of the year, Hopkins will sever it’s relationship with the Minnetonka Police Department (the Hopkins School District includes parts of Edina and Minnetonka) in a move that supporter and Board Vice Chair Chris LaTondresse bizarrely described as not actually “defunding” the police since the contract was due to expire anyway.

LaTondresse, a DFL endorsed candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner who touts his consulting work for USAID as making him an “Obama administration alum” in the same way that I apparently was a member of Congress because I visited Washington D.C. once, claims the move will allows for more mental health funding.  Considering the SRO budget is $113,142 out of a budget of $91,502,418, the idea that shifting 0.01% of the School Board’s resources away from security and towards mental health will address either issue is laughable at best and incredibly dangerous at worse.

It’s also a conclusion that files in the face of peer-tested research.  Carleton University conducted a two-year study of SRO programs and in their report, published by Routledge in 2019, they concluded that for every dollar invested in the program, a minimum of $11.13 of social and economic value was created.  While attention would likely focus on the role the SRO could or did play in the estimated 525 school shootings over the past decade (a number in partial dispute as it groups any gun-related incidents on a school campus together), left unreported are the number of incidents prevented by early SRO intervention.  The group Averted School Violence has begun to attempt to collect and analyze such data, a task made somewhat difficult by the very nature of the endeavor – incidents that don’t escalate into violence rarely make the news.

LaTondresse and the Hopkins School Board also want to cite that SROs make students of color fundamentally uncomfortable.  While data can’t contend with feelings, even a Brookings Institute report from 2018 which was less than fully supportive of SROs as agents of school safety didn’t see any correlation between SROs and race.  Brookings believed context for arrest records and racial backgrounds were lacking and thus a poor metric to judge whether or not SROs were more likely to discriminate or otherwise negatively impact minority students.

But no amount of data – or even common sense – was present on Tuesday night as the Hopkins School Board voted to eliminate basic security without even so much as a concept of what would replace their School Resource Officers.  Instead, a small but vocal minority has continued to push a partisan agenda that endangers students for the goal of striking symbolic blow against the police.

Are there still “independent” voters out there?

I don’t think I’ve called myself “independent” since my 20s. Most people I know are pretty strongly aligned, although “my social circle” is a self-selecting set.

But they apparently exist.

Let’s stipulate in advance – any poll taken before Labor Day is pretty useless. Any poll taken before mid-October is suspect. And as we saw in 2016, all polls are potentially delusional.

That being said – the Dems can’t be liking what this poll tells us:

When asked who they would vote for if the election were being held today, 47% of independents said that they would vote for Trump and 37% said they would vote for Biden, the poll showed. Another 5% said that they weren’t sure who they would vote for and 11% said that they would vote third-party or vote for someone other than Trump or Biden.

I’m gonna guess that, and not Mayor McDreamy and Governor Klink growing spines, is what brought the Guard out to Nicollet Mall last week.

While the Democrats work at quietly deflecting the nation’s attention from their senile soon-to-be-nominee, the media would seem to be working hard on keeping anyone from digging too hard into Kamala Harris’s past.

With good reason.

During her decade-and-a-half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred, despite the protests of victims’ groups.

Harris’s predecessor as San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, was aware of and had prosecuted numerous Catholic priests on sexual misconduct involving children. And he had been gathering case files for even more… Hallinan’s office had launched an investigation and quickly discovered that the San Francisco Archdiocese had extensive internal records concerning complaints going back some seventy-five years. In spring of 2002, Hallinan demanded the church turn them over to his office.

Now, there were reasons for this – some of them legal…

…and some of them apparently, er, convenience:

…many of the cases were past what had been the statute of limitations. And just as the cases were heating up, the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a 1994 California law that retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases. So instead of criminal prosecution for the older cases, Hallinan was forced to change his strategy. He wanted to hold the offenders accountable by releasing the clergy abuse files to the public and aiding the victims in civil cases.

But then Terence Hallinan made a big mistake. He lost his reelection bid to Kamala Harris. Of course, she had a little help from the local Catholic organizations that were freaking out over the prospect for Hallinan releasing the documents and helping the abuse victims.

The media’s job is covering stories about Democrats.

With a pillow.

Until the convulsions stop.

…claim the Democrats are just a little bit deranged.

No sirreebob:

UPDATE: And Kim Du Toit – long time no hear! – agrees. With the concept, anyway.

Far be it for me, a mere peasant, to question the journalistic integrity of the New York Times…But, may please the court of opinion, there might be a slight difference in the way the “newspaper of record” carried the two different announcements of vice presidential candidates, four years apart.Well, the key and I might notice it, anyway. Let’s see how you do:

Flashback four years:

But don’t you dare say the media is biased.

The Democrats are proposing Kamala Harris as the next President (after, let’s be honest, Creepy Joe’s inevitable resignation or removal).

It’s not like I’m in any danger of voting for any Democrat, ever – that shouldn’t be a surprise.

But I wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris if she were a fiscal conservative free-marketeering Second Amendendment advocate (which she has never been and will never be).

Let’s just cut to the chase: there is no circle of hell cold enough for prosecutor with Harris’s dubious relationship with honesty, ethics and morality.

She’s not ethically fit to be President – even in the post-Bill-and-Hillary Clinton sense of the term. Or even the post-Trump sense, if you’re wired that way.

She’s not morally fit to be mulch.

A little background: I support capital punishment for every reason but one – the inevitability, whether through accident or deliberate prosecutorial malfeasance, of executing innocent people. It’s already happened at least once, and at least 14 executions in the last since the death penalty was rebuilding a 19 7600s of people have been released directly from death row, their convictions “beyond a reasonable doubt“ vacated, very frequently because of prosecutorial misconduct.

That’s a sign, if you think about it, somethings very, very wrong with capital punishment.

Kamala Harris is one of those things that is very, very wrong.

I have a little personal background with a case of a man wrongly convicted in a grisly rape and murder case,

He spent those 22 years on death row because a prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence that would have led to his acquittal in the initial trial.

There is no circle in hell cold enough for a prosecutor who withholds exculpatory evidence in any case – least of all a death penalty case.

Kamala Harris has a long history of playing fast and loose with ethics rules, including gundecking exculpatory evidence in capital cases.

People like that aren’t fit to be president of the United States.

People like that aren’t fit to be mulch, morally speaking.

I take no joy in observing Joe Biden seems to be slipping into dementia. I’ve got family suffering from one degree of senile dementia or another – if you need to know the details, you already do – and it’s a horrible thing.

Of course, there needs to be a reckoning for the elder abusers propping him up in this run for the Presidency.

But fear not. To his biggest, most powerful supporters, dementia isn’t the problem. The system is! It’s time to scrap the debates!

But not, of course, because of the candidate’s mental state, nosireebob:

This, by the way, isn’t written out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden in the debates; Mr. Biden has done just fine in a long string of such contests. The point is that “winning” a debate, however assessed, should be irrelevant, as are the debates themselves.

Sarah Palin – derided as an anti-intellectual joke by the usual suspects these days – fought Biden to (I’ll be charitable) a standstill in 2008, when nobody was attacking his mental state. Ethics, yes – acuity, no.

Trump vs. Biden would be a little like Mohammed Ali vs. Jerry Cooney.

This is a bald-faced evasion.

This far.

I’ve seen a few Democrats on me on social media saying they thought Joe Biden’s performance with the auto workers the other day it was a good episode, and a sign of strength.

I was truly, truly not convinced.

I think I have really, really good reason not to be:

If Biden now has a reputation as a champion of gun confiscation — and if construction workers in Michigan are asking him about it, it suggests he does — he is going to have a hard time winning back the voters that Trump peeled away from the Obama coalition. Barack Obama didn’t say much about guns at all until his second term had begun, and, once he did, he presided over the loss of the Senate, the loss of the White House, and a record-breaking period of civilian firearms sales. Judging by their rhetoric, Democrats seem to believe that the center of gravity has changed on this question since then. But the evidence for this is scant. The State of Virginia is run solely by Democrats — Democrats who were bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg and who promised to pass restrictive gun control as their first priority. They failed, and sparked a massive backlash in the process. Do we think the playing field looks different in Michigan?

In a way, Biden‘s outburst serves as a Rorschach blob; Democrats see a Trump like outburst a candidly unguarded rhetoric; conservative to see a working stiff cornering a candidate with wildly contradictory messages on the issue, and the candidate flailing.

I’m going to stick with “flailing“.

Joe Biden tells 2nd Amendment supporter he’s, er, “full of shit”.

“You are actively trying to end our Second Amendment right and take away our guns,” the worker said to Biden, according to video captured by CBS reporter Bo Erickson.

Biden immediately interjected, saying “You’re full of shit,” and implored those gathered to listen to his clarification.

Then, he shows that he is, indeed, full of…

…well, you know. Specifically FOS bits are emphasized by me:

“I support the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment — just like right now, if you yelled ‘fire,’ that’s not free speech,” Biden continued. “And from the very beginning — I have a shotgun, I have a 20-gauge, a 12-gauge. My sons hunt. Guess what? You’re not allowed to own any weapon. I’m not taking your gun away at all.” [Which is it? Ed.]

The man cited “viral” videos surrounding his claim that Biden is against the Second Amendment, saying the former vice president was “trying to take our guns.”

“I did not say that. I did not say that,” Biden repeated. “It’s a viral video like the other ones they’re putting out that are simply a lie.”

“This is not OK, alright?” the man shot back.

Biden replied, “Don’t tell me that, pal, or I’m going to go outside with your ass.”

“You’re working for me, man!” the worker said.

“I’m not working for you,” Biden said. “Don’t be such a horse’s ass.”

But then, Biden has also told us he’s going to put Beto “Hell Yeah, I’m Coming For Your Guns” O’Rourke in charge of gun policy, so it’d seem he’s full of…

…well, you know where this leads, right?

So then you will ignore the Canadians:

For months, young people on university campuses across Canada have gathered to call and text American voters in the hopes of convincing them to support Sanders as the 2020 Democratic nominee.

“I see this as really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not just in American politics, but for left-wing politics around the world,” said Vancouver student Quentin Rowe-Codner.

The 22-year-old Sanders supporter did some research and discovered foreigners are allowed to volunteer for any campaign.

“I decided to start making calls and texts and I found that to be good and rewarding,” said Rowe-Codner. “But I started a little bit isolated just doing it on my own.” 

If the left didn’t have selective indignation, they’d have no…

…well, no. They’d just have undiscriminating blanket indignation.

There is only one reason to not vote for Mark Robinson for Lieutenant Governor this fall.

And that reason is racism.

Carry on.

In the race for the Democratic nomination to run against President Trump in 2020:

• Every black candidate has left the race.
• Every Latino candidate has dropped out.
• Every Native American candidate…hah hah hah, you know where this goes.
• Every woman with a serious shot (thanks for playing, Tulsi) is out.

Bummer Republicans are such bigots.

Twin Cities Media and Left (ptr), 2015: “Black Lives Matter were heroes for shutting down I94 during rush hour! Speak truth to power! Up next – Amanda Shapely at the Boat Show”

Twin Cities Media and the Left (ptr) 2020: “Black Lives Matter are a bunch of hooligans! Why weren’t the police able to keep order at Amy’s…er, Senator Klobuchar’s event?”

I’m pondering on what to do tomorrow.

Voting in the GOP primary is relatively pointless – I’ve got my choice of President Trump or The Donald. Hardly worth a trip to the neighborhood high school gym, is it?

On the other hand – paying a visit to the DFL primary it would give me a fairly pivotal choice in affecting the candidate the Democrats put on the ballot this November.

And the choices are enough to get you giddy with excitement:

• A woman whose relationship with the truth makes Donald Trump’s Twitter feed look like a Jordan Peterson video
• Another woman who’s never faced a hostile press question, much less Hillary Clinton’s celebrated “3 AM phone call”
• The mayor of the fourth or fifth largest city in Indiana (oops – missed the boat on that one)
• A 78-year-old man who has always been a walking political joke, and he seems to be into the first stages of senility
• Bernie Sanders, a man whose formidable foreign policy acumen has to elide confidence in even the most ardent skeptic, yessirreenob.

Hugh Hewitt says he plans on voting for Sanders, to do his bit to make sure that there is the Starkist possible choice this November – Between a candidate who has been a deeply imperfect president who has actually done an unexpectedly good job, and someone who is an active, enthusiastic apologist for a system that murdered 100 million people.

It’s tempting. It really is.

And it started as such a big day for A-Klo, who shocked the world by winning the endorsement of the Star Tribune’s editorial board, a group composed of people who used to get blackout drunk with her father. There are no words to describe our amazement that the Strib – a paper that’s served not only as Klobuchar’s PR firm, but the controller of all information about her, thoughout her career, would make such a bold, brave…

…Oh, I can’t keep a straight face any more.

Anyway – the day didn’t end nearly as well, as protesters affiliated with Black Lives Matter, irate over the Myon Burrell case, derailed one of her love-fests in Saint Louis Park last night, bum-rushing the stage and occupying it until the campaign cried uncle:

“The campaign offered a meeting with the senator if they would leave the stage after being onstage for more than an hour,” the spokesperson said. “After the group initially agreed, they backed out of the agreement and we are canceling the event.”

Questions over Klobuchar’s prosecutorial record, namely her handling of the Burrell case when she was the top attorney in Hennepin County, Minn., have dogged the senator since she announced her presidential bid last year. Klobuchar has also faced criticism for declining to prosecute cases involving police accused of using excessive force against black suspects, The Washington Post’s Elise Viebeck and Michelle Ye Hee Lee reported.

How bad was it?

This bad (Twitter link here, in case the tweet below doesn’t display properly)

Bad enough that even the Twin CIties media didn’t try to cover it up.

Yet.

I wouldn’t want to be any of those protesters when A-Klo catches them alone, though.

Who are they?

For starters, anyone who reads Paul Krugman unironically. 

Joe Biden has a big lead in the South Carolina Democrat Primary polls.

What on earth does this say about South Carolina Democrats?

Joe Biden.

With the nuclear “Football”. 

Sleep tight. 

The party of James Hodgkinson, of “Anti”-Fa, of Eric “Nuke The Gun Owners” Swalwell, of “Fight in the Streets” (VP candidate Tim Kaine and Loretta Lynch ) and punching teenage girls (Woody Kaine) and grownup girls (Keith “Thumper” Ellison) and fantasies (Madonna, Snoop Dogg, Bow Wow, MN DFL operative William “Guillotine” Davis ) and dramatizations (Kathy Griffin) about killing Republicans, of multiple dramatic and “comedic” productions featuring the violent deaths of Republicans (including Dubya and The Donald), of co-opting the same of a movement that killed “the enemy” with guns and bombs and molotov cocktails (“The #Resistance”)…

… which has just spent three years calling President Trump “literally Hitler”, and lying about his support for neo-Nazis at home (the Charlottesville slander) and his support from fascist to Brod (the fictitious Putin link”)…

… is about to nominate a candidate who literally, actively, proudly, truthfully supports people directly responsible for 100 million murders in the past century.

This is almost too far beyond satire for Berg’s Seventh Law.

…from the obvious signs, what is “straight” news and what’s the Babylon Bee. 

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison confesses, de facto, to spending the past three years under a rock:

So many comebacks possible – and the conservative Internet delivered a lot of them.  So much so that it modified the dictum to “never look at the comments”. 

But Steve Scalese topped ’em all:

I heard this – or a piece just like it, and which may well have been a rerun – on NPR on Sunday afternoon – explaining Bernie Sanders’ putative popularity among young latinos. 

And I found it pretty much chilling, to be honest.  

The Sanders campaign is pitching its candidate  as Tio Bernie – “Uncle Bernie” – to young Latin-Americans:

Shawn Navarro, a 33-year-old Sanders volunteer in Las Vegas, refers to his favorite presidential candidate as “Tío Bernie.”

“He reminds us a lot in the Latinx community of your grandpa, or your tío,” explained Navarro after a recent Spanish-language campaign event in Nevada. “He’s kind of stern, a little grumpy at times. But, at the same time, you really know he’s looking out for you.”

Latinos, Navarro says, are tired of listening to talking points from Democrats who come to their neighborhoods, “speak a little bit of Spanish” and “eat tacos,” but then don’t deliver any real results. It’s why, he says, exit polls found that Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, “who was far less offensive,” performed roughly equally with Latinos in the 2016 and 2012 elections.

Latinos come from a part of the world that’s been fairly ravaged by socialists painting themselves as “family” for right around two centuries.

There’s a real educational opportunity, here.

I don’t entirely mean for “progressives”.

Early yesterday evening, as I drove home from work, I heard National Public Radio’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Iowa Caucuses.

As they – or one or another of their intervieweews, anyway – raved about the process, they kept mentioning an “App”. One of the NPR anchors – who “covers” “election security”, we were told – mentioned that “the App” was of unknown origin; “who programmed the thing” was literally a secret. The media hadn’t even been allowed to look at it, or at the people who developed it.

“What could possibly go wrong?”, I said to myself.

Nonetheless, Dems were in high spirits, including Tom Perez:

Well, you saw the headlines.

As I drove home around 11 last night, it was becoming clear the Hawkeye Cauci were turning into a Bolivian Cluster Cuddle, with “the App” not working, and with precinct chairs sitting on hold for hours, or just giving up and going home.

So – what about “the App?”

So – not only do people commit suicide when they cross Hillary, but so apparently do entire party units.

The conspiracy theory du jour – Bernie was winning, and the Hillary/Biden machine told the Iowa Machine to finesse the the results no matter what.

Which, Ben Shapiro notes, shouldn’t be a problem for Bernie or his Bros:

Wonder if Putin had anything to do with it?