Since it’s state fair time Dash the time when at least some people in Minnesota start paying attention to the upcoming elections – let’s make sure we remember: when minutes counted, Governor Klink took days to respond to the collapse of law and order in Minneapolis.
If you lelt them babble on long enough, they always prove you right:
By the way – newspaper editorial cartoonists take a test when they’re interviewing, measuring their knowledge of current events, history, and their understanding of the ins and outs of American society.
If they score over 50%, they get a job in the warehouse.
Meanwhile, the military is reducing standards again, desperate to find bodies to replace the trained professional warriors they just let go.
Civilian gun sales continue unabated, the better to face off against Lesko Brandon’s Wokesters in Uniform. The next Insurrection should be a real doozy.
Joe Doakes
I’m going to break with Joe on this one for a bit. I’m going to suggest that if we ever have a real insurrection, the military will be the least of the problems, as they are overwhelmingly not drawn from the “blue“ elites.
As Robert Kaplan noted in his excellent (albeit a generation old) imperial Grunts, an 18-year-old from East Texas is 32 times as likely to serve in the military as one from New York City (and that New Yorker is much more likely a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx, or a blue-collar Irish kid from Staten Island, as opposed to a WASP trust fund baby from Manhattan).
Protesters outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Barrett.
First, it’s illegal to protest outside the home of a federal judge and rightly so. There are limits to free speech: fighting words, fire in a theater, perjury on the witness stand, and threatening/intimidating a judge are off limits. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, these gals can take their protests to their state legislatures. They have no place here.
Second, the sign makes clear this protest is not about saving Roe v. Wade’s “first trimester” limitation; it’s not about saving Casey’s “undue burden” limitation; it’s about Kermit Gosnell-style partial birth abortion butchery and Planned Parenthood’s baby-parts-to-order sales. They might be the only seven women in the nation who demand that. The rest of the nation recoils in horror.
Third, their costumes are meant to emphasize their plight. The bloody pants mean that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, women will have to seek back-alley abortions from unqualified practitioners who will leave them hemorrhaging from botched abortions. The tied hands holding the baby mean the women will be prisoners/slaves forced to carry the baby they conceived until it is born and can be given up for adoption. Dire predictions, considering that many states have already moved to guarantee abortions and some employers have even offered to pay for interstate travel if required to obtain one. This is not 1950. Alleys are for drug sales and commercial sex acts, not abortions.
The fact that seven women can get national media coverage for their little stunt instead of a quick trip to the local jail followed by prosecution in federal court indicates the effort likely is coordinated from the very top of the Lesko Brandon administration, probably the same people who sent the FBI after parents who complained to school boards about pedophile grooming curricula and covering up transgender rapes. I hope Democrats run this photo in every campaign ad from now until the election. It’s too much to hope that Republicans would be smart enough to do it.
Joe Doakes
Of course it’s too much to hope the Republicans do it.
I’ve probably noted this elsewhere, but I don’t’ think it can be overstated: the reason that the first Obama Administration spent so much time and effort barbering about “white supremacist terror” was to start projecting fault on the phantom menace to draw attention away from the mass of leftist thugs that Big Left was in the process of unleashing on society.
Events this week show I’m onto something.
Pro-infanticide terrorists in Buffalo firebomb a crisis pregnancy center – one of several such incidents nationwide lately:
The arsonists left graffiti on a wall that read, “Jane Was Here.” The organization has committed multiple such incidents in the last few months, including one in which it firebombed the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), a pro-life group in Madison, Wis. last month. There, the terrorists left the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”
…
Jane’s Revenge also admitted that it threw red paint on the the front door of a crisis pregnancy center in Washington, D.C. last week, spray painting “Jane Says Revenge” on the side of the building.
Here, locally? “Anti”-Fa torches the truck of a contractor who helped the city evict a homeless camp, takes credit:
It’s culminated – for now (?) – with the Democrat hit man who, incited by Chuck Schumer’s rhetoric (specifically calling out Justice Kavanaugh for the attention of extremists) and the partisan leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision and the likely outcome of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case, rangered up and went cross-country with the stated intent to kill the justice and intimidate the court.
The punk will get virtually no sentence; his crime, little media attention outside the conservative media. Big Left will blather on about “imminent waves of right wing / “white supremacist” terror”, while waves of leftists burn more cities, and eventually just through weight of numbers kill more conservatives.
And Big Left and its media toadies will befrenzy themselves over episodes like Charlottestown and January 6, while ignoring events like this – which are themselves every bit as great a threat to democrach.
If people don’t get law and order – and, more importantly, equality before the law – in exchange for all of the taxes and civil liberties we give up – or, perhaps worse, realistically believe that there are two separate, unequal justice systems – they are going to get it for themselves.
As I was putting out the cat this morning, the little girl from upstairs walked by. She was crying. I asked her what was wrong. “Someone stole my bike, I’m looking for it.” I told her I’d keep an eye out and wished her luck.
Yes, I could have lectured her on the evils of society, how she should have assumed everyone is a thief and locked it up, how we have new neighbors so no doubt they stole it just to wreck it because that’s how Those People are. I could have offered to buy her a different bike, a even better bike. But she’s a 2nd Grader. She doesn’t care about any of that. She doesn’t want a different bike, she wants her own bike back.
I know how she feels. I feel the same about America. The Left keeps trying to take it away so they can wreck it. They claim they will replace it with a different America, an even better America, but I don’t want a different America. I want my own America back. The fear it may be lost forever makes me feel like crying, too.
Joe Doakes
In my book “Trulbert“, the question on the surface was “what if society had to stay over“.
Implicit in that, sometimes, was “what if we could start society over“.
Because these days I’m feeling…
… not so much like that second grade girl.
More like the 18-year-old who got his bike stolen, and spent the summer roaming the city, looking for an excuse to pound the thief flat with a hammer.
The real wave of terror is going to be all those white right-wingers.
Someday.
One of these days.
Any time, now.
Honest.
In the meantime, though, we’ve just got the regular left-wing terrorists in the Twin Cities:
Or at least some Macalester poli-sci majors apprenticing with Big Left. By the way – the guy with the Molotov Cocktail in the pic is black – but I’ll wager a shiny new quarter that everyone behind this leaflet is whiter than me, and comes from a family with an income well into six figures.
Remember – if the people to whom we pay taxes don’t provide law and order, people will provide it for themselves.
The real danger to our society is “right wing terror”.
As the gone-but-not-forgotten, perma-blocked Dog Gone used to say, the danger is a wave or conservative violence that will “dwarf 9/11”.
While we wait,and wait, and wait, we saw this from a “journalist” for “Rewire News Group” re the firebombing in Madison we talked about earlier this week:
I’ve heard people on both sides of this issue say that abortion would be the spark for the next hot civil war in this country.
I disagree. The left’s response to being forced to share power, via shared powers, checks and balances and due process, with those they hate is going to be what the civil war is about.
Abortion will be one of the issues that will exercise the shared powers, checks, balances and process against which Big Left will revolt.
SCENE: Long after dark, in a ratty but not necessarily malevolent commercial and office district, in an unnamed “blue” city. A Hyundai crossover pulls up to the curb, in front of a relatively pristine, whitewashed brick wall on the side of a church.
Stacey HINTON, Executive Director of “Keep All Racists Eternally Nonplussed”, a white progressive support group, steps out of the vehicle. She furtively looks around, pulls a can of spray paint out of a bag, and starts to spray paint something on the white wall.
Gradually, it resolves into:
“If abortion isn’t safe, either are you”.
HINTON hurriedly climbs back into the Hyundai, and drives away.
Minutes pass.
Another car – a 1990 Dodge Ram – pulls up to the same spot. After a moment, Mitch BERG climbs out, and reads the graffiti. He shakes his head, mildly disgusted.
He looks around and, improbably and incredibly, notes a “Planned Parenthood” clinic which, oddly enough, is right across the parking lot from the now-vandalized church. It has a pristine, if dingy, yellow wall facing the parking lot. BERG saunters across the lot, checks his six, and pulls a can of spray paint from his cargo pocket. Slowly and vaguely legibly, he sprays the wall.
“If you threaten me and mine with political violence, finding an abortion is going to be the least of your problems”.
Madison police and fire departments were called to the office of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA) around 6 a.m. on Sunday after a passer-by reported smoke coming from the building. The flames were extinguished and thankfully, no one was injured. Investigators found a smashed window and at least one molotov cocktail that had failed to ignite. A fire inside the office burned books and damaged furnishings. Additionally, the building exterior was covered with spray-painted graffiti, including the anarchy symbol (an A inside a circle, also used by Antifa), the anti-police tag “1312” (which stands for ACAB — All Cops Are Bastards), and the threatening phrase, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”
As I noted earlier, it seemed that the most likely likely of the (likely) expungement of Roe v. Wade would be that they’d have to start trying to convince voters, one at a time, of the rightness of their cause.
As we saw in Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the George Floyd riots, violence is certainly one of the ways Big Left “convinces” people.
An anonymous lawyer friend (who is not Joe Doakes) writes:
I’d get in so much trouble if I posted this, but when I see people say that 70% opposethe overtruning of Roe v. Wade, my first thought is that no more than 2% even know what it says, much less what overturning it would mean.
And they also have no idea what the Mississippi law, challenged in the current case, says.
In terms of what it means?
I’m looking forward to explainingi this to pro-choicers: it means you’re going to have to do what we Second Amendment people have been doing for about the past fifty years; convincing people, one at a time, nationwide, of the rightness of your cause and case.
35 years ago, the same polls of uninformed and largely disinterested people said that 85% supported gun control, including a majority that supported banning handguns completely. That number is under 50% for the first time in a couple of generations.
And that’s because 2-3 generations of people have spent a lot of time, treasure and shoe leather convincing their fellow Americans that a constitutional right of the people is, in fact, a constitutional right of the people.
The terror the pro-choicers seem to feel about that concept tells us that while 70% of the people may respond to “Do you support women’s ‘reproductive rfights'” with “yes”, when you change it to “how are you with the thought of killing a gestating human?” it’s going to drop way off.
I suspect modern Americans, if asked “should we install a single executive, with unlimited power over government, to get things done and solve the current crisis?“, it’d show something like 52% positive.
If you listen to the pro-infanticide crowd, you might think the Unted States “lagged” behind the heathens on the Continent when it came to “reproductive rights”.
Which is why listening to the pro-infanticide crowd is such a terrible idea:
Most of Europe is more restrictive than Mississippi or Texas.
During World War 2 in the Pacific, American GIs famously used verbal call-and-answer passwords with the letter “L” – “Calla Lillies” was a famous one – because the Japanese language has no such sound in it; it’s hard for Japanese-born speakers, even those relatively fluent in English, to make that sound.
Likewise, an easy way to tell if someone is from Western Europe is to see how they pronounce a phrase like “Think Through The Thoughts Thurman Thought Thirty-Three Times”. A German will work hard not to say “Tink Tru Da Tots Turman Tot Turty-Three Times”; a French native, “Zink Zru Ze Zots Surman Sot Zurty-sree times”. Neither language has the “th” sound like American English does.
But if America comes, heaven forbid, to blows over our social and cultural differences, the social and cultural divides don’t really break along linguistic lines.
So as a substitute, perhaps we’d have to try this; tell someone a bit of news like this, and see if they regard it as good news or terrible news.
A sane man instinctively recoils in horror from harming another, and later suffers PTSD from the guilt;
A sociopath cares about his own group but not other groups and therefore has no problem harming them; and
A psychopath actively enjoys harming people and seeks out the opportunity to do so; then,
judging from behavior observed on freeways, grocery stores, Twitter and social media, ordinary Americans seem to be sliding from sanity to sociopathy, becoming less empathetic and more emphatic, less generous minded and more generally pissed at the world in general. And judging from crime reports and YouTube videos, young African-Americans seem to be sliding from sociopathy toward psychopathy.
If true, this change will make it easier for all Americans to resort to violence, murder, rebellion, revolution, which is what certain Liberal/Progressive/Leftists seem to desire: an end to the United States as it now exists.
Why has this happened?
Did we fall or were we pushed?
Joe Doakes
Well I’m not going to answer directly, I will remind you that the extremes like it when people feel the need to abandon the center.
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.
“So, Mitch – why do you say that the democratic party in United States is the party of authoritarianism? “
Because they tell us they are. Strong majority of Democrats approve of Justin Trudeaucescu‘s treatment of civil disobedience:treatment of civil civil disobedience:
35 percent overall approved of Trudeau’s crackdown, while 10 percent said they were unaware of what’s happening to the US’ northern neighbor.
Looking at Democrat likely voters alone, 65 percent said they favored Trudeau’s crackdown on the protestors, and 17 percent said they disapproved.
I mean, even the rhetoric is becoming too obvious to avoid; Orwell’s villains declared that freedom was slavery; today, democrat thinkers closer and closer to the main stream say freedom is “white supremacist“.
More on the Ilhan Omar response tweet – itself just a big fascination – later.
Now – let’s take a look at this tweet, from someone justifying the hacking of crowd-funding data for people supporting the Trucker Convoy, included this photo and blurb:
…at a libertarian, anti-masker rally of mostly rural, western, and libertarian-sympathetic Canadians, themselves likely to be not especially mask-y, especially if they take that whole Gadsden Flag “Don’t Tread On Me” thing seirouslly…
…all masked up as tightly as the most constipated Karen?
And no, the same does not hold true for “right wing“ groups:
They continued on to question whether the right-wing groups were the real source of the violence given that Antifa tens to show up to counter their presence.
“That’s not what our research found. We sawno difference between events in which antifa was facing off with a group such as the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters and when they were protesting unopposed,” they wrote.
The use of violence as a tool of political “persuasion“ appears to be almost purely a leftist phenomenon.
I don’t as a rule care about artists politics, anymore than I care about a politician’s taste in music.
But the flip-flop of so many “counterculture” artists to “cultural enforcer” would be jarring, to anyone who thought about it critically.
It made headlines last week: Neil Young, who’s spent the last couple weeks trying to shut down Joe Rogan, was participating in “Free Speech rallies” in 2006.
Now, you could call them anti-George W Bush rallies that had little to do with free speech; I certainly called them that at the time.
“Just getting up in front of a lot of people makes you nervous. But when you know that some of them are really going to be angry at you, and you’re in a crowd, and it’s a volatile situation, people have been drinking, whatever — you know, it makes you nervous.”
“It was just that critical time in history where things were turning. Things were changing,” he added. “Those who feel the way we do had some hope and those who don’t feel the way we do were angry that the change happened. And those people have got a voice, and they have a reason for feeling the way they do. They strongly believe in the convictions. They believe in the military.”
“They believe that we’re doing the right thing for the world, and they have every reason to be respected for their beliefs,” he said.
Does it look like he’s describing Rogan listeners to anyone else?
Did Neil Young become The Man? Did “Rage Against the Machine” become “Rage Enforcing The Machine?”
Maybe – but I suspect the Tea Party, and its slandering back into the shadows, from whence it emerged mean and without manners as the Trump Populist movment, had a lot to do with it. The counterculture of 50 years ago is now the dominant culture.
Black Lives Matter rioter Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, was sentenced Friday to 120 months in federal prison for his role in burning down a Minneapolis pawn shop during the destructive George Floyd riots in May 2020.
Lee had previously pleaded guilty in July 2021 to a single count of arson in connection with a fire that destroyed the Max It Pawn Shop on Lake St. at 2726 E. Lake St. He admitted to starting the fire on May 28, 2020, which is now considered one of many arson incidentsthat happened during the summer riots.
Oddly, the article doesn’t list which white supremacist group he was part of
Remember in the 1980s, when some “conservative” fundies rejoiced at the deaths of AIDS patients.
It was a pretty depraved stance. Everyone knows that.
Someone tell the fairly irredeemable LA Times drone Michael Hiltzik – who has reprised that particular bit of human depravity by declaring “Mocking some anti-vaxxers’ deaths is necessary“.
Helpfully, he adds “My exception applies to those who have actively undermined public health for the sake of an ideology and a culture war”.
I’m not going to extensively pull-quote the column – which is full of the sort of “two weeks to stop the virus” cheerleading that seems to have come from a CDC press release in April 2020, or from someone who thinks Gavin Newsom is on the right track.
That’s not especially remarkable.
Remarkable? Humanity is secondary to progs like Hiltzik:
It may be ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind.
But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled…There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.
Actually, there is another way: : stop politicizing public health. Stop spreading distrust of “the Trump Vaccine” during the elections, and then turn around and claim credit for it. Stop making “sowing controllable panic” the default setting for public health messaging. Stop being whores for the Democrats, if you’re the media.
But let’s not pretend this – mocking and giggling about opponents, on whatever issue, that die unfortunate deaths – is anything but the default setting for ghouls like Hiltzik. After watching people like him giggle and guffaw over the deaths of Tony Snow, Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh, and hoot and holler for the death of Steve Scaliise, it’s a stretch to assume they have any other setting.
Sort of like guffawing about dead AIDS patents, only apparently acceptable.
Governor Klink had a union obligation to save the bloody shirt yesterday:
A year ago, we witnessed an assault on our democracy when the U.S. Capitol building was stormed during an attempted insurrection. Today, we must protect and uphold our democratic ideals by ensuring this never happens again.
I mean, he’s not wrong – although I doubt he knows why.
The part of our “democratic ideals” that the mooks ofJanuary 6 attacked was the process – the Constitutionally-mandated steps for determining who the President is.
The rioters tried to circumvent that process. That – not the hooliganism in the Capitol itself – was the attack on democracy.
When government encourages or (hold onto this word) allows people to chuck the process and impose rule themselves – that’s the very definition of an attack on democracy.
Like, January 6? Sure.
Even if they’re dead sure the election was stolen, because Rudy Giuliani said so, and Sidney Powell had
Like when a group of protesters tore down the statue of Christopher Columbus on the Minnesota Capitol mall – bypassing the rule of law (the Capitol Architecture Committee), but with the tacit blessing of the Administration (whose Lieutenant Governor, Peggy Flanagan, chairs the committee); the DFL machine then “punished” the ringleader by “sentencing” him to preach to school kids why Columbus was evil enough to warrant trashing the process. Which would be more or less like “sentencing” Sheriff Hutchinson to a punitive round of tequila shots.
Is the destruction of the statue as big an assault on the rule of law as the riot a the Capitol?
In and of itself, of course not.
Is the fact that our institutions, and our media, tolerate one side attacking the rule of law while hammering on the oppositions attacks?
Today is the Honorable Sixth, the day when patriots everywhere raise their fingers to the usurper in Washington, in memory of the innocents slaughtered and the political prisoners still held captive for attempting to secure democracy by peaceful means.
Joe Doakes
I mean, if it were Democrats and the occupant were a Repubican, that’s what we’d have heard all day yesterday…
