Shot: Democrats act like there’s an exception in the First Amendment for “misinformation”, a term so broad literally nobody can define it (emphasis added):

Did someone send out a memo? Or has the shock of encountering the wild variety of views visible on Elon Musk’s X just been too much for grandees used to moving in circles where the acceptable boundaries of disagreement are narrowly drawn? When John Kerry recently spoke of “dislike of and anguish over social media,” he was presumably referring to how he and like-minded others (among them, it turned out, another failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton) reacted as they watched the wrong sort of ideas openly discussed on major online platforms.

For his part, Kerry was talking about climate “misinformation,” a word that, in the hands of those who manipulate its meaning, can encompass not only a misstatement of fact but also, all too frequently, nothing more than the expression of a heterodox point of view. Such fine distinctions, we suspect, are of little interest to Kerry. Instead, he bemoaned the way that people no longer turn to “the referees we used to have” to determine what’s true, but — the horror — “self-select where they go for their news, for their information.”

 

Chaser: The “Referees” we once had to tune into for information are, not misinforming, but actively disinforming us:

After Rathergate, and seeing Lesley Stahl humiliated while covering for Hunter Biden in 2020, you’d think CBS might learn, mightn’t you?

Of course not.

Chalk it up to a self-referential information feedback loop, but when Democrats started yapping about “misinformation”, I’d have bet a roll of quarters something like this was in the offing.

From a Trump rally last night

The decline of the American military is a serious problem.

Crude but merciless satire may not be the solution.  But hopefully it helps lead us there.

Can Kamala Harris ride “Vibes” and “Rizz” all the way to the White House?

Pessimistic as I am about the collective intelligence of half our population, I’m not always optimistic.

But Jim Geraghty has his doubts:

The Harris campaign’s entire theory of the case is wrong. Reminding people about what they couldn’t stand about Trump and emphasizing “joy” and “vibes” is not sufficient to close the deal with an electorate. It completely misreads the mood of the voters, who have been coping with runaway inflation and a high cost of living for most of the past four years, who have a growing sense that no one is in charge at the border, who worry about a genuine post-Covid rise in crime, and who see an international scene beset by invasions, terrorism, and massacres, all presided over by a doddering old man who was hidden from the public by a staff that took Edith Wilson as a role model.

This past weekend, Peggy Noonan asked the question the Harris brain trust should have asked: Is this the right moment in American life to proclaim a new politics of “joy”? “Do you want to feel joyful?” is the wrong question; almost all of us would prefer to be happier. The question is: Do you look around at the state of the United States and the world today — and the performance of this administration for the past four years — and feel like joy is the appropriate response?

 

My semi-related theory:  Democrats have been using Minnesota as a testbed for their approach in campaigning; running for high office on pure social media happy-vibing and platitudes, abetted by a mostly-in-the-tank media, worked well for Walz and Flanagan (and Dayton before them).

Why wouldn’t it work for Harris?

The answer – the fact that a few reporters, and “reporters”, didn’t get the message:  Harris could screw up scrambled eggs:

(As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, let’s just take a moment to savor the irony that Sunny Hostin asked Harris the question that did so much damage.)

Much more in the next couple of weeks.

I mean, Esme Murphy doesn’t tongue-bathe Democrats like Stephen Colbert does.

And yet Kamala Harris botches even that:

If you’re one of the world’s dictators, it’d be negligent of you not to the trying to influence the election in Harris’s favor.

Submitted without comment, here’s Governor Walz’s appearance last Sunday on Fox. 

Did I say “submitted without comment?”  You know me better than that.

He does not come off well.  

I’d like to make sure as many Minnesotans as possible see this – not only for the Presidential tilt, but as people assess the DFL’s performance this past six years.

David Strom has a results of VP debate.

In short, I have revised my opinion about the debate. Not about what happened–I thought Vance was clearly better than Walz, but that it wouldn’t matter. Now I think it very well might, not because Vance won the debate but rather the manner in which Walz lost it. 

Walz lost it by looking deranged at times and like a liar. The visuals mattered and Walz’s dancing around on his personal lies mattered even more. 

So I was wrong…I think. The aftermath of the debate has the potential to be devastating to Tim Walz. 

 

The ghosts of Richard Stockdale and Richard Nixon are calling back from the great beyond thanking Walz for making them no longer the easiest “presidential debate flop sweat” joke.

 I’ve been meaning to come back to this.   A Harris/Klink op brought it up with a high hanging curveball:

Being corralled into a staged propaganda exercise?

I’ve never been a big Tim Walz fan. Quite the opposite.

But is anyone else getting some…1930s vibes?

Or perhaps more appropriately to Walz’s time in Omahongkong:

I can’t be the only one that finds that photo a little #weird in and of itself, in addition to the historical allusions (especially when you add in Walz’s “One Minnesota” slogan), can I?

People can vote for whoever they want to.  It’s still a fairly free country. 

But I have a fair number of people in my social circle – co-workers, high school classmates, former teachers and professors – who are declaiming that they’re voting for Harris and Walz “to save democracy”.

And I read that and try to grasp how much one must ignore – willfully or not – to believe that Harris and Walz support the American republican (small-r) system of popular, federalist government:

• Supports (and gained power in part thru) big tech censoring dissent
• Actively suppressed dissent (Walz’s snitch lines and thoughtcrime database, as well as Harris’s coziness with Big Tech and Big Media with their record of censorship so bald-faced that even Mark Zuckerberg is feeling ashamed)
• Supports repealing the free market – the most human economic system for the most people in all of human history – via price controls and rent control
• Harris supports undercutting federalism and the separation of powers via:
  • proposing bringing the SCOTUS under control of the executive branch
  • further ratcheting up power to the administrative state
  • abolishing the Electoral College
  • abolishing the filibuster – one of the last ditch tools in thwarting the impune tyranny of the majority
  • further centralizing power in the Executive Branch
  • Indeed, *defying* the checks and balances of our system of enumerated powers (the Harris/Biden administrations’ unilateral “forgiveness” of student loans, and withholding of Congressionally-mandated support to Israel)?
• Supports abolishing private healthcare
• Openly seeks to disarm the law-abiding by executive decree (since they’ll never get it through Congress), and expressed contempt for the Fourth Amendment in pursuing that?
• Wants to ramp up the power of the administrative and regulatory state – with “stochastic” implications of violence.
• Actively working to make the border more or less irrelevant – and the nation’s shared ideals along with it.
• And let’s not forget the notion that if you dissent obstreporously enough, professional rioters may “spontaneously” and with no collusion from Big Left whatsoever, nosirreebob, arrive in your neighborhood?
• Subsuming American foreign policy to the power of alliances ?

Against that:

• Mean tweets
• A riot only rhetorically connected with Trump, which has been lavishly prosecuted. 

What am I missing, here?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Tim Walz ducked all meaningful debates in the 2022 cycle.

Highlights of the evening:

Vance calling the moderators on their fairly naked bias: After the moderators used their interstitial bits to finish Walz’s point for him while trying to “fact-check” Vance, Vance finally had enough, and beat them down pretty brutally.

“Misspoke”: Oh, yeah. Bias notwithstanding, the mods asked Walz to answer MPR’s reporting that he was not, in fact, in Hong Kong during the Tienanmen Square massare. And it was pretty glorious:

And his first answer was “I was born into a middle class family…”

No, really – although he’s spent his past eighteen years telling people every detail of that time in China, down to what he ate and which Communist-logo sweatshirt Gwen wore, he slammed on the brakes and phumphered away claiming that he was old knucklehead and had “misspoken”

Facts: Vance was able to shred Walz in detail on a few issues, including his signing of Minnesota’s radical abortion laws – which put Walz back on his heels (and showed us that Tom Emmer was in fact, a pretty effective debate prepper.

And the #1 highlight:

Walz was weird; Vance was not: Walz had his moments – but Vance never lost his cool, stayed on message. Walz did, and did not. Vance won on style and substance, and it wasn’t even close.

And this may have been the first Vice Presidential debate of my lifetime that might have an actual impact on the election.

Fingers crossed. 

In my interview with former Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka last Saturday, we talked about the depths of Governor Klink’s radicalism. 

With that in mind – with any luck, this should turn up in the Veep debate tonight:

In a very significant development — I am almost prepared to say the most significant development in the current presidential contest — it has recently been revealed that Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College and a leader in the development of Minnesota’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum, explicitly called for the “overthrow of the United States.” This goal has demonstrably shaped Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, according to which students are taught as early as kindergarten that America is evil. The video recording of Lozenski was made two years ago but was taken down the day after it was spotted by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center…  

And for someone who’s made a bit of an art form out of concealing his radical nature under a couple of layers of Elmer Fudd-wear, it’s actually been kind of brazen of Walz.

But there’s not much point in trying to make Lozenski look like anything but a CRT Kommissar:

To make as explicit an assertion as did Lozenski is extremely rare; indeed, I have never seen or heard such an admission. The destructive intent of ethnic studies or CRT has been very apparent and much commented upon for many years by the conservative commentariat. But Lozenski’s open, cavalier articulation makes the destructive nature of ethnic studies virtually impossible to deny. 

So the debate should be interesting, for a change.

On the weekend before the big debate with JD Vance, Tim Walz reminds everone that he’s a thin-skinned petulant little man:

For the first time in my politics-watching career, I’m excited to go to a vice-presidentai debate. 

Governor Walz, with Alex Soros.

Check the body language:

Looks like he’s ready to fetch a ball.

This is why I wonder how much prosecuting Kamala Harris did while she was in, and then leading, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.

The first rule of armed self-defense, especially in a “blue” city, is you never talk about armed self-defense.

A particularly zealous DA – like Harris – could use a statement like Harris’s as evidence that one was looking to kill someone; if one were involved in an incident, the DA could use a statement like that to try to impeach the idea that you were an “unwilling participant” in the incident.  Which is enough to turn a righteous self-defense shooting into a term in prison, if you get the wrong jury. 

So let’s say I have my doubts.

I’ve said it many times in this space – going back to 1986, I’ve never liked Donald Trump’s public persona.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for him in 2016 – I wrote in Scott Walker. 

And while Trump turned out to be a fine president on a policy level, I thought his behavior in the last few months of his presidency gave him a lot of baggage the GOP didn’t need – which was borne out in the 2022 cycle, and is certainly complicating this one.  His personality cult has, shall we say, underdelivered I was on Team DeSantis before there was a Team DeSantis, and I’m already on his 2028 team.

But with all my ambivalence about Trump, the prospect of a Harris/Walz administration makes the notion of voting for a third party, a write-in or, heaven forfend, Harris herself impels me to do my darnedest to convince people, like I convince myself, to hold my nose and vote for Trump.

Because Harris is that much worse. 

How?

How can I count the ways. 

She Is The Incumbent:  The mess we’re in right now has her autograph on it.

She’s been the sitting Vice President for almost four years. Harris, not to mention Biden, have proudly proclaimed she was the “last person in the room” when decisions about the economy, not to mention the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, were made. She was the “border czar” (Czaritsa?) during an era when eight digits worth of people crossed illegally into the country and stayed, the cartels took de facto control over the southern border, and over 300,000 unaccompanied minors disappeared from the ICE’s radar.

She’s been part of the brain trust that emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, Iran to invade Israel by proxy, ruinous spending, the porous border, the collapse in Afghanistan and the side-tracking of the peace process in the Middle East, and the hyper-acceleration of Trump’s own ill-advised spending..

She’s Incoherent:  The whole “Joy!” and “Brat Vibes!” memes sprang up as a way to spin attention away from her supremely annoying verbal crutch of breaking into cackling whenever she gets nervous.

She can’t explain anything.  Off the teleprompter, she sounds like a stream of lawn signs and bumper stickers; like an AI campaign slogan generator that needs some more work. 

And all of that is presuming she’s not an alcoholic, prone to working drunk during the day. 

She is hiding.   Behind all the “joy” and “brat vibes”, she’s clearly running out the clock, dodging interviews, committing to nothing, putting up vague bland hints at policy online,

She’s Dishonest:  For all the nine years of palaver about Trump’s facility with the half-truth, Harris spent three solid years lying about President Biden’s health – repeatedly exclaiming the President was stronger and more with it than Jackie Chan in his thirties – until time came to defenstrate him. 

And she’s lying about him now – keeping him in office so the American voter doesn’t see her in office via that 25th Amendment, riding herd on the policies she spent four years helping to drive. 

These two things can not be true at the same time. 

And let’s talk about her magical floating accents.  Her prominent black supporters say she’s “code switching”, something we’re told every black person ostensibly does.  They’re wrong – every human who jumps between linguistic subgroups does it; white academics who grow up in the Mississippi Delta go from goober-chaw brogue back to standard English pretty routinely.  AOC slips back and forth between “Alli from the block” and her regular brand of shrill as needed.  My original accent doesn’t sound like the guy you hear on the radio, and doesn’t usually come out until I’ve been in North Dakota for a bit.   So “code switching” is real. 

But when you’re changing into the accent of a place and culture where you never lived – like Harris pasting on a Latina accent in Hispanic areas – it’s not code-switching. It’s pandering. It’s being a minstrel.

It kind of insults our intelligence.

She’s A Terrible Manager:  Harris ran one of the worst credible presidential campaigns in history in 2019 – jumping from front-runner to donesville before she could garner a single primary vote.

She’s never run a significant compaign very well. She’s never run a tough race; the one race she’s ever run against a Republican, for Attorney General in California, she almost lost, and her only other competitive races have been against Democrats – and in the case of the 2020 primaries, she’s been a disaster.  WIthout the media running active interference for her, she’s a hapless wreck.

And when she is in office?  Leaving aside her many political failures (until below, anyway), she’s a terrible executive, who’s had over 93% turnover in her office as Vice President.  Which, by my count, is worse than Orange Hitler’s turnover rate.

She’s Got A Record Of Failure.  Look at literally everything she’s “been in charge” of:

She was the “border czar” – and the border is a disaster. 

She was sent on a mission to Ukraine on the eve of the war.  The joy and brat vibes had barely subsided at Hostomel Airport when the missiles started flying. 

She was made the titular head of America’s space program – and NASA is, improbably, in worse shape now than ever. 

Joe Biden sidelined her from most of the “duties” a Vice President usually has, because she’s just not competent.  She is only running for President because Pelosi and Schumer realized the senescent Biden would leave a lot of money on the sidelines.

No World Leader Respects Her:   As Border Czar, she has allowed biggest invasion of US history.  If you’re Putin or Xi, you don’t have to guess what her affect as President will be, even if you leave out the cackling and the vapidity; she played an important role in helping turn San Francisco, and California, into the basket cases they are today.

Her alleged “toughness” as a prosecutor may be a chanting point. 

There’s a reason Ukraine launched its hail mary offensive at Kursk, and why Israel is swarming the net with Hezb’allah; they see a possibility of a Harris presidency, and realize that four more years of vacillation, coddling Iran, and being the adenoidal little guy on the shetland pony rather than the knight on the huge horse is not going to end well for them.

She’s Radical.  In 2019 – the one time in her career she’s had to systematically lay out a vision of a nation with her at the helm – she campaigned to the left of Bernie Sanders.

• Banning fracking
• Eliminating gas cars by 2030
• Decriminalizing border crossings
• Exalting sanctuary cities (she sued to prevent the Feds from cracking down on the ones we had back then)
• Mandatory gun buybacks by executive order
• Taxing unrealized capital gains
• Price controls
• Rent control
• Reparations
• Undercutting law enforcement (she pimped for the MInnesota Freedom Fund)
• Abortion til birth
• Federal funding of gender transition, including for illegal aliens. 

And while she’s painstakingly avoided answering questions about any of these in this campaign, rarely going beyond “Oh, no I di-unt” when asked about her flips and flops, she’s also chanted that her principles haven’t changed. 

Which ones? 

She Is The Actual Threat To Democracy:  The most terrifying thing about a Harris/Walz regime is that it would seek to redefine the deal between people, the states, and the federal government, and the separation of powers defined for each in the Constitution.

To the extent that they deign to talk about policies, they actively promote:

• Killing off the filibuster, specifically to jam down “codifying Roe“
• Ramming through the packing of the Supreme Court and, perhaps worse, bringing it under control of the Executive Branch with term limits and “ethics” guidelines enforced by…the executive branch.
• Changing voting rules, and federalizing control of elections to enable and promote ballot harvesting and, shall we say, emphasizing access over security
• Jam down making DC and Puerto Rico into states, adding four Democrat senators. 
• Packing the Supreme Court, changing voting rules, ballot harvesting, adding new states to stack the Senate.  
• Continue Biden’s abuse of executive orders.  Remember – Harris enthusiastically signed on to Biden’s use of OSHA to to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans, cashiering thousands of people from the military, and trying to circumvent the limits on the exectutive branch to try to transfer student loan debt to the taxpayers. Actively promotes censorship.
• Harris and Walz will be disasters for the First Amendment; both favor censorship of “misinformation” – as defined by them.  Both enthusiastically colluded with Big Tech to censor dissent about Covid, vaccinations, and every issue in the 2020 and 2022 elections that was inconvenient to the left.  Walz created a thoughtcrime database. 
• Harris and Walz’s antipathy toward the Second Amendment is a matter of record.  While both claim to be gun owners – in Walz’s case, usually while in full Elmer Fudd costume – they also seek to make the Amendment meaningless at its original intent, defending The People against tyranny. 

While the suspense may not be killing you, I sometimes find it clarifying, for me if not others, to list the cons (and, in this case hypothetically, pros).

Few things have made me cringe quite as hard as “White Dudes for Harris” – the bunch of man-buns, ex-celebs, non-profit staffers and other walking caricatures that showed up on a struggle session on Zoom over the summer…

…to a fairly universal “ick”.

Why ,yes – I thought the whole thing was cloying and patronizing.

How cloying and patronizing?  You know when Tim Walz puts on his Elmer Fudd costume and grabs his entourage of photographers and social media dinks and waddles around the fair taking pictures of himself eating donuts and hugging piglets? 

 That cloying and patronizing.

But “they” were just getting started:

“Every time you go online, it’s the same story – the people who are paying me to read this script telling people like me that I suck. Well, if you vote for Kamala Harris, because reasons we’ll give you someday, maybe, then maybe you and I don’t suck”.

Whoever wrote this has never met an actual male of any race.

I’m trying to imagine the depths of Kamala Harris’s, er, nuance when it comes to civil liberties.  Perhaps…:

“It’s a false choice to say you support free speech, or censorship. I am in favor of the First Amendment, and I support a disinformation ban, licensing the press, and Governor Walz’s thoughtcrime database, like when I was born into the middle class!”

Or maybe…:

“It’s a false choice say say you are either for or against the Fourth Amendment. I support the 4th Amendment – and I think cops shouldn’t have to ask for search warrants before tossing your house and car, unburdened by what has been.”

Hmmm. How about…:

“It’s wrong to say you either support or oppose the 5th Amendment. I support the 5th Amendment – but it makes life easier for our First Responders in the County Attorneys office if we presume people guilty until proven innocent, abolish juries and defense counsel”

Oh, was there even a need to guess?

Her principles are, in fact, as convenient as her ethics.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is looking for arrowroot flour at a local co-op.  Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, a twenty-something graduate of Saint Olaf, and of Camp Wellstone. Moonbeam works as a telemarketer for “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, steps around the endcamp.

BIRKENSTOCK: Merg.

BERG:  Hey, Moonbeam. 

BIRKENSTOCK:  So Drumpf really stepped in it this time.

BERG: (With mock concern, tempered with a bit of fatigue). What?  Again?

BIRKENSTOCK: (Oblivious).  Yep.  Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala!

BERG:  You don’t say.  I mean, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion long ago. 

BIRKENSTOCK:  Yeah, but here’s the best part:  He insulted her!

BERG: Oooh. Bad. Really really bad.

BIRKENSTOCK:  This probably ends the race.

BERG: Well, it ends something, anyway:

Only 6% said it made them more likely to vote Harris, while 13% said it made them less likely to—though ABC News noted that those who responded negatively to the question were “overwhelmingly Trump supporters” (Forbes has reached out to ABC News and Ipsos for more data).

But the poll found Swift’s endorsement didn’t even help Harris much in the expected key demographic: Just 8% of women under 30 said they were more likely to support Harris, 13% said they were less likely and 78% said it made no difference.

 

BIRKENSTOCK. So why insult her and risk all those votes?

BERG:  Not sure it affected any votes that weren’t going to go to Harris anyway. 

BIRKENSTOCK:  Hah!  Young women are fierce and independent and…and…I just can’t…

BERG:  Shake it off.

 And SCENE

Seen on Twitter:

If someone on the Trump campaign doesn’t turn this into a bumper sticker, it deserves to lose.

But it brought me back to something I talked about on the air the other day.

Hear me out.

The Minnesota Model

See how Kamala Harris has been campaigning?

• Evading all questioning
• Avoiding policy discussions
• Being as vague and gauzy as possible about the bits of policy they do talk about
• Slopping the public trough with an endless diet of soft-focus social media
• Letting the opposition research staff and media (pardon the redundancy) do the hard work?

Look familiar?

If you live in Minnesota, it should.  The Democrats have been trial-running this strategy since at least 2018. 

Do you remember Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan ever talking about policy?

Other than soft-focus platitudes about “fully funding education”, “reducing poverty 30%”, “sending kids to school with full bellies” (puke), “One Minnesota!”, and even abortion policy?

The only record the Walz/Flanagan regime will leave to historians is the endless river of social media posts, dripping with platitudes and set-piece photos of Walz in his “regular guy” costume doing “regular guy” stuff, holding piglets and hugging kids and getting fed Pronto Pups by the Lieutenant Governor. 

Ditto Angie Craig, whose only public persona is the biennial off-road rally she throws in that stupid black Jeep. 

If you’re looking at Harris/Walz’s national campaign and not feeling deja vu, I’d love to know why. 

If Trump manages to win, and the DFL takes some setbacks, maybe the “Minnesota Model” of campaigning – evade questioning (or count on the media not bothering to ask them), slop the trough with an endless diet of gauzy social media holding piglets and being “brat” – will start reachind the end of its fifteen minutes.

Here’s some Kamala Harris “Brat Vibes” from her time as San Francisco DA:

Just because you have a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible…

If you don’t find “ignoring the Fourth Amendment” absolutely disqualifying, I’m almost afraid to ask what you’ll let government get away with.

Berg’s 20th Law of Social Justice Warmongering reads as follows:

All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone p roven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

Look – these laws, and the concept of “Berg’s Laws” themselves, were always intended to be tongue in cheek.

I didn’t expect them to be invariable truths.

And yet they very much seem to be. 

When I heard about the “flood of threats” descending on Springfield Ohio, I figured “Berg’s 20th Law is in effect”.

Was I right?

What do you think?

I don’t know my own strength.

Look – it’s not like there’s any reason at all, ever, that I’d vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.   I am not better off than I was four years ago, and likely either are you. 

But in addition to the whole “communist” thing, she appears to have been exactly the kind of soulless bureacratic bean-counter and image-polisher that I excoriated here. 

Kamala learned well from her Marxist parents; you gotta break some coconuts to make an omelet unburdened by the brat that has been. 

Or something like that. 

During Covid, I spent a lot of time driving between Minnesota and North Dakota.

And I listened to both governors’ press conferences, back when those were a daily or weekly thing – in one case, back to back, Walz and Burgum.  And the contrast could not have been more stark: listening to Walz felt like I was back in elementary school, with a history teacher who was really more of a football coach talking, slowly, like he thought you were as dumb as one of the jocks on his offensive line.  Burgum, on the other hand, sounded like he knew he was addressing not just adults, but people he had to treat with some basic adult respect.

And after seeing this…

…it’s all starting to make sense to me.

Side note:  a joint press conference with Kamala Harris and Gwen Walz would drive the suicide rate into double digits.

While this appears to be pure fluff on the surface…

Minnesota Governor and 2024 Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz has built a reputation as a bit of a foodie, or maybe just someone who enjoys food of varying qualities. After all, he’s not always eating the most refined foods — he’s declared his love for diet Mountain Dew, corn dogs, and Minneapolis’ signature cheese-filled burger,the Juicy Lucy. He’s even won the Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Off multiple years for his truly Midwestern tater tot casserole. This love of deliciously decadent foods definitely gives him points for relatability, while his universal free lunch program for Minnesota kids poises him as an executive who believes everyone (especially children) has the right to eat regardless of income.
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At the end of August 2024, the display of Governor Walz’s gastronomic delights continued as he was shown on his YouTube channel ordering a mint chocolate chip shake at Cook Out in North Carolina. Led by North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, this was Walz’s first trip to the southern fast food chain. When asked what he thought of the shake, he replied, “It’s really good.” Maybe not the most glowing review, but he did appear to enjoy it, at least. (“Oh, my god,” he said in delight as he continued eating.)

…it it is no less incisive than the rest of the MSM coverage Governor Klink has gotten so far.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is shopping at the Roseville Cub.  The one on Larpenteur, not the one at Har Mar.   He rounds the end-cap in the condiment aisle, and sees Avery LIBRELLE, Cat SCAT and Gutterball GARY.  Before he can backtrack, they notice him.

SCAT:  Hey, Merg.

BERG:  Uh…

GARY. We need to talk about voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

LIBRELLE:  Yes.  It’s time for a conversation. 

BERG:  A “conversation”.

SCAT:  Yes. 

BERG. OK.  But it’ll be a short “conversation”.   Harris and Walz are communists.  They’ll wreck the economy, trash civil liberties, throw the borders open thus crushing working Americans incomes, and give dictators from Putin to Xi to Khamenei free reign, while presiding over a “Lose Slowly” policy not only for the country, but for all of western civilization.

LIBRELLE:  Huh.

GARY:  OK.   You’ll need to change your mind, or this conversation will get “hard”.

(The three look menacingly at BERG).

BERG:  (Breaks out laughing, snorts in derision, walks away).

SCAT:  I think we got to him.

LIBRELLE:  Same.

And SCENE.

Amongf the Kamala Harris lies that ABC at the debates was the idea that “crime is down”:

It means you have a functioning BS detector. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which measures Americans interactions with crimes not reported to the cops, unlike the FBI report Muir was flogging.

And it’s not good:

Overall, the NCVS indicate that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.

Ironically, the NCVS had lower numbers for violent victimizations for 2020 and 2021, despite the widespread perception that crime got significantly worse during the pandemic. In 2018 the figure was 23.8, in 2019 it was 21, it was 16.4 in 2020 — remember, lots of people were stuck at home, and fewer people on the street means less street crime — and in 2021 it was 16.5.

 

And a look at the Minneapolis crime dashboard, counting only crimes reported to the cops, is also a little instructive: as of today,

• homicide, larceny and robbery are up from last year
• Assault and sex offenses are up above the 3 year average (and that counts 2021, one of the worst years on record)
• Vandalism and domestic assault are up over both last year and the average. 

One of the things that always drew me to blogging was the notion of having a voice to shoot back (figuratively) at Big Media’s stultifying echo chamber. 

I had no idea, 22 years on, that we’d be this busy at it.