Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I suggest a contest for readers to give new slogans to the Republican party

Trump or Biden, handcuffs or Depends. You decide.

Trump or Biden, mean tweets or elder abuse. You decide.

Want to kill your baby?  Vote Democrat.

Democrat dilemma, taxes or groceries?

 Have you been discriminated against? You may be entitled to compensation.  Unless you’re White. Then you’re just a hater. Vote Democrat. 

Cast your votes in the comments

To: Alvin Bragg,
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: You Did It!

I’ve never been coy about the fact that I’ve never cared about Donald Trump – or at least his dominant public persona. I don’t care for what his erratic and impulsive nature cost the GOP in 2018 and 2020.

Something I like far less than Trump? Debasing the justice system to harass poltiical opponents and try to rig elections.

Alvin Bragg’s goal may not have been to create someone who’s going to do whatever he can to push Trump over the top this fall.

If it were, I’m not sure what he’d have done differently.

January 6 was a riot – and the foundations of our representative republic were never in danger, any more than during Watergate or the Civil War.

The Trump trial – activities that according to the judge related to no crime, over charges that the FEC said weren’t crimes back when they were within the statute of limitations – is a direct assault on one of the things that tenuously separates America from the barbarians.

So far.

Congrats, Dems. You did it. You dragged me, kicking and screaming, into supporting Trump .

Let’s make America a constitutional republic with the rule of laws, not men, again.

Heather “Lawnmower Barbie” Edelson, beat Marisa Simonetti, 54-45.

In other words: A woman with near 100% name recognition, especially among people who come out for special elections, beat someone nobody had heard of three weeks before the election.

By nine points.

In a district Keith Ellison won by 20, and Governor Klink by 30:

There’ll be another round in November.

While the district is a little less “blue” than most of Hennepin County, this can’t be great news for the DFL headed into the fall

If you live in District Six in Hennepin County – this area here…:

…you need to get out and vote Marisa Simonetti for Hennepin County Commission in the special election being held today.

She’s an unknown conservative who ran in the runoff three weeks ago, spent about $700, and got 33% of the vote with no name recognition, running against Mary Moriarty’s spouse and at least one candidate who spent $70K to try to build name recognition, in a runoff. That took her to the final round, today:

Her opponent is Heather Edelson – a sitting Legislator whose sole “accomplishment” was writing a bill that would have banned gas powered lawn mowers in the state. “Lawncare Barbie” has name recognition – and literally nothing else.

Simonetti’s a dark horse – but given the tiny turnout in these special elections for county races, anything is possible.

So:

• If you live in the area in the map above – basically all of Henco south of 394 and west of 169 – get to the polls. Bring your family. Extort your kids. Whatever it takes.
• If you don’t live in this district, make sure any family you do have in the area turn out and vote for Simonetti.

This would really shock the world.

So let’s do it

Alex Plechash is running for RNC National Committeeman. If you’re a state central delegate and want to find out more, we gotcha right here.

Marisa Simonetti is running for Henco Commission in District 6. If you live in the district, or know someone who does, Tuesday is election day.

And of course, today’s music list:

Decades about, the Left used the term “Politically Correct” as a positive virtue; it referred to people, ideas and brands that, in 21st century parlance, signaled the correct virtues.

It took a few years of relentless grassroots conservative satire to turn “PC” into a cultural punchline.

Ditto “Woke”; it had an organic meaning among the black community, was appropriated and perverted into something akin to PC, and has since been pilloried to the point where white progressives have, uh, progressed from demanding conservatives “define woke”, to insisting it doesn’t exist.

And now…

Some of the most prominent figures in the Democratic Party have labeled themselves as progressives, but others, for various reasons, have put distance between them and the label recently.

Several Democrats have left the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with some leaving due to a rift over the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. One of the most high-profile departures came when Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) confirmed he was no longer in the caucus and shied away from calling himself a progressive when speaking with NBC News this month…Another Democrat who has shed the progressive label is Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who told NBC News in December 2023 that he is “not a progressive.” He has strayed further from progressive Democrats, especially regarding immigration and Israel, than he was expected to when he was elected in 2022.

Minnesota Democrats, of course, are tripling down; “Progressive” may be too far to their center.

I’m going to do my level best to make sure it hurts them.

A new KSTP/SUSA polls says Minnesota voters aren’t enthralled with “the Trifecta“:

When likely voters were asked if they’re “generally more inclined to vote” for a Republican, Democrat or candidate from another party, 45% said they prefer Republicans, 44% prefer Democrats, 8% were undecided and 3% preferred another party.

Minnesota Republicans are taking encouragement from this – as they should.

The same poll shows Trump and the First Potato in a dead heat:

According to our latest exclusive KSTP/SurveyUSA poll of Minnesota voters, Biden leads Trump 44% to 42%, with 11% saying they’ll vote for another candidate and 4% undecided. The poll has a credibility interval, similar to margin of error, of ±4.9%

“When you have a 2-point race in a presidential year, you’ve got a competitive state,” Carleton College political analyst Steven Schier said. “One that both campaigns will probably pay attention to.”

I’d urge a little caution along with the exuberance:

• See that11% “Other Candidate” and 4% in the Presidential poll (and 11% between “Other” and “Undecided” in the House race)? I’m going to guess that, among the Legal Pot and Libertarian and Ventura Party dross, that involves a lot of “Uncommitted” DFLers. Democrat intraparty squabbling is like a couple of bull hogs fighting for the best patch of mud – but being essentially herd animals, Democrat voters almost always “come home”.
• The numbers in the House poll refer to generic Republicans versus generic Democrats. It’s contingent on coming up with candidates who are better than generic. There is a strong undercurrent in the MNGOP of the same crowd that made Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Green into powerbrokers. Someone needs to teach some Minnesota GOP voters what legislatures are for. On the other hand, it shows that for exceptional candidates – people cut from the same cloth as Harry Niska, Eric Lucero, Pam Scott, Walter Hudson and Mary Franson – there is immense opportunity.
• The Conventional Wisdom in 2016, when Trump came without two points of toppling Hillary!, was that Trump didn’t “almost win”; Hillary!, being a terrible candidate, almost lost. We’ll see if Trump has increased his cachet, but it’s entirely possible the First Potato is a worse candidate than Hillary! was.

Still, two years into the “trifecta”, we’ve had worse news.

Let’s try not to screw this pooch, MNGOP.

Easy. Lie about how the pig has always had bright red lips.

That’s the tactic CD8 DFL candidate Jen Schultz is using to try to convince voters President Potato is somewhere north of worthless.

By picking numbers from the beginning of Reagan’s era, rather than, say, 1985, and assuming that people susceptible to voting for Jen Schultz either don’t remember the truth or are too intellectually bovine to question her.

As Berg’s 24th Law notes, it’s not a bad assumption.

Elon Musk illustrated the truth for many in America’s political “middle”:

I’m not in “the middle”, by any means. I used to call myself “center right”, but these days I am proud to call myself a Paleocon, from the “let’s get back to the Sharon Statement” school of paleoconning.

Trump from 2016 to 2020 governed largely, but far from consitently, as a conservative; he secured the border, exerted productive pressure to support US interests overseas, and cut a crap-load of regulations. He also blew up the deficit – just as Dubya and Lightworker before him, and not nearly as badly as Joe “Obama 2.0” Biden have. Never mind his Democrat origin story – I have one too – but he’s a populist standup comic, not an activist. He can, and is, publicly on any side of any issue that suits him. No different than his opposition.

But as the Biden campaign settles in to try to battle back from polls that, at the moment, seem a little encouraging to Trump, it’s worth asking – what is “the center” in America today? Or, more accurately, where are the American people as a mean, and who is closer to it?

Say what you will about the value of moderation; I’m here to pull the conversation to the right however I can.

But if the center decides the election, then Trump might just have a shot.

On the one hand, I think optimism is extremely premature for Republicans. While some polling is showing deep divides in the Democrat party, we’ve heard this tune more that “Freebird” on KQRS. Democrats may kvetch and moan – they whined about Bill Clinton – but they, being essentially herd animals, always “come home” at election time.

But it looks like a lot of them will have to come home a looooong way this fall:

“Uncommitted” takes almost 20% of the DFL primary vote.

And that was only the half of it:

Looks bad for Biden?

For now, sure.

But don’t get fooled – they’ll get goaded, logrolled, gaslit, threatened, or just talk themselves back into line this fall. Trump (who easily skated through the GOP contest) will have a hard go it it, nationwide and here in Minnesota.

I don’t get the National Review hate – that might be worth a letter from Joe in and of itself.

Anywayt, Joe Doakes emails:

I know better than to read National Review Online but sometimes I can’t help myself.   The recent article about Nikki Haley reminds me why that’s such a dumb thing to do. 

I hate ‘gotcha’ questions.  They are inevitably out of context and intended for use in a slanted, partisan media campaign.  For instance (paraphrasing):

Q: What was the cause of the Civil War?

A: It was a dispute about who decides how a state will be run – the federal government or the people living in the state.  

Q: You didn’t mention slavery. 

A: Well, what do you want me to say about slavery?  That wasn’t the cause of the war.  

GOTCHA!!!!

Except she’s right.  Elimination of slavery was not the cause of the war.  We know this from two crucial pieces of history.  You can look it up and should, because almost everything being said today is wrong. 

First of all, if abolishing slavery was the reason for the war, why did four slave states – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri – fight for the North?  If those states had wanted to abolish slavery in their state, they could have done it any time.  Instead, they joined the Union side to fight against the Secessionist side. Slavery was not the issue.  Secession from the Union was the issue.  

Second the publicity campaign to make the war about abolition of slavery came with the Emancipation Proclamation, announced long after the war was already going.  It only applied to the states in rebellion – NOT to the slave states in the Union – further evidence that the abolition of slavery was not the reason for starting the war in 1861, but was simply a tactic intended to divert attention from federal government over-reach to a high moral crusade of abolition which would justify Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions during the war.  

The historical evidence supports Haley but you can’t convince anybody of that today.  Slavery is everything and always the most important thing, to Liberals and RINOs alike.  Haley didn’t mention slavery so GOTCHA.  

Infuriating.

Joe Doakes no longer in Como Park

I’m going to stake out one (actually two, given that I don’t get the zing at NR) difference Joe.

“Secession was the issue”. And what were they seceding about?

• “Preserving the Union” – and what was the political issue breaking up the union? Slavery.
• “Economics” – And what was the economic issue? Competition between an industralizing society and an agrarian plantation society based around slavery.
• “Why were border states exempt?” – For the same reason the US allied with a rogues gallery of dictators when it was in their interests.

“Abolishing slavery” wasn’t the reason for the war – and yet all of the reasons for the war were one degree of separation away from slavery.

So the real answer, as usual, is everyone is wrong.

As I’ve been noting for about eight years on this blog, I’m intensely ambivalent about Donald Triump.

His personality roils with traits I personally don’t care for.

But something about all the prosperity, peace and border security is looking good.

“Oh, Merg, so you just want someone who’ll make the trains run on time, yuk yuk”

Peace and security are legitimate jobs of a national government. Prosperity is the opposite of the “Fascist” dynamic you’re yukking about. And Trump at his wackiest didn’t approach the level of authoritarianism of any of Baraclk Obama’s three terms in office.

I’m on Team DeSantis [1],but if it came down to Biden, Harris or Newsom against Trump, I’d probably hold my nose and vote Trump.

The worst thing about Trump is that he, like Obama before him, is the center of a personality cult. And with Trump, soooooo many of the cultists are just so deeply dim:

Loomer – charitably described as “insane” – cites a piece on by David Greenberg, a Rutgers historian who’s never been mistaken for someone who’d throw a life ring to a conservative who fell overboard.

Bill Clinton infamously threw some of his more extreme supporters under the bus in his long forgotten”Sista Soulja” moment (in the the long-forgotten Sista Soulja”). Trump’s never gonna have a “Crazy Laura” moment.

If he did, I might have to hold my nose a little less hard.

[1] And yeah, I think in a just world Doug Burgum would be on the short list, but we don’t live in a just world.

2022 was an upset and a good year at the polls for the DFL, largely on the strength of:

• Hysteria about abortion, whipped up after the SCOTUS overturned Roe.
• “Fully Funding Education” – a concept literally no DFLer could or would define.
• …that’s about it.

In terms of divisive issues that turn out Democrats in droves, the big kahunas of recent years? They can’t re-overturn Roe, re-legalize pot, re-sanctify stalking and Munchausens Syndrome, re-legalize same sex marriage – and they got literally everything they asked for in education, so the schools should be “Fully Funded”, whatever that is.

So – let’s do some predicting.

What will the the next issue the DFL uses to try to panic their herds of ill-informed, uncritical, gullible, emotion-driven hysterical voter base to the polls?

Leave ’em in the comments.

During the debate on the state’s #1 priority, Rep. Peggy Scott asked Rep. Skeletor when a baby becomes human.

Liebling’s response:

I’m going to park this is a post for 2024. The media will try to memory-hole this entire shameful episode. I may not be able to fix that, but in the little corner of the world I influence, this is going to be a topic in about 18 months.

Big Left will flip the tables, declare that Trump’s push to develop a vaccine was a huge mistake.

DeSantis tops Trump in a new poll – and not by a little bit.

Emphasis added by me:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) leads former President Trump by 23 points among Republicans in a hypothetical GOP presidential primary, according to a poll released Tuesday. 

The USA Today-Suffolk University poll found that 56 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters prefer DeSantis, while only 33 percent would support Trump. More than 60 percent said they want a nominee who will continue Trump’s policies but is not Trump, while 31 percent want the former president to run. 

I don’t care about mean tweets. I do care very much about slashing regulation (and, since Trump didn’t do it, spending as well) and acting in the nation’s best interest.

I’m not interested in relitigating the 2020 election; rooting out the corruption that does exist, sure; barbering on about remedies that aren’t anywhere in the Consitution, not so much.

Most of all? I want to force the Democrats to defend themselves, their record, their squatting on American democracy, in 2024. Without Trump to deflect to, they fail.

Remember when Jesse Ventura got elected governor?

He had what appeared to be a “deer in the headlights” look about him – like he never expected to win the race, I had no idea what to do when he did. When he said “we shocked the world“, he was being inclusive.

There are those who say Donald Trump was in the same basic boat; He never really expected to become president. I don’t necessarily believe that.

But I could read this next story and wonder if he’s really thought all that terribly hard about running again.S

Stay with me, here.

Now, I was never a Donald Trump fan, but it would be dishonest not to say that he did some great things in office, and punched way above his weight on many levels.

One of his greatest achievements? The sentencing reforms he drove halfway through his term, reducing federal sentences for petty drug distribution convictions and renegotiating sentences imposed during the insanely oversentenced crack epidemic, started breaking the log jam of the black vote.

This was one of his announcements last night:

Is he actually going to do a complete 180 on one of the best things he ever did for the actual party that nominated him?

Tulsi Gabbard is sick and tired of the Democrat party, and she’s not going to take it anymore:

A few thoughts:

The Key Log: As Berg’s Seventh Law foretells, one of the reasons that Democrats like to harp on the “extremism” of the GOP is to deflect away from their own. One can hope the popular Senator from the very blue state might be the crack in the dam that brings out this century’s “Reagan Republicans”.

Speaking of Reagan: There’s at least some conventional wisdom that Gabbard has made this move to put her name in the VP stakes for 2024.

“She’s a LIBERAL”, some of my conservative friends say.

Let’s back up a moment.

One of Ronald Reagan’s great bits of genius was his ability to reach across the aisle to get people to pull together on the issues that mattered to his agenda. His agenda, by the way, was two items: right the economic ship, and destroy communism. He used his bully pulpit to push others to make headway on other issues – abortion, 2nd Amendment, the border – but he kept his own political powder dry to get the deals he needed made with Dems like Tip O’Neil on the 1982 Tax Cuts, and with the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland on assisting the Eastern European labor movement against the USSR.

So – could a future Republican president focused on our society’s current enemies – the deep state, stagflation and China – benefit from reaching across the aisle to a center-left “libertarian” Democrat who shares those concerns (in as many words, in her statement above)?

It’s worth a look.

A week after a massive, potentially catastrophic hurricane, and the media is fairly quiet about things.

It’s because while it was a disaster, they haven’t been able to pin anything on Ron DeSantis.

They’ve tried. Oh, Lord, they’ve tried.

But the attacks have bounced off like lawn darts off an M1 Abrams. Even the complete fabrications squibbed:

So come on, Dems. If you think you’re gonna convict Trump of something, do it, so DeSantis can sweep unopposed to the nom in 2024.

Last week, President Biden said this:

And the left social-media bashibazuks spent the rest of the week repeating it as if – aaaaalmost as if – driven by a coded algorithm.

Why, it’s aaaaaaalmost as if the Democrats know they can count on stupidity, incuriosity and inability to reason to bring out the vote for them.

2020: His reelection bid coming up short in the face of democrat turnout and allegations of fraud, Donald Trump claims Dominion voting machines are rigged.

The establishment tut-tuts, call Trump a sore loser. Social media censor thousands of people who repeat and extend Trump’s claim about the voting machines

2024: Uh…

Joe Biden is a terrible president – he’s passed Jimmy Carter as the worst of my lifetime, and if his (or, let’s be honest, Obama’s) agenda follows through, could pass Woodrow Wilson as the worst ever.

But let’s talk a little compassion, here, first.

My mom passed away at the end of April, as wrote earlier this month. As I noted at the time, she had Alzheimers.

We first started noticing her memory issues around the end of 2016. It started out with little things – not being able to find her purse over and over, mistaking who she was talking with, that sort of thing. It progressed, slowly and yet inexorably and all too fast at the same time.

Biden reminds me of my mom in early 2017.

The sinister element behind all this is that my mother was not simultaneously at the head of the world’s most powerful bureaucracy and military, and a talking head basically parroting the words put in front of her on a teleprompter.

LIke this:

“A .22 will lodge in your lung; a surgeon can fix it. A 9mm blows your lung out”.

If Biden is going off-script, he’s babbling. If he’s repeating a chanting point fed to him by a Democrat messageer who can count of Democrat voters not being critical enough a bunch of thinkers to see through the BS, then he’s still babbling.

Inflation is off the charts.

Crime is exploding.

Our debt is going to crush us, sooner than later.

Americans hate each other, and are sorting themselves out ever more strictly.

And we’re led by a muppet.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I can’t wait to learn who GOP, Inc. will select as the Republican candidate for President in 2024. It won’t be Trump, that’s for certain. But I’d like to know now, so I can start working on my “literally Hitler” memes.

Well, yes, of course s/he will be “literally Hitler.” Every Republican candidate is “literally Hitler” until defeated. Reagan was “literally Hitler” for walking away from Reykjavik. Bush the Elder was ‘literally Hitler” for secretly flying an SR-71 Blackbird to Iran to negotiate the release of Jimmy Carter’s hostages. Romney was “literally Hitler” for having binders full of women. McCain was “literally Hitler” because he agreed to have Sarah Palin as running mate and she was “literally Hitler” too. Chimpy McBushHitler was “literally Hitler” because he lied and people died. Trump was “literally Hitler” because he bragged about grabbing women by the . . . and now, the next Republican candidate for President will be “literally Hitler” simply for . . . being the Republican candidate for President.

About the only person who wasn’t “literally Hitler” was Hitler himself, because he declared war on the Russians who weren’t led by Putin at the time, but someday would be. And Putin is “literally Hitler.”

Joe Doakes

They have been building the “literally Hitler“ file on Ron DeSantis for a while now.

The Left wants Donald Trump on the ballot this fall – the Trump with no internal governor who wrote the mean tweets, the Trump of the (often dishonest or fabricated) media narratives, and especially of the “January 6” of fact, fiction and in between.

But then, so does the GOP.

But which Donald Trump? The business tycoon? The loose cannon that could rope-a-dope either world leaders into agreement, or his own cabinet into distraction? Or the person that focused the economic and social concerns of a whole lot of people – middle America, blue-collar “Red” America, and by the bye more Black and Latino voters than any Republican in two generations, into political action?

The Virginia gubernatorial election showed us a hint: it’s #3. The first two camps barely registered in that fairly meat ‘n potatoes contest.

We’ve got a group of primaries coming up this month – Idaho, and later this month Georgia.

But it started last night, with Ohio’s primaries for Governor and Senate.

And it saw the above-mentioned three camps squaring off:

Was it that voters wanted a businessman? Well, Mike Gibbons was a successful businessman.

Was it that Trump was “the craziest son of a b****” in the room, as Thomas Massie sometimes wondered? Then Josh Mandel was your man.

Or was it the “America First” agenda on the immigration, trade, and foreign policy? If that’s what you thought, then J. D. Vance was your candidate.

And the winner: Vance.

But Vance’s advantage was that he campaigned on the politics he believes in. That’s one of the reasons he was able to campaign so much more than his opponents; he doesn’t need to read from cue cards. It’s why he was able to constantly reiterate his position on the Ukraine war with confidence, even as his opponents got lost while searching for their own views. Much has been made of Vance’s supposed transformation from the author of Hillbilly Elegy to the Senate candidate endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene. He shifted his assessment of Trump, absolutely, but his politics have remained much the same. Even Vance’s vengeful former roommate — who tried to harm his campaign by sharing a text showing that, years ago, Vance made an overheated comparison of Trump to Hitler — ended up proving the point. In that text exchange, Vance was saying that the Republican Party needed to deliver tangible benefits to working-class white people who have migrated into the party. That’s the message he had three years ago, too.

I suspect this is at least part of the reason Big Left is trying to make they hay they are over the leaked Roe decision; the GOP is running on the Trump legacy that’s least convenient to then. .

We’ll wait to see how Idaho and Georgia turn out.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Hillary figured out how to turn Haitian Relief donations into family funds. Of course she did, she’s the Smartest Woman in America (TM).

But Lesko Brandon figured out how to convert Ukraine foreign aid into 10% for The Big Guy, and he’s the dumbest man in Congress. He didn’t think up the scheme on his own, someone coached him. Who? And who else did they coach to use a similar scheme: maybe not Haiti but some other grant recipient, some other non-profit, some other book deal or art sale?

There doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in Washington for investigating money-laundering corrupt politicians, not even among Republicans. I wonder if the reluctance to throw stones has anything to do with living in glass houses?

Joe Doakes

That’s why I’m really, really, really hoping DeSantis gets the nod in 2024. Call me naïve, but I think he will at least have enough moral high ground, personally, to try to tackle this.