SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking to a GOP fundraiser in one of the Twin Cities.  He walks around a corner and almost slams into a distracted Avery LIBRELLE.

BERG:  Er, excuse me…oh, hi, Aver…

LIBRELLE: Shut up Merg.  Drumpf did a completely fake staged appearance at that McDonalds!

BERG:  Huh.  A politician doing a staged, fake appearance for purely political reasons?

LIBRELLE:  Yes and…hey, the world is going cloudy.  What’s up?

BERG:  It’s called a flashback.

LIBRELLE: Ooooh….Weird.

LIBRELLE: It’s making me dizzy.

BERG:  Uh, I don’t think that’s what’s doing it.  Anyway, just a couple more.

BERG: So you were saying…

(But LIBRELLLE appears to have passed out).

BERG:  Huh.

And SCENE.

“Grassroots”:   When a candidate who has never earned a primary vote, and only run one seriously contested election in her life, gets installed by the troika of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama after defenestrating the current President for being unfit to run a campaign (although apparently not to be President of the United States). 

Example:

Hope this resolves any confusion.

Berg’s Seventh Law has been getting quite a workout over the past nine years:

When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

When leftists warn of waves of “right wing violence”, you can bet that either:

• A wave of left-wing violence has just happened, or
• A wave of it is in the pipeline and expected soon.

John HInderaker has an example ripped from the headlines:

Here is another instance: a death threat against Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who correctly dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump. She has been the object of a campaign of vilification by Democrats:

Democrats and their media allies have been lambasting Cannon, a Trump appointee, since she was assigned to preside over the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and they have been apoplectic since July, when Cannon dismissed the indictment.

This past Thursday, Eric James Rennert was arrested based on a six-count indictment charging him with threatening to assault, kidnap, and murder a federal judge and that judge’s family in Florida’s St. Lucie County. The indictment does not name the judge. Nevertheless, as the New York Post reports, Cannon is the only judge who sits in the Fort Pierce courthouse in St. Lucie County.

At the link, Andy McCarthy details the Democrats’ shameful smear campaign against Judge Cannon, which has culminated in this assassination threat.

 

If Trump wins – what are you predictions?

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.

 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?

John Kerry – who came waaaay too close to becoming President, and that’s after acknowledging what a disappointment Dubya was in retrospect – accidentally told the left’s truth:

“our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it”

It’s disheartening how many Democrats consider that a bug rather than a feature.

Governor Walz takes us back to the glory days of “Separate but Equal”:

But of course there’s a reason for this:

Libraries have got to be woke, you see:

Nicole Cooke, a professor of library and information science at the University of South Carolina, is booked as a keynote speaker for the event, according to an agenda obtained by the DCNF.

Cooke has argued that it is “tantamount to malpractice” to allow students to enter the workforce without first being educated on diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice. In 2017, she received a grant to study “racial microaggressions in libraries,” according to a press release.

The professor has a long history of giving presentations on the importance of racial justice and diversity when managing libraries, according to her personal website. In 2020, she created an “anti-racism resources for all ages” project which includes a number of materials intended to introduce children to the topic.

 

One of the goals is to make libraries “more inclusive”. One would think inviting all those bigoted (checks notes) librarians would be pretty vital, if that’s the goal.

Wouldn’t one?

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.

They warned me if I voted for Donald Trump, democracy would be in danger.

And they were right:

It’s the things they say when they are among friends that really illuminate.

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. 

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.

It may be a symptom of how complete the “Great Sort” has been – but the safer a Democrat is, the more comfortable they feel “saying the quiet part out loud”, as the kids say these days:

By the way, Governor Newsom:  No.  Denied. 

Now what?

Now, Warnock feeling safe? Well, he is, for another couple years anyway:

On the other hand…:

Anyway – if you are a Democrat, you need to make absolutely certain your candidates accept nothing less than completely confiscation, publicly, and immediately.

“Hunters for Gun Control”.

“Kulaks for Lenin”

“Chickens for Foxes”.

Two of those are made up.

This next one…:

…I give about 50-50.

Show me the “Republican” who supports price controls, open borders, defunding police, gun confiscation, soical decline, packing the SCOTUS, creating two new Democrat states to pack the Senate, explosive debt, and a foreign policy as firm as a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, and I’ll show you the real problem. 

Once nice thing about being a conservative these days…

…is that all your “conspiracy theories” turn out to be true.

Tim Walz loves him some Chinese Communism. 

Well, at the very least he loved it, back when he was teaching kids “social studies”:

There appears to be precious little evidence that he changed anything but  his surface decorations (during 12 years as a “moderate” while campaigning in the rural 1st CD). 

When Governor Klink and the DFL legislative majority were making the case to squander the “surplus” [1], they put “cutting poverty by 30%” as one of their goals. 

So – how is poverty in Minnesota doing?

Well – we don’t know. 

Official poverty stats conveniently trail real time by a couple of years. 

Official poverty rates trail real time by a couple of years. In 2022, the official poverty rate in MN was 9.6% – up from 9.3% in 2021, and an even 9% in 2020.

So at some point – 2023? 2024? 2025? – the poverty rate needs to drop to 6.4% – a rate the state hasn’t seen in recent memory.

I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess the rate isn’t dropping to a historic low next year.  

Any action on that bet?

[1] Which, let’s not forget, wasn’t really a surplus

SCENE:   A small postwar “starter” home in New Hope, Minnesota.  It is about 10PM.  Josh McGILL, 35 year old estimator and sometimes technician for a family HVAC business, and Cassie McGILL, 33 and an office manager for a real estate firm, have finally gotten their kids to bed for the evening.  They are working on the bills as the evening news plays on the TV in the background.

JOSH:  Well, if we just had $100 more, the budget would be balanced.

CASSIE:  But Junior is going to need new skates for hockey soon.

JOSH:  Ugh.   I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get a lot over overtime.

CASSIE:  And then there’s the elephant in the room – this house is just too small for three kids. 

JOSH:  The way mortgage rates are going, we can’t afford to move.

CASSIE:  And with food up 30%, gas and heating up…

JOSH:  …don’t forget taxes on everything going up…

CASSIE:  …that too – I don’t know how we make that work. 

JOSH:  And with our commercial customers dropping like flies, we are going to wind up laying people off at this rate. 

CASSIE:  (sighs heavily). We’re still paying for that catalytic converter that got stolen.  What are we going to do?

(The TV mysteriously gets louder, and Kamala HARRIS and Tim WALZ dart their eyes to CASSIE and JOSH, through the screen)

HARRIS:  Feel joy!

JOSH:  DId you say something Cassie?

CASSIE:  It’s…the TV. 

HARRIS: 

WALZ:  Do it for One Minnesota!

CASSIE:  Oh, Madame Vice President and Governor Walz.  Hi.  It’s just that things are kinda…stressful…

(The sound of Beyonce’s song “Freedom” turns up, and HARRIS and WALZ start dancing)

JOSH:  It’s kinda like, prices have gone up way, way faster than our incomes, and business is slowing, and interest rates for my business are crazy, and whatever savings we have are getting bled out, and our kids school just isn’t doing the job, and…

(The music stops abruptly.  HARRIS and WALZ’s eletronic gazes fix upon the McGills)

WALZ:  Perhaps you weren’t listening.

HARRIS:  Don’t be weird ,Josh and Cassie.  Feel joy!  Because joy is what you should feel if you don’t want to be the weird person who isn’t feeling joy.

JOSH:  Er, that’s great, but it doesn’t…

HARRIS:  (Scowling). I said feel joy. . 

WALZ:  Now.  For One Minnesota.

HARRIS:  And One America, not weird America, a joyful America, unburdened by the weight of what has been.  

(And just as suddenly as they appeared, they are gone, as KARE 11 shows TikTok videos of the Saint Paul City Council dancing.)

CASSIE:  What was that?

JOSH:  I have no idea.

And SCENE.

…that amazes me about this “interview” with the loathsome Senator Smith…:

…is that Acosta actually called her on her lie. 

My expectations of the media have fallen that low.

On the other hand, Esme Murphy wouldn’t have done even that.

The Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum is a non-partisan, private museum located inside Camp Ripley, up near Baxter.

It published a book referencing MInnesotans’ involvement in twenty years of the Global War on Terror. 

It includes Governor Walz’s comments at a 9/11 address the the Capitol.

I’ve screenshot this quote from those remarks:

Let’s forget for a moment that Bagram is in Afghanistan; people flub things when speaking in public. Let’s just let that slide for the moment.

He said “he was in the Guard – and one night, he stood on a ramp at Bagram”.  

Was this yet another cutesy turn of phrase – “I said I was in the Guard, and that I was at a Ramp Ceremony; I didn’t literally say my Guard service and this ceremony intersected, you weird Repubulican”.

But it sure does look like he’s saying he was in the Guard in…er, someplace in action, doesn’t it.

So, Governor and Veep Candidate Walz supports censorship of “misinformation” (which is defined by his sycophants in the media) and “hate speech”, which is defined by…him.

I’m gonna guess this gets called “hateful misinformation”.

One heartbeat away from the presidency, if America doesn’t wise up this fall.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is whacking weeds along his alley.  He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, who appears to be inspecting peoples recycling bins for inappropriate material. 

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Oh, shiiiiiure as I live and breathe, it’s Aver…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.   Republicans are the worst possible combination of Nazis, Fascists and slave-owning Confederate traitors!

BERG:  You don’t say.

LIBRELLE:  I do – and so does America’s best governor and fun uncle, Tim Walz!

BERG:  Huh.  So you’re saying a populist utopian movement that builds itself around a central mythology, that relentlessly sorts society into “in” and “out” groups, that co-opts or destroys the societal institutions to consolidate and uphold its power,that requires enemies either internal or external to divert attention away from the problems they cause, and tolerates, and even glorifies and fetishizes violence to intimidate and subdue opposition, is Fascist?

LIBRELLE:  Yep!

BERG:  Right.  And a “fascist” movement that obsesses over race to the point that it’s their fundamental motivation, screening mechanism and call to action resembles Naziism?

LIBRELLE:  Uh, yeah!

BERG:  Huh.  And a movement that exists within our Federalist system, but ignores or actively denigrates the parts of that system that inconveniences its pursuit of its political goals, and exists mainly to uphold the wealth and power of its key stakeholders, resembles the Confederacy?

LIBRELLE:  Er…yes.  And why do you put all the links in when you talk?  That’s just #weird. 

BERG:  So…sorting and denigration…

LIBRELLE:  (Plugs ears, runs away) Nananananana can’t hear you….

BERG:  (sotto voce) Oh, I think you can. 

And SCENE.

To:  America
From:  Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant and American
Re:  Tim “Governor Klink” Walz

America,

Some of you – OK, most of you – may be getting your first introduction to Governor Tim Walz, as the noise machine frantically tries to position him as a viable VP candidate. 

“Small town regular Joe” is one of the costumes he puts on, complete with an ancient International Scout and an NRA cap…

…well, no.  He ditched the NRA cap when he had to power-suckup to the “progressive”/Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) wing of the party to beat back Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade in the primary in 2018.  He still puts on the costume on occasion – the DFL sends a social media intern with him for pictures at the lake, or driving the Scout, or having Peggy Flanagan feed him a corn dog. 

Anyway – if the news blitz is your first introduct5ion to Governor Klink, let’s go through some pros and cons of him and his administration.

Cons of Tim Walz

• Led the plundering of an $18B surplus, leaving the state with what will likely be at least a $2B deficit later this year.  Minimum.
• Turned a deaf ear to the most epic wave of corruption in Minnesota history, as DFL stakeholders from the DSA non-profit/industrial complex pillaged a bare minimum of a half billion dollars worth of funds “intended” to “feed hungry children” during the pandemic…
• …after having been equally incurious about at least $250M being piillaged by some of these same stakeholders from Health and Human Services budgets. 
• Like many governors, he assumed emergency powers in March 2020, when nobody knew muich about the pandemic.  He announced that, according to the model he’d gotten from the Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota faced upward of 70,000 deaths in the next four months – perhaps 20,000 as a best case scenario if the state shut down completely and submitted to draconian control of society.   By May, it was clear that the model was wrong – at which time the administration declared the model double-dog top secret, because in the words of an MDH staffer at one of his press conferences, “people might reach different conclusions”.  Y’know – try to reproduce results.  Like actual scientists, as opposed to propagandists, do. 
• He created castes of “essential workers” – which included grocery store workers (but only at “big box” stores), liquor stores, “the World’s Largest Candy Store” (run by a campaign contributor, as luck would have it),
• In particular, he instituted rules in nursing homes that created absolute carnage among seniors.  Minnesota had among the worst death rates in the nation among people in long term care – up there with New York City.  For this alone, I’ve got beef with the little fella – this happened right as my stepfather died and I needed to move my mom to Minnesota.  There was a six month delay – which caused plenty of other problems. 
• Notwithstanding that the “emergency” was effectively over in three months – six if you want to be cautious to the point of paranoia – he held onto “emergency powers” for well over a year and a half. 
• After the death of George Floyd, he publicly sided with Floyd, long before any facts were known about the incident.  Which contributed to the 2020 Riots. 
• During those 2020 riots, he followed his bureaucratically-defined role to an anal-retentive “T” – even publicly chiding Mayor Frey for not submitting a cover sheet on his TPS form when requesting the National Guard.  But he ceded the “bully pulpit” to the rioters and their symps in state government .  And to his daughter, who served as a source of intel for the rioters regarding police and Guard movements. 
• He also coddled lawlessness within government; when “protesters” tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the State Capitol Mall as his Capitol police looked on, he giggled until his belly jiggled like a bowl of jello. 
• He has actively contributed to the tribalizing of Minnesota politics. 
• On his watch, crime in Minnesota in general is up by at least 50% since he assumed office.
• On the other hand, capital is leaving the state.  Movers and shakers, entrepreneurs (other than coffee shops, which along with small political consultancies are the only for-profit businesses DFLers even pretend to understand), retirees – they’re leaving the state and taking their money with them.  Minnesota’s net wealth is down by billions. 
• Young people are also leaving Minnesota, reversing decades of Minnesota as a destination for young people just getting started on careers and life.  I was one of them, once.  If I were me, today, and not seeking a career in government or the non-profit/industrial complex, I wouldn’t do it again. 

Pros of Tim Walz

He spends a lot of money at the State Fair.

That pretty much it.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is trimming weeds while listening to “Office Ladies” on headphones.  He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has come up the sidewalk, looking for evidence of herbicide use.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  (Oblivious)

LIBRELLE:  The so-called “assassination attempt” was pretty much a fake.

BERG:  (No response, as he continues to listen to his podcast)

LIBRELLE:  It looks like his ear was cut by a piece of glass!  What a drama queen!

BERG:  (Nothin’)

GUY RIDING PAST ON BIKE:  So what do you think it was that accelerated this supposed piece of glass to a speed capable of taking a chunk out of the President’s ear?

WOMAN WAITING AT BUS STOP ACROSS THE STREET:  Yeah!  Perhaps magic?

GUY TRIMMING HEDGES DOWN THE BLOCK:  Maybe the kids from Slytherin playing around with their wands again?

LADY IN  KITCHEN, LISTENING THROUGH WINDOW:  Maybe it was Umbrella Man?

BUS DRIVER (Picking up the woman across the street):  Couldn’t have possibly been a bullet aimed at the candidate’s head, could it?

LIBRELLE:  (Looks around, sheepishly slinks away as BERG continues along, undisturbed)

And SCENE