Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Every government regulation restricts some individual’s freedom.  It wouldn’t be a regulation if it didn’t.

A government regulation which affects similarly situated individuals must treat them similarly.  That’s what the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment is all about. 

To survive an Equal Protection challenge, the government regulation must be rationally related to a legitimate government purpose.

The U of M concedes the Covid vaccine doesn’t halt the spread of Covid but intends to impose a vaccine mandate anyway.

St. Paul and Minneapolis require vaccine or proof of negative test to enter bars and restaurants. 

All three government entities insist the regulations are based on SCIENCE.  But other government entities in the state have not enacted similar regulations.  There is no scientific reason why restaurants in St. Paul would be deadlier than Maplewood, why Manny’s Steak House would be deadlier than Lord Fletcher’s, why a student with natural immunity is deadlier than a vaccinated student. 

The regulations do not treat citizens similarly.  There is no rational basis for the difference.  The different regulations violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In the olden days, there were organizations which cared about such things, the American Civil Liberties Union, for example.  They ought to be in court every day, suing on behalf of individual rights.  They’re not.  Nobody is.

Why doesn’t anybody care about Constitutional rights more?

What happened to us?

Joe Doakes

What happaned?

Big Left took over the institutions we used to trust to play it down the middle!

He drove with a .13 blood alcohol content (as of test time, hours later, indicating he had closer to a .17 at the time of the crash).

He drove 126MPH down 94, up until he went off the road.

He drove, thus hammered, carrying his service firearm (or at least a .357 magnum revolver in a holster), at a blood alcohol level 3-4 times the level at which a civilian would lose their permit.

He lied to officers about the crash; he didn’t invoke his 5th Amendment right to remain silent (which is legal, constitutionally protected, and good); he actually lied.

The story of Sheriff Hutchinson’s DUI and crash just keeps getting worse and worse:

The Governor and Lieutenant Governor asked for his resignation.

But that’ll be the end of it.

Not because the DFL is out to protect Hutchinson; the “progressives” have a hand-picked candidate even more “progressive” than Hutchinson waiting for November. The DFL will endorse her, and Hutchinson will be shunted aside like last year’s model.

But until then? If the DFL let it he known that driving drunk was a real problem, they’d endanger the prospects of one of their candidates, in a year when the DFL expects to have enough problems.

That’s how life, and politics, in a one-party autocracy works.

A friend of the blog emails:

Rise Bagel Company has decided to not have to make a choice of who they serve. They are now closed to indoor dining, open for take out. Their business, their choice. All customers treated equally. Shouldn’t be any controversy.

But, yet there is- people who like the vaccine mandate are somehow mad that Rise Bagel Company is closed to indoor dining. Read the comments on the Facebook-people are upset that this business isn’t doing the least bit to keep people safe. But, what? Isn’t closing down to indoor dining even safer? I’ve heard there are quite a few others doing the same thing, whether out of protest or lack of staffing.

They can only except people closing down for the right reasons.

No, that’s not hyperbole:

I suspect “Rise Bagels” couldn’t be happier to lose this person’s business.

But the point remains – this isn’t about infection control.

Just control.

So why are the Democrats hammering on January 6?

To draw attention away from their own hatred of self-government, of course:

Anyone say “it’s not about science, it’s about power?” Perish the thought:

– Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. However, 55% of Democratic voters would support such a proposal, compared to just 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters.

Who are those 19% of Republicans, anyway?

Of course, that’s benign compared to some of the other things Dems favor:

– Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.

Forget about the First Amendment…:

– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.

Hey, if reason and messaging don’t work, you can just ship ’em off to southern Idaho:

– Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”

Remember when people said comparing vaccinations to the Holocaust was abhorrent? Well, it still is – but a lot less so, in view of that graf.

The more you read, the. more you realize: Orwell underestimated Democrats:

– While about two-thirds (66%) of likely voters would be against governments using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others, 47% of Democrats favor a government tracking program for those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.

I swear, sometimes – if AOC called her next campaign “the Great Leap Forward”, not a single Dem would get the irony:

How far are Democrats willing to go in punishing the unvaccinated? Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.

Whenever someone chants “there’s no difference between the parties”, reference this poll.

“Government is all the things we do together – stupidly and ineffectively”.

Government is ponderous and brittle. People, when acting in enlightened self-interest, usually make the right call.

My favorite example: before 9/11, the official guidance for people in skyscraper offices in case of a major emergency was to wait for official instructions. The powers that be assumed that people would be a panicky mob, there’d be stampedes in the stairwells, and more people would die from the panic than from the disaster, since humans are (to officialdom) like longhorns in a thunderstorm.

Of course, on 9/11, the normies ignored the instructions to stay in their cubes – and, more importantly, they self-organized an evacuation that got just about everyone below the points of impact out of the Twin Towers that morning. Another epic self-organization led to the more or less organic appearance of the greatest maritime evacuation since Dunkirk, as boats, official and private, carried people across the Hudson and East Rivers, without any need for official guidance.

Government learned nothing from this, of course; one of the first rule of public health crisis communications is to try to convince people of one or both of two things; “you’re going to die a horrible death if you dbn’t follow directions”,, or “your children are going to die a horrible death if you don’t follow directions”.

Doesn’t sound very confident in human intelligence, does it?

People can be breathtakingly stupid – but enlightened self-interest is a powerful force for good.

It’s by no means a rare trait.

I talked about this article in “Commentary” last weekend on the show – “Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace” by James Meigs.

It’s about the gulf between the panicky official response to the Anchorage Earthquake of 1964 – the strongest earthquake in North American history – and the calm, purposeful response of the normies, who organized themselves much more effectively than the local authorities did.

The officlals assumed that the populace would panic:

Almost as soon as the shaking stopped, city officials began worrying about how the populace would respond. With every shop window broken, would looters ransack the local merchants? Would citizens panic at the sight of the dead or wounded? Police quickly deputized a group of volunteers—some of them freshly emerged from those Fourth Avenue bars—as ad hoc officers. The men put on armbands with the word police emblazoned in lipstick—a few were even issued firearms—and off they went to protect the city from the inevitable post-disaster crime wave.

The Anchorage officials weren’t being unusually paranoid. At the time, most experts believed any major disaster would cause “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” as social scientist Richard M. Titmuss had put it some years earlier. Shocked by carnage and desperate for food and shelter, people would “behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Only firm control by powerful authorities could keep the lid on such dangerous situations….Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

This led the authorities to devote far more effort to controlling crowds that tryint to rescue people trapped in buildings.

Sound familiar?

In the meantime, the normies organized themselves, and did what needed to be done:

Cars were buried in debris. One station wagon had been crushed almost flat by a concrete slab; Chance could hear a woman’s voice coming from inside. A crowd of people was trying to save her, clawing at the slab. Then a man stepped forward to organize the effort. Somehow, two tow trucks were located; they were able to split the slab partially in two. Another man climbed into the breech with a cutting torch—a cutting torch!—and carved a hole in the vehicle’s roof. The woman was pulled free, gravely injured but alive. She would survive. [Anchorage TV reporter Genie] Chance later marveled that all the people involved in the operation were mere passersby—impromptu volunteers. And yet they functioned as a team. Though she didn’t know it at the time, this dynamic was being replicated all over the city.

Officialdom was, in the meantime ,paralyzed by the collapse of its assumptions:

[Psychologist] Enrico Quarantelli, the leader of [a team of academics that flew to Anchorage to study the response], was particularly interested in Anchorage’s small Civil Defense office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but, Quarantelli noted, had quickly become bogged down over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, Bill Davis’s amateur mountaineers had taken over that function almost immediately. Quarantelli used the term “emergent groups” to describe teams of self-organized volunteers like Davis’s searchers. He didn’t miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. And, far from being a hindrance to trained first responders, those gangs of citizens turned out to be an indispensable resource.

It’s not a new phenomenon at all:

Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

I urge you to read the entire piece.

I urge you to read the whole thing – in particular, the article’s focus on the importance of getting reliable, trustworthy information to the population:

 Fear of public panic remains common today. Disaster literature bulges with examples—from Hurricane Katrina, to the 2011 Japan tsunami, to the current coronavirus pandemic—in which officials suppressed information, or passed along misinformation, out of concern over an unruly populace…One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling. After the 2011 tsunami knocked out Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials gave a series of confusing briefings. To many, they seemed to be downplaying the amount of radiation released in the accident. In the end, the radiation risks turned out to be much lower than feared, resulting in no civilian deaths. But, by then, the traumatized public had lost faith in any official statements. As one team of researchers notes, any “perceived lack of information provision increases public anxiety and distrust.”

Similar example. the Bengal Famine of 1942, where British/Indian authorities clamped down on information, causing the rumor mill to take over, leading to food hoarding and bureacratic – dare we say, “elite” – panic, leading to two million starvataion deaths, in a place with plenty of food.

Think of that when you remember the Minnesota Department of Health’s refusal to divulge the mathematical model by which it predicted tens of thousands of Covid deaths by July 2020i, as a best case, because “people might reach different resujlts”.

A friend of the blog emails:

Seen on Twitter- “Some people really don’t get how much more appealing a place is when we know people like them won’t be there.”

Is this:

A- referring to Black Americans during segregation

B- referring to the unvaccinated

C- does it matter?

We might also add “D Dash Penzeys spices “call a republican a racist“ day“.

No shortage of bigotry out there.

No shortage of bigotry out there.

Declan Leary, on Muriel Bowser’s vaccine mandate in the District of Columbia – which isn’t all that different from the ones going into “effect” in Minneapolis and Saint Paul

It is all the more concerning given the precedent we risk setting if we tolerate the vaccine mandates. As a number of conservatives have warned repeatedly these last few months, even begrudging compliance with irrational diktats issued by the Covidcrats gives the ruling class valuable strategic ground. Moving forward, we can only expect our government to become less sensible and more immoderate if we refuse to push back now. As TAC’s

Helen Andrews wrote last week, “Once Americans get accustomed to scanning a QR code every time they enter a building, there is no limit to the surveillance and nudges that can be built on top of it.”

So I don’t know what to do here. I could easily comply; I have proof of the jab ready to go right on my phone. I need to show it if I want any part in so much of what makes city life good, worth living even under the rule of a Muriel Bowser and with a not insignificant risk of getting shot on a given day. (This latter point, by the way, calls into question the sincerity of the mayor’s interest in preserving the lives of citizens.) But I am far from convinced that the benefits of compliance—just like the benefits of enforcement—will really outweigh the costs.

I’m in about the same boat:  I’ve had the J&J vaccine (chosen because it was alleged to be best at preventing hospitalization, which given that I had OG Covid in the spring of 2020 was my only actual concern).   I could play the game.

But I am not going to.

Governor Klink had a union obligation to save the bloody shirt yesterday:

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?

Yeah,that doesn’t help one little bit.

With Denmark and Sweden tripling down on the free market and abandoning draconian Covid regulations, the longing eyes of the world’s “Social Democrat” noodlers have turned to New Zealand’s. Jacinda Ardern.

She ran a very hawkish “Lockdown” regime in 2020, drawing the admiration of a lot of Mascists – as if they could replicate the lockdown of a country with a population 20% smaller than Minnesota’s, with land area 25% larger, isolated from all other land by a thousand miles, able to cut itself off from the world by closing a couple ports and a few gates at the Wellington airport.

Has it worked? Time’ll tell.

But she’s got more government gigantism in mind:

So – if you’re a smuggler, run an organized crime syndicate, or just like making money off of government-induced shortages?

Opportunity is knocking!

I’d respond “these people never learn from history”, but assuming they would would paradoxically mean I haven’t learned from history.

Sheriff Dave Hutchinson, to Fox9’s Mary McGuire:

Well, let’s get that reflected in statute, pronto! Everyone does it!

(Maybe he meant “everyone at the Sheriff’s Association meeting? We’ll never know – all cameras were reportedly barred. What happens near Alexandria stays near Alexandria).

And when they do, and a Henco sheriff’s deputy pulls them over and they come in with a .17 (which was what the .13 from his urine test likely was at the time of the accident), they don’t get a whiffleball home booking with not one second spent in a jail cell.

And if a Minnesotan with a carry permit is busted with over .04, they’re at very serious risk of losing their carry permit.

What happens to cops who lose their right to carry?

I’d love to ask the sheriff this question. I’m gonna guess I don’t get any chance to.

By the way – I’ll be talking with Rebecca Brannon on the show this Saturday about this story, including the blowback she’s gotten from local cops.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senator Elizabeth Warren supports court-packing.  That’s really embarrassing for a Harvard law professor.  Even a night-school wonder like me, knows better. 

The problem with the Supreme Court is not that it’s too small. The court is too large now, to get things done expeditiously and correctly: too many egos to sooth, too many agendas to accommodate, too many compromises requiring hair-splitting decisions.

The problem is not that the court is full of justices eager to overturn precedent.  If a case was wrongly decided, it should be overturned in the interest of justice.    

The problem is not that the court veers away from widely held public opinion.  Pandering to public opinion is Congress’ job.  And it’s mostly on volatile social issues where the Court has caused the worst problems.

The problem is Marbury v. Madison, a case decided fewer than 20 years after the Constitution was adopted.  That’s the case in which the Supreme Court gave itself the power to throw out legislation the Court felt was incompatible with the Constitution.  The court’s power-grab flatly contradicts the entire premise of a “enumerated powers” Constitution.  That decision set up the Court to make historically and horrifically bad law:  Dred Scott (struck down the Missouri Compromise which allowed slavery to spread to more states), Plessy v. Fergussn (upheld racial segregation); Korematsu (upheld concentration camps for American citizens); Roe v. Wade (upheld abortion on demand); Obergefell v. Hodges (struck down gay marriage laws nationwide).   

Adding more justices to a run-away court won’t rein it in from ruling on social issues.  A constitutional amendment is required.  And if that doesn’t curb their enthusiasm, perhaps removal from office?  A Harvard law professor should understand that.  

Joe Doakes

Bring on the mid-terms.

Rep. John Thompson shreds the DFL and mainstream media’s hypocrisy in re Sheriff Hutchinson.

And he’s not wrong:

And there’s still a week to go…

“But Mitch – why are you an Originalist? Don’t think mankind has evolved in the past 240-odd years?”

Sure – backward.

Case in point: an op-ed in the Boston Glob over the weekend, advocating a rewrite of the first two Amendments of the Constitution. The piece, by one Mary Anne Franks, identified by the Glob as “Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech“, opens as follows:

As legal texts go, neither of the two amendments is a model of clarity or precision. More important, both are deeply flawed in their respective conceptualizations of some of the most important rights of a democratic society: the freedom of expression and religion and the right of self-defense.

Well – she’s not wrong per se.

Sanford Levinson’s seminal Yale Law Review article, “The Embarassing Second Amendent” – an article that led, circuitously but certainly over the course of two decades to the Heller and McDonald decisions, makes the same point; the language of the Second Amendment is a wee bit anachronistic, although its legal, historical and textual roots are crystal clear to any point of view not addled by 60 years of activist, revisionist jurisprudence largely tied to risible overextension of the Miller decision.

It’s about there that the good points end. I’ll give Franks points for honesty, at least; her op-ed encapsulates the modern Left’s notion that rights are bestowed by a benevolent government, not endowed us by our creator.

It’s a notion that is, in fact, worth going to war over; ideally, a war of words, if we can keep it that way.

Re the First Amendment:

Every person has the right to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and petition of the government for redress of grievances, consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility for abuses. All conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.

Both the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion shall be respected by the government. The government may not single out any religion for interference or endorsement, nor may it force any person to accept or adhere to any religious belief or practice.

Perhaps it’s a sign of social perspicacity that Franks feels the need to enshrine the concept that rights – which are, by definition, “consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility of abuses” – apply to everyone, or that they shall “be respected by the government”.

But I don’t even want to think about how the Federal judiciary would torture the meaning of “the princinple of equality and dignity of all persons”, after a few decades of abuse by today’s “woke” blue legal academy.

And the Second?:

All people have the right to bodily autonomy consistent with the right of other people to the same, including the right to defend themselves against unlawful force and the right of self-determination in reproductive matters. The government shall take reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole.

The inalienable right to defend one’s self, family, property, community and freedom – to preserve the “bodily autonomy” not of people as individuals (subject to government’s “reasonable measures”, naturally) would become a carrier germ for abortion.

I’ll await Professor Franks’s attempt to get a majority of Congress and the legislatures and governors of 37 states to jam this down.

(My rewrite of the 2nd Amendment, by the way? It’s simple: drop the dependent clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the preservation of a free state”. Cut it down to “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. Simple, elegant, and exactly the opposite of Professor Franks’s intent, which is all I really care about).

2020: San Francisco mayor London Breed pushes policies softer on crime, vagrancy and social decay than even her predecessors. She literally raised not a finger – at best – against the decriminalization of shoplifting less than $900 worth of merchandise, leading to the gutting of much San Francisco retail and roaming gangs of smash and grab flash mobs of looters.

2021: London Breed turns into “Dirty Harriett“.

Mark my words: Law Enforcement in San Francisco, under pfogressive leadership, will be about as subtle and libertarian as Ted Nugent leading a band of saracens…

…although I suspect it’ll have little effect on crime.

Let’s say you had a couple bumps at a bar – like, say, 8 to 12 of them. And then decided to drive home.

You were carrying a gun, and a car full of loose ammunition.

You drove down the freeway, until you didn’t – you swerved off the road, rolled your car, scattering ammunition all over the place. You had to be extricated, in no condition for a field sobriety test. When you finally took a whiz test at the hospital, you tested at a .13 BAC – 50% above the legal limit,and a level that indicates you were likely at a .17 during the accident itself.

And you’re a civilian.

Do you think the county attorney is going to let you plead out to fourth degree DUI?

I’m referring of course to Henco Sheriff Dave Hutchinson.

Or course. you wouldn’t. At the very least, the County Attorney would put you through a legal wringer, and make sure you settled with charges that involved serious time in jail.

So – is it just county employee mutual backscratching?

Maybe.

Now ask yourself – would Rich Stanek, the previous Sheriff and the last elected Republican of any kind in Henco, have gotten the same treatment?

Remember how the media covered his adult son’s behavior. before you answer that.

Oh, yeah – the media. The only media actually covering this story are the conservative alternative media here in MInnesota:

So perhaps we call it “DFL Privilege?”

A relationship can survive anything, says Dennis Prager, except contempt.

And there is a lot of contempt in our society.

Mostly one-way:

Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn’t be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling.

And a disturbing number of leftists don’t want to hire or employ those people, either.

It’s the ugly, militant side of Urban Progressive Privillege: not only do people with UPP never need to recognize any different perspectives on life, they increasingly work to actively cleanse their echo chambers of any dissonance.

You could call it cultural cleansing:

The Democrats routinely call Republicans and their activists “culture warriors,” but when it comes to pushing the country in a particular direction away from where it currently is, it’s always the Democrats who have been at the forefront. On abortion, they have been pushing to open up the definition to make it as widely available and as routine as any other form of birth control. With social spending, they have moved to make it more and more available while lowering the requirements further and further, creating programs that are impossible to pay for.

On issues like education, they are tightening their control as much as possible and shutting families out, even going so far as to label concerned parents as “terrorists.”

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

A restaurant owner in Albert Lea has been convicted of violating Walz’ Executive Order to close. The judge gave her 90 days in jail.

A restaurant owner in Lynd (near Marshall) had her restaurant license yanked by the Minnesota Department of Health because she stayed open in defiance of Gov. Walz’ Executive Order to close.

Those of us who have worked with small-town restaurant owners know it’s a business with brutal working hours and razor-thin margins. They don’t get paid vacation. They don’t have capital reserves to weather a ‘temporary’ shutdown of ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ which dragged into months. The cooks and wait staff are typically local people of limited skills who depend on these jobs to survive. The banks typically force owners to pledge their homes as collateral for the business loan so if the business fails, they lose everything.

There is no scientific evidence that closing a small town restaurant but allowing larger restaurants (including casinos) to remain open, has any effect on public health. The Executive Order took away vested property rights with no rational basis. It’s unconstitutional.

Governor Walz stole these people’s livelihoods and robbed them of their future, for no reason.

Refused to obey an unconstitutional order to close, so their employees could feed their families? They ought to be given a medal.

Joe Doakes

You’ve got to break some eggs to make a kombucha.

Or something like that.

My question isn’t whether Sheriff Hutchinson drove impaired last weekend – though it seems likelyl.

It’s not why – cops are prone to drinking, and it’s been a rough couple years.

It’s not whether he drove in a county vehicle.

It’s not whether he got favorable treatment from the State Patrol – which didn’t post the details of his crash for nearly half a day (2.5 hours is the norm), or took a urine test rather than a more accurate. blood test when Hutchinson got to the hospital. Cops generally look out for cops. Of course the Patrol went easy on the Sheriff.

No. My question is this:

The Sheriff was said to have been partying at a resort full of sheriffs, at the State Sheriff’s Association meeting, at the Arrowwood Resort near Alexandria – a room full of people whose departments spend a lot of time, and earn a big part of their budgets, arresting, prosecuting and fining drunk drivers – very frequently, people with blood alcohol levels between .08 and .1, which in most people is barely perceptible intoxication, a lowering of the limit that was almost entirely done to allow more arrests and prosecutions of people pulled over for other offenses – tail-lights, expired tabs – after a beer or two. They run departments whose deputies have prosecuted DUI cases that have gotten many menaces off the road, it’s true – and also put a “DUI” on the recrods of nearly 10% of Minnesotans – a blotch that goes on to infringe their civil rights, their employment prospects, and their status in the community.

And yet, nobody in that resort full of sheriffs thought to tell Hutchinson “er, maybe you oughtta stay and have a couple cups of coffee, or bunk up at a Best Western for the night”, or anything of the sort.

No – off he went.

And, one presumes, off most of them went, as well, presumably after a bump or two themselves.

Nobody in that room full of people that have helped arrest and convict 10% of the entire state of DUI thought to pull Hutchinson aside?

…if modern Social Justice chic would or could exhibit the faintest hint of conscience…

…it seems it can.

Although it took an (ostensibly) Catholic university to do it, so…

Remember:

Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors…And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that [concern] comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working,

Minneapolis City Council PResident Lisa Bender, June, 2020

It appears Minneapolis has solved that particular “privilege”:

This sort of thing is unacceptable in North Minneapolis, in Frogtown, out on the Lower East Side or deep in the heart of Phillips.

But this isni’t in any of those places. This is in leafy, green, upper-middle-class, DFL-voting Nokomis. The heart of Mayor Frey’s power base. Just down the road, figuratively, from Lisa Bender’s privately-secured house.

The victim is speaking out:

Public Safety is a privilege – one that Lisa Bender enjoys with all the subtlety of Keith Moon at an open bar, at taxpayer’s expense, to the tune of well into six and heading toward seven figures, if last years spend rate has kept up.

This is the choice facing the entire state next year; more of this, or drawing a line on the cement and say “they shall not pass”.

And make no mistake, that is the whole choice; Mayor Frey is stuck with a city council that was bruised but not chastened by the electoral results last month. Governor Walz is a beard for the “Progressive” wing of the DFL (read: the DFL), the extremists who call all the shots in the DFL these days, without whom he will be an empty plus-size suit out of a job in 2023. That wing thinks the disorder is a good thing. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be running rampant in Minneapolis.

This is the choice.

PS: This is the situation in Minneapolis, with Mike Freeman – “liberal”, but not “progressive” – runs the Henco Attorney’s office, perfunctorily shoveling cases before “progressive” judges who’ll kick everyone back out on the street before their cell beds get warm.

Imagine what life’s gonna be like when Ryan Winkler is the Henco Prosecutor!

Uh, because they routinely lie to you, and we know it, but they keep on trying to deny it?

Whistle blown on Bloomington public health director, lying to school parents about the effectiveness of masks:

Emphasis added:

At an August 2 “Return to School” webinar on the district’s proposed COVID plan, Kelley urged parents to get their kids vaccinated, calling it the “cornerstone” to containing COVID. Next up in his presentation, Kelly unveiled a list of best practices for schools to follow in preventing the spread of the virus, emphasizing masks were the most important tool of all.

“They’re called best practices because this is the evidence-based data we have for driving how to protect kids in school environments based on experiences we saw in the last two school years,” Kelley said in the August meeting posted on YouTube. “Masking is at the top of that list. The ability to have source control and some aspect of protection for the wearer is a phenomenal tool to control a respiratory pathogen like COVID.”

Yet in a closed door meeting of Bloomington Public Health staff the week school began, Kelley appeared to offer a markedly different view of the usefulness of mandatory masking at schools, according to a watchdog who attended the virtual meeting.

“In terms of purely broad effectiveness, the least effective mitigation we’re implementing in this process is masking,” Kelley said in a recording provided by the watchdog. “Masking, the quality of the consistency of the fit, all those things are highly variable in a population setting.”

It’s becoming a Berg’s Law; anyone who refers to an argument as “evidence-based” should be distrusted and verified – and, almost invariably, distrusted thereafter.

The media yesterday expressed wonder that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey had created a group of his “political critics“ serves a task force to “work“ on the cities crime problem.

A reader emails describe that group as:

…a veritable who’s who of those with their snout in the trough.

With LA carpetbagger Nekima Levy at the helm nothing but good can come from Mayor Frey’s Community Safety Workgroup

This gets, I think, to the truth that our media won’t, can’t, or aren’t supposed to talk about; this exercise is entirely a matter of greasing all the palms that need to be greased.

Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:

For months, I’ve been saying Democrats stole the election with help from the media and RINO Never-Trumpers, all banding together to rid themselves of the Bad Orange Man.

For months, it’s been obvious Biden and Harris weren’t smart enough to have engineered The Big Steal; they were merely the patsies put forward by The Real Usurper.

For months, we’ve known Joe Biden’s mental and physical health is failing too quickly for him to serve his full term of office and Kamala Harris has virtually no support among Democrat bigwigs.

For months, I’ve been asking how The Real Usurper plans to get rid of the patsies so he can take up the power of the Presidency.

For months, I’ve been suggesting Biden gets rid of Harris, who is replaced by The Real Usurper, who moves up when Biden resigns/is removed from office, but Harris’ supporters claim it’s impossible.

The fact my strategy is being openly discussed in Washington power circles means it is not impossible, it simply is not yet time to act. That time is coming – Biden’s decline will force it to happen.

The question remains: who will The Real Usurper install as his puppet, to finish his efforts to destroy America? Who is being groomed by the media for the job? Who would have an easy confirmation as Vice President?

My money is on Michelle Obama.

Joe Doakes

I should start a pool…

…that a city run by Kim Norton, which has been becoming blue-er and blue-er over time, would play passive-aggressive bureaucratic pattycake games with the citizenry…

…right?

A group of parents, with a Twin Cities law firm, are asking for records related to the district’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.

And how did that go over?

“On Nov. 12, an attorney representing the district said that it would cost ‘Equality in Education’ $901,121.15 to obtain the records and they must prepay before the district completes their request,” the report reads.

The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.

…that the current, possibly-excessive, garment-rending over the “Omicron” variant is the sound of an awful lot of people who’ve gone through lives with little purpose or meaning, and have found a perverted version of both in bullying, shunning and scarlet-lettering people with different conclusions and means of dealing with Covid?

That depression and anxiety might be the least of society’s mental health issues when it comes to this pandemic – that the wave of cultural narcissism it’s released dwarves everything else (except, obviously, the suicide?)