Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been informed that as a White Male, I have White Privilege and therefore, my life is easy. It doesn’t seem easy. I decided to check what privileges I got from being a White Male. I’m having trouble finding any and that’s unfair. All the other White Males get to feel guilty, they all have an excuse to wave signs while they stand around on freeways, I don’t get to. I can’t see that I’ve ever gotten a benefit from my White Privilege.

I grew up in a town with no Black families at all. Every boy in school was a White boy. When teachers went looking for the kid who caused the trouble, I got no preference for being a White boy.

To be accepted to college, I had to meet a certain minimum GPA and test score. The college needed Black Males to meet its affirmative action goals so the GPA and test scores were lowered for Black Males. It happened again when I applied to graduate school. I received no preference for being a White Male.

To be hired for a government job, I had to score in the top 5% on the civil service exam to get an interview. The agency needed women to meet its affirmative action goals so they hired a woman who scraped by with a minimum passing score instead of hiring one of the top scoring applicants. I received no preference for being a White Male.

Supposedly, my White Privilege protects me from harassment by the police. When I was a teenage White Boy cruising at night in a bright red Mustang, you can bet I caught the eye of every traffic cop. Now that I’m a middle aged man commuting from work in a sedan, cops never notice me. I’m just as White and Male as ever, but I’m not driving a noticeable vehicle and I don’t drive badly or during high-crime hours. That’s not a privilege, that’s adulthood.

So where do I go to get my share of the privilege?

Joe Doakes

A question I keep trying to ask people who prattle about “privilege”; so let’s say Nekima Levy-Pounds, the boss of Black Lives Matter in Minneapolis, a law professor with tenure and an upper-middle-class income who can pretty much do anything she wants without fear of getting fired, and Billy Bob Bodine, a hot tar roofer from Shreveport Arkansas who sounds like an extra from Deliverance, walk into MPR or Minneapolis City Hall or the U of M.

Who would have the “privilege”?

This observation is a whack upside the head (emphasis added):

Some U.S. counter-terrorism officials say much of the gap between Washington and Belgium — and some other European countries — is cultural. Europeans’ deeper commitment to personal privacy sometimes prevents or delays sharing of information such as travel data — that is taken for granted in the United States.

The idea that Europe – the contintent of sheep-like government-addled socialized drones who gave us Naziism, Socialism, Communism and Soccer – have more commitment to personal privacy than the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is a jab in the gut.

…that some prosecutors need to be pelted with rocks and garbage.

Court rules that the IRS acted in bad faith, targeted Tea Party groups:

A federal appeals court spanked the IRS Tuesday, saying it has taken laws designed to protect taxpayers from the government and turned them on their head, using them to try to protect the tax agency from the very tea party groups it targeted.

The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Departmentlawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.

My greatest dream is to see those responsible frog-walked into a paddy wagon.   Like the “Clinton Indictment”, it’ll never happen – but hope is what it’s all about.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

SF2680 is a bill in Minnesota legislature to increase penalties for crimes motivated by Bad Thoughts.

Punishing people for how they Act is traditional American justice; but punishing people for how they Think is the crime of Heresy.

That’s not who we are.  This bill is a mistake.

Joe Doakes

By golly, you’d best not think the wrong things when you’re attacking someone, or you’re really gonna get it!

Yesterday was Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day – where Real Minnesotans came together to lobby their legislators to pass Second-Amendment-friendly legislation, and shun the stupid bills that Michael Bloomberg is paying for.

And since the legislature was busy talking about all the bills they were introducing, the other side – to the extent you could call it that – was also at the Capitol.

Let’s compare and contrast.

The Herd:  Here is the “group” from the pro-slavery group “Moms Want Action”.  

Count ’em.   That’s 26 people.  And most of them were being  paid, directly (DFL pols, people on the Bloomberg payroll) or indirectly (cops representing the Police Chiefs Assocation) to be there.

If one-third of the people in that photo above were not present for vocational reasons, and being compensated in some way for their time, I’d be amazed.

In other words, at the most Moms Want Action drew eight “activists”.  And that’s being generous.

Drone photo courtesy Dustin Doyle

The Pack: Meanwhile at the foot of the Capitol Mall, there was a different crowd – distinguisted by being an actual crowd.  It was GOCRA’s “MNGOLD” group – or as the sensible refer to them, the “Real Americans”.
I was proud and honored, by the way, to have been invited to be the Master of Ceremonies.   We were joined by an array of speakers, each of them authorities in their area of the issue; Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt (who pledged a lonely death for all of Bloomberg’s bills this session), Oleg Volk (who talked about life without freedom in his native USSR), Rep. Jim Nash, a second-Amendment leader in the House, Professor Joe Olson, the longtime leader of GOCRA, as well as GOCRA president Andrew Rothman and Rep. Tony Cornish, who noted “a bill won’t get passed if it never comes up for a hearing” – which, in his committee, none ever will.

I counted about 170 people – mostly younger, almost exclusively working people, outdoors in temperatures that hovered below 40 degrees as the rally started,  taking a few hours off from their mostly private-sector jobs to come and fight for freedom; most of the crowd, clad in their maroon GOCRA t-shirts, went straight in to the Capitol to buttonhole their legislators and let them know the votes they expected (and to thank the good ones for the pro-freedom votes they made, if applicable).

And not a single one of them was there because it was their job (other than the state’s NRA rep).

That is, conservatively (how else) about seven times the crowd of unemployed/underemployed wannabe social justice warriors and other layabouts that came out to work toward your enslavement.  Or more like 20:1, if you just count people there voluntarily.

If it’d been a Saturday – or a vital hearing – the odds would have been 2-3 times as strongly in the Real Americans’ favor.

Welcome to hell, pro-slavery activists.

Saint Paul’s social justice mafia is baying for blood again.

A Saint Paul teacher, Theo Olson, made a perfectly legitimate observation:

“Black Lives Matter” of Saint Paul is threatening to – you guessed it – “close down” Como High School over the posting.

(Note to BLM; if you are a one trick pony, eventually people get bored with that one trick.  It might pay to learn a new one.  Just saying).

Now, if you’ve read this blog, you know I’m no huge fan of the public school system.   I’ve got my reasons.  I don’t cut public schools, least of all the SPPS, a whole lot of slack.

But Olson’s right.

And this is another example of a particularly ugly form of anti-intellectual know-nothingism that’s sweeping ” progressive” circles in “progressive” cesspools like Saint Paul; shaming and attacking and calling “racist” the very act of questioning BLM.

For any reason!

At all!

Of course, the SPPS’ leadership will be too pusillanimous to react as it should.  It’s sort of baked into their organizational DNA.

I missed covering this the other day.  AFSCME’s push to vacuum up money from Minnesota daycare providers got rebuffed in a landslide so decisive, that even the government unions – who normally clap their jaws onto any hint of graft like a pitbull – have given it up:

AFSCME organizers declined interviews on Tuesday but issued a statement saying they were disappointed, but that they wouldn’t pursue another union election before the law expires in 2017.

Upside?  Maybe the good guys/gals can get some decent sleep during the next session:

Jennifer Parrish, a Rochester child-care provider and a leader of the Coalition of Union Free Providers, said the results of the vote weren’t surprising.

“We know that over the 10 years that we’ve been working on this that child-care providers are hands down overwhelmingly opposed to this. They were waiting by their mailboxes just so they could have an opportunity to vote no,” she said. “Family child-care providers are small business owners. … We set our own rates, we create our own working conditions — all the things that unions typically negotiate for, we determine for ourselves.”

The union would have negotiated public policy issues that “we can work for through our associations without having to pay high union dues,” she said.

Five will get you ten the DFL and Governor Flint-Smith Dayton are upset because they already spent the $2 million a year the jamdown was going to bring the DFL.

Oberlin College – which is sort of the UC Berkeley of small private schools, the school that spawned Lena Dunham, the place where the affirmative checklist for student sex was invented, which has led the academic world in “trigger warning” R&D, a place that makes Carlton or Macalester look like Hillsdale – has been on the “dodgy” list for it’s weaselly approach to free speech on campus.

But it’s nice to know they know where to draw the line, isn’t it?

…that a Trump presidency would be a total loss, there’s always this.

Of course, I believe all those useless mouths will walk away from their federal pensions abojt the time Rosie O’Donnell moves to Canada.

But a guy can dream.

…must be tempered by the knowledge that the only reason this happened – University of Missouri professor Melissa “Poster Child for Moral Constipation” Click, was fired earlier this week – was that her little meltdown was caught on video:

(Looking at the “Students” in this video may be the most deeply depressing thing I’ve done lately.  Fascism is alive and well and drinking latte on a thousand university campuses)

How many professors out there commit the same, and worse, crimes against free expression and critical inquiry every day, unrecorded and, thanks to the outdated practice of academic tenure, utterly untouchable?

In a just world, every one of those “students” will have this video hounding them throughout their “lives”.

Additional Question:  Any bets on whether Click gets hired at one of the Twin Cities’ surplus crop of mediocre colleges?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Bad news: Shot In The Dark failed to make the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups again this year.

There are only six hate groups in Minnesota.

A chapter of the KKK somewhere Up North.  Not sure how they found them, I never heard of them.

Vinlanders Social Club, a racist skinhead outfit in Vinlanders, Minnesota

A Christian preacher in Annandale who preaches that homosexuality is wrong.  [I bet that’s Bradlee Dean – Ed]

The Remnant Press, a traditional Catholic publisher in Forest Lake.

The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, a black separatist church in Minneapolis.

Weisman Publications in Apple Valley, Christian Identity, whatever that means.

Even if we concede that the KKK and racist skinheads are hate groups, so what?  Hate speech is constitutional in Minnesota, has been since the St. Paul cross-burning case.

And what’s up with calling the others haters, simply because they’re Christians of one stripe or another?

This looks like nothing more than a list of “people we don’t agree with and wish to silence.”

I’m not sure what you need to do to amp up the hate around here so you can get yourself noticed, Mitch.  But there’s one consolation – Powerline didn’t make it, either.

Always next year.

The potatoes seem so small, we’d call them “popcorn” where I come from.

But with the SPLC – which is sort of the curia of the Social Justice Warrior community – there’s always a next year.

I’m frankly more worried SITD will be considered a terrorist outfit than a hate group.  It seems pretty likely, with another Democrat administration.

…a more mundane case that could be a much, much bigger deal for offline individual privacy is brewing under the radar in Golden Valley.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

One of the keys to achieving a healthier citizenry is providing everyone with affordable (meaning subsidized) health insurance.  Naturally, since the government is paying for most of it, the government needs the data supporting the billings.  So all your medical records belong to the government.  But it’s okay, the data is totally secure, just like the personnel records at the Department of Homeland Security.

Joe Doakes

In all things, we must reinforce failure and reward incompentence.

With government, anyway.

It’s been my theory that Minnesota “progressives” – especially here in the Metro area – are incapable of debating conservatives on a level deeper than ad-homina and strawmen because they never learn what it’s like to deal with dissent.  They grow up in “progressive” families, sure – and then go on to 12 years of public education run by and for the left.  Then 4-8 years at a U of M or a Saint Olaf or a Macalester, where conservatism is treated as a villain in a melodrama, all but twisting its mustache in sadistic glee, and where no realistic debate is tolerated.  Then they go on to careers in academia, public education, non-profits, or public sector unions, where people marinade in unquestioned “progressivism” for decades without a break.

In other words, for Minnesota “progressives”, their entire life is a “safe space”.

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist thinks that’s a bad sign for progressivism – that it will lead, eventually, to “Peak Leftism”.  In fact…

At the beginning of the year, I speculated that we may have reached “Peak Leftism,” the point at which the left has achieved such uniform control of the commanding heights of the culture that they have no place to go but down. Their mania for soft ideological conformity suggests a mechanism for this decline. They are growing so accustomed to living in an ideological “safe space” that they will no longer understand what it means to debate their positions, much less how to win the debate.

And this is bad for “progressive”ism because… (emphasis added):

The most powerful historical precedent for this is the totalitarian creed of the Soviet Union—a dogma imposed, not just by campus censors or a Twitter mob, but by gulags and secret police. Yet one of the lessons of the Soviet collapse is that the ideological uniformity of a dictatorship seems totally solid and impenetrable—right up to the moment it cracks apart. The imposition of dogma succeeds in getting everyone to mouth the right slogans, even as fewer and fewer of them understand or believe the ideology behind it.

Go ahead.  Talk some some Sanders supporters for a while.  Tracinski’s thesis doesn’t seem so far out.

On the Democrat side, it mattered because it’s high time the voters saw how dodgy the Democrat “commitment” to “democracy” actually is.

Ian Tuttle:

High-minded appeals to transparency are the stuff of which Democrats are made. Barack Obama has called his scandal-plagued White House “the most transparent administration in history,” even as he resorts to circumventing the legislative process to enact policies he couldn’t get through Congress, thereby stripping voters of their ability to check the executive branch.  Hillary Clinton says she has been “as transparent as possible” about her troublesome e-mail, ignoring the plain truth that she intentionally used a private e-mail account to circumvent public-disclosure laws, thereby keeping voters in the dark about her work as the nation’s chief diplomat.

Is power ultimately vested in “the people”? And do “the people” have a right to the capacity and knowledge to make use of that power? If so, then Democrats at the highest levels have sought to curtail their rights at every turn. And now it’s happened again, at the ballot box in Iowa, the state’s Democratic party and the apparent winner of the caucus having decided that transparency and accountability — “more democracy,” as it were — do not serve their purposes at this particular juncture.

America may have slid from “Democracy” (representative republic, of course) into “Authoritarian Bureaucracy” some time ago.  But the Obama administration will be known as the time when the mask came off all the happy talk.

… unless it’s half the population that you’re trying to strong-arm.

(Madeline Albright may have been Hillary Clinton’s sole competitor for the title of “worst Secretary of State in history”)

To:  Colgate
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Super Bowl Ad

Colgate,

So I watched the teaser for your Super Bowl spot:

I get it.  There’s big money in appealing to the altruism of the soft-core social justice warrior.  There’s a whole generation of Millennials out there who are impressed by symbols.

And I am not one of the people who “wastes” water like the guy in the ad.  I’m way too frugal for that.

But I have a question.  Several, actually:

1. If I did leave the faucet running, what do you think would happen (other than inflating my water bill)?   Would the water disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again?    Of course not; it runs down the drain, through the sanitary sewer, back to sewage plant and a holding pond, where it evaporates, turning into humidity, clouds, and eventually rain or snow, falling…somewhere in the world, usually to repeat the cycle over and over and over.
2. For that matter, what do you think happens to the water I drink?  That it disappears from the earth for good?  No – it comes back out in one form or another; #1, #2, sweat, tears, spittle, whatever.  It eventually gets back to the environment, where it evaporates and becomes humidity, clouds, fog, snow, rain, ice, glaciers, or something.  And then repeats the cycle, over and over again.
3. You end the ad with a young, ethnically-ambiguous girl (Asian? Central American?  Briilliant casting, actually) thirstily and heart-rendingly slurping up every drop of the “wasted” water she can get her hands, literally, around.  Now, I live in a part of the world blessed with a lot of water.  My city water comes from the Mississippi River.  And any water I don’t physically consume eventually probably gets back there, or seeps down into an aquifer, or evaporates back into the atmosphere to go heaven-only-knows where.  So please tell me; if I don’t use a gallon of water, how do you propose that it gets to that little girl in Myanmar or Honduras?  Can I pack it up in a jug and send it there, with Colgate paying the freight? Will you be holding a water drive?  How is my use of water – which, between nature and a government that handles basic services with some degree of competence, is plentiful where I live – related to the availability of water in a third-world hellhole beset by banana-republic socialists, corruption and incompetence?   Can the water I don’t use be re-purposed to drowning the successive waves of dictators that have managed to make places like the little girl’s hometown short of water, even though they’re by a freaking rain forest.

Thanks in advance.

It’s become an election-year staple; celebrities – usually well past the tops of their career bell curves – promising to move to other countries if a Republican is elected or re-elected President.

Of course, I can’t recall a single one that ever did.

But here’s one such promise that, if true, could have a monumental impact on our society:

One in four federal workers would consider leaving their jobs if Trump were elected president, according to a new survey conducted by the Government Business Council, Government Executive Media Group’s research arm. About 14 percent of respondents said they would definitely consider leaving federal service under President Trump, while an additional 11 percent said they might.

 

The findings indicate those leaving government would come from agencies’ top ranks, as a majority of respondents were in General Schedule positions GS-13 and higher.

 

Nearly as many Democrats said they would consider leaving in a Trump administration as would definitely stay, the survey found. Among Democrats, 42 percent said they would consider leaving, while 48 percent would not. Just 8 percent of Republican feds would consider refusing to work in a Trump presidency.

Read on if you want to get even more disgusted with the Federal workforce.

Of course, just like our big-talking celeb class, it’ll never happen.  If Trump is elected, the morning after the inauguration every federal worker will look at that Trump picture on the wall, and then they’ll look at their pension prospectus, and then likely think about what it’d take for someone with no marketable skills in the private sector to get a job, and they’ll sit back down at those government-issued seats and go back to, um, “work“.

But we can dream.

For all the talk about “White Privilege”, there is a much bigger, much more powerful form of privilege in our society; the privilege of belonging to the urban liberal establishment.

Kevin Williamson has a dossier on the slice (and it’s a large, non-diet-friendly slice) of that sector that works for government, and government academia.  There’s far too much to quote.  The conclusion:

For all the talk about “privilege,” this is a much more familiar phenomenon: This is what it means to have a ruling class.

And it cannot be repeated often enough: We are ruled by criminals.

But read the whole thing.  You’re not angry enough yet.

Yes, as a matter of fact, they do.

One of the gun grabbers’ chanting points of late is “Obama hasn’t confiscated a single gun”.  Perhaps, but states like New York, Connecticut and California are.  And Obama needn’t send a single SWAT team out on a single “search and confiscate” mission to “win” his real goal; start changing the culture back to the intolerance of guns we had forty years ago, to set the stage for making the Second Amendment irrelevant.

The good guys can not give ground ever.  Not on anything.  We are dealing with people who are fundamentally dishonest.  We need to treat them as such.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Supreme Court will hear a public sector union case: does forcing government employees to pay Fair Share dues interfere with their First Amendment right?

George Will’s view differs from John Choi’s view.

First, why is John Choi expressing a view at all?  He’s an executive branch government official.  Shouldn’t he keep his mouth shut and let the judicial branch decide without political influence?

Second, this line from Choi’s column:

“If the Friedrichs decision upends existing labor law, it could jeopardize our ability to ensure effective delivery of services.”

In other words, if you don’t let public employees organize into unions that contribute to the Democrats, police and firemen won’t do their jobs.  Nice city you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it.

Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers who were trying to cripple the nation with an illegal strike and replaced them with military controllers until new non-union employees could be trained.  Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan.  He won’t deploy the military to serve as police and firemen.  You can bet he’s told Justice Roberts as much.  The nation is being held hostage by the Democrat-controlled public employee unions.

This is EXACTLY what Conservatives predicted would happen before public employees unions were allowed.

Joe Doakes

I’m inclined to say “let ’em strike”; most of the “services” provided by government would be better done by the private sector, or nobody at all.

But Joe’s right.  The fix is in.  It’ll never happen.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota is no longer a Christian state (if, indeed, it ever was).  We have homosexual marriage.  Sodomy, fornication and adultery are still crimes on the books but never enforced because of court decisions or prosecutor’s policies.  We have legal gambling, eat shellfish, and covet our neighbor’s goods (Hell, the entire DFL party platform is based on coveting they neighbors goods).  We curse, shave our faces, drink strong liquor, eat pork, suffer witches to live, sow fields with hybrid seeds and wear cotton/wool blend sox.  We kill our unborn children, get tattoos and work on the Sabbath.  There’s very little left of the Biblical list of profane acts that aren’t commonplace in Minnesota.

Why not legalize prostitution, tax it, license it, regulate it, use the money to pay for early childhood education or midnight basketball or any of the myriad feel-good programs we’ve adopted to replace morality?

Some are forced into prostitution?  Well, yes, now, because it’s an illegal, underground activity where there are no unions and no inspectors.  Bring it into the open, subject employers to OSHA and Fair Labor Standards, let the workers organize and give the government a financial incentive to crack down on slavers who don’t pay taxes – that problem will go the way of child labor and indentured servitude.

All we have to lose is our souls.

Joe Doakes

The DFL would have the profession unionized and be mining it for graft right out of the gate.  Guaraneed.

Reading the President’s “sweeping” new “gun regulations”, it occurs to me – I was right.

The “war on guns” is one of this electoral season’s candidates for “war on women”; it’s an attempt to get Democrat, especially Black, voters, to come out for an election where there won’t be The First Black President Ever sending tingles up peoples’ legs, and vote for a geriatric white woman.   If Obama, or any president, were serious about violence, he’d send the National Guard into Saint Louis, Baltimore, Oakland, Newark, Camden…

It is, like everything Obama has ever done, a lot of big talk combined with a few little nuggets of unconstitutional abuse of power.

With the help of our friends at the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, rather than read the bill, let’s just sort it out.

You’re Being Redundant, Again, All Over:  Restating things that are currently law, including:

• Background checks
• Calling for enforcement of existing federal gun laws; Obama’s prosecutions are down 30% over Dubya’s.
• Ensuring dealers notify law enforcement if guns are stolen.
• Denying the mentally ill the right to keep and bear arms, with due process, (although the Administration seems to want to remove due process from this)
• Asking communities to keep guns out of the wrong hands.  Paging Rahm Emanuel.  And Eric Holder.
• Ensuring dealers have federal licenses, and have criminal penalties for not complying with the rules
• Watching for large numbers of sales, in conjunction with other factors. This already happens.
• Ensure criminal data is forwarded to the NICS database from the states completely and promptly.

Talk, Talk, Talk:  Stuff the President can ask for, but needs Congressional approval and, most of all, funding:

• Funding for 200 new Keystone Kops.  Er, ATF agents.  Tomayto, tomahto.
• 500 million in mental health funding.
• Mining Social Security information for info about mental health.
• Funding for “Smart guns”.  Good luck with that.

Peace And Joy Through Memos:  Calls for sternly worded memos and announcements, including:

• Demanding the AGO write a letter to the states about coughing up mental health info
• Telling the AGO to write a memo about domestic violence

Even A Blind Squirrel Can Find A Nut:  There are a few things buried in the proposal that aren’t actually stupid:

• Overhauling the background check system to make it open 24/7, and cut down on bottlenecks.  This is especially important if Obama insists on constantly launching waves of panic-buying.
• Investigating illegal online trafficking in guns.  Presumably excluding Eric Holder.  But still.
• Defining responsibility for reporting thefts at the manufacturer/carrier/dealer level (might be good, provided it doesn’t merely serve as the basis for endless litigation)
• Help for the mentally-ill.

Have You Really Thought About This?:  The President mentioons “removing the stigma” of mental illness – in the same metaphorical breath as he demands taking guns from people at slightest sign of it.

Would You Like Hobnails With Those Boots?:  These are proposals that are completely unacceptable, and pretty much stupid to boot, including:

• If the President really is trying to put firearms trusts in the hands of politicized local cops, this will be a big problem.
• Denying guns to people whose finances are being a managed by Social Security, for no other reason.

You First, Barry:  Things like:

• “Smart” guns”.  I’ll use them, Mr. President, when your Secret Service detail does.
  • Not to mention the police, to say nothing of the military.  They won’t.  Either will I.

Busted last week for using public data to try to shame constituents who disagreed with her participation in a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America, Alondra Cano is sorry…

…that all you dissenters are such racisssss rubes:

“It was not my intent to put anyone in danger by any means, and this was not an attempt to punish anyone,” Cano said. “But it was actually an attempt to have a public conversation about the importance of Black Lives Matter and how the public should continue to have that debate publicly without fear of having to hide your thoughts behind some rationale that doesn’t make sense.”

“…behind some rationale that doesn’t make sense”.  Hmmm.

Of course, her “public conversation” talk would seem less bullshit-y if Cano actually had a conversation.  She didn’t. She took the four dissenters contact information from a city server, and published it on Twitter – which is sort of like “having a conversation” with someone after you’ve hung up the phone with them.

And her “conversation” – like Heather Martens and Kim Norton before her – is, of course, a monologue; everyone who criticized her on Twitter got blocked; she responded to no media requests.

Which is an interesting response for someone who claims “”I did it out of a belief in government transparency and public discourse”;  intimidate dissenters, ignore questioners, hide from reporters.