He’s talking about the Nick Shirley video that’s brought the Minnesota fraud scandal to a few million new sets of eyeballs:

Nick Shirley’s video (I’ll link it in the comments) has gotten a ton of traffic and is bringing the story of Minnesota’s fraud pandemic to a lot of people for the first time – but Bill Glahn, Liz Collin, Scott Johnson and even some MSM reporters (Lou Raguse, Jay Kolls) have been reporting on the fraud problem, including this very daycare, for literally four years. Shirley’s video is a great contribution, especially in terms of eyeballs on topic (pushing 100 million as I write this) – but the fact that it’s the first coverage you’ve *noticed* about the fraud doesn’t make it the first coverage. Do a little listening. Some of us have been beating the drum on this story literally for years [1].

Now, let’s move on to Mr. Mannarino and his invincibly ignorant post.

“While you clowns collect fat paychecks to audit and oversee the government”

Strap in for some ninth-grade civics.

Who does Mr. Mannarino (or anyone who read what he wrote and went “that makes sense!”) think does the “Auditing” of state government?

The executive branch.

Who runs the executive branch?

Since 2011, the DFL. Completely. 100%. Minnesota Republicans have had zero influence into any part of the work of *the executive branch* – the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and especially the entire bureaucracy that reports to the Governor – since Tim Pawlenty left office about this time 15 years ago. [2]

The GOP has had intermittent power *in the legislature* since then – both chambers for two years, no chambers for four, and divided government the rest of the time.

And this is basic civics; the legislature doesn’t tell the governor how to run the executive branch, other than via the budget and, indirectly, via hearings. The legislature doesn’t have arrest or prosecutorial power. [3].

The DFL controls the Governor’s office, has a one-vote majority in the Senate, and a tied House of Representatives. Which meant nothing got through the legislature without *some* biparatisan support – in the 2025 session. Which is how the GOP shut down the DFL’s budget plans in 2025, and how the GOP managed to set up the Fraud Committee that is doing *everything a legislative body can* to fight fraud – hold hearings and make information public. In 2023 and 2024, the DFL controlled *everything* – governor, the whole legislature and the Supreme Court.

So when uninformed social media pundits like “Joey Mannarino” start yapping about “primarying every Republican in the legislature”, I keep asking: “what, SPECIFICALLY, did the GOP not do, that it was legally allowed to do, and was procedurally *able* to do being out of power in 23-24 and with only the power to say “No” today, that it SHOULD do?”

And the responses I get are usually things like…

“Get TOUGH”. OK. How?

“AUDIT them!” The Legislature doesn’t have that power, and even if it did, the DFL has the votes to block it.

“Walk out!” The DFL tried that. It cost them their budget. Given the tied House and minority in the Senate, it’d likely cost the GOP more.

“Arrest the governor!” The Legislature doesn’t have arrest power, even if the GOP had the majority.

Still waiting on an answer.

“Primarying the MNGOP in the Legislature” will affect fraud about as much as, I dunno, going after Menards’ rebate program. Anyone who tells you otherwise is engagement farming and/or fundraising off the ignorant.

Don’t be “the ignorant”.

[1] I’ve interviewed many of the principals on the fraud story since literally 2022 at the latest: Glahn, Johnson, Collin and others from Alpha, and some local Somalis as well.

[2] By the way – the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, the two largest parts of the executive branch, are both clogged with fraud, and the Attorney General is at the very least circumstantially tied to the fraud (having been recorded telling a room full of people who donated to his and his son’s re-elections that he’d fight AGAINST the Education Departments attempts to investigate them, a month before the FBI raided them and, eventually put them in prison) – but don’t you DARE suggest Secretary of State Simon and our election system aren’t above it all!

[3] And the governor can’t control how the legislature legislates – which is why Gov. Walz failed at armtwisting the legislature into agreeing to his agenda for a special session on “gun violence”

So, with the revelation last week that hiring managers and the MN Department of Human Services need to explicitly justify hiring white (presumably especially male) candidates for jobs, it’s not unreasonable to wonder – there must be some kind of deeply racist person driving these policies.  

Your reasonable question has been rewarded with an answer:

The tipster raised concerns about Phillips and claimed his social media page is “littered with racist comments about ‘white folk.’”

After reviewing a Facebook page under the name Vonnie Phillips — filled with the type of content described by the tipster and a video tagging a woman whose name matches Phillips’ wife in public records — Alpha News sent an inquiry to Phillips’ state email address.

In his response, Phillips confirmed the Facebook page was his and lashed out at Alpha News reporter Jenna Gloeb in a profanity-laced tirade defending his posts.

“Good luck,” he wrote. “My Facebook page is within the ‘protected concerted’ activity guidelines, therefore, do what you want; nowhere on my Facebook page lists my employer; and the person, the gutless, worthless coward that reported me, the hell with them, please tell them I said that fool.”

Ooof. Someone played that one wrong.

And played it, and played it…

The worst part, to me at least, isn’t Phillips’s statements or actions.  

It’s the culture of bureaucratic entitlement that allows bureaucrats to think that they’re OK acting like this on taxpayer time. 

Reporter from the Star-Tribune questions Minneapolis Police Department assistant chief Katie Blackwell about the dozens of MPD cops who swore out affadavits that she perjured herself about Maximum Restraint Technique (MRT) during the Chauvin trial:

Just kidding.  It was Liz Collin, from Alpha.   A conservative news organization, which does most of the actual “journalism” in this town.

The list of stories the MSM won’t touch until shamed into it by local conservative media, or naitonal/international media, or both, just keeps getting longer. 

In fact, it deserves a list of its own. 

Stay tuned. 

I’m pondering renewing my subscription to Daily Wire.  

On the one hand, they’ve got good news coverage. 

On the other, the “membership” user experience needs work. 

So as part of my analysis process, I present:

Mitch Ranks the Daily Wire Podcasts.

Podcasts are rated in terms of

• Overall quality (subjective, judged by me), and
• Standard deviations from the mean likely with any given episode.  For those who don’t wrangle much with statistics (and I realize much of my audience does), standard deviations are a measure of consistency of statistics.  Example:  a sample of several ratings within 70% would have a very small standard deviation; a “90%” leaking in there would have a very large standard deviation.
  

OK.  Let’s get started (subscribe to the Daily Mitch for the…oh, wait.  I don’t do that. Yet). 

Ben Shapiro:

• Rating: 92%.
• Standard Deviation: 3%

Shapiro is just about always super solid. He rarely deviates from a very solid mean; his show on October 8 2023 was two standard deviations above (99%), and his review of “Barbie” was an extremely rare 20 standard deviations below.

Andrew Klavan

• Rating: NA
• Standard Deviation: NA

I can not work up the interest to listen to Klavan.  Maybe I should.  

Someday.  Promise. 

Probably.

Matt Walsh:

• Rating: 65%.
• Standard Deviation: 20%

The problem with Matt Walsh is, when he’s hot, he’s amazing (hence the high standard deviation). The problem with Matt Walsh is that when he really wants to make a point, and has a point to make, he makes the point in such a way as to make the point he has to make. As in, makes the point – the one he set out to make. And then makes that point – and makes the point again. Seriously – I once counted him re-making the same assertion ten times in 90 seconds.

Michael Knowles:

• Rating: 73%.
• Standard Deviation: 2%

Knowles is always Knowles. And by that, I mean he’s a 34 year old guy who lectures people about “growing old gracefully”.  He’s a very strident Roman Catholic who relates have been an atheist at Yale (all good), but goes on to live out the ecclesiastical version of the old saying “the most annoying New Yorkers are the ones that were born in Albany”;  he couldn’t exude “recent RomCat Convert” any harder if he did the show in Latin and squirted incense through the speakers.  But his insights about politics, especially the intersection of culture an politics, are almost always spot-on. 

He’s docked five points for constantly use of the term “weird sex stuff”, like he’s the world’s oldest awkward eight-grade boy. Seriously, taking a drink when Knowles says “Weird Sex Stuff” could be a more toxic drinking game than “Hundred Beer Club”. He gets three points back for getting “Barbie” very right for the same reasons I did.

Daily Wire Backstage

• Rating:  40%
• Standard Deviation: 15

Like The View, if it were done by frat bros with whom I largely agree. 

Last week, I asked “why all the hate for National Review?”

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, responded:

I had a subscription to National Review for decades.  I let it lapse when I realized O’Sullivan’s Law applied to his own magazine.  The writers I admired – who stated my views better than I could – were no longer welcome there.

Samuel Francis.  John Derbyshire.  Mark Steyn.  Conrad Black. Theodore Dalrymple.  Victor Davis Hanson.  Some of their names still appear on the website but they haven’t had an article published in years.  The views of the magazine have shifted.  Look at the articles in the last few issues, the most conservative guy is . . . James Lileks.  I love his writing but he’s not the successor to William F. that I would have chosen to write insightful political commentary.   I didn’t leave the magazine, the magazine left me but it’s worse than that.

“National Review is now run by a nest of never-Trumpers,” said Francis Sempa in 2021, and his comment is still on-point today. The man who is far and away the most popular candidate for the Republican nomination for President isn’t classy enough for National Review.   He’s a boor.  He doesn’t lose gracefully.  And those tweets!  He’d never get invited to one of National Review’s cruises.

Neither will I.  My views are too extreme, too conservative.  Like their former columnists and the former President, and the 80 million people who voted for Trump last time and the 120 million who will vote for him this time, I’m not good enough enough for National Review.  Which puts me in mind of Grocho Marx:  “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

Joe Doakes, former National Review subscriber, no longer in Como Park

Well, I do subscribe to the National Review. Some of my favorites are gone – Derb, Kevin WIlliamson – and others like Charles CW Cooke and Andrew McCarthy remain.

“Never Trump?” Some are. Some are, like me, Trump skeptics, or from the “what have you done lately?” crowd. Not sure if Trump isn’t classy enough for the NR, but I’ve never gelled with his personality, even back when he was a Democrat.

I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. I did in 2020, although his behavior between the election and Biden’s coronation was almost as stupid as, well, the system he fought. I’ll be in Team Ron ’til the bitter end, but I won’t be voting, directly or indirectly, for a fourth Obama term. Make of that what you will.

But the Trump era is going to end – next summer, next November, or perhaps in January of 2029. And I want the GOP that picks up at the end of all that to be more like the GOP of 1994 than the Matt Gaetz clown car of 2023.

And the National Review, whatever else you say about them, is about the same thing.

I hear what Joe’s saying. I understand it. I even agree to a point. I’m also a conservative before I”m a Republican. There will be a post-Trump era, sooner or later. I’d like whatever replaces Trump to reflect beliefs I can get behind. Love Trump, hate him, or fall somewhere in the middle,

Earlier this week, we noted that an anonymous Hennepin county official had ordered an investigation of journalist Rebecca Brannon, who is just about the only reporter in the Twin Cities to be actively asking questions about the incident a few weeks back with sheriff Hutchinson..

Thanks to the Medina Police Department, they are apparently no longer anonymous:

So why did the Medina police decide to give up the identity of the Hennepin county official who had brought the cops sniffing after Brannon and, oddly, her parents?

Maybe somebody realizes there’s a first amendment lawsuit just waiting to happen here, and ashes need to be covered?

Reminder: I will be talking with Brannon this Saturday at 2 o’clock on the Northern Alliance.

So – will the Twin Cities main stream media, stenographers though they largely are, be shamed into actually covering the story, finally?

Rebecca Brannon may be the best reporter in the Twin Cities.

Not “journalist” – reporter. Someone who goes out and gets the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story. Comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, as Nick Coleman used to say (but never do).

Speaking of saying but never doing reporting? The Twin Cities mainstream media is doing its usual job; serving as a PR firm for DFL officials:

This is “journalism” with all the heft of a Beanie Baby. Wonder if that interview came with a hot towel?

Brannon, on the other hand, is afflicting the politically comfortable, and someone doesn’t seem to like it:

Trying to intimidate reporters?

Why, isn’t that what authoritarian states do? What’s the term – we heard it all the time during the Trump administration, from reporters big and small…

“Chilling Effect on reporting and transparency?” (Whatever did happen to that term, anyway)?

Aren’t there groups of “journalists” dedicated to keeping the press free? Like the “Society of Professional Journalists of Minnesota?”

Oof. Not a whole lot.

Read Brannon’s whole thread, by the way.

The world has become too absurd to be satirized
– G.K. Chesterton

As God is my witness, I saw this headline for a few days on social media, and assumed it was The Babylon Bee. And then I wondered. And then I confirmed it.

But it took a while.

The world has become too absurd to be satirized
– G.K. Chesterton

When live imitates satire – why write satire?

Pinky swear – when I started writing the various “Berg’s Laws“, something like 17 years ago, they started out as wry quips. Sarcastic bits of bemused satire.

I didn’t expect every last one of them to turn out to be iron-clad descriptions of modern political and human behavior.

It’s made things a little…difficult? It’s no doubt thrown a monkey wrench at satirists like the Babylon Bee, who no doubt didn’t set out on their mission intended to become America’s best actual news source.

The Bee’s edtior, Seth Dillon, comments on not only how often, but how quickly, the arc of the news turned toward exactly what the Bee started by mocking:

As to “Berg’s Law” – the more I think about it, the more I think I’m onto something.

Almost 35 years ago, reacting to the Democrat bias in the media, Rush Limbaugh brought fearless, joyful paleoconservatism [1]. Spends thirty years dominating the ratings.

Decades ago, reacting to “liberal” slant from the Big Three and CNN, Rupert Murdoch creates Fox News [2]. It dominates cable ratings for decades.

2021: reacting to a landscape of deadly dull, smugly “progressive” late night hosts that all have different names but may as well be reading off the same deadly dull script [3], Fox Launches Gutfeld.

What’ll be happening in decades? Time will tell, but the roll-out has been pretty spectacular. I’ve added emphasis:

Gutfeld!” averaged 1.6 million viewers for the week ending May 14, beating Kimmel on ABC and Fallon on NBC, though it trailed CBS’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Nielsen data shows.

May 13 was the Fox show’s best night so far, with 1.8 million viewers, placing second only to Colbert’s show, which drew 1.9 million viewers. Gutfeld’s show beat Colbert slightly in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic.

The free market will provide.

Which is why the Harris Administration is trying to hard to kill it.

[1] “But but but but he was so hateful!” He was no such thing. You’re projecting.

[2] “But but but but but but they’re teh biased!”. In terms of news coverage? Less so than CNN. In terms of opinion programming? Who cares (other than “you, because you’re threatened by dissent and have no productive, adult way to deal with it”, I mean).

[3] The fact that Stephen Colbert has a late night show at all shows that the late-night comedy gene pool is very, very shallow. The fact that Samantha Bee and Jimmy Kimmel have late-night shows tells us that gene poll is inflatable and gets filled with a hose.

Seems like forever ago that Michael Mann published his hockey-stick
graph, Mary Steyn made fun of it in a column for National Review, and
Mann sued for defamation.  The case has lingered for eight years in the
courts, only now entering the ‘discovery’ phase after National Review
was dismissed as a defendant.

Mark Steyn was deposed by Michael Mann’s lawyer.  Steyn uploaded the
transcript here: https://www.steynonline.com/documents/11106.pdf

I suppose reading deposition transcripts isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,
but I found it entertaining.  Your mileage may vary.

Joe Doakes

I can’t imagine those lawyers knew what hit them.

I got caught up in one of KSTP-AM’s constant rounds of staff reductions on April 4, 1987. I was 24, and very much in love with the idea of finding a career in a medium I’d discovered less than two years before, talk radio. Especially the conservative wing of it – as a newly-minted Reagan voter as of age 21, I had that newbie zeal that tries so, so very hard to make up for lack of experience and information. Speaking of inexperience and naivete, I was pretty new to and green in the world of big-market radio – especially to the process of trying to find a job in the field, without moving to Saint Cloud to play country western radio.

I thought I had a couple of leads, though; a station in Raleigh was interested in me even as I left the station. Others in Orlando, Waukegan, Fall River Massachusetts, Hammond Indiana, Cleveland and Santa Rosa California would come up in the next few months.

But one by miserable, painful one they all dried up, one after the other. A few changed formats. A few changed management.

But most of them, given a choice between paying a 24 year old kid $20-30K a year to work afternoons or evenings, or getting national-level talent for free via satellite, went with the new, cheap, national offering…

…by a fellow named Rush Limbaugh.

Gradually yet blazingly quickly, Limbaugh’s mid-day show ate up hundreds of jobs that might have gone to a kid like me – and prompted hundreds more struggling AM stations to flip formats, ditching country-western or polka or oldies for the new, newly deregulated field of conservative political talk.

And it brought an audience. And sponsors. And, almost against many stations’ wills, ratings and money.

I remember management at a couple of stations fairly visibly holding their noses and solemnly declaring “Limbaugh doesn’t reprsent this station’s entire point of view” out one side of their mouths, while eagerly cashing the bonus checks that his ratings, and those of his format-mates, brought them.

For twenty years, until the 2007 recession cut the guts out of the radio ad market, it was like a license to print money. I remember meeting an old friend from our time at KDWB who’d landed at KSTP. He was figuring out what he was going to spend a five-digit bonus check, over double what I’d ever earned in a year at that station even after adjusting for inflation, on. Even after the meltdown in rates, Limbaugh’s dominance and prosperity, and that of conservative talk, endured – or at least better than any other segment of entertainment radio other than sports and Spanish.

Rush Limbaugh didn’t dominate an industry. He created it – and saved the AM Radio band while he was at it. Matt Continetti points out that he was the right guy in the right place at the right technological, ideological and regulatory time:

It’s one thing to excel in your field. It’s another to create the field in which you excel. Conservative talk radio was local and niche before Limbaugh. He was the first to capitalize on regulatory and technological changes that allowed for national scale. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 freed affiliates to air controversial political opinions without inviting government scrutiny. As music programming migrated to the FM spectrum, AM bandwidth welcomed talk. Listener participation was also critical. “It was not until 1982,” writes Nicole Hemmer in Messengers of the Right, “that AT&T introduced the modern direct-dial toll-free calling system that national call-in shows use.”

Limbaugh made the most of these opportunities. And he contributed stylistic innovations of his own. He treated politics not only as a competition of ideas but also as a contest between liberal elites and the American public. He also added the irreverent and sometimes scandalous humor and cultural commentary of the great DJs. He introduced catchphrases still in circulation: “dittohead,” “Drive-By media,” “feminazi,” “talent on loan from God.”
The template he created has been so successful that the list of his imitators on both the left and right is endless. Even Al Franken wanted in on the act. Dostoyevsky is attributed with the saying that the great Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” Political talk show hosts came out of Limbaugh’s microphone.

And for those who weren’t around back then, he was, and remains, a connection to an era where real, Buckley-style conservatism changed the world – with the hope it could change it again:

[Limbaugh] took from Reagan the sense that America’s future is bright, that America isn’t broken, just its liberal political, media, and cultural elites. “He rejected Washington elitism and connected directly with the American people who adored him,” Limbaugh said after Reagan’s death. “He didn’t need the press. He didn’t need the press to spin what he was or what he said. He had the ability to connect individually with each American who saw him.” The two men never met.

Limbaugh assumed Reagan’s position as leader of the conservative movement. In a letter sent to Limbaugh after the 1992 election, Reagan wrote, “Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you have become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country. I know the liberals call you the most dangerous man in America, but don’t worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work. America needs to hear ‘the way things ought to be.’”

Limbaugh gave a voice to a half of the country that’d always been expect to shut up and listen.

And for me? He supplied my life a major, inconvenient, and ultimately life-changing detour – and built an industry for me to come home to when the time was right.

All the best, Rush. I’m rooting for you.

…the Babylon Bee is reinforcing itself as America’s news source of record.

Because this.

Babyon Bee may be America’s most credible news source.

…Is Babylon Bee satire, or is it the best straight news source in America?

It comes in all shapes and sizes.

This news should open things up for you-know-who. 

Heh.

Indeed.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I had a day off last week and caught a bit of Rush Limbaugh’s interview with Vice President Pence.

Rush hammered the Vice President from the word go and, I thought, justly so. His tone was respectful but his questioning was direct and gave no ground. It was completely clear Rush thought Republicans got rolled.

Pence did his best to spin the bill as a victory. He said: “Look, the President has made it clear, his number one priority is national defense and national security.”

Yeah? I don’t recall that being the slogan from the campaign. I don’t recall enthusiastic crowd screaming for more military spending. I remember it more like this:

“What are we gonna do?”

“Build the Wall.”

“Who’s gonna pay for it?”

“Mexico!!”

I think Trump ought to tell Congress he’s going to veto the bill and shut down the government unless he gets money to build the wall. It can be any amount, even as little as $1, just so long as he gets to say that he’s keeping his promise. Hell, his salary is $400,000 and he’s agreed to forego it to be a dollar-a-year man; use some of that money to fund the wall. We don’t care where the money comes from, only where it goes to, and that’s got to be funding to build the wall or there’s no deal.

If Congress won’t put $1 into the bill to show its symbolic commitment to enforcing the national borders, then the country isn’t worth saving and we might as well shut the whole thing down now and be done with it.

Joe Doakes

It’s getting harder to disagree.

Other than the Trump campaign, and the people (should a conservative spring take hold)?

Us.  The alternative media.

We pounded the mainstream media in this election like a piece of WalMart veal.

After more than a decade of storming online to expose the national media as the serial-lying, double dealing, leftwing anarchists and activists they truly are, we have finally beaten them.

At long last our efforts to use truth to expose the media for what they truly are has resulted in these insulated, lying, cultural supremacists finding themselves so de-legitimized, so marginalized, so distrusted, disliked, and resented, that they could not do it … Summoning all of their mighty and evil powers, firing everything they had, leaving nothing on the field … they could not do it.

And the beauty of it is that the media’s targets were so precise. Everything they had was geared towards a fear-mongering hate campaign specifically designed to convince women, blacks, and Hispanics not to vote for Trump.

Moreover, the campaign was so dishonest that for 18 months we were told over and over again that the Precious Data proved poetic justice was on the way … that Trump would lose these groups by spectacular numbers.

All of those lies, all of that propaganda, and … they failed.

The “elite” media’s efforts in this past election indicates that they read the work of Dr. Albert Mehrabian – dealing with the role of media and “polling” to create a “bandwagon effect”, discouraging ones’ opponents from coming to the polls – just like I did.

The “photomeme” – the bits of graphic overlaid with a simple, usually simplistic, message – may be, along with Twitter,  the greatest step toward Orwell’s “duckspeak” that Western communications have ever taken.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not occasionally brilliant:

But it’s rare. Oh, so rare.

Rand Paul supporters – and maybe some Trump supporters – need to read and learn from this piece.

Apparently I’m a one-person trigger warning!

A longtime friend of this blog emailed:

Mitch,

I thought you might find this interesting. For the mornings this week, I’m camped out on the second floor of the MacPhail Center for Music, while my kiddo attends a harp class. (I’m hoping she takes an interest in something much less expensive, such as ukulele, for which she has a class in July.)

After a while, kids’ music all sounds the same.

I digress:

Sometimes I’ve used my cell phone service for an Internet connection, sometimes I use the MacPhail Wi-fi. I just tried to go to SITD, and got this message instead: Redirecting you to Barracuda Web Filter.

I was able to get to National Review and Powerline, so it’s not an anti-conservative thing. I didn’t see any “bans guns on these premises” sign when I have entered, but perhaps “shot” is just too … violent, ya know?

[Name Redacted]

I suspect it’s mostly my music reviews.

…for everyone in the mainstream media, alternative media, and talk radio – even conservative talk radio:

Unless you work at a Red Wing outlet store and are changing your shelving, could you never, Ever, EVER use the term “Boots on the Ground” again?  It’s gone so far beyond cliché, light leaving “cliché” right now won’t reach us until our great-grandchildren are getting AARP cards.

“Troops in the field” actually works.

Thank you all in advance for seeing to this.

That is all.

Katie Kieffer is back in town, and she’ll be signing copies of her first book, Let Me Be Clear, tomorrow night at O’Gara’s in Saint Paul.

Hey, it worked for Vince Flynn.

I may just stop by.