Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

We’re Number 1!

Viewed from the bottom up, that is.   Or you might say, “dead last.”  Potato, potahto.

It’s talking about fiscal policy and, well…

A newly released analysis of fiscal policy ranked all 50 states with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ state coming in first and Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in last.

The libertarian Cato Institute released the report, which graded states by spending, revenue and taxes. The top ten states in the rankings starting at the top are Iowa, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Dakota, Montana, Hawaii, Georgia, Idaho, and Vermont…

In 2019, Walz’s budget would have added ‘$2 billion more in new spending and taxes would increase by $1.3 billion to pay for it, with the rest of the money coming from an existing surplus.’ But he compromised with the legislature, and the final tax increase was about $330 million annually. Walz also pushed for higher gas taxes and higher vehicle fees to raise about $1 billion annually for transportation, but those increases were rejected.

Walz pushed for more tax hikes in 2021. He proposed adding a new individual income tax rate of 10.85 percent above the current top rate of 9.85 percent, a surtax on capital gains and dividends, and a hike to the corporate tax rate from 9.8 percent to 11.25 percent. The proposals—which would have raised about $1.6 billion annually—were rejected by the legislature…

Walz hit the middle class with HF 2887, which raised taxes and fees on vehicles and transportation. The increases included indexing the gas tax for inflation, increasing vehicle registration taxes, raising fees on deliveries, and raising sales taxes in the Twin Cities area.

 

 

No choking in the finals in this contest…

During the last couple of legislative sessions, the DFL wrote a whole bunch of moral checks.

Since we’ve got an election coming up, how about we see how many of them bounced?

Abortion

Unrestricted abortion is one promise the DFL trifected promised and delivered on. 

Perhaps very very overdelivered.

The DFL brought a certain brusque brutality to the issue:

And delivered on it with teutonic precision, leaving no potential abortee behind:

And have brought a certain totalitarian panache to trying to erase all dissent

Green Energy

Was your powrer cheaper?

Why, no. It is not.


Social Security Taxes

Remember when the DFL ran on eliminating taxes on Social Security?

They are certainly hoping you don’t:

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – For the second time this month, Minnesota Senate Democrats voted against eliminating the taxation of Social Security benefits – despite a massive projected budget surplus of $17.6 billion. Five of those Democrats have also already broken promises to end the taxation of social security benefits and did so again today; Sens. Hauschild, Gustafson, Kupec, Putnam and Seeberger all voted to maintain the tax again after doing so earlier this month. The Republican Party of Minnesota issued the statement below in response:

“This latest vote shows that Democrats in St. Paul are only interested in one thing – partisan politics. Instead of voting to provide much-needed tax relief to seniors by ending the tax on Social Security benefits, the Democrats voted to kill this bill for the second time this month. Meanwhile, Democrats in the legislature along with Gov. Tim Walz continue to push tax increases and one-time political gimmicks. With a budget surplus of more than $17 billion, Minnesota taxpayers deserve more than petty partisan games. Democrats need to stop the petty politics and work with Republicans to pass real, permanent tax relief for Minnesota families and businesses.” – Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman David Hann

“Fully Funding Education”

The term was intentionally misleading – when you finally got a DFLer to admit what this little word salad starter meant, it boiled down to rolling back a Pawlenty-era accounting shift. 

Forget for a moment the flurry of teacher strikes and headlines about districts running out of money – as the DFL wants you to forget them – because it was never intended as anything but a campaign slogan to gull the gullible.

The results are self-explanatory…:

…provided you can read and do math which, fortunately for the MNDFL, more and more Minesotans can’t.

“Reducing Poverty 30%”

That was a promise they made before the 2023 session – and abruptly stopped once they started legislating.

Because while the stats aren’t in for this last few years yet…:

…the leading indicators just aren’t that good.

Just want to keep that memory hole exhumed for election time.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

President Biden blamed Hurricane Helene on climate change and said anybody who disagreed must be brain dead.

Formerly, hurricane were “acts of God” which Were Not covered under ordinary insurance, special  coverage was required, whereas damage resulting from actions of other people Were covered.

So .  .  .  does this mean all our insurance premiums are going up, because hurricanes are now torts? 

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

Uh…lawyers?

Governor Klink, Melissa Hortman and the Urban DFL clacque squandered a $19 billion surplus paying off the DFL’s special interests, and all we got was a broken dam.

Unexpectedly? No. Not a bit. The century-old Rapidan Dam on the Blue Earth River – a tributary to the Minnesota, and eventually the Mississippi – has been a problem for a long time.

And everyone who gave a, er, damn knew it:

In 2021, a study was conducted that identified two feasible solutions for the dam’s state of disrepair: repair or remove the dam. Both options have significant costs, and each has its opportunities, trade-offs, and timeframes. The purpose of the Future of Rapidan Dam project is to identify the community’s needs and concerns and use their input on the options to help the County make the best decision for all impacted by the Dam’s future.

You can’t buy any urban non-profit allegiances with a dam. You sure can’t carry a dam in a suitcase to Kenya.

It’s bad.

If there’s a better way of depicting the results of the DFL’s priorities, I’m open to suggestions.

Minnesota’s gross domestic product growth – which has long run far ahead of national averages – isn’t anymore:

I’ve been observing this for a while now – when I decided to move to Minnesota, the state was simultaneously a mecca of opportunity in the Midwest, a place that Fodor Travel Guides called “The Athens of the 20th Century” in a fit of not-excessive hyperbole – that was nonetheless modestly affordable for a 22 year old guy with a BA in English, as opposed to an MBA or a software engineering degree.

And that is just not true anymore.

And it might seem rote and predictable to follow that with “and it’s the DFL’s fault”.

But, honestly, who else has been driving the ship for the past 16 years?

As we watch the back an forth between dismal demographic news and media pollyannaism in Minneapolis, it’s worth looking at other cities that are having similar post-pandemic problems.

Which is most of Blue Urban America, to be honest – there aren’t many cities outside Florida, Texas, the Carolinas and Tennessee doing well these days – but Boston is a particularly interesting case.

Boston has one advantage – a media where someone, in this case Jon Keller of Boston Magazine – will actually do serious, sober, balanced reporting on the issue, a job that normally falls to Alphanews and the Center of the American Experiment here in the Twin Cities.

Boston had the advantage of not having had a bunch of riots at the height of the pandemic. It has the overcompensating disadvantage of being ruled by a mayor who may be worse than Minneapolis’s mayor and council (so far) put together:

Disaster movies involving skyscrapers are part of America’s cultural canon—and while the situation here isn’t quite as dire as the terrorist attack on the swanky Nakatomi Plaza in the classic Christmas movie Die Hard, neither does there seem to be much hope of a Bruce Willis–style miracle rescue by our elected leaders. After scoffing at the warnings, Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration stunned property owners this spring by proposing the one idea few outside of City Hall seem to think has even a chance of fixing the problem: a tax hike on the beleaguered commercial holdings themselves (which would likely get passed on to tenants, forcing them to downsize their office footprint or flee). It’s a move arguably more intended to curry favor with voters in the upcoming election than keep Boston safe from the doom loop. Coming on top of a string of initiatives deeply unpopular with real estate owners, including an attempt to restore rent control and adopting a surtax on property sales worth more than $2 million, the tensions between Wu and local developers have never been higher.

At the same time, other immediate options for averting catastrophe seem either politically unpalatable or unlikely. Extracting more money from relatively undertaxed residential properties? A politically toxic non-starter in an election year for the mayor, who has said, “I cannot have that happen.” Seeking relief from the state? Given the traditional strain between urban and suburban priorities, good luck with that. And while officials are exploring ideas to deal with the ever-increasing office-building vacancy rate, such as converting empty offices into desperately needed housing, the economic viability of that solution is somewhere between questionable and laughable.

The parallels are seductive – and perhaps a little misleading. And the whole article is worth a read.

But if you read about Mayor Wu’s approach to the collapse of downtown Boston’s commercial real estate market and the hole it leaves in the city’s budget and think “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, you and I think just a little alike.

Oh, yeah – Chicago, too.

If the Democrat party’s messaging machine were targeted at people who did critical thinking, I’d have a little sympathy for them.

They’d have to navigate a pretty tight logical hairpin turn.

To wit: they’d have to supervise the gaslighting of the people to believe the “experts” and not their lying eyes about the economy:

…and that workers have more buying power than they did five years ago…

…while simultaneously making them believe that public employee unions are doing less well:

As schools across the country struggle to find teachers to hire, more governors are pushing for pay increases, bonuses and other perks for the beleaguered profession.

Meanwhile, teacher salaries have fallen further and further behind those of their college-educated peers in other fields.

Remember – I said “if they had to convince people who could think critically”.

They don’t.

Steady as she goes.

Notice how many Democrats and media people (ptr) are gaslighting working Americans about the economy lately?

The Dow Jones and the level of GDP is nice and all, but inflation is rising faster than buying power, and is going to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better.

Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:

Seems that Cracker Barrel is in financial trouble after inviting restaurant patrons to celebrate Gay Pride.  Go to https://ace.mu.nu/ and scroll down to “The Morning Rant: Cracker Barrel Went Woke and Now It’s Going Broke” for a nice recap. 

Sometimes I wonder if every big company is working from the same “How to Destroy Your Business” cheat sheet, but that cynically paints with too broad a brush.  It’s not “every big company” but “every company that ought to know its customers better.”  This isn’t a woke failing, it’s a management failing.  Figure out what the customers want, figure out how much they’ll pay for it, figure out how to sell them what they want at the price they’re willing to pay, then get rich doing it.  It’s been the business model of civilization for thousands of years.  How hard is it to understand?

I could see Target deciding to go woke.  They’ve been on the cutting edge of liberal silliness forever.  They were leaders in the trans bathroom issue.  They refuse to sell spark plugs because gas lawn mowers kill Mother Nature.  For them to put penis shorts in girls’ clothes should have made perfect sense, given the liberal woke crowd they’re marking to.  It only blew up because they failed to understand that Woodbury Soccer Moms are all in for gay rights and saving the planet when the issue is theoretical but some of them become Mama Bear protecting her little girl cubs when the issue is personal.  “Woke” is fine until their own daughter is at risk of being raped by the trannie in the girls’ bathroom at school, or shot by the vibrant kid who be jus bout to turn his life t’roun, or beat up by the diversity princess because the daughter didn’t respeck her.  Then, old fashioned law-and-order values are in hot demand.  Not enough to sustain a serious boycott to cause serious damage to the brand, but enough to be noticed.  Okay, that’s Target.

 Cracker Barrel, on the other hand, should know better.  Their customers are Southern church-goers and senior citizens.  It’s the Denny’s crowd, one economic step up from the Waffle House rabble.  They’re willing to tolerate queers and trannies but they’re not the least bit interested in celebrating them.  If you’re going queer, we’re going elsewhere, same as the Bud Light drinkers.

 Personally, I’m waiting for Remington to announce its new Rainbow Pride Rifle to completely finish off the brand forever.  Can’t be long now, can it? 

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

Personally, the problem is that so many of these brands we’re avoiding are ones I haven’t patronized in forever.

Cracker Barrel? In the ’90s – when my budget made a trip to CB a treat for special occasions – it was an event. A destination. The biscuits alone were something I looked forward to.

The last time I ate at a CB – maybe 2017? – it was like eating at a Perkins that’d given up. Them going “woke” was a market anticlimax for me.

The good news: Minnesota’s new paid family leave law will cost 25% more than originally budgeted:

Minnesota’s new paid family and medical leave program will launch in 2026 with a 25% higher payroll tax than originally anticipated when the bill was passed last session, an assistant commissioner with the Department of Employment and Economic Development told lawmakers on Monday. 

Because DEED has been given legislative authority to raise the tax, the agency can do so without requiring a new law. 

“Wait, Mitch – I thought you said that was the good news?”

I did.

The bad news? The program doesn’t start until 2026. Like the Southwest LIght Rail and every other DFL spending boondoggle, this program is going to get more expensive before anyone ends up using it.

Once the colonoscopy removes all that smoke the DFL and media have been blowing into your distal colon, the news about Minnesota’s business climate just ain’t good:

Published last week, Chief Executive’s list of 2024 Best & Worst States for Business ranked Minnesota near the bottom at No. 41. The result isn’t much different from last year when Minnesota ranked at No. 40. Over 500 CEOs and business owners were surveyed across the U.S.

Turns out you can only pay so many taxes for so few badly-allocated “services” before you start looking into that “Galt” guy.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

From Powerline:

Something strange has been happening with jobless claims numbers lately

Calling the state of the U.S. jobs market these days stable seems like an understatement considering the latest data coming out of the Labor Department.

That’s because most of the past several weeks have shown that first-time claims for unemployment benefits haven’t fluctuated at all — as in zero.

For five of the past six weeks, the level of initial jobless filings totaled exactly 212,000. Given a labor force that is 168 million strong, achieving such stasis seems at least unusual if not uncanny, yet that is what the figures released each Thursday morning since mid-March have shown.

The consistency has raised a few eyebrows on Wall Street. The only week that varied was March 30, with 222,000.

“How is this statistically possible? Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number,” market veteran Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, posted Thursday on X

I chalk it up to Berg’s 24th Law: Democrats know their audience just doesn’t think all that critically, so there’s no need to actually present facts.

So – why did the ever-so-decisive Minneapolis City Council delay its “minimum wage” hike against Uber and Lyft to July?

To help the soon-to-be-unemployed drivers?

To give the companies a reasonable chance to adjust?

HAH. Naïve peasant!

It’s to save the DFL from itself!

The Minneapolis City Council, in voting unanimously on Thursday to delay enactment of minimum pay rates for Uber and Lyft drivers for two months, offered a lifeline for Democratic legislators embroiled in their own divisions over the issue.

Legislative leaders, who are trying to craft their own compromise that would increase driver earnings but keep Uber and Lyft in the Twin Cities metro, are increasingly concerned that the polarizing ride hailing issue could upend the remainder of the legislative session, which hangs on a one-vote majority in the Senate.

The council has come under immense pressure to reconsider their minimum rates since the wide-ranging effects of Uber and Lyft pulling out have become more clear: some 10,000 drivers likely losing income without unemployment benefits and tens of thousands of convention-goers, commuters, bar hoppers and people with disabilities needing to find different transportation.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, and House Majority Leader Jamie Long, DFL-Minneapolis, met recently with a half dozen members of the City Council to request the delay and remind them of the stakes of a deal, as well as the city’s significant legislative agenda at the Capitol, according to several people present or briefed on the conversation.

So they found an issue where out-radicaling each other isn’t bringing them votes.

Weird. It can be done.

BTW, if I were the CEOs of Lyft or Uber, I’d tell the CIty Council to go pound sand unless they all came to my headquarters on their knees to kiss my butt on live television.

As we noted yesterday, the sports bar “A Bar Of Their Own” – which opened on March 1 to paeons of praise and wall-to-wall coverage from local media – has a unique-ish marketing hook; the TVs are all tuned to womens sports.

That’s all well and good. I support anyone and everyone bringing a new product or service, or bar for that matter, to the market and letting the market decide.

But, again as noted yesterday – if I were the proprietor of another sportsbar, I might be wondering what marketing hook I could come up with to get pretty much every single news outlet in town to come back, not once but several times, to provide breathless, adulatory coverage to my establishment?

“A Bar Of Their Own” (henceforth ABoTO) got the sort of gauzy, soft-focus, “lifestyle” coverage – sometimes not just bordering on cheerleading, but sailing right past it it into borderline unseemliness – that money can’t buy .

But – what if money did have to buy it?

How much free advertising (called “Earned Media”) did ABoTO get over this past few months?

Method To (March) Madness: Advertising costs money. And while rates and revenues have dropped sharply on traditional broadcast and print media over the past decade and change, it’s still not cheap.

So here’s what I did:

1. I took the six biggest media outlets in the Twin Cities, other than Shot in the Dark and the Northern Alliance; WCCO (Channel 4), KSTP (Channel 5), KMSP (Channel 9), KARE (Channel 11), MPR and the Strib.
2. I figured out how many times each of the outlets ran stories on, or prominently referencing, ABoTO. This is the “Story Count” for each outlet.
3. I multiplied the number of stories by the number of “newscasts” on which the piece of hard hitting journalism appeared (the “Newscast/Publication Count” in the table below. (In the case of the Strib, this refers to many days it appeared in the paper).
4. I multiplied the number of appearances by an adjusted, estimated spot ad rate. See “Assumptions”, below. That gave us a “Total Advertising Equivalent”.

Now, the goal is to provide a ball-park figure, not an academic or legal disquisition. But just so we’re clear, I made a few assumptions.

Assumptions: Here’s what I included and excluded, and why.

• I included unique stories that appeared on the station website. Some outlets run the story online multiple times on the same date with different headlines. It’s a marketing thing.
• I counted the number of newscasts that would have likely run the story. (With the Strib, I figured a story would run in one day’s edition).
• I assumed each outlet would run the story for one day’s worth of newscasts. I know that the story ran for longer than one day on some TV stations, but I had no way to measure that.
• I left out longer-form pieces, like appearances on “magazine” or “features” type shows (“Twin Cities Live”, “The Jason Show”, “Good Day” and the like).
• The rates, I fudged – downward. A one minute spot on a major metro TV station newscast runs (according to local broadcast sources) between $1,000 and $1,500. There is of course a quantity discount (and the amount and frequency of some outlets coverage would seem, if only sarcastically, to appy), and ratings do count; I gave a 10% bump to Channel 4.
• The rate and number of appearances on MPR are a semi-educated guess.
• The rate at the Strib is evel less educated, and is based on the price of a prominent display ad.

With all that understood, here are the numbers:

The estimate is inexact – there might be other ways of estimating the numbers, but I can’t think of many objectively better – and I’d be amazed if any of them showed less benefit to ABoTO.

This is the spot where a lesser writer might throw in “doing this is more fun than watching most women’s sports” – but as I noted yesterday, I’m distantly related to women’s nordic skiing royalty, and let’s be honest, who doesn’t love beach volleyball, so I’m going to let that trope go.

Anyway – I guess if you’re thinking about opening a business, the path to free advertising is clear.

In California, fast-food restaurants must now pay $20/hour. Newsom has celebrated this as a major achievement.

But Newsom’s restaurant group can, and does, hire people for much, much less.

PlumpJack Cafe in Olympic Valley – which is among a group of eateries owned by a company Newsom founded in 1992 – is hiring a part-time busser who “will aim to assist the food server … to ensure guest satisfaction during all aspects of the dining experience,” according to a ZipRecruiter posting.

The job listing states the salary for the busser is $16 an hour plus tips.

But a food service worker would make more working at a McDonald’s than at the high-end restaurant and bar thanks to the new $20 fast food minimum wage that went into effect Monday.

Fast food restaurants under Newsom’s law includes any place without table-side service that has more than 60 locations around the country – which seems pretty oddly specific, targeting McDonalds and skipping Chilis…

…or the PlumpJack group, where you can get a steak for $90 with tax and tip.

Some animals are more equal than others…

Perhaps you’ve heard – there’s a sports bar in Minneapolis that focuses on women’s sports.

And heard.

And heard.

And heard some more.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I wish “A Bar Of Their Own” all the best. I wish pretty much any private-sector business kills it in the market; I’m with pretty much any entrepreneur – even if I’m not necessarily a patron [1]

But if I owned a “regular” sports bar who might be looking at all that free coverage, I might be looking to make all “journalists” pay up their bar tabs.

A Bar Of Their Own has gotten a lot of free advertising from Twin Cities media.

How much?

Come back tomorrow.

[1] Heck, come Winter Olympics time I might even patronize a “female sports” focused bar, since I’ve got distant family among the elite ranks of Women’s XC Skiing.

A friend of the blog emails:

I was always afraid the activists had too much control, [the FOB’s spouse] was confident that the state wouldn’t do something this stupid. But, it is getting talked about in mainstream media now. It’s probably really going to happen, isn’t it? 

The FOB is talking about the “Plan” being pushed by “advocates” to replace I94 between the downtowns with a “boulevard”.

Normally at this point, of course, I’d say it’s just another racket to transfer money from the taxpayers to the non-profit and consultant “advocate” class. They can write puff-piece reports and squalls of PR material on the indirect public dime, build entire careers out of yapping about vaporware projects.

But the people who love to play with the levers and buttons and knobs of government have gotten their hands on this, so I’d say the odds are pretty decent that a lot more money will be spent on this.

The obvious question is, what happens when an untstoppable money-squandering force (the drive to gut 94) meets the immovable money-squandering object (the drive to put a deck over the freeway to rebuild Rondo)?

They can’t both win…

A significant chunk of the far-left clacque that runs politics in the metro are Marxists, either overtly or under the hood.

And an amazing number of them subscribe to the “Labor Theory of Value” – the idea that labor, as opposed to the other three factors (Capitol, Management and Land) is the dispositive factor of production.

I have been challenging adherents for years – test the theory by taking a group of fast food workers, plopping them on a vacant lot, and seeing if a Hardee’s springs up around them.

It’s an absurd test – exactly the one the theory deserves.

I used to say nobody had taken the challenge.

But it appears that, at least indirectly, someone just might.

One of the big quasi-empirical drivers to “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in the business world was a McKinsey consulting study from almost ten years ago, whose results claimed that diversity was strength, not just for virtue-signaling purposes, but in bottom line terms.

If it seemed like a stretch – it was. A new study can’t reproduce McKinsey’s results:

However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.

Full study here.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that corporate America is going to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube; that would be a free market response, and Human Resources is a little bit of government, with all the attendant hidebound inflexibility and mulishness, embedded into the market.

“A Bar Of Their Own” has apparently had a good first month, according to this cheerleading press release.

Since its inception, enthusiasm has only grown for the tavern with the radical concept of playing only women’s sports on its multiple TVs. The idea was overwhelmingly embraced, from a successful crowdfunding campaign to an opening day met with cheers and a line of fans stretched around the block.

We spoke with owner Jillian Hiscock, who said the lines have calmed a bit since the March 1 opening, but haven’t dissipated. She shared a few of the stats from the history-making bar’s first 14 days.

The bar’s PR person is doing bang-up work, leading the cheering for their client, and…

…uh…

…hang on just a dog-gone minute. It’s not a PR flak’s press release. It’s a “news” story from the Star Tribune. Y’know – journalists who tell you the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story, remaining detached from…

…(sknzxxx)…

…detached and objective and…

…oh, I can’t keep a straight face.

• “The mega-hit sports bar opened with a big splash,”
• “the absolute dominator of a Minneapolis sports bar that highlights women’s sports”
• “Since its inception, enthusiasm has only grown”
• “radical concept of playing only women’s sports”
• “The idea was overwhelmingly embraced”,
• “from a successful crowdfunding campaign to an opening day met with cheers and a line of fans stretched around the block”

The “journalist”, Joy Summers, is credited as “a St. Paul-based food reporter who has been covering Twin Cities restaurants since 2010”.

To be fair, Esme Murphy is still more embarassingly effusive talking about Amy Klobuchar than this.

Seriously, though – new businesses are good. More power to A Bar Of Their Own.

But they’ve had effusive – let’s say “fawning”, even “embarassingly brown-nosing” – media coverage ever since the idea first went public.

That’s gotta be worth a lot of free advertising.

Which is what an awful lot of Twin Cities “journalism” is, these days.

What’s the term all the urbanist fanboys are using these days?

Oh, yeah – “vibrant”.

Here’s another example of blue city “vibrancy”, this time from San Francisco:

Any bets as to whether the Minneapolis City Council will consider “desolation” a bug, or a counter-capitalist feature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Bar Of Their Own” – a bar devoted to women’s sports – opens tomorrow in Minneapolis.

I wish them, and just about any new business trying to make a go of it, all the best.

There are some who’ve mocked the concept. I don’t – anyone who tries to contribute more growth and wealth to our society is doing the right thing, even if they seem to couch the idea in terms of “community” and “inclusion”.

Profiting from a consensual transaction is as inclusive as it gets.

Now, I have a few questions. For example…:

The bar was made possible in part by a crowdfunding campaign that managed to exceed its fundraising goal of $200,000 by more than $5,000. 

The notion of starting a business via crowdfunding is kind of a new one. On the one hand, if you can get people to pony up for a concept, maybe they’ll patronize the business.

On the other, investing based on emotion isn’t a smart play, and crowdfunding isn’t even investing, per se.

At any rate, I do wish them success. While I imagine most of the donors would get hives seeing it this way, that’s what makes free-market capitalism work.

No, my question is this: “Bring Me The News” added:

A Bar of Their Own is part of a rising trend kicked off last year when The Sports Bra — the very first women’s sports bar in the U.S. — opened to huge fanfare in Portland. You can read more about it right here. 

Boy howdy, did they ever get the fanfare. They got more free media coverage than any new business I’ve ever seen – sorta like ABoTO is getting in the Twin Cities. I fully expect to see the Fox9 Morning News to do one of their “free ad” standups at the bar on Friday morning.

But is two bars actually a “trend”?

By the way – leave your predictions for the bar’s future in the comments.

…if it’s one that anyone wants, people pay you to do it.

For example, the one type of recycling that’s economically viable is recycling metal. There’s a demand – it’s easier and cheaper to melt and re-use metal, especially aluminum, than to mine and refine it from raw ore. So companies pay for metal.

They don’t pay for other things.

Here’s an experiment for you: put a bag of old newspapers and a bag of aluminum cans out in the alley. See which pile disappears within a day, and which one slowly decomposes.

Penn and Teller explained it in an epic episode of “Penn and Teller: Bullshit”, 20 years ago:

When it’s not viable? The government taxes you to prevent you from needing to do it, since nobody but third-world landfills wants the good or service.

Sort of like this.

Which, mark my words, is coming to Minnesota if there’s another session or two of DFL control.

Remember this episode – one of the events boosters of Downtown Minneapolis have hung their hat on as a symbol of their commitment and capability?

It’s the 1999 move of the historic Schubert Theater [1] – a $14 million move that was part of a $42 million (in 1999 dollars – call it about $73 million today – as part of one of the various downtown revitalization efforts that happened before downtown got devitalized. The Cowles family pumped a pile of money into turning it into a community art space – home to a dance theater and other arts companies.

Well, Downtown Minneapolis is gonna downtownminneapolis:

The Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts announced Wednesday that it would end its dance programming at the Goodale Theater as of March 31. The downtown Minneapolis center’s educational and community programs will, however, continue through the end of the 2023-24 school year in May.

“It became clear, probably several months ago, that Artspace, our largest donor and administrative partner, was having their own financial troubles, which wouldn’t allow them to sustain their level of giving to the Cowles,” said Joseph Bingham, co-director of the Cowles Center. “We’ve been working in the background to kind of figure out what that meant financially and figure out either a Plan B or whether that meant potential fundraising or another partner in the picture.”

According to Bingham, two weeks ago, Cowles staff found that Artspace’s financial picture couldn’t sustain the performing arts center.

It’s unlikely that financial disarray in an arts organization is directly connected to the crime and economic malaise that’s been Downtown’s dominant feature this past four years.

But for at least some people – in this case, Libertarian Burnsville City Councilwoman Cara Schulz – one other social and literal contagion had something to do with it:

I wrote Cara to clarify. There was literally an email saying “good riddance and a pox on your house, as it were”, or words to that effect.

But yet another unused building certainly isn’t going to help things.

So – here’s the current plan:

• Some major network picks up my show. Maybe weekday afternoons.
• I turn the building into a broadcast studio (a la Keillor at the Fitzgerald) and conservative event center.

[1] Ho Lee Crap. 25 years?