While the shocking sea change in Minnesota politics – the inversion of political power in the cities and the suburbs due to the free-market politics of St. Paul’s Mayor Lopez (joined, in 2017, by Republican Minneapolis Mayor Anatolii Dolokhov, elected after Green Party mayor Loaf Beziers was indicted for attempting to donate an entire Minneapolis neighborhood and its residents to Greenpeace) and the growing DFL-centricity of the suburbs – snuck up on Minnesota, the events of 2039 came more suddenly – and were more shocking.

———-

August 22, 2039
Blaine Cleans Up After Riots
Tylenol Harris, Minnesota Democrats Exposed On IMax

The city of Eden Prairie is cleaning up after three days of the worst rioting in Minnesota history.

Some say the emotional damage will take a lot longer to clean up.

The streets of this troubled southwest metro suburb exploded in rage after Eden Prairie Police Sgt. Thai O’Riordan and Patrolman Jeff “Lumpy” Al-Khalid were acquitted in the beating of Justin Prince-Adddams and Tylenol Lundgren.

“For the millionth time”, says defense attorney Cassandra Blodgett, “It wasn’t a beating.  It wasn’t a beating.  It was NOT A BEATING!”.

Blodgett notes that the video seems to confirm the officers’ defense – that they merely pushed the men up against the side of their squad car after they were caught huffing paint and butane while skateboarding with bags of stolen clothing.

However, a new Eden Prairie law didn’t allow police to touch suspects; the seven-member Eden Prairie City Parliament, which had been merged with the 75-member School Board, had passed a law to adopt school disciplinary rules for the city as a whole.  As a result, the officers were not legally allowed to impart physical force in arresting suspects.  A Grand Jury refused to indict the officers on charges of Sexual Abuse and Molestation, but returned charges of Aggravated Assault and Larceny of Self-Esteem.

Community groups started posturing long before the trial began.  White liberals complained of systematic discrimination.  “Look at where we live!”, exclaimed Fidel Klempfer, leader of “Eden Prairie Needs Money For The Children”.  “Moldy McMansions!  Man-made lakes lined with tenements!  Streets crawling with unemployed anthropology majors, social networking life coaches and vegan consultants!  This city needs help!”

“There are two Minnesotas” proclaimed Ed Johnson of “Give Us What We Need” “The part of Minnesota that won life’s lottery, and the part that is still waiting at the track for their number to come up”.

As the verdicts were read, Eden Prairie riot police stood by, awaiting the worst.

They got it.

As the “not guilty” verdicts trailed out, one by one, the gathered crowd fell silent.

Then, someone in the gathered crowd from the Barrista’s Union threw a brick, hitting someone from “Vegans For Emotional Justice”.

“That was all it took”, said Lieutenant Phong Leung of the State Patrol.

What started as a scuffle between Vegans and Barristas morphed into a city-wide riot, as other disaffected overeducated young white liberals crowded mass transit to get to the city.

At the end of three days of rioting, 4,000 houses and businesses were burned.  Anderson Lakes Parkway – the epicenter of Eden Prairie’s drug trade – lay in ruins.  Eden Prairie Center, a former shopping center than had been converted into a Kabbala center and had lain vacant for a decade attracting drug addicts and intellectual navel-gazers, became a charnel-house before it collapsed.  Hundreds were injured.  Police reported no injuries to law-enforcment; “Oddly”, said Lt. Leung, “Police weren’t targeted.  They were all going after each other.  Like crabs in a pot, pulling in the ones that tried to get out”.

Standing in the ruins of William Kling High School, School Board/Parliament member Alabassah Mortenssen shakes her head.

“There were signs of a rebirth in Eden Prairie; last fall, we actually beat back some free-market, low-tax challengers!  This time, we coulda done it, but for those damn Republicans!”

She shakes her head.

“And the barristas”.

———-

Tomorrow – as Eden Prairie rebuilds, Minnesota tries to heal in that way that places with big nasty political divides always “heal”. 

Doug Grow – long known as the DFL’s number two shill in the mainstream media (second only to Lori Sturdevant) – is trying to blow some wind into the sails of the Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg campaign.

E-Tink is trying to unseat Michele Bachmann in the Sixth Congressional District. He’s most “famous” in Minnesota for having been Jesse Ventura’s do-nothing Tranportation Commissioner. He should be even more famous for his ghoulish performance after the collapse of the I35W bridge, almost a year ago. As the fires still blazed and before the last girders had fallen into the water, Tinklenberg joined State Rep. Alice “The Phantom” Hausman on TV and radio coverage of the tragedy, claiming – before the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had shut off their pagers summoning them to Minneapolis – that the collapse was the result of Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to raise the gas tax. The performance was a ghoulish embarassment that would have ended the career of a politician…

…that was not a DFLer in a city where having paid lefty PR flaks like the MNPost and the Minnesoros “Independent” are almost redundant.

Anyway – Doug Grow writes in re the race:

A month ago, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann said she’s on board with a campaign plan to get gasoline prices back to $2 a gallon…Do people in the 6th Congressional District buy this sort of campaign talk?

Well, if “they” don’t understand the laws of supply and demand, they can certainly get jobs as economics reporters for the Minnesoros “Indepdendent” perhaps they deserve to be getting their news from Doug Grow we can trade them all to Massachussetts?

I digress. Grow is doing what he’s done his whole career; spin, whilst carrying water for the DFL:

At this point, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has NOT put the 6th District in its “red to blue” category. Instead, it calls the district an “emerging” race for Democrats. The difference in categories is substantial: Democrats in “red to blue” districts receive financial and other resource help. Those in “emerging” districts receive pats on the back and encouraging words from the DCCC: “Go get ’em, buddy!”

But even if the DCCC isn’t convinced that Bachmann can be defeated after one term in Washington, Tinklenberg says he’s optimistic.

I’d actually pay money to hear some DFLer say “Oh, I’m going to get my donkey kicked. It’s hopeless. Smoke ’em if you got ’em”.

Of course, being a DFLer in Minnesota means never needing to come up with your own facile explanations:

Recall, Bachmann defeated Patty Wetterling by 8 percentage points, 50 to 42. BUT there was a third candidate in the race, John Binkowski, of the Independence Party, who picked up 7.8 percent of the vote. This time around, the IPs endorsed Tinklenberg.

When you add Wetterling’s 127,144 votes and Binkowski’s 23,557 votes, Bachmann won the district by just 548 votes.

Fascinating.

Except that Bachmann and Wetterling were running for an open seat – which is always much more up in the air.

And the national Democrat establishment did a lot more than pat Patty on the back; they poured truckloads of money into the race. The media, even more in the bag than usual for the DFLer, called in all its markers, assisted by a large, sometimes deranged pack of alternative media adjuncts. And for all that, Bachmann still not only won, but won by the biggest margin of victory of any Republican in the state, in a year where Republicans got trounced nationwide, with the most conservative message of any Republican in Minnesota.

This time around? She’s the incumbent. That’s worth a few points all by itself. The media has moved on to other races, doing its damnedest to get Al Franken elected. The DCCC knows a dead horse when it sees one. Her alt-media stalkers – having provided her (I am convinced) with at least one point of her margin of victory – have marginalized themselves into near-irrelevance; even some of the media figures that used to regard them with breathless credulity have gotten the message.

E-Tink; Dead Bid Walking.

Long ago – thirty years ago, for crying out loud – The Who was my favorite band.  They’re still right up there.  While I tired of some of Pete Townsend’s mid-career dramatics, Who’s Next is right up there with Darkness on the Edge of Town among my three favorite albums in rock and roll history, and The Who Sell Out and Quadrophenia are on my top forty.

So yes.  As a matter of fact, I’m a bit of a Who afficionado.  Which mean, of course, that I turn a gimlet-y eye toward Who covers.

So VH1 has been broadcasting “Rock Honors – The Who“.  It was actually a bit disorienting – actually seeing music on VH1 – but I digress.

I’d never seen “Rock Honors”, but it’s apparently the musical equivalent of a Friar’s Roast, only with music instead of blue humor.

The highlight of the evening was “The Who” – well, Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey, at any event – doing some of their biggest hits.

That was fun.  More later.

The most interesting part, to me anyway, was the “tribute” covers.  Hearing them, it was hard to miss…

…how few singers are fit to carry Roger Daltrey’s gig bag.

• Foo Fighters, “Young Man Blues” and “Bargain”: Dave Grohl is just about the most talented guy in music today. And picking Young Man Blues was a choice that’ll gladden any Who freak’s heart; the song, a cover of an obscure Mose Allison song that appeared on the classic Live at Leeds album, smoked.  They squandered a bit of goodwill, though, bringing Gaz Coombes of the Brit alt-rock band “Supergrass” up to sing lead on “Bargain”, one of Who’s Next‘s best songs and one of my favorite Who songs ever.  The Foos rocked, but Coombes – who, let’s just say, has “opportunities” as a singer – could have been replaced by the top half of singers at a decent karaoke joint and nobody would have known better.  Disappointing.  Three and a half smashed Hiwatt amps (docked half a point for Coombes’ “contribution”).
• Incubus, “I Can See For Miles” and “I Can’t Explain”: Serviceable but uninspired.  Which, with “I Can’t Explain” – a song that every band in the world has covered at least once – is pretty much the norm.  But with “I Can See For Miles”, one of the five best songs of the British Invasion?  It’ll take a good lawyer to get pled down to misdemeanor.  Three smashed Hiwatt amps.
• Flaming Lips, “Amazing Journey” and “Pinball Wizard”: I dunno – the Lips are an off-and-on thing for me.  All I do know is that it’d have been cool if they’d have found a song or two that fit into Wayne Coyne’s eight note range.  Even Bun thought it was weak, weak, weak.  One and a half smashed Hiwatt amps.
• Pearl Jam, “Love Reign O’er Me” and “The Real Me”: On the other hand, Eddie Vedder sticks two of Daltrey’s most challenging parts; the soaring “Love Reign O’er Me” and the meatgrinder “The Real Me” from Quadrophenia.  And they were just freaking amazing, going for a note-for-note cover on “Love” (complete with full orchestra on the string part), while opting to try to out-loud the Who on “The Real Me”.  And dayum, it was good.  Four and a half smashed Hiwatt amps.
• Tenacious D, “Squeeze Box” and something else, I think, because while Jack Black can be a really good actor, the whole “Tenacious D” joke wore thin on me ten years ago, and I went to answer the phone in mid-“Squeeze Box” (probably my least-favorite Who single while Keith Moon was still alive).  Two smashed Hiwatt amps, if only because even though I’ve long tired of TD, they did the voodoo they do pretty serviceably, even though it bored me too stiff to watch all the way through.

That is all.

Congressional Quarterly says Minnesota is clearing the phlegm out of its electoral pipes:

Congressional Quarterly has switched Minnesota’s Senate race to “leans Republican.” Previously the contest had been assessed as having “no clear favorite.” The publication cited recent controversies sapping Democrat Al Franken’s candidacy, along with a series of polls that mostly indicate a comfortable lead for Sen. Norm Coleman. (One exception: a Rasmussen Reports survey released last week that showed Franken with a 44-42 advantage.)

CQ notes, however, that Republicans being Republicans and acting like a political party is all that it takes to set some Twin Citians off: 

 CQ points to the looming Republican gathering in St. Paul, however, as a potential campaign hazard for Coleman given the party’s overall low regard in Minnesota.

The polling sample for that last question was described as “50% Lori Sturdevant”. 

On Friday, we looked into the ragged, rough beginnings of Minnesota’s renaissance, back in the 2020’s.

Today – well, we’ll take a walk through the dingy side of Minnesota’s political transformation, see how the children are doing, and…well, we’ll indulge in some foreshadowing.

———-

January 3, 2033
Decaying Housing Stock Causes Big Worries In ‘Burbs
Tim Plott, Minnesota Utterly Dependent

Father PZ Myers III has inherited a real mess. And he thinks he knows why.

The new priest at Saint Ignatius Church in Chanhassen – one of a wave of churches built during the huge rush to the suburbs in the 1990s – inherited a lot of problems that would have baffled his predecessor.

“It’s sort of a perfect storm of problems. For starters, most of the McMansions built in the 1990s were, to put it in terms I think the good Lord himself would understand, pieces of crap. Shoddy, poorly built, just garbage.”

“And then”, Myers continues as he walks through the cots at the homeless shelter the parish has set up in its basement, “between that and the fuel costs in the ’00s, the collapse of the transit system, the growth of the telecommuting service economy and the revival of the city, pretty soon all the middle class families that used to keep places like Chanhassen and Chaska going fled for places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Or, since telecommuting is so ubiquitous, far far outstate.”

Myers pauses, exhausted at the parade of misery he sees around him. “It might have worked”, he said, “except that – well, some of the people that moved out to the ‘burbs didn’t help things one bit”.

“No”, he adds hastily, “I’m not talking about the poor. I’m talking, frankly – and I do hate to get political – but I’m talking about the DFLers that flocked out here when the Southwest LRT started running. That was…”

He looks about the rows of cots, full of men who’ve staggered off the dismal, blighted streets of Chanhassen. The train station that used to carry suburban government workers from homes in Chanhassen and Chaska to jobs in Edina and St. Louis Park is now sodden with grafitti. Crack dealers terrorize the area at night. Vacant blocks of houses, some collapsing on themselves, bear mute witness to an experiment that failed, and failed badly.

Father Myers shakes his head. “That was when our problems started”.

But others see opportunity.

“What you have here”, says Gretel Lackey-Grotnick-Willey of “Homes And Money”, a non-profit advocacy group based in inner-suburban Lakeville, “is a situation where rich Republicans took all the good, solid, inner-city housing stock after the foreclosure crisis in the ’00s, leaving the poor out in the shoddily-built “mcmansions” in places like Lakeville and Eden Prairie. They had the connections to know that with gas prices rising, homes near work would be vital. This disenfranchised the poor, who, lured to the ‘burbs by artificially low prices and massive, publicly-subsidized public transit, got into the transit trap”.

“The key”, asserts Lackey-Grotnick-Willey, “is to completely fund the Aid to Local Governments And Environs program”.

Andrea Loang, professor of Suburban Pathology at the University of Minnesota’s Strom School for Public Policy, agrees and disagrees. “Homes and Money is right about construction techniques – but that’s about it. ALGAE was an organized subsidy of failure and poverty – basically, paying failing suburbs to get it wrong, and keep getting it wrong. The renaissance of Minneapolis, Saint Paul and outstate Minnesota show us that the free market not only works, it kicks ass”.

Lackey-Grotnick-Willey remains undeterred. “We need to start getting affordable housing in the city. The government needs to give these people dreams, too”, she says.

———-

January 3, 2034
Morales Goes To Nationals
Local Girl Dominant Yet Again
Buffy Moltke, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Dakotas Public Radio

For the third straight year, Phuong Morales of Saint Paul has won the state High School Combat Marksmanship title.

A senior at Margaret Thatcher International Charter Academy in Minneapolis, Morales held off a late surge by junior Ahmad Szarkowski of Hibbing with a rolling double-tap bullseye in double-overtime.

Morales victory continues a six-year tradition of inner-city shooting sports dominance at Reagan, where Tad Haukeboe had a three-peat before Morales’ string.

Morales will be attending Texas Tech next year on a combat shooting scholarship, and plans to major in nuclear engineering.

But the Morales dynasty seems likely to continue; younger brother Chuck placed fifth in state, after winning the state Junior Varsity last year.

The rise of high school pistolcraft programs, which only started a decade ago, has been astounding. Critics say the competitions “send the wrong message”, and emphatically deny any link between armed teenagers and the recent descent of crime rates in the Twin Cities prosperous inner-city to less than measurable levels.

And this one – which seemed fairly innocuous in context: 

———-

July 9, 2039
Trial Begins In Eden Prairie Beating Case
Belton Farouk, Network Of The Moderate Left

The trial of two Eden Prairie police officers accused in the beatings of Eden Prairie teens Jarrod Mondale and Bentley Pogemiller begins today at the Department of Public Esteem in Eden Prairie.

The officers – Sgt. Thai O’Riordan and Jeff “Lumpy” Al-Khalid – are charged with holding the two teens against a car during a paint-huffing bust last summer.  The case has stirred up passions in this troubled city which, in recent years, has not shared in the prosperity of the city to its northeast and the rural area to its southwest.

“This bit of brutality shows the community that it’s us against them”, says Celine Murchisson-Koblecki, leader of “Eden Prairy’s for Justice”, a group formed to protest police brutality in the wake of the alleged beatings.

———-

We’ll follow up tomorrow.

Hard set upon by an oppressive tyranny, the people dutifully pulled their burdens.  At times, it seemed there was no hope; the overlords would work you to death and their pleasure, living off the fruit of our labors and the sweat of our brow, as it pleased them.

There were occasional whispers – kept silent, for fear of retribution from the overlords – of a liberator.  But most of the people kept it firmly in the realm of legend – as much for their own protection as out of lack of faith.  Some of the people even acquiesced with their oppressors; “truely, it’s better to go along than to resist”, they said, weary of the battle. 

But then, one day…

…in the middle of yet another dark, dismal year in the dank, oppressed land…

…the first glimmer of sanity broke over the rancid murk.

And a few of The People began to whisper under their breath.  Soon. 

Soon.

Sean at MNPublius does the endzone happy dance over Iraqi leader Maliki’s “endorsement” of The Messiah’s “withdrawal plan”:

Obviously — this is huge. The Democratically elected leader of Iraq says that Barack Obama’s withdrawal plan (1 or 2 brigades a month, somewhere between 6-8 thousand people a month) is the right idea.

Er, let’s shoot for accuracy here; Maliki agrees with The Messiah’s latest plan. The one he put forward after the surge (which The Messiah opposed) made the whole notion of withdrawal responsible enough for Iraq to consider:

Allahpundit, with emphasis added by me:

The unasked follow-up question: How about the 14-month timetable that Obama wanted to set in January 2007 to start pulling troops out before those positive developments could occur? How keen does that look in hindsight?

(Hindsight? Leftybloggers don’t need no steenkin’ hindsight!)

To repeat a point made yesterday, the only reason a timetable or “time horizon” is arguably a responsible strategy now is because it was properly rejected as being irresponsible then.

Sean missed this part of Maliki’s statement:

Maliki hints at that in another part of the interview:

So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn’t the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.

Exactly, which at least partly explains why Bush is more willing to compromise now on some sort of informal schedule. Compare Maliki’s justification for the timetable to Obama’s justification in his big Iraq speech. The pacification of the country is almost incidental, something to congratulate Petraeus on and then quickly move past.

Most of us want to embrace the victory that our troops – and tens of thousands of brave Iraqi troops, and the millions of citizens that the troops won over through killing Al-Quaeda and pacifying the religious militias – seem to have won. Obama just wants to gloss it over.

Other than all of that, though? Sure. It’s a ringing endorsement of The Messiah’s sagacity.

Hey – does anyone remember when the left thought Maliki was just a stooge of the Bushes?

Why, sure I do!

UPDATE: Of course, the above only counts if Maliki really said what Sean said he said – if it made the translation from Arabic to German and then to English correctly and… ach du lieber! Und ach, Dolmetschung is so schwehr!

Well, of course, if they got the political context right…

Right?

D’oh!

Sort of like “Secession Diaries” and Minnesota 2050. 

Really.

The harassment of delegates came as organized protests continued to draw thousands of people. The Still We Rise march by advocates for social issues was peaceful, and a Poor People’s March, a column several blocks long, proceeded from the United Nations to the Madison Square Garden yesterday after the police decided to let it go ahead without a permit.

When marchers approached the Garden, a police detective was knocked off his scooter. He was then repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by at least one male demonstrator, the police said.

…

The heavy police presence at the Garden apparently inspired the coordinated plan by anarchists and other radicals to strike out at the delegates at their hotels, breakfasts, parties, and on the streets.

The incidents are the result of months of planning by opposition groups, who report that they have obtained copies of plans and addresses for delegates’ parties, caucuses and other gatherings outside the Garden.

OK, I’m not making it up.  It’s what happened in 2004 in New York.  With all the talk about all the arrests that were dismissed over allegedly-excessive zeal on the part of the NYPD, you’d have a hard time realizing that there really was any low-level, non-lethal (hey, the cop on the scooter lived!) domestic terrorism going on at the last RNC.

The Twin Cities’ police are officially fairly sanguine; they’re taking a fairly low-key approach (which isn’t a bad thing; there’s no need to feed the anarkids’ need for drama). 

Anyway, no need to worry; “Scottsdale Woman” assures us that it’s really the GOP delgates and their sympathizers that’ll be causing the problems.

More later.

The other day, we noted that the “universal consensus” behind Man-Made Global Warming is, er, not really universal.

And over at American Thinker, we also see that it’s not consensual:

First, the editors of APS newsletter Physics and Society invited [man-made global warming skeptic] Lord Monckton to present them a paper explaining his disagreement with the AGW findings of the IPCC.  And the former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher happily accepted the offer, submitting a brilliant, must read article excoriating the UN lapdogs, both for their deliberately obscured methods and their gross exaggerations of green house gas impact on global temperatures.

But once Lord Monckton’s paper started getting attention?

But a few days later, Monckton’s paper was suddenly and inexplicably branded with these scurrilous prefacing words, emphasized in red:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”

An outlandish disclaimer, particularly considering that the paper had been reviewed by one of APS’s own scientists, and all requested clarifications were duly incorporated by the author. 

In other words – if you can’t beat ’em, lie about ’em. 

Proof that G-d not only exists, but cares for us deeply:

“We are sad to announce the engagement of Salma Hayek and Francois-Henri Pinault has been canceled,” publicist Cari Ross said in a statement. “There will be no further comment.”

If you. Catch. My.  Drift. 

Game, set, match.

The march of our domestic economic policies deeper and deeper into socialistic territory is often justified by liberals who will site Europe’s success; they having scouted ahead for us.

You will hear such things as hight tax brackets and universal healthcare are working for them – they’re doing just fine.

So why is it that there are signs Europe is calling a retreat and marching back our way?

Europe Has an Economics Lesson for Obama

Over the last decade, much of Europe has very quietly embraced market-based reforms that either draw inspiration from American successes or — on issues like retirement security — are even more market-oriented than many U.S. Republicans support.

The cutting of corporate income- tax rates is an excellent example of European market-friendly bipartisanship. Germany’s right-left coalition of Christian and Social Democrats implemented a large rate cut earlier this year, reducing the top marginal corporate rate to about 30% from 39%. Spain’s Socialist and Britain’s Labor governments have followed suit, reducing their countries’ top corporate rates.

These traditionally left-of-center parties understand that in a globalized economy, wealth and investment are mobile, flowing to those countries that provide hospitable investment climates. As part of a European Union where center-right governments in Greece, Denmark, Ireland and Eastern Europe have dramatically reduced corporate tax rates, they understand that they cannot help workers if they drive away the capital that employs and pays them.

Read that last sentence. Now read it again. Thank Ronald Regan for that one.

Mr. Obama’s main solution to the looming Social Security bankruptcy is to raise taxes on the well-off. To date, he has eschewed other solutions such as raising the retirement age or creating private Social Security accounts. But European center-left parties have no such reservations.

Take Sweden, for example. In the 1990s, a series of center-right and Social Democratic governments reached agreement on wide ranging pension reforms that include a private account option not too different than the one proposed by President George W. Bush.

Yah, but they’ll never give credit to Bush for the idea.

This new European consensus is founded, like all political calculations, partly on conviction and partly on necessity. European center-left politicians have slowly come to respect the power of markets. Much like the so-called “Rubin Democrats,” they recognize that the energy and innovation of market actors can better produce wealth than more traditional social democratic economic theory.

Necessity. Hey, soon we will have that in common!

Again, Sweden is an excellent example of this. Since 1932, Social Democrats have governed the country mostly without significant coalition partners, with the exception of the years when Sweden’s economy stalled and they had to cede power — 1976-82, 1991-94 and again in 2006 when the current center-right government took over. Even in egalitarian Sweden, voters will turn to the right if jobs are scarce and incomes stagnant.

Does this bode well for November? Does it hurt bad enough yet America?

The political pundits are buzzing today about Hillary Clinton’s new look: She changed her hair part from left to right. What might this mean? If you go by the CEO hair-part theory I wrote about in Fortune three months ago, her new right part could signal that she is ceding her claim to leadership and is moving into a role supporting Barack Obama.

Applying Fortune’s hair-part theory to Hillary’s new look 

Or it might just mean she got up on the wrong side of the bed?

Hey, I think she looks thinner too! What does that mean?

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad and John kick off (Brian is off on assignment) from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is off on assignment today.  I will take over from 1-3. We – meaning you and I – are going to be talking about the Valleyfair assault, as well as the ongoing campaign to make the southwest metro redder and redder.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will be dishing the Minnesota smack from 3-5.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

And don’t forget the David Strom Show, with David Strom and Margaret Martin and the bird-friendly Prius, from 9-11!

It was Monday, July 18, 1988.

It had been scorchingly hot all summer. It was a muggy, awful night out.

We had a new roommate; Shane, a singer in a speed metal band. He was nineteen, about 5’6, wore his hair in a white trash afro (long, frizzy and all over the place) and looked every inch the metal dude. He was a nice guy, though, and paid his bills on time. This became important, later.

Shane and Wyatt both worked nights. Wyatt worked as a bouncer at “Hot Rod’s”, a dive bar on University Avenue, where he basically sold pot, pilfered free drinks, picked up an endless stream of girls or, sometimes, just had sex with them in a storage closet back by the bar’s kitchen, or, not infrequently, both. Indeed, he’d brag on occasion about “trifecta” days; bagging Teresa at home during the day, banging one of the bartenders in the storage locker during his shift, and picking up one skeeze or another to bring home at night. Sometimes, rarely, he’d even toss an old drunk or underage Hamline or Concordia dweeb out of the place.

Shane worked the night shift at a foundry out on the East Side. The hours meshed nicely with his band’s rehearsal schedule. On non-practice nights – like tonight – he took the bus around 9:30PM.

Me? I had the night off. I noodled around on guitar for a while, and then settled down with a book I’d gotten at the library over the weekend.

And I heard the front door open downstairs.

My ears perked up – but it wouldn’t have been the first time Shane missed his bus and needed to bug me for a ride to work; even more likely was Wyatt to have gotten off work early, and probably picked up some skeeze or another (or, if all else failed, called Teresa).

I heard footsteps – two sets – downstairs. Option B, I thought.

And then I heard a male voice. Not Shane’s nasal Wisconsin chatter. Not Wyatt’s affected Arklahoma drawl.

And then I heard another male voice. A different one.

These were not my roommates.

I sat, frozen in my chair, for a moment, as I heard the two sets of feet moving around downstairs, now pretty loudly. They were moving through the living room, and into the kitchen. I heard something clattering.

I had no phone – the only one was downstairs in the kitchen. All the exits to the house were downstairs. The dogs – worthless as they were under normal circumstances – were both out back. My only way out was through my second-story window.

I had one option.

Panic.

Well, no. There was one other.

I got up as quietly as I could, and padded in my stocking feet over to my bed. I reached down into the gap between the wall and the mattress; I had a little box wedged in there, holding the mattress almost imperceptibly out from the wall. On it lay my pistol – an American Arms PK22. It had a magazine in it, with eight rounds (of .22 Long Rifle) loaded. (My rifles, in the closet, would have taken too long to load).

I turned, flipped the safety catch off, and started padding toward the top of the stairs. The old floor creaked loudly, and the footsteps downstairs stopped cold for a moment.

I crouched behind the thick wooden top pillar of the banister; I heard one of the voices below, sounding only slightly agitated. They started moving again – toward (I imagined, rightly or not, and I wasn’t about to ask) the stairs.

But it was all I had.

“You c*******ers come up the stairs, and I’ll f***ing blow your heads off”, I yelled – loudly, trying to will my voice not to crack.

More footsteps.

I took the slide and racked a round as loudly and ostentatiously as I could…

…which chambered with a not-very-intimidating tinny “tic-tic-schluck” sound that had me wishing for the beefy “KA-SCHLACK” of a 12 gauge shotgun, or the sharp “ksssh-LOCK” of an M1 Garand.

“Sh*t”, I heard one of them mutter. From my vantage point, I saw a pair of tennis shoes racing out the door. They left the door open.

I crouched at the top of the steps for what seemed like a couple minutes, hyperventilating as my heart pounded, watching the screen door drift aimlessly in the dank humid breeze. Then, slowly, I crept down the stairs, pistol in front of me, pointing where I was looking, making sure they were all gone. I shut and locked the door, checked the kitchen and basement, and then stopped and took stock. They’d made off with Wyatt’s boom box and some cassettes, and not much more.

My ignorant nutslap roommates had left the door unlocked.

And today, I became a big believer in self-defense shooting.

…but the notion that there is “universal consensus” among scientists on  the subject is:

“There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

 Science is so complicated.

Yesterday, we looked back on 42 years of reforms in Minnesota.

But how did the state get to that point?

Today, we start at the beginning.

———-

September 21, 2021
A Tale Of Two Schools
Molybdenum Priestley, StarTribuneSunVillager Weekly Shopper

Willow Brockley-Stensrud-Mauer-Hoff, age ten, is in her third school in five years.

“Daddy keeps moving us farther and farther out”, says Ms. Brockley-Stensrud-Mauer-Hoff, a fifth-grader at Fidel Castro Middle School in Annandale. “He says we need to stay at least two tiers of suburbs away from the ‘scum'”, she adds, doodling in a notebook.

Ashley Brockley-Mauer, 55, a life coach who works for the State Department of Health in downtown Minneapolis, drops Willow off at school before getting on the train to go to her job in downtown Minneapolis. Her life partner, Ian Hoff-Hoff-Stensrud-Hoff, 58, was recently laid off from a position with the Minneapolis Department of Green Enforcement. He’s seeking a position with the Stearns County Lifestyle Patrol – but things look dismal. “There were two hundred applicants for one opening”, he notes. “But I look at the interregnum as a bit of a growth experience”.

Annandale, once a Republican stronghold, has had its politics switch drastically in recent years. When the city was connected to the Northstar Line, the city was inundated with Minneapolitans. Drawn by an excellent school system, low housing costs and low crime, the urban expats – 99.8% white, registered DFL members – quickly put their imprint on the town.

“Once we took control”, recalls Ms. Brockley-Mauer, “thanks to Instant Runoff Voting, we instituted rigorous Green environmental standards and sustainable growth practices on regional businesses, and outcome-based juvenile justice and corrections practices. We gave the teachers and public employees unions voting seats on the City Parliament, and instituted the “FairBallot” for all city spending votes, abolishing the non-progressive secret ballot. We also put a price cap on local homes to make sure housing would remain affordable, and established a living wage ordinance for all jobs. We also began the “Diversity Through Unity” program at the school system”. She nods with satisfaction. “It was about then that Willow was born”.

Despite the improvements, problems started cropping up. Crime rates inexplicably rose, student achievement dropped, and the available housing stock, mostly built in the 1990s, wasn’t being renewed. A wave of business bankruptcies rapidly followed, and area unemployment zoomed upward.

“Temporary hiccups on the great progressive leap forward”, Brockley-Mauer asserts. “We’ve kept DFL legislators in office in this district for the past ten years, so things are bound to improve.”

The troubled-but-cozy suburb has its share of controversies, of course. Malcolm X High School briefly instituted a Junior ROTC Program imported from Saint Paul to help bolster achievement among troubled suburban teens.

“It was great”, recalls Justin Yetterboe, 17, of Waite Park. “Before JROTC, I was a shiftless, paint-huffing skate bum. Sergeant Xiong – the JROTC leader – changed all that. He taught me some pride in myself. He made me reach for more.”

But the program was cancelled last year amid a flurry of controversy. “This was the sort of thing we left Minneapolis to try to escape”, says Mr. Hoff-Hoff-Stensrud-Hoff, a key activist in getting the program scrapped. “Halliburton Bushitler Chimpy Chimp”, he adds, reprising his closing argument at the public meeting that led to the cancellation of the program and the public burning of all its course materials.

“We moved out here to get the life we wanted, and we will have it”, he nods with emphasis.

———-

Fifty miles east-southeast, 13 year old Anna Strachan and 14 year old LaKeisha Morris sit at computers in the rough-hewn looking but cozy classroom at Phil Krinkie Academy, a charter school in Saint Paul.

“The teachers here preach one thing only – your life is your responsibility, and you’re the only one who can live up to it. So have some self-respect”, says Morris, the daughter of Shondra and DahnDre Morris of Saint Paul.

“We built this school ourselves, from the ground up, once we took over the old building”, recalls DahnDre Morris of the school’s early years after it took over the former Arlington High School, off Rice Street in Saint Paul. “I didn’t want my kids going through what I did”.

“No kidding”, adds his wife. “The only thing I remember learning in four years of high school was that I needed self-esteem. But I never did learn why!”

Parents of four kids ages six through 17, the couple is used to hard work. DahnDre is a CNC machinist with PowerTec, a precision parts manufacturer in Saint Paul. Shondra runs a soul food restaurant on Rice Street. “Rice used to be a wasteland, just empty storefronts and crappy bars”, Shondra remembers. “Now, the biggest problem is finding space for the new businesses that are moving in”.

The couple, newly-married and with a baby back in 2005, tried moving out to suburban Burnsville to raise their young family. “It started out well”, DahnDre explains. “The schools and the city were pretty free of some of the inner city BS”.

But then, about the time of the great Mortgage Meltdown of 2008, things started changing.

“As the inner city got more run down and torn down”, DahnDre starts, “and about the time gas prices rose up so that I couldn’t drive to work, more and more of the white, middle class types started leaving the city – for pretty much the same reason we did. Lower taxes, better schools, etc, etc.”

“But”, Shondra interjects, “they brought their politics with”.

Taxes zoomed. School achievement started dropping. Crime skyrocketed.

The final straw came in 2017. “The school called and said they’d caught DeShawn, our oldest, huffing paint. They suspended him…”, DahnDre reports, eyes wide with amazement he still visibly feels “…not for huffing, but for skipping Gay Pride class. They called it a “hate infraction”. Can you believe that?”.

(Burnsville school district Diversity supervisor Poppy Fleeber declined to comment on the case).

So the Morrises moved back to Saint Paul, drawn not only by the ample cheap housing, but by a subtle but intense change in atmosphere.

“After some of the scandals that happened in the late ’00s and early teens – the Saint Paul Land Grab, the Minneapolis Atheism Accord, the Met Council Sex Ring, that sort of thing, people took a look around. And they saw it was time for a real change”.

The turning point was the 2013 election of Mayor Annaluisa Lopez, the first Republican elected mayor of Saint Paul as a Republican since the mid-1900s.

“I led quite the coalition”, Lopez recalls via phone from her office in Washington, DC. Sworn in last January as Minnesota’s first Latina Senator, Lopez led a motley collection of supporters – Asian free-enterprise activists, Afro-American education reformers, Hispanic social conservatives, and Eritrean and working-class white crime hawks – against a phalanx of traditional DFL constituencies. “Everyone predicted we’d lose and lose big”, Lopez reminisces. “The turning point was when Garrison Keillor called me Tija Tomasina (broken spanish for “Auntie Tom”)”. The outrage filled Lopez’ electoral sails – she beat incumbent Chris Coleman 51-49$ in the ’13 election, despite Council President Dave Thune’s call for Governor Pogemiller to declare martial law, famously claiming “A Republican Mayor would be a natural disaster”.

She slashed taxes and city bureaucracy, and instituted a “homestead” program for vacant housing and commercial property, privatized public housing, and instituted a citywide “Smack Down Crime” program, giving cash prizes for the most creative capture of criminals by civilians. “Some liberals from Lake Elmo called it “vigilante justice”. We just called it fun!” Lopez remembers.

Lopez rode to victory in 2017 by a 60-40 margin over DFL challenger Marcy Piffle, a middle school teacher, performance artist and pro-Palestinian poet.

“That”, says DahnDre Morris, “was the first time I voted Republican in my life”.

“I told you so!”, Shondra laughs, nudging him. Shondra voted for President Palin in 2012, and a framed picture of Ronald Reagan hangs on the wall of her restaurant. “Some of the old timers give me guff about it. But not much”.

DeShawn, their oldest, has turned things around since his run-in in Burnsville. He graduated from the Krinkie Academy last fall, and just started attending the Naval Academy a few weeks ago.

“I shudder to think what would have happened had we stayed out there in Burnsville”, DahnDre shakes his head. Then, eyes wide open in disbelief, he jumps to his feet. “I gotta show you this!” he bellows.

“Oh, yeah”, says Shondra. “This is hilarious”.

DahnDre returns with a letter on Burnsville City letterhead. “It’s a demand that we move back and be happy to pay for a better People’s City of Burnsville!”

———-

Monday? Well, not every part of Minnesota fared as well as Rice Street.

Some of my best friends are atheists.

Me? Nah. I’ve never found the scientific case against God remotely compelling. The cases of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so hate-clogged they’re pretty easily dispatched; indeed, I’d love to see debate between one of them and a genuine Christian thinker, especially one that wasn’t moderated by some NPR suckup; it’d be like a lawnmower going through a cabbage patch. Christopher Hitchens is more acerbic – and easier, since while he rejects “God”, he still buys the notion of some kind of universal energy of one kind or another.

But at least there’s an argument you can try to respect.

Well, for some of ’em anyway.

The big problem with the latest wave of atheists isn’t their beliefs – because their beliefs are irrelevant. It’s all about their hatred of faith. Read their blogs, watch their cable-access shows – it’s less about “the case against God” and more “aren’t people of faith Christians stupid!” It’d be like packs of fundamentalist Christians filming themselves mocking (stereotyped) gay behavior for cruel, cheap yuks, if you can imagine that (and, as a rule, you do have to imagine it).

No. I mean just like it.

Reading the local Sorosphere’s fawning coverage of PZ “Meyers” Myers’ extended game of “monkey in the middle” with a consecrated host (the wafer from a Catholic communion that’s been blessed by a priest – which, orthodox Catholics believe, “transubstantiates” into the literal body of Christ as related in the Last Supper) is…depressing. Myers, a biology professor and one of the more prominent atheist bloggers, declaims about religion from atop what he seems to consider a mountain of logic. And he pays, indeed, some lip service to common decency, as most people, faith aside, would understand it…:

I don’t favor the idea of going to somebody’s home or to something they own and possess and consider very important, like a graveyard—going to a grave and desecrating that. That’s something completely different. Because what you’re doing is doing harm to something unique and something that is rightfully part of somebody else—it’s somebody else’s ownership.

And yet…:

The cracker [host, presumably] is completely different. This is something that’s freely handed out.

Well, no. It’s not.

I’m not Catholic – and, like most Protestants, I take an allegorical rather than literal view of the host. But it’s not remotely “freely” handed out. The Catholic communion involves jumping through some spiritual hoops (as does the Protestant communion, in most cases) to “commune” with God; in the Catholic tradition (stop me if I’m wrong, Catholics) involves being in a “state of grace”, of having ones’ sins forgiven, before receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. Not everyone who walks into a Catholic Church gets communion. The host is no more “freely” handed out than is an “A” in one of Myers’ classes. I presume.

So the stunt Myers is defending – a college student, Webster Cook, who kyped a consecrated host from a mass, drawing all sorts of emotional reactions from Catholics, some of them terribly overwrought – was as much vandalism (devaluing something of value to another by defacing, damaging or destroying it) as theft.

To Myers, of course, it’s a big joke; like stealing a hat from a kid on the playground and tossing it around among the other little reprobates. It’s a cruel little giggle – after all, it’s not your hat that you’re having fun with! – and if the kid gets pissed and decks you, you can run to the principal and get him in trouble.

I read PZ Myers, and I can’t feel angry, really.  All I can feel is sad.

And not just in a spiritual sense.  This is a guy – and a huge pack of suckups – who think this is cutting-edge shiznit.  Sticking it to the man priest; Effing with a host (hahaha, they think it’s the body of Jeeeebus!)

I was going to write “I’m not sure what bothers me more – the stunt, and Myers’ puerile reaction in support, or the local Sorosphere’s fawning coverage and belief that it’s “news” and that Myers is a profile in courage for doing it” – but I stopped.

The answer is “neither”.

Here’s why: this is probably good news for people of faith. If this – and Dawkins, and Harris – is the best atheists can do, God is not only alive, but He is so confident in our ability to withstand the real challenges to our faith that He’s sent us some puffed-up, arrogant, self-important buffoons to laugh at.

The DC Gun Ban is officially euthanized as of today.

I said “officially”. 

Because I think Dick Heller’s gonna be back in court sooner than later:

District residents can start registering their guns today. But at least one very high profile application was already rejected.

Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District’s 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit.

But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

Look for DC to try to run out the clock – at taxpayer’s expense, and without an actual end to the game – trying to give the Second Amendment the death of a thousand paperwork cuts.

Though residents will be allowed to begin applying for handgun permits, city officials have said the entire process could take weeks or months.

“I’m shocked, shocked to see that the District of Columbia believes it’s above the Supreme Court”.   

Back to court, with copy of Scalia’s opinion in hand, baby:

We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”… It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

Perhaps Heller should try to register one of these, as a big FU to DC.

Hey, it’s not bottom-loading…

Honda’s version of Toyota’s Prius (Obama Bumper Sticker also Standard?)

You and your kids are out for a day of fun at Valleyfair.

Some dirtball cops a feel of your daughter.

You go to try to set him straight.

He calls for a bunch of his friends.

They mean to do  you harm.  Lots and lots of it.  Eight teenagers and twentysomethings, jacked up on misplaced testosterone.

What do you do?

If you’re a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Minnesota, and didn’t seek out the confrontation, and think you can convince a jury that you reasonably fear death or great bodily harm, and that you’ve made reasonable efforts to de-escalate, and that the use of lethal force is reasonable (again with the jury), and there’s not a big crowd with possibilities for collateral damage, the decision is both easy and awful.  You draw.  You point.  If the scumbags are like most scumbags, they get a sudden case of mortal fear, and they run like hell.  If they don’t back down – say, they draw a knife or a gun of their own, or come at you with tire irons – you shoot.  Given that you are probably overwhelmed with adrenaline,  you don’t – can’t – try to get cutesy with your aim; you shoot for center mass, and keep shooting until your target drops.  And pray that that’s enough to stop things.  As, indeed, it usually is.

What if it’s not you?  What if you see the event going down – the father defending his daughter, the gang of wanna-be thugs gathering, the “men” stomping on the man’s head.  You have a permit.  There is no sign of a security guard, to say nothing of cops.  Nobody else is stepping forward.  You reasonably believe that the guy, the father, is about to get his brains stomped out.

What do you do?

While Minnesota’s self-defense law states that one can use lethal force in self-defense if one reasonably believes oneself or another person are in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, things get very cloudy when you are not the potential victim, but just a good samaritan.

 There’s nothing hypothetical about the story, of course.  As John Hinderaker notes, the local media is finally talking about  this two-week-old beating at Valleyfair…:

Shakopee police say as the crowd was leaving Valleyfair Amusement Park around midnight on the 4th of July, the victim’s daughter was confronted by two men.

“The 12-year-old daughter was either touched or slapped in the buttocks area,” Scott County Attorney Patrick Ciliberto said. “The father confronted (the men) by yelling at them for what they had done to his daughter,” he added.

Police say the two men called their friends, who were also in the park. The group of seven men and a juvenile then confronted the father.

“They beat him to the ground and then, the evidence that we have, when he was on the ground, they used their feet on him. They were kicking him in the face when he was down,” Ciliberto said.

According to the criminal complaints, the men were stomping on the 41-year-old father as he lay on the ground, unconscious.

He suffered severe head injuries, including a fractured right orbital bone and possible subdural bleeding on the brain. “We don’t know if there are permanent injuries yet,” the County Attorney said.

Of course, nobody was armed – or if they were, they opted not to use their gun to break up the beating.  Nothing unusual there; it’s a difficult decision, made all the harder by the disdain in which the local officialdom holds citizens who defend themselves or other citizens from the depraved. 

In 1994, after a crazed loner killed a Saint Paul police officer, a citizen – and expert marksman –  had a clear shot at the murderer.  He hesitated – because he feared that he’d be prosecuted by then-Ramsey-County Attorney Mark Foley, known (as is his successor, current occupant Susan Gaertner) for his hatred of law-abiding citizens with guns.  So he shot instead to mark the car – and did it with such accuracy that he was able to tell the police forensics lab exactly where to find the bullet, later on.  If only he’d felt empowered to do the same with the murderer’s head; the madman went on to murder another policeman later that day.  The citizen was right to be worried; Foley did try find some reason to prosecute.  The Saint Paul police made it known to Foley that, since the citizen had tried to save a cop, they would not cooperate with any attempt to prosecution.

Would he have gotten the same treatment had he decided to help a typical citizen?

Like someone who had tried to draw on this lot…:

The six adults charged and held in jail are Devondre Evans-Lewis, Andrew Shannon, Darris Evans, Terry Arnold, Derry Evans, and Anthony Gildersleeve.

…and their two “juvenile” accomplices?

Eight “men” who put an innocent man in the hospital, possibly with permanent brain damage?  “Men” who could have killed the victim?

We don’t know.  It’s all gray area. 

The DFL wants to keep it that way.  They want you, the law-abiding citizen, to feel out of your depth when trying to keep the forces of barbarity at bay when they are tearing civilization apart in your face.  They call it “vigilante justice”.  When we try to change the laws to put the average citizen on firmer ground, they lie through their teeth to scare the uninformed (who are uninformed precisely because that’s the way they want it). 

Feel helpless?

Feel angry?

Good.  You should.

You should turn your anger on everyone who voted against Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill.  At the polls only, of course.

You should turn your anger on Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota, the lying racist orcs who want to keep the laws just as they are – because they value criminal lives more than they value yours.  But only rhetorically.

You should turn your anger on the lying hacks in the bought-and-paid-for media who play along with CSM’s propaganda, who give it unquestioned play while understanding neither the laws, the proposals for change, nor any of their ramifications (beyond what’s fed to them by their benefactors).  But only by repudiating their lies.

And save some anger for the alleged perps.  Because they are out on bail.

And here’s praying that, if every last one of them doesn’t suddenly come to Jesus (or whomever) and beg forgiveness for trying to destroy a man and his family, that the next man they try to destroy can respond meaningfully – with half a dozen shots to the chest.

This looks like it’s going to be a rough election for Republicans, in Minnesota and nationwide. While I think Mac has a decent shot in upending the Messiah in the stretch, here, I think Congress is going to be just brutal. As I’ve said in the past, I think that if the Democrats come up with less than an 80-20 majority in the Senate, and less than 340 seats in the House, it’ll be tantamount to a defeat. It’s been pointed out that that is technically impossible – there aren’t that many seats up for election this year. That is technically true, and still false; the electoral debacle should prompt the requisite number of Republicans to resign, or be impeached, or attacked and carried from office by mobs with pitchforks and torches. 80 and 340, or bust, Democrats.

And yet, being a conservative, I temper my pragmatism about people and temporal trends with unshakeable optimism for the future.  As such, I’m not merely pondering the “future” this November. I was looking waaay off into the great wide open.

Someone – I think it was either Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill – said “the best way to learn about the future is to look back on it”. 

So I decided to do just that.  I took a little dig through the archives of the future.  I wondered – given the long-term trends that are just starting to poke their noses into the public consciousness, what will Minnesota – especially the Twin Cities metro – look like in 2050?

And the message?  Well, it was surprising.

———-

November 2, 2050
Nguyen In Landslide:  Third-Place DFL Ponders Future
Ozriel Phamagagides, Hot Air (Saint Paul Bureau)

The outcome of the top of the race was never in much doubt; Conservative Republican John F. Nguyen won his second term as governor of Minnesota.  The Nguyen/Moss ticket’s 56% majority was two points stronger than the election-eve Rasmussen/Hajib/Lepkowitz poll predicted, indicating that the generation-old conservative powerhouse in Minnesota politics continues unabated.

The only real question was would the DFL – at one time Minnesota’s dominant, supermajority party – hold on to second-party status. 

“We think the results are more optimistic for us than some predicted”, said State DFL Chairbeing Starfish Bronkhorst-Rabbit, referring to a late prediction on the ultra-left HuffingtonPod that “the ground will open up and swallow the DFL”. 

But the results still don’t bode well.  The statewide votes for all Legislative, Constitutional and Local offices, according to the Secretary of State’s office, broke out like this:

GOP: 51%
Independence Party:  19%
Democrat/Farmer/Labor:  16%
La Raza USA: 14%

Bronkhorst-Rabbit is undeterred.  “I think we’re well-positioned for a comeback.  I think Minnesota is more ready than it’s been in years for the DFL’s message”.

Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota isn’t so sure.  “Look – the DFL finished third behind the conservative GOP, the pragmo-moderate Independence Party, and barely ahead of the ultra-social-conservative, pro-legal-immigration, hardline-anti-illegal La Raza.  That says something; that the party of Hubert Humphrey isn’t what it used to be.”

“I think the DFL faces two big questions.  First:  do the people of Minnesota still want a party whose platform of returning to the long-rejected Factory School model, economic shrinkage, a state parliament, institutionalized state guilt, catch-and-release sentencing, unrestricted immigration, socialized medicine, union featherbedding and open-ballot intimidation, and forced reparations to gays, the handicapped and the mentally ill in power?  And, second, given that the party’s entire base of support is concentrated in the third through fifth tiers of suburbs, and is nonexistent in the inner city and outstate Minnesota, will they even be able to retain major-party status?

Duffy Shabazz, four-term GOP representative from Thief River Falls, agrees.  “Given that they barely even beat La Raza in their own former home turf, really, what future is there for the DFL?”

The biggest question for many DFL rank-and-file, today, is “how did we get to this point?”

How, indeed?

With that in mind, I’m going to devote some time on this blog to a series, “Minnesota 2050”, in which we will look back on the next 42 years of Minnesota history.  And while this look will be both satirical and speculative, I’m correct in pointing out that all of my frighteningly accurate predictions started out as satirical swags.

Shot in the Dark – blurring the line between satire and secular prophecy for 78 months. 

As we noted yesterday, there’s a bit of a foreclosure and vacant home crisis in Saint Paul. And while having 1993 registered vacant homes in a stock of about 115,000 residential buildings is a crisis by any measure, the fact that they are (so far) so heavily concentrated in some of the city’s lower-income neighborhoods – Frogtown and the North End, as well as the East Side’s Dayton’s Bluff, Swede Hollow and Payne-Phalen neighborhoods – is its most visible consequence so far. And that’s just the registered ones. It’s likely there are hundreds more that aren’t in the system yet.
A bus ride down Thomas Avenue in Frogtown, or a bike ride down Front Street between Western and Rice, takes you past rows of blue “Vacant Building” placards taped to front doors. It’s depressing.

So how does the city plan to respond?

It went past pretty much without notice. The Saint Paul City Council adopted ordinance 07-1194 4 (“Green Sheet” number 3046791) at its June 25 meeting. It passed unanimously. It went pretty nearly un-covered in the media, and escaped notice elsewhere.

Including by me. While I live in Saint Paul, and am among the thin film of Republicans who tries to keep the hard-left City Council  honest, it’s one never-ending job among many.

But I got an email last week about this. I cited the writer yesterday – he’ll remain anonymous for now, as the information comes from his wife, and she’d like to remain under the radar.

Ordinance 07-1194 4 is the city’s response to the vacant building crisis. My emailer writes:

There are three categories of buildings: cat 1 is pretty good shape (350 of them); cat 2 needs work (1400 of them); cat 3 is pretty tough (200 of them).

None of these houses can be occupied without City permission. Cat 1 is simple – pay a fee and you’re in business. Cat 2 and 3 is tougher – pay a fee, develop a rehab plan, make a deposit to cover inspections, develop a timetable to get the work done. Oh, and you can’t live there while you work on it, the place has no Certificate of Occupancy.

What does this mean?

So it’s not clear that you, as owner, can do the work since you’re not the owner-occupant. You certainly have to pay to live somewhere else while you work on the place, you may have to hire contractors who have the special City-issued licenses to work in St. Paul and yes, that means they charge more.

You might be thinking “no biggie”. You’d be thinking wrong. We’re not talking a coat of paint and and some Murphy Soap here:

Here’s where the new ordinance comes in. When the City says it wants you to bring your vacant building up to code, they mean ALL codes. Building code for wall stud spacing (rip off the siding to add studs, then replace siding). Energy code (rip open the walls to insulate, replace windows and appliances). Wiring code (replace old wires with new plastic-coated wires pulled through the walls to the outlets). Plumbing code: replace lead or galvanized plumbing with copper or PVC. Building code: tear off shingles and lay new plywood to cover gaps in roof boards before reshingling. Jackup the floors to level them. Re-landscape for drainage.

Expensive?

I’ve seen the work order – it’s more expensive than building a new house because you have all the demo work first.

You might be thinking “So what? We make sure we have decent housing stock”.

Well, perhaps not so much.

If the city seriously makes all the Cat 2 and 3 houses go through this, who’s going to pay for it? The foreclosing lenders? They’re not stupid. They already know they’re upside down on those houses, that’s why they took them back in foreclosure. Throw in another $50,000 of repairs before the lenders can sell the foreclosed houses, and the lenders would be complete fools to bother.

So what is the motivation behind the new ordinance?  I mean, everyone can agree on sticking it to the lenders that got us into this mess in the first place – right?
More on Monday.

(Read the whole series: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

The American gun control movement has looked at the UK, among others, as a living demonstration of the benefits of a soft-on-criminals approach to crime, including a near-total civilian gun ban.

And, as UK violent crime rates zoomed even with and beyond US rates, it might help explain why US gun control efforts have abated for the moment.

But I digress.

One of the worst aspects of British law in recent years is a disposition to punish homeowners for injuring burgars and robbers; in a few high-profile cases, citizens have been prosecuted and jailed for attacking burglars and robbers.

In the act.

On their own property.

That might be changing.  Sort of.

They will be able to use force against criminals who break into their homes or attack them in the street without worrying that “heat of the moment” misjudgements could see them brought before the courts.

Under new laws police and prosecutors will have to assess a person’s actions based on the person’s situation “as they saw it at the time” even if in hindsight it could be seen as unreasonable.

For example, homeowners would be able stab or shoot a burglar if confronted or tackle them and use force to detain them until police arrive. Muggers could be legally punched and beaten in the street or have their own weapons used against them.

However, attacking a fleeing criminal with a weapon is not permitted nor is lying in wait to ambush them.

The new laws follow a growing public campaign for people to be given the right to defend themselves and their own homes in the wake of a number of high profile cases.

It’s not an academic problem:

In 2000, Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer, was sent to prison for manslaughter for shooting an intruder in his home.

Earlier this year, Tony Singh, a shopkeeper, found himself facing a murder charge after he defended himself against an armed robber who tried to steal his takings. During the struggle the robber received a single fatal stab wound to the heart with his own knife.

There seems to be at least some recognition that self-defense is both a human instinct and not necessarily something that happens with a lot of legalistic intellectual parsing:

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said that people would be protected legally if they defend themselves “instinctively”; they fear for their own safety or that of others; and the level of force used is not excessive or disproportionate.

It’s a start.

If only the Minnesota legislature could do so well.

Our new stadium deal stinks? Nick, we knew that already and as much as I loathe linking to your tripe, you may have a point (albeit a bit late) here.

Our ill-gotten stadium will be a flop without a roof once the novelty wears off, and now it appears the weather may be the least of the Twin’s environmental bogies.

With ‘facility’ next door – so much for new ballpark smell

Don’t say “garbage burner.”

“It’s not a garbage burner,” says Glenn Schmidt, chief engineer at the plant, which burns 1,000 tons of, um, “waste” daily. “It’s Energy From Waste.”

“Facility,” adds maintenance supervisor Jeff Johnson: “Energy From Waste Facility.'”

I met them after I hiked around the stadium Wednesday to check out a tip that “the facility” was giving off the kind of smell you encounter when someone “dies” while using your facilities.

In other words, it wasn’t good. And it really wouldn’t be good if a national TV audience saw us holding our noses.

It was 85 degrees and windy — a typical summer day — as I perambulated the area. It didn’t smell good to me, but I have a big smeller, so maybe I was pulling in a scent cloud from a turkey plant near Willmar. I asked people I met along the way how it smelled to them. Some were catching a big whiff. Others, just a sniff.

“It stinks like mildewing filth,” said Jennifer Dixon, 36, who was waiting on 7th Street with her husband, Mike, and their children to catch a No. 22 bus. “I don’t think people at a ballgame are gonna like it.”

Slate