To: Rep. Kim Norton, Rep. Heather Martens, et al
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Your Sources
All,
Don’t say I never did anything for you. This is as good as any case you’ve ever made:
Feel free to just cut the crap and quote this at will.
That is all.
Mark Kennedy – former Representative for Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, and a longtime friend of this blog and the NARN – has been named president of the University of North Dakota.
Congratulations!
Carls Junior / Hardees corporate HQ flees California for Tennessee.
Yes, we know that CKE’s official line is that the firm is relocating because it has less need for office space as it consolidates operations. But the company executives say this with a wink. Tax savings are a big factor, as is the stifling regulatory environment on the left coast, where businesses are treated like villains and rich people as cash dispensers for big government programs. It’s not a coincidence that CKE’s CEO Andy Puzder has been one of the leading critics of high taxes and onerous rules in Washington D.C. and Sacramento.
The next time some liberal hamster asks “what’s the matter with Kansas?”, one might respond “the usual. What’s the matter with California?”
The state legislative group ALEC finds in its latest “Rich States, Poor States” rating of the states on business climate that California ranks 44th of all the states in business competitiveness. California has lost roughly 9,000 companies over the last decade, with most of them moving to Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Last year, in a major loss, Toyota moved its North American headquarters from the Golden State to North Texas.
And that’s just the headquarters – although with many small-to-medium companies, the HQ and the production/distribution/retail is all under one roof.
But with bigger companies?
Minnesota liberals love to hide behind the fact that the Twin Cities is home to a lot of Fortune 1000 companies. The part they omit (or don’t understand) is that the Headquarters – with its staffs of senior executives and high-level technocrats, with their taste for the lifestyle and ameniities and central location of major metro hubs like the Twin cities – is a small part of the organization.
Quick – when was the last time 3M or Ecolab built a manufacturing or distribution facility in Minnesota?
(Don’t use Target for an example; it manufactures nothing. It’s employees are all white-collar headquarters workers, and red-collar service employees out in the retail world).
But when things get bad enough? Even the headquarters staff can move – or, as 3M did during the tax-happy Perpich and Carlson eras, start thinning out the central HQ and moving people to Austin.
Another Good Guy with a Gun saves a life:
The suspect first tried to attack the customer and then went after a clerk behind the counter, wounding him in the stomach, the sheriff’s office said…The shooting will be investigated, and the case will be sent to a prosecutor to determine if charges should be filed against the shooter.
Tickets will be punched:
King County Sheriff Sgt. Cindi West told NBC News that “during the initial investigation we did not see any wrongdoing on the part of the citizen who shot.”
But the sheriff did make one important side note:
“In fact, he may have prevented the clerk from being killed or seriously injured,” she said.
A good guy on the scene with a gun; if you don’t happen to have a cop on the premises, it’s just about the best response to crime there is.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Excellent recap of Minnesota self-defense law. Crappy facts.
joe doakes
Which is one “excellent” better than you’re gonna get from anyone in the Twin Cities media.
Macalester – at $47,195 a year – has made the list of colleges where alumni earn less than high school grads.
Now, to some extent these rankings are misleading; students’ earning potential is whatever they decide it’s going to be.
Provided they don’t think waving a degree about and saying “I want a job in my field” is the way to do it.
Which, given the number of International Victimization Studies majors Mac turns out, may be a bigger problem than most places.
To: The City Pages
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: You Suck
Dear “City Pages”,
While you’ve always been a freebie hipster lifestyle ‘zine, you used to have some great writing. Thirty years ago, you were the home of Lileks and Jim DeRogatis.
Twenty years ago, led by Steve Perry, you had some great journalism – as in, some of the best reporting in the Twin Cities. And as smugly left-of-center as you’ve always been, you surprised us; under Perry’s watch, you were the first newspaper in town to fairly and accurately cover the Concealed Carry debate. I said so at the time, and I say it now – kudos.
Twenty years ago.
Today, though?
Just saying – this kind of fratboy drunk-Facebooking pablum would have been laughed out of my high school newspaper. And this piece here might legitimately make someone wonder if the City Pages is getting money, directly or indirectly, from Bloomberg (more tomorrow).
Speaking of which – is City Pages getting money from Bloomberg?
It’s almost, but not quite, a Berg’s Law; whenever you think the City Pages can’t get any dumber, it will get dumber.
That is all.
The following post is going to sound kinda conspiracy-theory-ish. That makes me a little queasy – but hear it out.
The headlines over the weekend were all about Trump.
As in, all of them. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, even Hillary and Bernie, could barely buy a headline; as they used to say, they “couldn’t get arrested”…
…which, for one of the candidates, is suddenly not such a quaint expression.
And while Republicans more or less dropped the “Trump is really a stealth Democrat” meme a long time ago, this weekend started me wondering.
Lesser Of Three Goods: Let’s say for the moment that Trump is a sincere Republicans. As we’ve seen, he’s also the Republican that Hillary would rather face (assuming the polls are legitimate). They keep the focus on him,
So anything that helps Trump to the nomination, presuming the polls are legit, benefits Hillary.
Distracted: When was the last time you heard anyone outside the conservative alt-media talking about Hillary’s email server, much less Benghazi?
Follow The Money: The “protests” have largely been associated with Bernie Sanders’ supporters…
…but have gotten ample financial support from the cabal of liberal plutocrats and their shills that’ve been working for Hillary Clinton for nearly 20 years, now?
Connect The Dots, People: So the “protests” simultaneously promote a candidate the Democrats would prefer to face, starve the dangerous ones of media coverage during the heart of primary season, keep the media’s attention off of the marching band of skeletons banging on drums in Hillary’s closet, and provide a couple of layers of separation between Hillary and the protesters, even providing another entire campaign to blame if needed?
I mean, yes, it sounds all Art Bell-y – but isn’t that the beauty of it?
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!
Today on the show,
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
Yesterday was Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day – where Real Minnesotans came together to lobby their legislators to pass Second-Amendment-friendly legislation, and shun the stupid bills that Michael Bloomberg is paying for.
And since the legislature was busy talking about all the bills they were introducing, the other side – to the extent you could call it that – was also at the Capitol.
Let’s compare and contrast.
The Herd: Here is the “group” from the pro-slavery group “Moms Want Action”. 
Count ’em. That’s 26 people. And most of them were being paid, directly (DFL pols, people on the Bloomberg payroll) or indirectly (cops representing the Police Chiefs Assocation) to be there.
If one-third of the people in that photo above were not present for vocational reasons, and being compensated in some way for their time, I’d be amazed.
In other words, at the most Moms Want Action drew eight “activists”. And that’s being generous.
Drone photo courtesy Dustin Doyle
The Pack: Meanwhile at the foot of the Capitol Mall, there was a different crowd – distinguisted by being an actual crowd. It was GOCRA’s “MNGOLD” group – or as the sensible refer to them, the “Real Americans”.
I was proud and honored, by the way, to have been invited to be the Master of Ceremonies. We were joined by an array of speakers, each of them authorities in their area of the issue; Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt (who pledged a lonely death for all of Bloomberg’s bills this session), Oleg Volk (who talked about life without freedom in his native USSR), Rep. Jim Nash, a second-Amendment leader in the House, Professor Joe Olson, the longtime leader of GOCRA, as well as GOCRA president Andrew Rothman and Rep. Tony Cornish, who noted “a bill won’t get passed if it never comes up for a hearing” – which, in his committee, none ever will.
I counted about 170 people – mostly younger, almost exclusively working people, outdoors in temperatures that hovered below 40 degrees as the rally started, taking a few hours off from their mostly private-sector jobs to come and fight for freedom; most of the crowd, clad in their maroon GOCRA t-shirts, went straight in to the Capitol to buttonhole their legislators and let them know the votes they expected (and to thank the good ones for the pro-freedom votes they made, if applicable).
And not a single one of them was there because it was their job (other than the state’s NRA rep).
That is, conservatively (how else) about seven times the crowd of unemployed/underemployed wannabe social justice warriors and other layabouts that came out to work toward your enslavement. Or more like 20:1, if you just count people there voluntarily.
If it’d been a Saturday – or a vital hearing – the odds would have been 2-3 times as strongly in the Real Americans’ favor.
Welcome to hell, pro-slavery activists.
Trump tanking in polls against Clinton, Sanders. Any of the other three GOP candidates looks good, at this point (although I suspect Kasich’s solid showing is more related to the fact that nobody knows him).
Earlier this week, we wrote about the story of a Hmong man on the East Side of Saint Paul who was beaten badly by a crowd of youths. The attack ended when the man’s wife came out of the house with her gun (and her carry permit).
Kudos to WCCO for being the sole news outlet that didn’t bury the lede.
Come on out to B52 Burgers and Brew in Inver Grove tonight for the AM1280 The Patriot debate party!
Brad Carlson and I will be there. We’ll be giving away prizes (including tickets to the AM1280 The Patriot birthday party, which is coming right up here)
How do you get there? Simple; it’s at 5639 Bishop Ave. Inver Grove Heights, MN 55076. Prefer a map? Here you go:
Did someone say burgers? They did win a best burgers in the Twin Cities contest, after all. Don’t try and argue with me about it – come out out and check ’em out for yourself!
Come on down to the Capitol (lower mall) today at noon for Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day.
There’ll be a few speakers – I’m MCing – but the important part is each of you. The whole idea is this; we, the people, are going to head into the Capitol and lobby our legislators to support good gun bills, and oppose the stupid ones.
This has a huge effect on the legislature. Having hundreds of the good guys in their maroon Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) T-shirts, all over the place really starts a few of ’em thinking (especially when they compare the crowds to the pathetic drizzle of nattering crones who show up for ProtectMN, Code Pink and Moms Want Action rallies).
So I do hope to see you down there.
High noon!
TANGENTIAL QUESTION: I wonder how much street crime there’ll be around this rally?
Saint Paul’s social justice mafia is baying for blood again.
A Saint Paul teacher, Theo Olson, made a perfectly legitimate observation:
“Black Lives Matter” of Saint Paul is threatening to – you guessed it – “close down” Como High School over the posting.
(Note to BLM; if you are a one trick pony, eventually people get bored with that one trick. It might pay to learn a new one. Just saying).
Now, if you’ve read this blog, you know I’m no huge fan of the public school system. I’ve got my reasons. I don’t cut public schools, least of all the SPPS, a whole lot of slack.
But Olson’s right.
And this is another example of a particularly ugly form of anti-intellectual know-nothingism that’s sweeping ” progressive” circles in “progressive” cesspools like Saint Paul; shaming and attacking and calling “racist” the very act of questioning BLM.
For any reason!
At all!
Of course, the SPPS’ leadership will be too pusillanimous to react as it should. It’s sort of baked into their organizational DNA.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Just returned from a trip where I met a couple from Canada, dairy farmers who milk 150 head. They couldn’t understand why Americans would support Sanders.
It seems the political party that dominated their province was conservative until a “Tax The Rich Corporations” party won and raised corporate taxes in order to lighten the load on the middle class. Corporations are rich, they’re not stupid, so they moved out, taking their jobs with them, leaving a budget shortfall that required raising taxes on the middle class, who are now worse off because greed blinded their common sense.
Gee, where have I heard that one before?
Joe Doakes
We have a generation of voters who don’t remember the lessons of socialism in Eastern Europe.
Or Cuba.
Or Argentina.
Or Western Europe in the ’60s and ’70s (and coming back for an encore now)
Or India through the seventies, when it almost starved itself back to the 1600s.
Or Africa,’til today.
Or Venezuela in the past 20 years.
Other than that…
East-side Saint Paul man jumped by group of teen thugs stabbed in the eye with a stick, missing being blinded by mere millimeters.
The attack took place in an alley behind Geranium Avenue, near Payne Avenue. “When I got hit, I got dazed a little and fell to my knees, but I got up and continued to fight off my attackers,” Chang said.
Chang shouted to his sister-in-law, who had been in the vehicle with him and locked herself inside, to phone his wife and ask her to come out of the home with a gun.
Both Chang and his wife have permits to carry, and she came outside with a gun, Chang said. The attackers ran off.
I read these stories – gangs of youths roaming the neighborhoods, beating people to within an inch of their lives, like Ray Widstrand a couple of years ago – and wonder when the left will start to apply their old warhorse, “if it saves one life…”.
There’s one, right here.
One would have to search hard to find the tiny village of Columbus, New Mexico on a map in the modern era. It wouldn’t have been any easier on March 9th, 1916.
The quiet hamlet on the Mexican/American border had grown in recent years thanks to the train stop, adding a general store, a saloon and even a school, in addition to several hundred new residents. Signs of the village’s growth were everywhere as four new hotels sprang up and even a local newspaper. Guarded by a few hundred soldiers, Columbus probably felt as safe as any location in the United States.
The sounds of gunshots and battle cries surprised both civilian and soldier alike. Cutting through the cold desert night, 500 Mexican guerrillas loyal to famed rebel Pancho Villa, (or Villistas, as they were known) had invaded the village, pillaging and shooting anything they could. Desperate for supplies in their long-running war against Mexican authorities, Villa and his men had mistakenly been told the village was all but unprotected (rumors persist into the modern era that Villa had come to Columbus to buy guns from an American arms dealer). Instead, 270 U.S. soldiers, and several Hotchkiss M1909 Benét–Mercié machine guns, lay just over the border. By the time dawn broke, Columbus had been burnt to the ground, with at least 90 Villistas, 8 U.S. soldiers, and 10 U.S. civilians dead. Elements of Columbus’ garrison defied orders and chased Villa 15 miles into Mexico, killing a few more of his men.
The United States had resisted entering Europe’s war, even amid hundreds of American casualties. But blood had been spilled on American soil from across the Mexican border – and not for the first time. America was going to war in Mexico.
—
Pancho Villa (middle) and Gen. John J. Pershing (right) in 1913. A young George S. Patton looms over Pershing’s shoulder
The turbulent political background in Mexico had seen an ever-changing series of alliances, with the United States intermittently intervening and then withdrawing, unwilling and/or uninterested in creating permanent relationships with the variety of figures and governments in Mexico since 1910. Despite a sizable American military presence on the border, rebels continued to cross into the U.S., trading fire and casualties. Coupled with political paralysis from Washington, which dithered between antagonizing Mexico and trying to quell the violence, the situation on the border had significantly deteriorated by the beginning of 1916. (more…)
Posting will likely be pretty light today. Blech.
It’s gonna be a big week.
MNGOLD: Don’t forget – Thursday is “Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day” at the Capitol.
Come on down to the Capitol Mall. There’ll be a quick (it’s warm, but not that warm) rally outside. Then we’ll go in and talk with our legislators, and tell them – and show them – that we, the Real Americans of the Second Amendment human rights movement, are here, and we vote, and we’re not going away.
Debate!: Brad Carlson and I will be out at B52 Burgers and Brew in Inver Grove Heights for our final debate party of the season. The burgers are amazing, by the way. Come on out and hang out with a few dozen of your closest friends. We’ll be giving away tickets to the AM1280 Birthday Bash, too!
A story from Kentucky is the usual kind of dog bites man piece that keeps internet news services in the chips; a couple was busted for getting their freak on in clear view of a Hardee’s drive-in in the town of Harlan.
But the wording of the story has me scratching my head (emphasis added):
The couple’s vehicle, a police citation notes, was parked next to the drive-thru lane, in full view of customers waiting to order Hardee’s favorites like the loaded breakfast burrito or the smoked sausage biscuit.
Fanciful/sloppy story editing? Or product placement run amok?
As Kevin Williamson points out in the NR, much of what made this nation great and exceptional in the first place was the fact that we tempered democracy with many un-democratic, and even some anti-democratic, features – the filibuster, checks and balances, and of course, the most anti-democratic notion of all, “inalienable rights endowed to us by our creator”.
The idea was to moderate the depredations of the majority.
And the “political party” was one of the influences that moderated the passion of the mob. And with all their faults, they worked pretty well in American party politics. Until “democracy” took over.
It is a little ironic that at the very moment when railing against the “establishment” of either party is so very fashionable, the parties are in fact shells of what they once were. To the extent that there is a Republican-party establishment, it plainly does not have the power to, e.g., call down anathema upon a potential Republican-party presidential nominee. The day before yesterday, Marco Rubio was the anti-establishment, tea-party insurgent; today he is the establishment, if the doggie-treat salesmen on the radio are to be believed. If that leads you to believe that the word “establishment” does not actually mean anything, you are correct.
Williamson echoes a point I’ve been making (emphasis added):
It was democracy that did the parties in, of course. One of the harebrained progressive reforms foisted upon our republic is the so-called open primary, which amounts to something close to the abolition of political parties as such. If anybody can vote in the Republican primary — Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, independent, etc. — then membership in the party does not mean very much, and, hence, the party itself does not mean very much. Instead of two main political parties, we have two available channels for the communication of populist spite; the parties themselves are mere conveniences for political entrepreneurs and demagogues. Trump might as easily have run as a Democrat — he is a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, and he raves about the wonderful things the butchers at Planned Parenthood do — but the opening was more attractive on the R side.
Parties in their classic form did a decent job of moderating the mob. Not perfect – perfection is anathema to freedom, anyway – but decent.
It’s time to drop caucuses and go to a closed primary.
At this past weekend’s Democrat candidates’ debate, Bernie Sanders testily shushed Hillary when she tried to interrupt him:
“If you are talking about the Wall Street bailout, where some of your friends destroyed this economy…” Sanders began.
“You know…” Clinton interjected.
“Excuse me, I’m talking,” Bernie stopped her.
“If you’re gonna talk, tell the whole story, Senator Sanders,” she shot back.
“Let me tell my story. You tell yours,” he retorted.
Policy-wise? Who cares.
Etiquette-wise? I could give the old duffer a big hug.
One of the biggest critters on my peeve farm lately is the sense of entitlement some people bring to interrupting others. Of course, interrupting ones’ subordinates has always been a way to pee on your tree to establish corporate pecking order – but I’ve noticed in recent years it’s been moving down the corporate food chain. People seem to feel more entitled to just interject whenever they feel like it. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake – thinking you see a hole in the conversation where there isn’t one (sheepishly raises hand). With others, it’s that they just don’t care that you’re talking, and they want the floor. Now.
Incredibly, and utterly predictably, Clinton’s partisans are calling Sanders “sexist” for his response.
Of course they are. What else could they say?
If there’s a person in this world who can not, not now, not ever, complain about being the victim of sexism on any level, ever, it’s Hillary Clinton. She is arguably the most powerful woman in America (possibly tied with Oprah); she’s part of the 1% of the 1%. If there is a woman in America who never needs to worry about being overpowered by the evil male, it’s Hillary.
It is, indeed, Hillary’s defenders who are being the sexists; Clinton walked over an unspoken societal rule (and a pet peeve of mine!), and got what she (and anyone) deserved.
Women – especially immensely powerful and wealthy ones – dealing with natural consequences of their adult actions. What a concept.
When/if the police finally catch the person responsible for this shooting, at the corner of my neighborhood on Saturday night, what do you suppose the odds are that he bought the gun at a gun show, or from a law-abiding citizen in any location?
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