I’ve run by far the most, er, liberal comment policy among Minnesota bloggers with traffic in my general weight class ever since I started carrying comments in 2002.

I ask for civility, as a general rule – but don’t require it, or at least not to a pollyanna-ish extent.  Don’t get too pointlessly inflammatory, and don’t go too far off topic, and we’ll get along just fine.

Unlike many blogs in my general traffic class, I don’t censor comments, and I don’t block commenters that I find annoying, to say nothing of those that try to challenge me.

I welcome commenters who disagree with me – indeed, encourage them. In the history of this blog, I think I’ve actually banned a grand total of half a dozen commenters – none of them for disagreeing with me, or even being jerks about it.

However, the comment section has a goal; to serve as a forum for discussion.  Which is to say, discussion of the topics I write about.

By extension, this means two things:

• By discussion, I mean a two-way dialog.  Not repeatedly, constantly, very deliberately, dropping comments and running away without any further discussion, as if my comment section is your personal blog space.  It’s not.  You want a place to drop your comments without further comment?  Get your own blog, and build your own audience.
• By the topics I write about, I mean “in relation to the posts I’m writing about”.   Now, I don’t mind the occasional thread-jack; sometimes they lead me to a topic I’d have missed otherwise.  But some thread-jacks just say “I don’t want to talk about what you’re writing about; I want to talk about what I want to talk about”.  Which is your prerogative – on your own blog.   Go out to Blogger.com or Tumblr or WordPress and start building your own audience.  It’s harder than it looks.

So I’m changing policies;  the following behavior will wind up with the commenter getting put in the moderation queue:

• Commenters who make a habit of leaving comments without discussing them, ever
• Repeated thread-jacking with an intent to turn the comment section into the commenter’s publication space.

When posts go in the moderation queue, they stay there until the offender contacts me to work things out.

I’m sorry it’s come to this.

A longtime reader of this blog writes regarding this post, by Joe Doakes:

To correct the record, Pillsbury United Communities is a nonprofit that is not connected to the Pillsbury brand owned by General Mills. It was founded by the Pillsbury family in 1905: https://www.puc-mn.org/about/history

It’s more analogous to the Ford Foundation vs Ford Motor Company.

This was apparently in response to Joe’s remark “Pillsbury Doughboy wants to give me a free assault rifle.  How can I turn that down?”.  

It would be more accurate to say “A bunch of left-leaning plutocrats want to provide us an opportunity to out-bid the city and themselves on some potentially useful hardware”.

We apologize for the error.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

First Quarter GDP revised down to 0.8% and second quarter revised down to 1.2%.  The economy is flat.

 And that’s if you believe these revised numbers are accurate information instead of political propaganda for the election year.

 Joe Doakes

Like any of Obama’s policy declarations, job and GDP numbers have shelf lives.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – I’ll be filling in for Brad Carlson, who’s off on assignment today.

I’l be on from 2-3PM today this afternoon.  We’ll be talking Berg’s 11th Law, and the new generation of gaslighting.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally heard on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Bill Reichert is running for Hennepin County Commission.

Greg Ryan is running for US Congress in CD4 – Saint Paul, Ramsey and part of Washington Counties.

Tom Emmer is the incumbent Representative in the Sixth CD.

Jason Lewis is running to replace John Kline in Minnesota’s Second CD.

And today’s ♫ playlist:

Mitch Berg Show Playlist- 08/06/16- #NARN ♫ https://t.co/xY01aOlF6s

— NARN (@NARNShow) August 6, 2016

To:  Donald Trump
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:   Doyyy

Mr. Trump,

I started disliking your public persona thirty years ago.   While I’m told you are a perfectly fine human being in person, your public persona – the garish extravagant gaudiness, the constant noise – was always off-putting. Still is.

Now, this time a year ago I was a Scott Walker supporter.  And I still am.  If there were a way to get him into the race (and lamentably, there is not), Shrillary would get pounded like a piece of cheap steak.

But that’s neither here nor there.  Because here we are.

Anyway – I’m not one of the #NeverTrump crowd, if only because crowds annoy me.  The idea of Hillary Clinton nominating SCOTUS justices should terrify everyone who cares about the Bill of Rights.   And the Libertarian ticket isn’t an option (forget about the Greens).

So I don’t like your persona – but I don’t vote for personas.  I don’t like what your campaign has done to the GOP, but then the GOP has been frustrating lately, too.  And I don’t like the way you’re running this campaign, but then it’s your campaign, not mine.

But this?  This is just plain stupid.

You’ll help NATO countries if they’ve “paid their way?”

What’s this tell you?

The NATO members in the most immediate danger from Russia – the Poles and Estonians – are taking their defense pretty seriously.  Latvia and Lithuania are coming around (both have increased their spending in 2016 – Latvia’s spending is actually up 50% in the past two years).

And can you think of four nations that have “spent” more freedom in the past 30 years that those four?  Not just in terms of budget, but in terms of actually resisting tyranny?

No, I don’t imagine you can.

Think about it, Mr. Trump.

That is all.

I’ve been looking for the perfect word to describe the cultural left’s most noxious rhetorical habit.   At times, I’d despaired of ever finding it.

But Wendy McElroy pretty well nails it.

The term “kafkatrapping” describes a logical fallacy that is popular within gender feminism, racial politics and other ideologies of victimhood. It occurs when you are accused of a thought crime such as sexism, racism or homophobia. You respond with an honest denial, which is then used as further confirmation of your guilt. You are now trapped in a circular and unfalsifiable argument; no one who is accused can be innocent because the structure of kafkatrapping precludes that possibility.

The term derives from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in which a nondescript bank clerk named Josef K. is arrested; no charges are ever revealed to the character or to the reader. Josef is prosecuted by a bizarre and tyrannical court of unknown authority and he is doomed by impenetrable red tape. In the end, Josef is abducted by two strange men and inexplicably executed by being stabbed through the heart. The Trial is Kafka’s comment on totalitarian governments, like the Soviet Union, in which justice is twisted into a bitter, horrifying parody of itself and serves only those in charge.

I run into this all the time.  I rebuke and mock it without mercy.  Now I can do it by name.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I have a dilemma. 

 On one hand, I hate to support gun buy-back programs because they’re a waste of money on feel-good foolishness that will have absolutely no effect on crime.  This one is especially idiotic because the sponsor – Pillsbury – plans to turn the guns into “art” which means there’s also a subsidy to some “artist” to produce junk nobody would ever pay to see.

 On the other hand, I have an old .22 pistol that I bought for $100 and rarely use; they’ll give me $200 for it at the buy-back.  There might be other impulse buys and relics in the gun safe.  I could free up shelf space at higher-than-market prices and use the money to buy a gun I really want.

The Pillsbury Doughboy wants to give me a free assault rifle.  How can I turn that down? 

 It’s a dilemma.

 Joe Doakes

It’s tempting.  Oh, yes, it is.

…to the clueless; Chicago – the city with all the gun control that “ProtectMN” and Michael Bloomberg want (with the possible exception of “the disarmament of everyone else”) is seeing violence at a record clip:

July 2016 was the “deadliest July in 10 years” for heavily gun-controlled Chicago: Sixty-five individuals were shot and killed.
Moreover, according to the Chicago Tribune, such death figures do not set a new record — they simply tie a record set in 2006, when 65 individuals were killed in the month of July. This brings Chicago’s homicide total to “nearly 400” for the first seven months of 2016 alone. The number of homicides for the whole year of 2015 was 490.

“Assault weapons” are banned.  It’s exceptionally difficult for a law-abiding citizen to get a carry permit (although two of them have prevented mass shootings in the past couple of years alone); gun stores are essentially banned.   There is no way to measure the ratio of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to criminals, but it has to be among the lowest in the country.

This is the world Nancy Nord Bence wants to bring you.

Artificially-high minimum wages affect black teens disproportionally.

A friend of the blog writes:

Last week, I saw this article from MPR .  

I admit to being somewhat old fashioned and probably judge everyone too harshly. However, I do think that there are some social norms and expected behavior that should be followed if one seeks respect and success in life. Basic social norms like speaking respectfully to each other, dressing appropriately for the situation,  respecting other people’s property come to mind, and being accountable for one’s own actions come to mind. But, in terms of treating some people more harshly than others, I’m just not seeing the same results as MPR.

If a black student disrupts a classroom, or punches a teacher,  we’re asked not to hold him accountable. The white teacher had to have been racist. If black people get stopped by police, for minor offenses, and the situation escalates more than it would for a white person who is stopped, we’re asked not to consider the black person’s prior history or the person’s approach and interaction with the officer. That would be a racist thing to do.

If we question a woman’s choice of skimpy attire, we’re “slut shaming.” If we question a woman’s judgment and how that might affect her ability to lead the country, we’re not given answers or any hint of accountability.  Instead, we’re call sexist for asking these questions.

On the other hand, if a white man is running for Republican president, hold him accountable for everything. How he travels with his dog. His former hiring and firing practices. The remarks he makes on Twitter. His public opinions. His private opinions.  

Now, I am ok with holding Trump accountable for many of the things he says and does. He isn’t meeting my standard for how a President should act. But, unlike what the MPR article noted in their study, I am not seeing Clinton being held to a higher ethical standard. And I don’t want her held to a higher standard, but the same standard would be a good starting point. If black lives matter and women are equal, then we all need to be accountable for what we say, what we do, how we dress. 

I recall hearing the interview that the writer is talking about.  I think it tracks with our entire society putting women on pedestals, at least in an ideal world; they start out as “sugar and spice and everything nice”, and grow up into a life of being revered as mothers, wise grandmas, the whole cultural shebang.

At any rate, the whole thing is worth a read/listen.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is hilarious.  Trump asking Russia “If you hacked Hillary’s private email server, will you give the FBI copies of the stuff she deleted?”  

 Hey, they need it to complete their investigation, right?  What, are Democrats against law and order?

 This is genius.  It forces everyone to recall that Hillary ran a private server for official government business, that she deleted emails instead of giving them to our own government, and that her carelessness probably enabled Russia to see her emails including anything that was classified. 

This forces Hillary’s campaign onto the defensive and robs her of momentum.   And it threatens Hillary with the possibility that stuff she believed safely deleted might come to light so she must prepare the battle-space for that possibility, which further distracts her from campaigning.

 Glenn Reynolds comments: “Troll Level: Supreme Galactic Overlord.”  All of that.

Joe Doakes

Never thought I’d find something to admire about Trump – but here we go.

“Why are you gun fondlers so paranoid”, the snarky but uninformed “gun safety” parrots chant in smug unison.  “Why do you oppose universal background checks?”

“It’s ‘Human Rights Activist’, you closet commie” I gently correct them.  “And it’s because while the same criminals who aren’t going through background checks now aren’t going to start when they become ‘universal’, it will be used to compile a list of gun owners”.

“Pshaw”, they say, which surprises me, since I haven’t heard the word “pshaw” since I watched a Ma and Pa Kettle short when I was a little kid.  “That’s just paranoid”.

And I respond “As usual, at best, you’re uninformed, and at worst, you’re lying“.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the go-to federal oversight agency, conducted an audit of ATF and found it does not remove certain identifiable information, despite the law explicitly mandating it do so. GAO conducted reviews for four data systems, and concluded at least two of ATF’s systems violated official protocols.

One of the data-collecting systems called Multiple Sales (MS) requires that multiple firearms purchased at once must be reported to ATF by the federal firearms licensee (FFL). ATF policy requires that the bureau internally removes particular data from multiple gun sales reports after two years if the firearm has not been traced to criminal activity. GAO found that ATF does not adhere to its own policy. In fact, “until May 2016, MS contained over 10,000 names that were not consistently deleted within the required 2 years.”

Every bit of information you give government gives government an opportunity to use it against you.

The Strib endorses John Howe for the CD2 congressional seat currently held by John Kline.

Nothing against Howe, who was a capable legislator and an estimable mayor of Red Wing – but this endorsement is a classic example of Berg’s 11th Law:

Berg’s Eleventh Law of Inverse Viability: The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected.

Jason Lewis is the endorsed candidate, with immense name recognition and a record as the father of modern Minnesota conservatism.  Darlene Miller is John Kline’s preferred candidate.  The fourth, the putative Trump-supporting candidate Hey Look At Meeeee, along with Howe, rounds out the field.

I’ll be interviewing Jason Lewis this coming Saturday on the NARN, by the way.

Chicago  has a horrendous murder rate.  Black and brown lives apparently don’t matter down there.

One of the reasons?  Chicago’s US attorney publicly announced that he’s not going to be chasing after “straw dealers” – people who use their clean criminal records to buy guns to resell to criminals.  And so a lot of gang-bangers’ girlfriends and moms and associates are supplying the guns that feed the bloodbath.

Now, Minnesota has both one of the lower murder rates in the country; outside North Minneapolis, our murder rate in 2014 was competitive with the rural west – and a high rate of legal gun ownership outside the hapless metro.

Is Minnesota doing something right?

Well, compared to Chicago, almost everyone is.  But yes:

Amid signs of a rise in illegal firearms trafficking, federal prosecutors in Minnesota have hit on a novel strategy to crack down on gun violence and get shooters off the streets. Instead of prosecuting suspects for murder, where convictions can be difficult to obtain, they charge multiple defendants with conspiracy to buy and possess guns illegally.

The strategy is rooted in the successful prosecution of 11 gang members in 2014, after what authorities called an “all-out shooting gang war” in the Twin Cities. Prosecutors built a conspiracy case that produced 10 guilty pleas and a jury trial conviction of the gang’s leader, Veltrez Black, who was sentenced this spring to 15 years in prison.

Now a Minnesota prosecutor has been asked to share the strategy with Chicago authorities, who are grappling with near nightly volleys of gunfire throughout their city.

Prosecuting criminals to lower crime.

Who’da thunk it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Do Democrats know NOTHING of security?  Now Wikileaks has released their voice-mail messages.

 Drip.

 Drip.

 Drip.

You did see Thirteen Hours, right?

In yet another example of throwing good money after bad, the City of Minneapolis is teaming up with some of their poverty-pimp non-profit friends to host a gun buyback on August 27th, in North and South Minneapolis.

They’ll be offereing Visa gift cards – from $25 for an “antique” to $300 for an “assault weapon”.  The buyback will happen at (Station 14 in north Minneapolis and Station 17 in south Minneapolis).

I’ll let that sink in for a moment as you mark your calenders and locate your ATM cards.

But to add some extra wieselfreude:  there’s public art involved!

Unlike typical gun buybacks, following the August 27 buyback … the weapons will be decommissioned and given to Twin Cities’ artists to create statements about the impact of gun violence in our community.

Building upon the momentum of the national Guns in the Hands of Artists exhibit that PUC recently presented in the Twin Cities, the reclaimed guns will be given to local artists to create statements about the impact of gun violence in our community. This art will be a part of a new campaign called “Art Is My Weapon: a Minnesota Installation of Guns in the Hands of Artists.” A call for artists will be posted soon atwww.ArtIsMyWeapon.com.

And will this ‘art’ be sent to North Minneapolis, where the actual violence is?

Or will this stay in Kenwood and Crocus Hill, like all the other anti-gun protests?

Limbaugh inks another long-term deal with iHeartMedia.

Under the circumstances – the NARN hasn’t quite put me in a position to make a run for Limbaugh’s gig – the timing actually works out well.

It’s an election-year tradition dating back to the glaciers; the media trots out an evangelical/gun owner/businessman who claims to have been a lifelong Republican, but for whatever reason can never ever vote for Reagan/Dubya/McCain/Trump.

And this year it the…

…what?  Hello?

Well, someone at the Virginia paper isn’t getting invited to the Saint Paul Grill at the next media confab.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The President calling on cops to admit they’re racist and the Pioneer Press article on racial disparity in regional park use gave me an inspiration: I plan to spend the weekend observing the customers at Big Daddy’s BBQ at Dale and University.  I strongly suspect that although the percentage of Black people in the United States is only 15%, the percentage of Black customers at a BBQ joint in the heart of a predominantly Black neighborhood will be significantly higher.

In the past, I would have said “Well, duh, it’s the local joint and they have award-winning food so why wouldn’t locals go there” but now that I’ve been educated about disparate impact, I can see it’s a clear case of institutional racism against White people.  I intend to protest this hateful practice until I get my order free.

 I’m having the half-rack of Beef ribs with collard greens and cornbread.  Wanna join me?

 Joe Doakes

I’m in.  See you there.

It reminds me of a story – quite possibly apocryphal – from North Dakota.  Back in the eighties, the Pentagon noted that roughly half of one percent of the population in North Dakota was black.   They sent a letter fo the North Dakota National Guard tellling them to take care that at least 1/2 of one percent of the NDNG were African-American – including officers and NCOs.

As the story goes, the state’s adjutant general wrote back, telling the Pentagon that the overwhelming majority of African-Americans in North Dakota were either college students, and thus only temporary residents, or already members of the United States Air Force and stationed in Minot or Grand Forks, and there really weren’t any eligible blacks to recruit.

Not out of institutional racism – but because at the time no black people lived there.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Target to quit sponsoring Indy cars.

 Why quit?   They had a winning team, which means eyeballs on logo all season long.  Why would you give up advertising like that?

 Wrong eyeballs.

 The people who watch racing tend to be White Christian beer-drinking men.  Those people are not the “target” audience.  You can’t buy a spark plug or a shotgun shell at Target, a 2×4 or a necktie.  The chain is focused on women, gays and People Whose Lives Matter.

 Look for Target to shift the advertising money to a more politically correct area.  I wonder what?

My guess:  a Beyoncé tour.

Questions on reading the City Pages’ “reporting” on s the departure of Jack Tomczak from KTCN

1. If a conservative caucasian male orders a pizza in the woods, and no “progressive” media hack is there to hear it, is the conservative still “angry?”
2. Quick – name any person of color that’s ever worked for the City Pages.  Interns, and freelancers who wrote single articles (generally on race-related issues) don’t count.
3. On the off-chance that you do find a person of color at the City Pages; be honest.  they went to Macalester, Saint Olaf, Carlton or the U of M journo proglram.  Right?
4. When you refer to “angry white men on radio”, I’m kind of curious how one includes the dryly funny, constantly-wisecracking Tomczak (and the incisive, cynical Mitch Berg) but not the eternally red-faced Ed Schultz, the toxic Mike Malloy, the just-plain-wierd Nick Coleman, Matt “Who’s He?” McNeil, the incoherent Mike McFeely, or pretty much every other liberal talk show host?

Why, it’s always almost like a chanting point I’m on our unimaginative lefty friends; they referred should talk radio as “angry white male radio” with almost the exact same geometric precision as which they referred to Donald trumps speech as “dark”.

Of course, Tomczak’s departure highlights the elephant in the room for conservative talk radio.  While conservative talk is one of three formats in all of terrestrial radio that still can make money (sports and Spanish radio also make a buck or two), the industry ate its proverbial seed corn over the past 20 years; the local stations in smaller markets where young talk radio talent used to come from mostly went all-network decades ago – a process that accelerated as the bottom fell out of the revenue pool around 2008.   The likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Levin and the rest wiped out a generation of conservative talk radio’s “farm team”.   And as the likes of Rush, Hewitt, Prager and Beck start to age out, who’s going to replace them – whether on the radio or online?

IHeart Radio – formerly Clear Channel, which owns “Twin Cities NewsTalk” – has been a key player in this; they’ve relentlessly pushed their properties to cut costs; with talk stations, that means “go network”.

“Does the business model for any terrestrial radio work?” is a legitimate question – but it’s a moot point if there is nothing to broadcast after Rush retires.

I opened an email from MoveOn.Org the other day.

Here’s the header:

I stopped right there and threw it in the trash.

Robert Reich is “terrified”.

Now, I’ll cop to is – I read this on the end of a two week big of liberal panic; of a social media feed clogged with liberal acquaintances overwrought with “fear” about the GOP candidate.

Of course, as we noted the other day, this “fear” is something they’re painstakingly trained to have by the people who call their collective shots.   Every Republican is, in succession, the worst human ever!

It’s classic Berg’s Seventh Law; on the one hand, the left says conservatives, the right, and even Trump supporters (who are far from necessarily conservative) are motivated by “fear”; on the other, the most powerful voices on the left are trying to provoke and motivate people to feel…

…what, now?  I don’t wanna see all the same hands, here.

Ahem:

#RecordSetStraight

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“That means minor crimes that take place at school, such as trespassing, truancy, theft and drug use, she said, would be “dealt with more appropriately in other ways” that don’t involve arrest and prosecution.”

All crimes?  Or only crimes committed by Students Whose Lives Matter, to make the statistics come out better?

What a rude shock when you leave school and find out there are laws in place and people expect you to follow them. Thugs will encounter kindler, gentler police when police encounter kindler, gentler thugs.  Until then . . . .

I’ll differ with Joe in degree, here; we do have too many arrestable crimes in this country.  Truancy?  Marijuana possession?  Minor driving offenses?  Please.

  Joe Doakes