Dress maker does the thing that got Christian bakers / florists / photographers in trouble; exercises her right of free association:

“As one who celebrates and strives for diversity, individual freedom and respect for all lifestyles, I will not participate in dressing or associating in any way with the next First Lady,” Sophie Theallet wrote in a letter this week.

“The rhetoric of racism, sexism, and xenophobia unleashed by her husband’s presidential campaign are incompatible with the shared values we live by,” Theallet wrote about President-elect Donald Trump.

“I encourage my fellow designers to do the same,” she continued.

Of course, the big difference is that Melania Trump isn’t part of a “protected class”.

Which is rich, isn’t it?  Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Peter Thiele, Jennifer Lopez and Carlos Slim are all “protected classes”.  Because apparently “white privilege” or “straight priviliege”, er, trumps whatever they’ve got.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mainstream media is alarmed that internet sites provide fake news, leading innocent voters astray from The Truth which they ought to be getting from the mainstream media.  And since nobody is reading their content, the mainstream outlets are going to lay off staff and close offices which will exacerbate the problem as professional journalists are replaced by internet trolls blogging in their pajamas in the basement.

Missing the point.  The reason people read internet sites is because the mainstream media news sites are, themselves, fake news.  They only cover the stories they think are important.  The stories they do deign to cover are consistently slanted.  Millions of Americans know it and are desperate enough for full, honest news that they are willing to risk slogging through the gutter of internet sites to find the few gems.  And the reason they’re justified in doing so is that respectable internet sites have scooped mainstream media on noteworthy stories such as Powerline and Little Green Footballs exposing Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service.  

 If pajamas media has become a more reliable source of truthful news than mainstream media, extinction is what we should expect.  File this in the “Obsolete” file right next to “buggy whips.” 

 Joe Doakes

If the mainstream media doesn’t get its mission, as well as its business model, squared away sooner than later, that train will leave the station very soon.

To:  Minnesota Public Radio
From: Mitch Berg, “tribal” peasant
Re:  Norm Orenstein

MPR,

Last Friday you played an interview with Norman Orenstein on your noon show.   Orenstein is to academia what Lori Sturdevant is to journalism; a myopic scold for a very defined ideology, who after a career of being hailed as a genius by his own echo chamber can not possibly conceive of there being a rational alternative.

Orenstein’s major points:

• The national conversation is getting very uncivil – due to the right.  Not the left.
• While he used to support the electoral college, now he does not.
• The conservative alternative media – Orenstein calls it “tribal” media, in the tone of a British grandée in colonial India – is at fault for everything.

Thanks, MPR.  We don’t get enough of that from the local media.

By the way, MPR?  Why did you book Orenstein?  Self-affirmation therapy for your distraught audience?

That is all.

Car2Go – a rental car-sharing service much favored by “new urbanists” and others on the left – is leaving the Twin cities…

…because of the taxes.

Moms Want Action – the pro-criminal group funded entirely by liberal plutocrat Michael Bloomberg – posted this over the weekend:

Oh, that’s so cute.    A group of smug, privileged, Whole-Foods-shopping, MPR-listening, Subaru driving insta-activists say “it’s on”.

No, ma’am (including that “mom” with the beard in the back row on the left).  You’re wrong.

It was “on” on election night, when the plutocrat who owns your organization, Michael Bloomberg, spent nearly a million dollars in Minnesota.  To capture two seats (and lose several more ).

And even that’s not completely right.  It’s been “on” for thirty years.  Millions of Real Americans – men, women, black and white, urban and rural – started giving your boogeyman, the “gun lobby”, some actual teeth.

So go ahead.  Prance around at your “rallies” in the safe parts of downtown, and in Eagan in your Dreamsicle t-shirts.  Parrot the same lies the good guys have been shredding for decades just a few more times.  Get bored and walk away again.

We’ll still be here.

And it’ll still be “on”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It occurs to me that I haven’t heard Larry Jacobs opine about Kellyanne Conway, the woman who ran Donald Trump’s stunningly successful Presidential campaign.  Why not? 

 It’s not as if she had such a great candidate that the campaign was a walk in the park.  Trump isn’t George Washington, someone the whole public would love to proclaim King.  I’m absolutely confident that no other candidate could have beaten Hillary.  The other Republicans all were hiring the same strategy consultants, making the same media buys, hitting up the same super PAC fundraisers.  They even shop at the same tailors: I never saw so many identical outfits as when the twelve dwarfs were in those early debates.  Somehow, she pulled her guy to the top of that heap.

 And did it practically free.  She convinced the media to give Trump a zillion dollars of free publicity, thinking they were killing his campaign by reporting on his outrageous promise to “Build the Wall” when in fact, he was using them to reach out to Joe Six-Pack who heard the slogan and thought “Damned straight and about time!”  Talk about your all-time classic backfires . . . that’s a brilliant tactic nobody else could have gotten away with.

 Kellyanne Conway ought to be on the cover of every political magazine, the talk of every political news program and the subject of every Poli Sci class on every campus.  She ran an insurgent campaign on a shoestring and beat the best political consultants and candidate in the nation.  And did it with a unruly novice as the candidate!  And won walking away, an Electoral College landslide. Why isn’t she getting more praise?

 She’s either the single luckiest woman in the world or the smartest, I’m not sure which and I don’t care.  I’m just grateful to her for preventing The Lizard Queen from ascending to the Rose Garden Throne.  In the first week alone, she saved me $1,000 that I was planning to spend on ammunition before Hillary banned it.  Her guy hasn’t even taken office and already, my life is richer.  

 Joe Doakes

Same same.

The Strib “reported”, after a fashion, about attitudes about Obamacare after an election where it was primarily responsible for ejecting the DFL from power in the Minnesota Senate.

And it’s either a masterpiece of selective fact, or some fairly incurious reporting:

Anxiety is greatest among Minnesotans with preexisting medical conditions. Before the ACA, insurance companies could simply deny them coverage.

Which is technically true.

After which, in Minnesota at least, they would get insurance from one of the state-subsizied high risk plans.

Before MNSure, 92% of Minnesotans were insured, via the private market, a public plan, or some combination.   It was the highest share in the nation.   Of the 8% who didn’t have insurance, the vast majority were people who didn’t want insurance – mostly young, mostly healthy.  There were exceptions – but they were few, rare, and mostly the product of poor information and a pre-Obama media who were actively pitching the “47 million uninsured Americans…” narrative.

Today, the state says half as many Minnesotans are uninsured – but networks have shrunk (in vast swathes of Minnesota, only one plan is available), premiums have skyrocketed for individual members (like me!),  people could not keep their doctor (The Lightworker’s promises notwithstanding…)

So why is the Strib story – a “Team Report” by Jeremy Olson, Christopher Snowbeck and Glenn Howatt, no less – either so slanted or uninformed?

To borrow a Glenn Reynolds phrase – if you treat them as DFL operatives with bylines, it all makes sense.

One campaign-season cliche we can retire:  “money buys elections”.

Trump won is election very much on the cheap:

Of course, the battlefield was already littered with candidates from both parties that outspent their opponents, only to lose. Meg Whitman, John Corzine, Linda McMahon and a host of other famous and unfamous names outspent their opponents on the way to defeat in previous years. But Trump may put all of those elections to shame when it comes to disparity of resources.

Consider that Hillary Clinton’s campaign outspent Trump by more than two-to-one. Pro-Clinton ads outnumbered pro-Trump ads by three-to-one. Independent groups (the “super PACs”) supporting Clinton outspent independent groups supporting Trump by three-to-one. The average contribution to Trump was smaller than the average contribution to Clinton. And on and on it goes.

Which, in a reasonable world, would put a hard kibosh on the idea of campaign finance “Reform”:

We’re told by campaign finance “reformers” that we must restrict spending in politics so that “people” can have their voices heard. But voters in 2016 ultimately chose the candidate without even a “real” super PAC to speak of.

This tells us two things: First, that money is simply the facilitator by which candidates speak to voters, but that voters will make up their own minds. Second, it shows us that money simply can’t make up for a message that people aren’t interested in. After his defeat, the man in charge of Jeb Bush’s $100 million super PAC remarked of the voters: “They just weren’t buying what we were selling.”

Let’s hope the same goes for tired tropes on money in politics.

Look for the Democrats to push a bill establishing minimum spending.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I question whether Liberals and Conservatives hear the same things.

 

When a Liberal says “Joe Doakes is a racist,” I suspect other Liberals hear “Joe Doakes is dangerous.”  That triggers a fight-or-flight response.  The listening Liberals know they should shun me – at a minimum – and fight me if they can do it from a place of safety.  Thus, we get unfriended on Facebook, one-star Amazon reviews, one-star Yelp reviews and secondary boycotts to pressure employers to fire the accused.

 When a Liberal says “Joe Doakes is a racist,” I suspect Conservatives hear “Joe Doakes is a poopy-head.”  That triggers a scornful response.   The listening Conservatives know they should ignore the Liberals – at a minimum – and actively support me, even if it brings Liberal wrath down on them, too.  Thus we get Trump’s cabinet nominations.

 This may be the new litmus test.  When a politician hears someone called “racist,” watch how they react.  If they react like Liberals, then they are Liberals at heart, regardless of which party affiliation they wear at the moment. 

 When everyone is a racist, no one is a racist.  The term as no longer has an agreed-upon meaning.  Does this mean I hate Black people and want them to die?  No, it means the word is worn out from overuse.  Find another word.

Joe Doakes

They will.  They will.

Check out ♫ today’s music playlist.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show:

• Why are the left such a bunch of spoiled babies?
• My call to the GOP-controlled legislature

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!

In Minnesota, the DFL lost its majority in the Senate, and were reduced in the House.   It’s a wonderful thing.

To look at what is possible, though?

In North Dakota, the Democrat-NPL party was reduced on election night from “minority” to “barely there”.

And it’s a very very wonderful thing:

The shellacking North Dakota’s Democrats got on election day is absolutely the fault of [state DFL chair Kylie] Oversen and the candidates Democrats put on the ballot this cycle. They saw not a single statewide candidate get over 30 percent of the vote while in the Legislature they lost their House and Senate leaders, their party chairwoman, and now have just nine seats in the state Senate and just 13 in the House.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s not enough elected members of the Legislature for Democrats to cover all of their committee assignments.

Now, MInnesota liberals have been taking it on faith that, since wildcat drilling has stalled, the state must be in freefall.  If that were true, the opposite would have likely happened on election night.  Right?

Right?

Well, no – North Dakota’s 3% unemployment rate remains a solid point below Minnesota’s low rate of 4%.

By the way, congratulations to North Dakota’s governor-elect, Doug Burgum, the former CEO of “Great Plains Software”, the little software shop that could; it was purchased by Microsoft in the 2000s, and has become Redmond’s biggest campus outside of Washington State.

And, I should add, congrats to North Dakota’s new First Lady, my high school classmate Kathy.

A good guy with a gun shoots two robbers at a pizzeria in Levittown, Pennsylvania:

The shooting happened late Tuesday night at Porfirio’s Pizza and Pasta, located in a shopping plaza in Levittown, about 25 miles northeast of Philadelphia.

The customer took out a gun and shot both men after they allegedly pistol-whipped him, Middletown Police Chief Joe Bartorilla told reporters.

The police are still investigating.  But I’m pretty sure we all know where this ends up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota has early voting.  People were coming to the office two months before election, to cast absentee ballots.  That was before most of the major revelations about Hillary.

 To what extent did early voting artificially inflate Hillary’s support?  Had those voters been required to vote on election day – knowing the full story about her – would some have changed their votes?

 Joe Doakes

The answer, I suspect?  To borrow a phrase, “bigly”.

Ramsey County attorney John Choi released the findings of the investigation of the Philando Castile shooting.  Ramco charged Saint Anthony Park police officer Jeronimo Yanez with second-degree manslaughter in the death of the Saint Paul school employee last summer.

There are better commentators on the legalities and the sociology of this incident than me.

But there’s one angle that might be of some concern to those of you who exercise  your second amendment rights.  Castile was a carry permittee – meaning he had a clean criminal record (which also enabled him to get a job in a public school).

When you go through carry permit class, you’re taught that getting stopped by the police while carrying is one of the more dangerous times for a permittee.   The rules are vague, and cops are (as we saw in the incident) often badly trained on the law and how to respond to carriers.  But there are two generally-accepted trains of thought for the civilian carrier:

1. Mention your permit and firearm only if the cop asks you to get out of the car.  If it’s a simple traffic ticket, it’ll never be an issue.
2. Mention, calmly and casually, up front, that you have a permit and are carrying, and where, and ask the officer how they’d like to proceed.

According to the evidence released yesterday, Castile went with #2:

Officer Yanez is, of course, innocent until proven guilty.

But – assuming the timeline above is accurate (and that will no doubt be a major subject at trial), it appears officer Yanez had a very intense reaction to…

…to what?

To the fact that Castile was a black male who, according to some stories circulating last summer, allegedly resembled a suspect in a robbery?

If that were true, Officer Yanez apparently didn’t follow felony stop procedures; he approached it as a stop over a broken tail light.  Which might, to the casual observer, make it appear like he wasn’t concerned Castile was the suspect.

Which leaves what?  The carry permit status and the gun.

It’s possible Officer Yanez reacted with panic to learning that Castile had a permit and was armed, and over the course of seven seconds, went from asking a question to shooting Castile seven times at point blank range.

Why?

We don’t know.  We may or may not find out at trial.

But I suspect, at least in part, that the hysteria about carry permittees and their guns spread by the anti-gun groups in this state had a role.   Groups like “Protect” Minnesota and “Moms Want Action” have been painstakingly training people, mostly in and near the urban core, to be terrified of firearms in the hands of civilians.

And if that’s true, then there’s blood – the real kind – on the hands of the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence and the rest of the pack of liars she leads.

Kevin Williamson on the return of at least some old fashioned values among Democrats after the election of Donald Trump who, let’s forget, had more in common with Bernie Sanders than any other candidate on the ballot:

The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, the same people who until ten minutes ago denounced federalism — which they mischaracterize as the doctrine of “states’ rights” — as an instrument for the suppression of African Americans are now embracing secession, which, in the American context at least, has a little bit of its own racial baggage.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

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

Us.  The alternative media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started noticing the fracture sometime during the Bush II administration;  vast swathes of conservatives who could simply not tolerate other vast swathes of conservatives.

It was unheard of during the Reagan era – and even under Newt Gingrich in 1994, conservatism was a fairly cohesive voting bloc as well as strategy.

But somewhere during the Bush years – when our “conservative” governed more as a Democrat than his Gingrich-haunted predecessor did – the flaking started happening.

By 2008, “conservatism” had split into three separate factions.  I identified them as:

• Northeastern:  These are your grandfather’s Repubicans.  They are focused on GDP growth and domestic and national security; much weaker on personal liberty, limited government and cultural issues.   Think Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie, or the original Mitt Romney.  At one point, Arne Carlson would have qualified.
• Southern:  The culture warriors.  Also strong on national and domestic security, but perfectly comfortable with big government.   Think Mike Huckabee.
• Western:  Heavily into limiting government and personal liberty, especially property and privacy rights.  The heart of the Second Amendment movement.  Non-intentionist on national security, laissez-faire on the economy.   Think Barry Goldwater, the Paul family and the Tea Party in its original conception.

James Heaney in Federalist, in a piece called “Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism” reaches a similar conclusion.

He divides the movement…

…well, no.  The “movement” is dead.  He divides it also into three major centers of activity:

• Populists:  Nationalists, not uncomfortable with taxes and government intervention.  Mostly Trump voters, intuitively enough.
• Establishment:  Focused on growing GDP.   Think the Jeb or Kasich voters.
• Grass Roots:  The culture warriors.  Think Cruz and Rubio voters.

The problem is, the three largely detest each other – in some cases, more than the Democrats (indeed, the Populists drove a “former” Democrat who favors more Democrat-friendly policies than the other 18 contenders he beat to the nomination, all the way to victory).

Is there a way forward?

Not sure Heaney answers it.  But he notes that the way back – to a fundamental definition of what conservatism is supposed to be – is important:

When the modern conservative movement started out under the political leadership of Barry Goldwater and later Reagan, it was built on centuries-old principles handed down by men like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Toqueville. In 1953, the great intellectual, Russell Kirk, summarized those central premises of conservatism.

In his “six canons,” Kirk articulated a conservativism that embraces “a transcendant order, or body of natural law,” because “[p]olitical problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” Conservatives, Kirk said, reject “uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims,” even as they recognize “ultimate equality in the judgement of God and… before courts of law.” They maintain the importance of property rights against Leviathan government, and distrust “sophisters, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society on abstract designs.” Finally, a Kirk conservative is prudent, recognizing “that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”

The modern “conservative movement” has lost touch with these essentials. The establishment builds entire fiscal plans out of the “abstract designs” of “calculators and economists,” and the Wall Street Journal editorial board wouldn’t recognize a “body of natural law” if that body hauled back and punched L. Gordon Crovitz in the nose. Even if they did take notice, the Journal and its Acela Corridor buddies would find it gauche in the extreme to actually speak out loud about political problems in fundamentally “religious and moral” terms.

The populists, for their part, often preach about problems in highly charged moral language, but their only common theme is outrage, and their chosen avatar is Trump, the serial adulterer. Moreover, their desire to burn down all our political institutions is the very definition of the “devouring conflagration” Kirk warns of.

Conservatism has failed, then, partly because a large swath of the “movement” has lost touch with its central ideas. The very word “conservative” has been badly damaged. Corrupted and polarized, the label has become little more than a tribal marker, and alienates many voters who would otherwise naturally align with Kirk’s principles.

I’m going to try to write more about this in the coming week or so.

If John Podhoretz gets it wrong, it probably didn’t need to be said anyway:

Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 9, 2016

Read the whole thing…

…no, wait – you just did.

Lego has jumped on the “diversity of opinion and dissent are “hate”” wagon…

Lego will stop advertising its products in the Daily Mail, following a public campaign calling on big companies to drop adverts from newspapers accused of promoting “hatred, discrimination and demonisation”, the company has announced.

…and also the shark.

No more Legos.  It’ll hurt, but I can’t handle the language or the discourse being raped like this anymore.

A brief-ish article about Jason Lewis’s “upset” win in the 2nd CD by the always astute Matt Pagano.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s the good-news takeaway:

One more (extremely local) angle is that Lewis’ win will likely help revitalize the CD2 Republican Party. In the past few years, the local Party had come to be defined by infighting between opponents, and loyalists, to incumbent Rep. John Kline. Lewis’ election offers the opportunity to move past the Republican-on-Republican violence within the local Republican parties that has raged the past few cycles. If you’re a conservative activist who isn’t happy with Jason Lewis as your Congressman, you ain’t never gonna be happy.

https://medium.com/@mjp4liberty/unpacking-jason-lewis-win-in-mn-cd2-9ef3918c577b#.kpez2p77y

At least one lefty keyboard commando on Facebook isn’t ready to make nice:

The little fella apparently lives in upstate New York – his Facebook page has disappeared – so I’m not sure how he plans to evict people from red states.  I’ll look for his plan.

Someone is clearly compensating for something.

If you can spare some prayers for the little fella’s sanity, the timing might be just about right ifyaknowwhatImean.

You’ve been given a priceless opportunity; to have the first woman president be someone we don’t all have to be ashamed of.

Don’t screw it up again.

That is all.

This may be hard to believe, but I truly do try to see the best in people.  I really do.  I actively try to find ways to find empathy with people, even – or especially – with people I disagree with.

For example, while I agree with nothing Barack Obama did as president, I always figured he was a decent human and a good father.  Time will tell, of course.

So when I first heard the story of the woman who ran into Hillary Clinton on a stroll in the woods the day after the election – which seemed to be a story of a plaintive, human moment – I wanted it to be legitimate.

Of course, doubts nagged at me. Hillary Clinton, walking in the woods without a Secret Service perimeter?

Much as part of me wanted it to be a legitimate story, it nagged at me.

As always, the nagging was for good reason.

If it’s the Clintons, it’s pure artifice.

Commenter “Dog Gone” finally responded to my challenge a few weeks back, in this thread.

To her credit, she cited a source to one of her claims.

To her debit?  It isn’t a very good source.

Anyway, “Mitchketeers” – feel free to go and respond to the response.