To:  House GOP Caucus, Senate GOP Caucus
From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
Re:  Focus

Dear Cauci,

Congrats on taking the majority.  I’m truly overjoyed.

Now, let’s get real.

Focus:  Ever watched someone doing karate?  When they do a strike, they focus all their energy, from their waist on down through their hands, into their knuckle.  One or two of them.  Because that’s how you inflict as much force as possible on your target – focusing the energy.

We’ll come back to that.

Focus Some More:  When the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, it took eight or so weeks of brutal fighting to break through the German defenses.

And when the Allies forced that breakthrough, did they then pause, and redirect to the invasion of Denmark?

No!   They focused on driving to Berlin, and destroying any enemy that got in their way!

They focused on the mission at hand!

No.  Really Focus:  You have the majority in both chambers of the Legislature (if only by a vote in the Senate).

You got it for three reasons:

1. The Dems brought us MNSure, and you were able to tie it around their necks
2. The economy in greater Minnesota isn’t nearly as spiffy as it is in the Metro
3. Just like nationwide – the metro “elites” are utterly disconnected with the experience of Greater Minnesota.

That is why you have the majority.  Not to protect marriage.  Not to argue about who goes in what bathrooms.

Heathcare.   Economy.   Elites.  

No more.  No less.

I Said Focus, MKay?:  It was six short years ago that voters last gave you both chambers of the Legislature.  Even with a DFL ideologue for a governor, it was a golden opportunity.   You were given that majority because:

1. Obama overreached – on healthcare
2. The economy in Greater Minnesota sucked!
3. The DFL had made a hash out of the budget.

What did you – or at least the previous leadership – do?

Well, good work on the budget, to be honest.  But that wonky triumph was overshadowed by the national, media-stoked furor over the Gay Marriage issue.  The legislature bet a ton of political capital…

…on an issue that had nothing to do with you getting your majority.

Nothing!

If you’re a North Dakota or Montana Republican, with a near-permanent majority and an opposition Democrat party that barely qualifies as a party at all, you can spend political capital on anything you want, and there’ll be no consequences.   It might even work (long enough to get struck down by the Supreme Court, anyway).

But not in Minnesota, the purplest of purple states.

Focus Focus Focus Focus Focus!:  This is not North Dakota.  Perhaps if you hold your majorities long enough to bring a quarter century of unbridled prosperity to Minnesota and we might become so lucky.  But we’re nowhere close to that yet.

You were elected by a fickle electorate over…what?

Let’s run the list again:

1. MNSure
2. The economy in greater MN
3. Our idiot elites

You have political capital – a mandate, indeed.

And like the Allies after D-Day, you need to focus that capital on beating the enemy in front of us; MNSure, taxes, regulations, mining-phobia.

And like Bruce Lee, you need to focus that energy straight to the metaphorical knuckle, as narrowly and overwhelmingly as you can to win on the issues we, the voters, sent you there to win!

For The Love Of God, Focus!:  I’ve heard talk of legislators discussing floating some legislation:

• Rest Rooms:  Don’t be idiots.  We already have laws making mischief in bathrooms illegal. And all it’s gonna take is one angry father or grandfather at some Target somewhere to make that issue pretty well self-enforcing.  It’s a private property issue,   And it’s a distraction.   Deal with the restrooms when the majority is rock solid safe.
• Abortion:  It’s an important thing.  I get it.  It’s also not why you were sent to Saint Paul.  Not this time.  If you win long and big enough, you’ll get your chance.  This is not that chance.   Do not screw this up.  
• Other social issues:  Stop.  Just stop.  Now.  Seriously. 

GOP legislators:  today, you control the agenda in Saint Paul.  It gives you a huge opportunity.  With the opportunity comes risk; if you take the GOP majority off beam, and bog the party down in a fight that has nothing to do with why you have the majority, fighting a veto you can’t win over an issue that does nothing but focus all of the Big Democrat Money, all their bottomless funding and masses of drooling droogs, over something that the voters that sent you to Saint Paul don’t care about nearly as much as healthcare and the economy, you will deserve to lose again in 2016.  

Focus.

Focus.

Focus focus focus.

Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.

No.  More than that.  Focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus.

No.  More than that.

Sing along with me:  Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.  Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.  Kill MNSure.  Kill regulations.  Lower taxes.

Win the war we sent you there to win.

Oh – and focus.

No.  More than that.

In an incident overnight, a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit shot and killed a man who was pummeling the stuffing out of a sheriff’s deputy in Estero, Florida, near Fort Myer:

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office told local news media that the deputy who was involved, 12-year veteran Deputy First Class Dean Bardes, is expected to be okay. The suspect who was fighting with the deputy was killed during the struggle and WINK is reporting that a passerby is the one who shot him.

“The passerby, who had a Concealed Weapons License, exited his vehicle and instructed the suspect to stop beating the deputy…after noncompliance from the suspect, the passerby shot the suspect three times,”  sources said.

Local TV news report below the jump (since it launches automatically).

(more…)

I’ve said for some time now that there have been two reasons I could get behind Trump; his SCOTUS picks, and his stance on healthcare.

And now there’s a third:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump — who said he has a concealed carry permit — called for the expansion of gun rights Friday, including making those permits applicable nationwide. In a position paper published on his website Friday afternoon, Trump called for the elimination of gun and magazine bans, labeling them a “total failure.”

“Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own,” Trump wrote.

And he brings some fairly ineluctible logic to the argument:

The permits, which are issued by states, should be valid nationwide like a driver’s license, Trump said. “If we can do that for driving — which is a privilege, not a right — then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege,” Trump said.

It may be political red meat to keep his base whipped up.

Good.

To:  All Democrats
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:  Prescription

Democrats,

What this guy said.

You didn’t go far enough to the left.

So let’s endeavour (Canadian spelling! Wou hou!) to:

• Condescend to the working class more
• Write more editorials sniffing down your nose about the “Best Interests” of “Flyover Land”
• Insult gun owners more!

You can do it!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My Facebook page is full of complaints by Liberal friends. They’re hurting now because ignorant racist misogynist Trump voters rejected Hillary.  They demand that Trump voters be respectful of their feelings.  Don’t gloat over winning: reach out, be inclusive, help heal America.  They’re unfriending family members who crow about Trump winning because if they did that, they really can’t have been very good friends to begin with.

In other words, Liberals demand a ‘safe space’ on Facebook. Everyone is entitled to an opinion as long as it agrees with theirs; dissent is hatred.  Winning requires surrender.

Yeah, well, I remember the attitude they showed to us when Obama won.

Man, am I sick of Liberals.

Joe Doakes

My sense of sportsmanship pretty much foreswears all but tongue-in-cheek gloating.  I may have been the last generation raised with the idea of “sportsmanship” – and that’s not a good thing.  We’d be a better place.

But yeah, Joe, I totally hear you.

Earlier, I noted that Donald Trump’s election is a result of liberal attitudes.

Here, a liberal agrees.

Language NSFW.

By the way? Now that Republicans (not necessarily conservatives) are in power, it’d be good to make sure the good guys take this to heart.

Trump’s election has thrown a good chunk of the American left for an unexpected loop.

Not least of the loopers is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), famous for “ELCA Hair” and unctuous, smug politics slathered on a fairly neutered reading of the Bible.

And over at their “Engage” blog – the ELCA’s gun-grab propaganda organ, which blindly opposes the Second Amendment and bows down to Michael Bloomberg – they are more depressed than most these days.  They posted about the current lay of the land:

The recent election spells difficult days ahead for gun violence prevention (GVP). Trump’s victory, coupled with his blind support of the Second Amendment and bowing to the NRA, spell high odds against any GVP laws being passed.

I’d like to ask someone from “Engage” what exactly they mean by “Blind Support” – but I suspect none of them actually knows.

But I’d very much like to invite a representative from “Engage” onto my show, on any weekend of their choosing.  Because I’m dying to find out – among other things.

Similarly, with the Republicans now in control of the Minnesota House and Senate, similar negative progress is probably the norm. Elections matter.

They can take some solace in the fact that they actually haven’t mattered that much for a little over a decade.  Even when the DFL controlled both chambers two short years ago, there was a functional pro-Second Amendment majority in the Legislature.  You guys have been in a deep hole since about 2002, and it just got a lot deeper.

As it should be.

Now what? We can take heart in Luke 21:5-19. It is the end time of Jesus’ earthly ministry. He has entered Jerusalem. The final countdown has begun. He told his disciples the Temple would be destroyed, they would be persecuted by the state and religious leaders, some of them would be executed, and they would be rejected by friends and family. Yet, these realities would give them the opportunity to give testimony to the truth, and by their persistent endurance in telling the truth in the face of negative odds, they would save their souls.

Right.  It’s a great verse – one that’s resonated with a lot of us Second Amendment advocates, especially here in urban areas, for a long time.

The right to defend ourselves, our homes, our families and our society from aggression is granted to us by God Almighty himself.

That right – enabling us to bear the responsibility of defending our earthly freedoms while we’re in this world – is one of few that separates us from subjects of a king or dictator.  Without that right and ability, our “rights” merely exist until government – or someone bigger and stronger than us – decides to take them away.

History is full of innocent, unarmed people who were wiped off the map by bigger, stronger people; sometimes the victims shared our faith; sometimes the killers did, too.

Citing Luke indicates you put yourselves in the position of the disciples.

You are not.

You are in the position of Herod’s Jews, the ones that collaborated with the Romans in oppressing other Jews.  You are the oppressors, working hand in hand with those who would render us, not citizens, but mere subjects.

And while I’m a subject of God’s kingdom, on this earth, I’m a citizen.  Not a subject.  And if you want to take that away from me by civil means, last Tuesday’s loss isn’t the last you’re going to face.

By consistently telling the truth in the name of Jesus, we will gain our souls! We will be faithful disciples. God’s grace is sufficient for the task!

I’m not going to speak for God.  Neither should you.  On this issue, you are not qualified.

I’d be more than happy to debate this – although clearly you don’t have enough faith in God’s grace to face me in a civil discussion.

As the nation – or at least the nation’s chattering classes – continue to rend their garments over Democracy giving them the leader they deserved, and with about 66 days until Donald Trump takes office, let’s take a break from the Peltschmertz and start talking policy.

Donald Trump proposed a healthcare plan.  It’s on his website.

And…it’s good.  Really good.  To paraphrase Joe Biden, it’s a big freaking deal, if he follows through on it:

1. Repeal Obamacare. “Our elected representatives must eliminate the individual mandate. No person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to,” the plan says.
2. Repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act, and allow the sale of insurance across state lines. “By allowing full competition in this market, insurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up,” it says.
3. Allow tax payers to fully deduct health insurance premium payments in their tax returns, as businesses can. The plan asks: “Businesses are allowed to take these deductions so why wouldn’t Congress allow individuals the same exemptions?”
4. Review basic options for Medicaid and work with states to ensure that those who want healthcare coverage can have it.
5. Allow all individuals to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and make those contributions tax-free and allow them to accumulate year after year. Make them part of an individual’s estate, able to be passed on to heirs without fear of any death penalty.
6. Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, including clinics and hospitals.
7. Block-grant Medicaid to the states. Incentivize the states to seek out and eliminate fraud, waste and abuse to preserve government resources.
8. Remove barriers to entry into free markets for drug providers that offer safe, generic options. “Congress will need the courage to step away from the special interests and do what is right for America. Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector, drug companies provide a public service,” the plan says.

Speaking as a newly self-employed person for whom 3 and 5 alone would be financial lifesavers, I’ll say right now that if passing this plan is the only thing he accomplishes domestically in his first term, it’ll be a successful term indeed.

Some of these – especially “Repealing Obamacare” – are going to be difficult.  I personally authorize air strikes.

…you lost because the Democrat Party wasn’t radical enough.

This’ll fix it.

Oh, yes it will.

(Seriously – who else could make Deb Wasserman Schultz look like a moderate?)

Back when conservative blogging was a large, signfiicant force in the 2004 elections, many of us pointed out consistently and clearly that the mainstream media’s consistent, overwhelming bias was going to render it irrelevant.

It didn’t happen right away – although the 2007 recession gutted ad revenues, which certainly accelerated the process – but this past election proved us right; even some parts of what we used to call the “MSM” are finally starting to figure it out:

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doingwhen he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

Read the whole thing.

The PR Agency Of Record:  And Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the NYTimes, sent out a memo last week.  After an entire cycle carrying water for Hillary Clinton and getting pretty much absolutely everything wrong, they are “rededicating” themselves to…

…accurate and honest reporting.

Is it “journalistic ethics”, or is it watching non-liberals turning off and unsubscribing in droves?

You be the judge.

BONUS QUESTION : Think you’ll see a similar memo from the Star/Tribune’s publishers?

Hah.  I made myself laugh.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Hello, Congressman Never-Trump?  Yeah, hi, this is PRESIDENT Trump.  What’s all that wailing in the background?  Oh, you were just about to call to congratulate me?  Yeah, that’s great.  Listen, I’m gonna need some money to build the wall with Mexico.  About those appropriations in your district . . . be a shame if anything happened to them, like maybe a line-item veto.  Oh, I can?  Great, I’m glad to have your support.  That’s fine, talk to you soon.  Get some rest, you sound a little down.  Bye now!”

 Joe Doakes

We shall truly see.

Bryan Strawser is with the MN  Gun Owners Caucus.

And of course, ♫ today’s music playlist.  

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

Today, on our final pre-election show:

• Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Caucus and the Minnesota Gun Owners PAC will be joining me to talk about the election results.
• I’ll be talking about election day, its aftermath, and the next four years.

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!

Well, “Protect Minnesota” certainly seems happy – they broke out the “happy” stock photos yesterday!

So Protect Minnesota is happy about something that happened in California?  Why is that?

Because they’ve got nothing to celebrate in Minnesota.

Bupkes.

Anti-gun Pro-criminal groups – “Protect” Minnesota and Moms Want Action, which are really nothing but puppets of Everytown, the group controlled and owned by New York plutocrat Michael Bloomberg – spent $800,000 in Minnesota this past cycle, most of it in the past month or so.  They heavily targeted several seats:  Roz Peterson in Burnsville, Sarah Anderson in Plymouth, and several seats in the purple-ish southwestern suburbs.

And they certainly had some effect…on Democrats, before the election.  Rep. Walz, from Southern Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, who has always made pro-gun noises commensurate with his largely rural district, felt comfortable (or arrogant?) enough circulate a photo of him with a couple of Bloomberg’s Dreamsicles the week before the election:

Walz posing with the Dreamsicles. Republicans in CD1 – make sure this photo comes back in 2018.

And at the end of the evening, all of that blood money got them…what?

They spent some of their money on Dave Hann – who was largely toppled by the changing demographics in his bluish-purple district and the mountain of indepedent cash.  Their loss – and only tangentially related to the Bloomberg spending.

And one House seat – again, Bloomberg’s cash was only part of the flood of Democrat money that poured into the state…

…and only speed bumps on the way to the GOP flipping the Senate and extending its control of the House.

The Future:  It’s not all god news.

“Protect” Minnesota and the Action Moms did, finally, learn something from the good guys.  They did in fact spend some time and energy cultivating and training volunteers, and getting into political action.  The years when we could count on Heather Martens’ incompetence and indolence to insulate Real Americans from reality are over.

We Real American joke – rightly – about the gun grabbers needing to pay for their volunteers…

…while thousands of us turn out on our own time and dime to make the magic happen.  And it is a legitimate point of pride for the good guys.

But stop and think.

The pro-criminal groups have the money to spend, and they’re spending it like drunk Kardashians.

$800,000 to help, maybe, flip two seats in the legislature?  Well over ten times what all pro-freedom groups spent, combined?  That’s pocket lint to Michael Bloomberg.  It’s background noise to the well-heeled liberals who support the pro-criminal groups.

And while the volunteers may well be the Subaru-driving, Saint Olaf-attending, Whole Foods shopping, ELCA-haired caricatures that I gleefully point out to you, even a caricature out doing productive work on the street moves the needle.

So we pro-freedom people have a lot to celebrate today.  The SCOTUS has a fighting chance of breaking with the good guys for the next generation; the Legislature will no doubt put a “Stand Your Ground” measure on the Governor’s desk, and by my count, the GOP and outstate Democrats are painfully close to being able to override Governor Flint-Smith’s veto.   We won one against a flood of out-of-state money.

But this is going to get harder, not easier.

Oil up those wallets and keep those walking shoes ready.

To: Anti-Trump Protesters, Celebribities moving to Canada, Garrison Keillor, People curled up in your safe spaces, and other people who are angry at the world today
From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant an Scott Walker vote
Re:  Why Trump Won

I  didn’t vote for Trump, but I most definitely voted for the GOP majority that he helped usher in.

I’ll just leave you with this:

Everyone who’s out there breaking things and beating people up?

Everyone who’s calling the election result a macroaggression and running for your safe space?

Everyone who keeps repeating that Trump called all Mexicans rapists (he didn’t) or that he’s going to bring on a wave of anti-gay repression (even the NYTimes called him the most pro-LGBT candidate among the GOP field, a year ago)?

Every teacher who called in “Grief Counselors” for the kids they’d painstakingly trained to be distraught over the election?

Everyone who took Wednesday off from work to cry about the election? Posting “He’s not my president” memes on Facebook? Jabbering about moving to Canada?

And above all, everyone who sniffs down your nose at what a bunch of morons your fellow citizens seem to be?

YOU are why Donald Trump won.

Not “racists”. Not Wall Street (they donated overwhelmingly to Hillary). Not ignorant rubes. Not me, a humble weekend talk show host who cordially disliked Trump’s public persona twenty years before most of you were making The Apprentice appointment TV.

You.

To:  Jon Stewart, Chelsea Handler, Miley Cyrus, Neve Campbell, Lena Dunham, Cher, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Babe Streisand, Amy Shumer, Samuel L. Jackson, Natasha Lyonne, George Lopez, Raven Symone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Byron Cranston.

From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant

Re:  Moving to Canada

Need help packing?  Say when.  I’m there for you.

That is all.

(Is it just me, or is this the first time in 15 years that Neve Campbell’s been in the news at all?)

Near as I can figure, it’s:

Step 1:  Run around waving signs, chanting chants, burning things and looting things and attacking people and vandalizing dissenters’ property (actually property dissenters rent…):

Anti-Trumpkins vandalized the GOP headquarters…
…no. They vandalized the building where the GOP rents space for its headquarters.
The property owners will now have to remove the vandalism or get a ticket from the city.
Not the GOP. The property’s owners.

…and block highways.

Step 2:  Trump resigns.

Dear protesters:  please keep it up.  The GOP will gain seats in the mid-terms.

Paul Krugman on election night: “The sky is falling and we’re all gonna die.”

A day later: “It’s not and we’re not, and anyone who takes Paul Krugman seriously had better hope they have a fat government pension to rely on”.

Paul Krugman; the most useful of idiots.

Note:  back during the Obama administration, when the poorly trained chimps in Minnesota’s leftyblogosphere panted “The Dow!  The Dow!” as evidence that the Obama economy was humming along, I pointed out – correctly – that that was a result of companies sitting on lots of cash in a zero-interest environment.  It was a bubble. They were creating few jobs, investing in little new plant; the Dow was a reflection of cash.

And it still is.

But I’m just trying to keep them consistent.  Which could keep an army of researchers busy, although not very interested.

I didn’t get to bed until 5AM yesterday morning.  It wasn’t “excitement” so much as “restlessness”, to be honest.

Watching liberal media, blogs and social media, you’d think the US just got conquered by Francisco Franco.

It did not.

Watching the mobs of pajama boys grrls that our “educational” establishment has spawned taking their sick days and rushing to their safe spaces, you’d think we’d suffered a terrorist attack.

We didn’t, unless you consider dissent “terrorism”.    And I know some of you do.

Of course, there’s no discussing this with some people.   (To be fair, while you can discuss it with me, and I’ll listen hard, you’ll have to bring your A game).

But how about let’s try?

I’m going to borrow an idea from Dennis Prager.

Let’s talk in two years, right before the mid-terms.

If we get the Armageddon you all predict – rampant discrimination (real discrimination, not dissenting sentiments by marginal figures and isolated people) against immigrants in general, society turning into a dystopia for women, gays, Latinos, blacks and everyone in between, violent nationalism running amok – I’ll admit publicly I was wrong.

If we don’t –  or, if in fact attitudes about immigration, race and the economy improve – you admit publicly you were wrong.

Let me know if we have a deal.

The biggest relief of the Trump landslide?   The SCOTUS.  If Trump keeps his promise to draw from his list of Supreme Court nominees, this nation has at least a hope of having a backbone of relative sanity for the next generation.

I’m relieved to see that that was the impetus for an awful lot of voters:

The future of the Supreme Court’s ideological balance proved to be a critical factor for many Republican voters. In exit polls, about 1 in 5 voters said the Supreme Court appointments were “the most important factor” in their decision, and those voters favored Trump by a 57% to 40% margin, according to ABC News.

For me, the Supreme Court – and keeping Hillary and her owners, George Soros and the Saudis, away from it – was as close to a single-issue litmus test as I’ve ever had.

The country that built the Manhattan Project and the Panama Canal ain’t done yet!

2008:  Discussion of secession from the union (by Texas, were the sentiment is pretty strong) or from oppressive an alienating state governments (inland and northern California) are “treason” and a call for a return to slavery.

2016:  Calls for secession are all the liberal rage.

I say keep it up.  You may never get seceded (although good riddance, California), but you’ll give me the impetus I need to revive one of my old online larks into a full fledged book.

Last year, exactly one pundit predicted Donald Trump would be in the race as of Christmas, to say nothing of winning the primaries and (as he predicted in May) the election itself.

It was Scott Adams, cartoonist behind Dilbert.

That Scott Adams.

Last year, when many observers were saying Trump was a stupid, under-informed clown, I was saying he was a Master Persuader. Pundits said he ignored facts because he didn’t know them or because he was a liar. I said he ignored facts because facts are useless for persuasion. Trump could learn lots of facts if he wanted to do so. But he knew it was a waste of time. These are two totally different views of reality. And yet they did not conflict. Clinton supporters still see the stupid, under-informed clown and I still see the Master Persuader. We live in totally different movies and yet we can still interact with each other, still eat and drink, still procreate when necessary.

The whole thing is worth a read.

I’ll be the first to admit – I didn’t see last night coming.

When I went on the air, I knew that Trump had to win North Carolina, Florida and Ohio to have a shot – even a long shot at the presidency.

All three fell; North Carolina fairly quickly, Florida with a bit of suspense, and Ohio in a complete rout.

From there, as Brad Carlson and I broadcast from the Radisson Blue and the GOP Victory Party, we puttered around with various scenarios, watching the numbers creep up, wondering if it’d come down to Nevada…

…until events bypassed us all.  When Wisconsin went Trump, I knew my math was out the window; when Michigan, New Hampshire, and – incredibly, finally, Pennsylvania – dropped in the bucket, I felt…

…like someone had dropped LSD into the cucumber water in the press pit.  I was, for one of very few times in my talk radio career, reduced to jabbering nonsense on the air.

We recovered, of course; to the best of my knowledge, we predicted the flip in the Minnesota Senate before the rest of the Twin Cities media, yet again; only a math mistake on my part precluded Brad and me from being first on the ground with an official prediction.

Local highlights:  The GOP broke their curse inside the metro:  Roz Peterson crushed her challenger; Randy Jessup and Dario Anselmo flipped solid first and second tier suburban seats; Paul Anderson flipped Terri Bonoff’s old seat.   Tim Walz is facing a recount against Jim Hagedorn; Obamacare cost him bad, but I have a hunch his ill-advised and arrogant photo with the Action Moms didn’t help much.

Nancy Laroche is now on the Crystal City Council!

And  – Congressman Lewis.  I love that.   We finally found a campaign where cynical lies aimed at the lowest, basest common denominator (worst than the stereotype Trump voter, even!) lost.  It restored my faith in Minnesota voters.

Downsides:  Dave Hann, one of the most decent people in politics, is out.  And Stewart Mills.  That hurt.

But what about Trump?  Kevin Williamson of National Review – an out-front non-fan of Trump (vide his coverage of Trump’s kickoff entitied “Witless Ape Ascends Escalator“, to telegraph the punch just a little) – has some advice, and I like it a lot:

The first and most important thing to do is to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that Trump sticks by the promise he made — his record on keeping his word is not very good — on his list of Supreme Court nominees under consideration. If a Trump presidency means ensuring a generation of decent constitutional jurisprudence on the First and Second Amendments, then that will be worth a great deal in the way of tradeoffs. What tradeoffs? Conservatives should meet Trump on his own ground on the question of immigration, especially illegal immigration. His proposals on the question have been fantastical — making Mexico pay for a wall and all that — but his insistence that this be addressed rather than being kept eternally on the national back burner is appropriate. There are reasonable steps on immigration that can be taken, an enforcement-first approach that secures the borders (and the airports and the visa system) and focuses on workplace enforcement before moving on to broader reform questions, such as replacing the reunification-oriented chain-immigration system with one based on economic criteria.

The whole thing is, as always with Williamson, worth a read.

Heh.

On the one hand, 4-8 years of Clinton will do for women what 8 years of Obama did for race relations.

On the other, we’ve got four more glorious years of non-stop blog and talk show fodder.

UPDATE:  Clearly, I wrote this on Sunday, expecting a Hillary win.

I neglected to delete it.

What the heck.