Hark.  Is that the sound of packing tape and boxes being stacked? 

I tend to doubt it.

At 1AM this morning, I35 northbound in Duluth is jammed with cars heading from Kenwood, Crocus Hill and Edina to Canada.

I’ve been up front about my ambivalence about Donald Trump.  I cordially disliked him back when most liberals were watching The Apprentice faithfully.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police erecting a wall along the British Columbian border with Washington State, to head off a wave of refugees from California.  Word has it Justin Trudeau intends to send the bill to Jerry Brown. 

But I do suppose legislation making “If [something I don’t want to happen happens] I’m moving to Canada” a legally binding contract.

To:  My various Democrat friends
From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
Re:  The sun will come out.

Suck it up, little campers.

I survived the last eight years.  You’ll survive the Trump years, as well -provided you don’t slash your wrists tonight, or freeze to death in a Canadian winter.

If it’s any consolation to y’all?  While a Hillary victory would have left a Democrat party marching in its usual lockstep, the GOP is going to have to work just as hard to focus Trump as it would have had to do to oppose HIllary.

By the way – is the nuclear option immoral again?

That is all.

Congratulations, as I write this, to two long-time friends of this blog.

Rob Doar, political director of MN-GOPAC, was also campaign director for Randy Jessup, for whom the second try was the charm against Barb Yarusso up in Shoreview.

And long-time Shot in the Dark history correspondent First Ringer was the manager of the Dario Anselmo campaign – and between the two of them, they did the state the estimable favor of ejecting Ron Erhardt from public life in Minnesota.  Maybe he’ll blow Ringer’s head off?

Hopefully not.

Anysay – salute!

We don’t know much about the man who shot two people at a dollar store on the mean streets of Burnsville yesterday.

And by “we”, I mean everyone but Erin Maye Quade, who promptly tweeted that the shooting proved the need for background checks.

Before any details were known.

Not only before the investigation had started, much less turned up any information, but before an arrest had been made.

She wants to represent you in the Minnesota House.

If you live in HD57A, please bring some friends to the poll and vote for Ali Jimenez-Hopper.

UPDATE:  Early, unofficial report:  the shooter is a registered sex offender who is legally barred from having guns.

Yep. That background check sure woulda done the trick.

One of the issues I’ve been silent about so far is the Constitutional Amendment that would take legislative pay out of the legislature’s hands and move the decision on salaries for legislators (and many other government employees) to an independent council.

Brianna Biersbach writes an excellent piece on the subject in MinnPost.

The government-accountability hawk in me says “note no and do it now!”.    Voting for pay raises is political suicide; the limited-government spending hawk in me says “good”.

But there’s a little more to it than that.

A friend of the blog – a solid Republican – wrote me yesterday:

I am a single income, homeschooling, tithing Christian man in a [modest house in a first-ring ‘burb]. It would be tough for me be a legislator and leave my IT job for 6-9 months a year for $32-49k. Am I off base?

Not at all.  I’ve been approached to run for office.  I’ve had to respond “unless I win seats in a couple of districts, I can’t financially justify it”.

Currently, “serving” in the Legislature is effectively limited to a few classes of people:

• People with highly remunerative jobs they can put “on hold” for weeks or months at a time.  Think lawyers.
• People whose spouses make enough to support the political habit
• People whose employers are really conscientious about allowing their employees to take sabbaticals for public service.  Show of hands?  That’s what I thought.
• People working for unions who see the benefit of having members in high places.  Including lots and lots of teachers.

Oh, there are a very, very few legislators with relatively limited financial means who work for the $32K and change the legislature pays, and find pick-up work between sessions.  But they are rare indeed.

In effect, it limits “public service” to people whose entire goal is…well, public “Service”.

So there’s a theoretical case to be made for the council.

Realistically?  They’re not going to make the legislature financially remunerative enough to draw successful private-sector workers into public life.  And that’s largely a bad thing; especially in Minnesota, our legislature needs more of them.

The other option, I hasten to remind you, would be to get by with less legislature, and legislation.  North Dakota’s legislature meets every other year, for a very abbreviated session.  It pays the same as it paid 120 years ago – $5 a day (plus per diems) – so it’s nobody’s idea of the career.  And North Dakota is a much better-governed state than Minnesota.

But that’s never getting on the table; too much pork for the political class is at stake.

Get out and vote today.

Assuming it matters.  George Soros has been spending big bucks to control the system.  And he’s just getting started:

The documents reveal that the Soros campaign fueled litigation attacking election integrity measures, such as citizenship verification and voter ID. It funded long-term efforts to fundamentally transform election administration — including the creation of databases that were marketed to state governments for use in voter verification. It propped up left-leaning media to attack reports of voter fraud, and conducted racially and ideologically targeted voter registration drives.

The racially targeted voter registration drives were executed at the same time Soros dollars were funding other public relations efforts to polarize racial minority groups by scaring them about the loss of voting rights and the dangers of police officers.

The Soros documents reveal hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into the effort to transform the legal and media environment touching on elections. One document notes that poverty-alleviation programs are being de-emphasized for this new effort. It states: “George Soros has authorized U.S. Programs to propose a budget of $320 million over two years, with the understanding that the annual budget for U.S. Programs will be $150 million beginning in 2013.”

To have a functional democracy, it’s important for people to trust their fellow citizens’ motives.

I don’t know that there’s any way to trust the motives of people who are floating on a raft of Sorosbucks.

This has been a tough election season.  It’s hard to make a choice, honestly.   As I’ve noted in this space, I don’t much care for Donald Trump, for reasons that go back three decades.

But after thinking a long, long time, I’ve come to the realization that there really is only one valid choice for President:  Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This may come as a surprise to those of you who’ve been reading my blog this past fifteen years.  I’m not just a Republican – I’m a conservative.

And yet, here I am.

Why?

For The Girls:  Donald Trump’s on-camera japes about women ten years ago were nauseating.

I want America’s women to learn the right lessons:  that any little girl who goes to an “elite” university, marries up, and spends decades ignoring her husband’s abuses, and slandering hubby’s accusers, can make it big in this country.

And when women are victimized by sexual predators, we need to take them seriously.  They are, indeed, a serious threat to your gravy train.   Women need to get out there, call those tramps out for the crazies, stalkers and publicity whores they really are, and get back to business, for everyone’s best interests!

Opening Up The US!  The US is not an island.  We are part of a global community.

And as such, like any other business in a community, we need to separate the serious discussion from the background noise.

And nobody has more experience than Hillary at filtering the serious conversations – those backed by enough money to matter – out from the background noise.

Laws Are For Little People:  Running a democracy is a big job.  Big  jobs have big responsibilities.  The people with those responsibilities need to be able to pick and choose the laws they follow to do their work For The People.

Priorities!:  Relax, shooters.  Hillary’s not coming for your guns!

She’s going to appoint Supreme Court justices who will, on command, overturn Heller and McDonald, throwing control over gun laws back to the states and cities, subjecting tens of millions of Americans to having their rights sodomized by some of our most repugnant politicians.

But Hillary won’t be leading the SWAT team into your house personally, herself, so she will bear no responsibility for this, and you don’t dare hold it against her.  Sexist pig.

And finally…:  I realized that the only reason not to vote for her was that she was a woman, rather than a man with a mediocre record as a back-bench Senator, and a Secretary of State whose sole achievement (deposing a second-rate Libyan dictator, with the unintended consequence of creating a vacuum into which all manner of radicals have flowed) would make him a deservedly obscure figure in public life, and whose “foundation” would make Al Capone look like Fulton Sheen.

Nope.  The only reason anyone could possibly oppose her is her gender.   And I’m just better than that.

Of course, I hasten to remind you that  after 9/11, while in the Senate, she did a lot of work helping out victims and first responders.  AKA, “her job”, just like the rest of Congress.

Conclusions:  This country needs someone who can both give The People the platitudes they need, while making the light rail run on time.

I think the choice is clear and obvious.

UPDATE:  One more reason I’ll be voting for Hillary:  if she’s President, I won’t have to write pieces like this anymore.  When she engineers the reversal of Citizens United, all political criticism will be considered “in-kind political spending” and regulated by the Federal Elections Commission.  So I won’t have to do it, because the professionals will take care of it!

POSTSCRIPT:  If you’re a Hillary supporter, feel free to sound off.

Unless you’re a commenter who’s made a habit of leaving long, fact-challenged comments and not reading the response.  I’ve given you homework; until you do it, your posts are being moderated.

Reason #1:  She lied about her business background.   Her ads make her sound like some kind of entrepreneur.  In fact, she’s a “Human Resources” executive.  Now, God love all you HR people in the audience, but Human Resources is the exact opposite of entrepreneurship.  Fully-implemented HR processes are a leash around business’ neck, ready for government to yank.  And while I’m sure none of you HR people in my audience are like this, far too many are utterly worthless.

Reason #2:  She’s a lying pig, and voting for her would validate all that is slimy and stupid about American politics.  A vote against Craig – no matter who the opponent – is a vote against the basest, most rotten aspects of politics today.

Reason #3:  Her opponent is the father of modern Minnesota conservatism.  Jason Lewis has a 30 year record of putting his principles out there; walking back from ’em would be very, very hard – and, I suspect, anathema to him.  Add to that the fact – which I’ve already mentioned, but bears repeating as often as possible between now and election day – that Angie Craig is a lying pig who represents everything that is vile and pustulent about American politics today – and the choice is clear.

UPDATE:  Did I mention Angie Craig is a lying pig?

SCENE:  FBI Director James COMEY drives up to his house, in a cozy northern Virginia suburb of DC.

As he gets out of his car, he notes Huma ABEDIN, sitting on his porch.  

He takes his briefcase and walks toward her.

ABEDIN:  Good day, Mr. Comey.

COMEY:  Ms. Abedin, you know I can’t communicate with you during an investigation,

ABEDIN:   You can’t talk about the investigation.  This is a social call.

COMEY:  Do tell.

ABEDIN:  Purely social.

(ABEDIN pulls out a manila envelope)

COMEY:  Social?

ABEDIN:  Sure.  I wanted to talk family.

(She pulls out an 8×10 photo and a sheet of paper from the envelope and hands it to COMEY)

COMEY:  What the…?

ABEDIN:   Nice looking grandkids, there.  Aaron, age six, who attends Holy Cross Elementary school, takes the 4 bus, gets to school at 8:30 and leaves at 2:30, plays soccer with the Hippo team at Wartford Rec Center, and…Emiliy age four, attends the Rutherford Crossing pre-school from 9AM to noon.  Children of your daughter, if I’m not mistaken.

COMEY:  So you want…

ABEDIN:  You know what I want.

(ABEDIN rises, leaves)

COMEY:  (Sighs, resignedly dials number on cell phone)

And SCENE

On the one hand, it seems all primitive and quaint.

On the other, it’s basically what happens every day, under a different name, at America’s universities.

I suspect that Hillary Clinton has enough states with enough electoral votes to win the election – at that the vote-generation systems in her blue-city base of operations will generates any votes needed to give her the win.  ¹

And while any given liberal is no more likely to be violent than any given conservative, the fact is that when liberals get scared – and they are always terrified about something – some of them get violent.

In late July an unidentified 60-year-old man was shot in the leg at Winston’s Bar on Cleveland’s East Side. His assailant, Darnell Hall, 45, shot him after their discussion of presidential politics grew heated. The attacker “was enraged that anyone in the overwhelmingly African-American bar would support the GOP nominee,” the Plain Dealer reports. Hall later surrendered to police and was charged with felonious assault.
Two UCLA students told Sean Hannity on Oct. 25 they’ve seen a lot of anti-Trump violence on campus. Haley Nieves said protesters crashed one of their pro-Trump rallies. “They were stomping on the American flag during the event and even attempting to burn it afterward.” Dominique Blair said, “You face crazy leftist mobs that are not tolerant of your views whatsoever, and it turns into a lot of bad debates. Sometimes violent, sometimes hitting and fights. I’ve been all around it.” Blair added, “I am treated very poorly on my campus and other campuses. It’s very hard to be a conservative activist in Los Angeles.”

Given the amount of ink the left’s media has expended fretting about largely nonexistent violence on the right, you can expect the left to act out badly over the next couple days.

And if Hillary somehow loses?

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

1 – If you’re a regular commenter prone to claiming nobody can see, hear or say anything about vote fraud, do not bother leaving a comment until you have resonded tothis question it in detail.  I’m done playing games.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Now Sweden is facing societal collapse, crime is out of control and police are quitting their jobs.  This is the entirely predictable result of open borders they refuse to close because to Liberal politicians, Migrant Lives Matter but nobody else’s lives do.

 So who maintains order when the police resign?  I suspect neighborhoods will establish committees of volunteers to maintain vigilance against crime, like  Neighborhood Watch.   But when they learn that watching isn’t enough because the police aren’t coming to take suspects into custody and even if they do, the courts let them right back out again, I suspect some committees will begin to expand their duties to include patrol, apprehension, judge, jury, executioner and solid waste disposal. 

 Joe Doakes 

It’s why the Irish and Italian mobs initially took root in America.  Swedes may be just Swedes, but they’re not stupid.

Rep. Tim Walz like to portray himself as a pro-Second-Amendment legislator.

But here the Representative is, huddled up with some of Michael Bloomberg’s paid shills, promising to support larding up law-abiding gun owners with additional regulations, and to carry the Bloomberg agenda (which, make no mistake, leads inevitably to New York-style gun control.

If you live in CD1, or know people there, please pass this around far and wide. Tim Walz is just another toady for the Dreamsicles.   His GOP challenger, Jim Hagedorn, is the real supporter of the

When it comes to supporting the human right of self-defense, he talks the talk every two years.

But actions – especially the dimwitted ones that Bloomberg’s “Moms” demand – speak louder.

More about the Minnesota Business Alliance.

Here’s the Legislative Evaluation Assembly report.

Greg Ryan is running for US House in CD 4.

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:

• Phil Krinkie of the Minnesodta Business Alliance joins us to talk about what’s at stake in this election.
• John Augustine of the Legislative Evaluation Assembly talks about their latest Minnesota Legislative report card
• Greg Ryan, GOP candidate for US Congress in the Fourth CD, joins us.
• Senator Dave Osmek joins us to talk MNSure, the upcoming elections.

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!

The good news:  the World Series drew, by modern standards, an avalanche of viewers.  While more people watched the last really really great Game 7 that I saw (1991, Twins vs. Braves), more people watched TV back then.   It was an irresistable draw; two “cursed” teams meeting, and having one of the more enjoyable World Series I can remember.

And no Yankees.

Downside:  in a culture where short-attention-span games are replacing sports in the public consciousness, it goes without saying that a lot of people who really don’t get baseball were really watching it for the first time.

Which leads to…culture shock.

This photo caused a tempest in the teapot of vacuity that is Twitter:

The sign says “K K K” – which you know, if you grew up keeping baseball scorecards, means three strikeouts.

Right?

Bring on the tempest:

Among many others.

And people wonder why we have a choice between a racketeer and a blowhard for President this year.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The GERMANS are losing control of the streets?  The Italians never had any, the French are too arrogant to want any, but the GERMANS can’t keep people in line?

 Sure, migrants get a pass.  Their Lives Matter.  But if a citizen shot one, you know the entire weight of the government would land on his head.

 This can’t continue.  I suspect the next step will be immigrants stir up enough animosity that local police begin to look the other way as reprisals occur.  The police will shrug and say “We have no witnesses, what can we do?”   Word will get around – stay out of that town, they’ll beat you to death – and migrants will move to Austria, Norway, etc. 

 Joe Doakes

People are mindless, bovine herd animals – until they’re not.

You just know Team Clinton – the finest collection of political skullduggerers, character assassins and anger merchants money can buy – didn’t burn through all their their oppo-research two weeks ago.  You just know they saved something for today, the last news dump before election day.

Let’s take bets.  What is Team Clinton going to dump today?

Just remember – Nate Silver’s 538 statistics blog is infallible.  Bet your mortgage payments on their statistically-modeled predictions.

Because human nature never defies numbers.  It’s settled science.

One of my most fearless predictions of this campaign cycle; “Black Lives Matter” will be shown up as an election-year artifice of the Democrat party.

While the movement may well have started organically, it has most certainly been harnessed by Soros money toward the goal of getting black voters to turn out, after two cycles of voting for the First (Actual Ethnic) Black President, to vote for a geriatric authoritarian white woman.

It’s a legitimate worry for them – legit enough to drive Hillary to some fairly absurd lengths.

But some folks just can’t be pleased; Louis Farrakhan is not a Hillary fan:

“Mrs. Clinton backed the crime bill and then called our young people super predators. Of course she apologized, but just a minute. See Hitler could’ve said to the Jews after Auschwitz, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Would that be enough to satisfy you?”

“Look at this award that she got,” he continued. “In 2009 Hillary Clinton received the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. It was Mrs. Sanger who advocated population control of black and poor people.”

Farrakhan is hardly a speaker for all of African-America.

But he’s not wrong…

If everybody they disagree with is a “hate group”  – as the Southern poverty Law Center would have you believe – then the term “hate group” has completely lost in the meeting.

They do, and it has.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which made its reputation tracking and cataloguing violent extremist groups, has set its sights on a new group of people who are neither violent nor extreme but who are in fact precisely the opposite of that: critics of the violence and extremism too often associated with Islam. The new SPLC blacklist includes: Daniel Pipes, holder of a Ph.D. in Islamic history from Harvard, a man who reads both modern and classical Arabic, who studied in Egypt, and who has taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a celebrated author, a former member of the Dutch parliament and crusader against female genital mutilation; Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim reformist who was held as a political prisoner in Egypt; former Defense Department official Frank Gaffney; Radical Son author David Horowitz; attorney and free-speech advocate Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center; provocatrix Pamela Geller; former PLO member and Muslim reformist Walid Shoebat, among others

Free speech itself is, apparently, hate.

Oh, not the kind of free speech where you hope straight white males go extinct; that’s “robust interaction”.

Note to liberals; go ahead.  Cite the SPLC in any debate with me.   Then brace yourself.

The Twin Cities Social Justice militia has been carping about Henco sheriff Rich Stanek “sending” Henco deputies to help North Dakota law enforcement deal with the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

This, partially at the behest of Governor Lieutenant Governor Tina Flint-Smith, who has been using her position to flog the issue on Facebook:

I do not support Sheriff Stanek’s decision to send his deputies to North Dakota, nor did we approve his decision to begin with. I do not have any control over the Sheriff’s actions, which I think were wrong, and I believe he should being his deputies home, if he hasn’t already. I strongly support the rights of all people to peacefully protest, including, tonight, the Standing Rock protest.

Of course, the Governor Lieutenant Governor and former state chair of Infanticide R Us is lying:

In a blistering letter of his own, Sheriff Stanek schooled the legislators on how the mobilization materialized when state homeland security officials responded to an urgent request from North Dakota.

The Governor’s Office and the State of Minnesota authorized the mission, signed the contract, secured the reimbursement agreement and approved the plan two days before deputies departed for North Dakota.

The request came in under the Emergency Management Assistant Compact (EMAC) system adopted in all 50 states to make sure essential personnel and resources are made available for any catastrophe that occurs anywhere in the country.

The Governor’s office – Tina Flint-Smith and her audioanimatronic puppet Mark Dayton – are playing both sides of this issue for political gain.

Oh,  relax. It’s just a photo meme.

Or… Is it?

Why, no, Ms. Social Justice Warrior, I’m not appropriating Latino culture by eating a burrito.  This is a Pølse – a lefse (potetkakke, to be precise) wrapped around meat, vegetables and sauces to taste.

Not a freaking burrito.

Check your privilege.

We have offically hit Peak Social Justice:

In a piece for the Patriot, the school’s official student newspaper, Leah Power explains that although she has “attempted to build up a thick skin towards the insensitive jokes, stereotypes, cultural appropriation and overall ignorance” that she sees around her, she just cannot help but get very upset every time she hears someone who is not from the South use the word “y’all.” Power writes that she remembers traveling outside of the South when she was young and having to deal with “people joking about my accent and the stereotypes of the dumb, inbred, redneck hicks who made up the southern states,” but that “sometime in the last year or so, [‘y’all’ has] gone from a redneck pronoun to a socially acceptable form of addressing a group of people.”

Well, Ms. Power, all I can say is “d’uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh”.

Yes, it has.  And I’ve contributed to it.  And I will continue to contribute to it.

English is one of very few languages without a second-person plural.   In German, the singular you is “Du”; if you’re referring to more than one person, it’s “ihr”.  (In formal situations – another thing English lacks – it’s “Sie” and “Ihnen”).

But for English – since the demise of “Ye”, anyway – we have no word for second-person plural.

And there are times that causes problems.

Enter “y’all” – the southern dialect group’s great contribution to grammar.  It is a second person plural.  And unlike the Northern dialect group’s “Youse”, it’s  not phonetically awkward; it’s easier to go from an “L” to most other sounds than from an “S”.

So yes Ms. Power; by your leave (or even without it), I’m going to use “y’all”.   I’m also going to appropriate any parts of southern culture that suit me – Tom Petty, a sarcastic “yee haw” on occasion, Emmylou Harris, rockabilly, cheese grits, whatever.

And not just southern culture, either.  I will take whatever parts of other cultures and incorporate them into my life in any way I see fit; I’ll listen to R&B, Jazz and black Gospel music; I’ll incorporate words like “Boondocks” (stolen from the Philippines) and “Cojones” (Mexico) and others into my vernacular;  if something in another culture makes my life better and more interesting, I’m going to take it,and I’m going to dare you to do anything but whine about it.

Because that’s how all human cultures throughout history have formed, intermingled and grown.  Western European culture is the result of 2,000 years of various levels of mixture of Latin, Gallic, Frankish, Saxon, Anglic, Teutonic, Slavic,  Near Eastern, Nordic, Greek, and countless other cultures, customs and languages, none of which existed anymore in the original forms, because they all appropriated each other, and themselves, out of existence.   And it’s the same for every other culture on the planet – African, Asian, you name it.  The only exceptions are tribes in the impenetrable wilds of New Guinea or the Philippines that have gotten through these last 2,000 years with no other human contact.

So save us the jabbering about appropriation.  Every culture appropriates every other culture, always has, and always will.  Take what you need and leave the rest.

Or whine.

Your call.

Minnesota high school students choose Trump over Clinton:

More than 77,000 students from 213 high schools have taken part in the election so far, and the first round of results came in Tuesday morning.

The Republican ticket with Donald Trump and Mike Pence narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine 35 to 33 percent. The Trump/Pence ticket received 26,930 votes and the Clinton/Kaine ticket received 25,333 votes.

When I was in high school, I think Jimmy Carter won by a 2:1 margin over Ronald Reagan.  So this is a surprise, to say the least.