The Mesabi News has been one of few newspapers in the state with an editorial board that bucks the DFL line.

And their editorial from last Tuesday – “” – might be exhibit A in the “Why Trump Won” museum, someday.

They’ve had enough of the Iron Range’s future being determined by Twin Cities environmentalists:

The Iron Range is done being paraded around in the three-ring circus of hearings, resolutions and comment periods, which are really nothing more than putting the everyday Iron Ranger on trial by a jury of its uniformed peers.

At 4 p.m. today at Virginia Carpenters Union Hall, the Iron Range unifies. Labor groups, businesses, politicians and unions — and supporters in the Twin Cities — are standing up and saying we’re done. They’re calling for a boycott of a Forest Service hearing on July 18 in St. Paul over a federal land withdrawal, and instead will protect the Range’s way of life — on the Iron Range — July 25 in Virginia.

The editors see how the game is being played.

These hearings, on the taxpayers’ dime, are a mockery of working government. Go to Duluth, go to St. Paul, Ely or Virginia and it’s the same group of people talking on both sides.

What more is there to hear? And what is there to learn about mining in St. Paul? The Forest Service says it seeks a wide opinion on the subject, so by that logic environmental hearings on the St. Croix Bridge or the Fargo-Moorhead Diversion project should have hearings on the Iron Range.

But it won’t happen because this is the playground for the Twin Cities, and they’ll get there “one funeral at a time,” as Becky Rom, the leader of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, has been quoted by The Progressive, a grassroots publication that champions progressive politics.

Remember this the next time some plushbottom fop from Kenwood or Crocus Hill calls themselves “the Resistance”.

To:  Minnesota Public Radio News
From:  Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re:  Your Teaser This Morning

Heard on MPR’s morning edition:  Cathy Wurzer blurbs to tease an upcoming story:  “Will an Embridge pipeline in Northern Minnesota become the next Standing Rock?”

Given MPR’s connections to the Twin Cities’ Big Environmentalist Left, you’ll pardon me if it sounds like:

1. Big Environmentalism and Big Protest have been planning to make this pipeline “the next Standing Rock” for some time.
2. MPR, being tied into the same Twin Cities “progressive” non-profit circles as Big Environment and Big Protest, knows this fully well.
3. Standing Rock was good business for MPR.  Their reporters had constant access to the Standing Rock site, and responded with what sounded to this listener like an awful lot of sympathetic puff-piece coverage.   MPR News and APM would no doubt love to have another story like it to fill this long slow, election-free summer.

Of course it’s going to be “like Standing Rock”.  And I’m pretty sure everyone that matters at MPR already knows it, is planning for it, and started booking hotel rooms up amid the jackpines long before Wurzer’s teaser was written.

I mean, am I wrong?

That is all.

Via social media, from my friend “Midway Murph”:

MITCH: Institutional Social Media people can’t possibly get any dumber.

INSTITUTIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA PEOPLE: Hold my beer.

I posted this link last week – Glenn Reynolds in USAToday on how David Brooks and establishment-y pundits like him led to Donald Trump.

This passage caught my attention; the Tea Party preceded  Trump by a good 6-7 years.  We were civil, orderly, and we left the world a much better place than we found it, even in little ways, as shown in this story from a San Francisco counterprotest:

In San Francisco, too, tea party protesters met pro-Obama activists and picked up their trash. “John,” author of The City Square blog wrote: “As Obama supporters moved along in the line to get into the fundraiser, they left behind an impressive amount of trash … Tea Partiers shouted ‘pick up your garbage’ and ‘this is San Francisco, what about recycling?’ There was no response. They chanted ‘Obama leaves a mess.’ Still no response. Eventually, a tea partier (wearing the black cowboy hat) crosses over and starts to pick up the trash on his own. Other tea partiers join him. Another manages to find a trash bag. Soon the trash is being collected.”

It’s true. I was there.  It was an amazing outpouring of motivation, passion, and equanimity.

But it was spontaneous and from the right, so it had to be destroyed.  And between the media and the establishment GOP, it was.

Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

So when you shut down peoples’ peaceful, reasonable assembly for redress of grievances, what do you expect is going to happen?

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.

When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

All those Liberals on campus protesting White Privilege, it occurs to me to ask: if you succeeded in getting rid of White people, what will you eat?

All the food on campus comes from White people.  No, seriously, how many left-handed lesbian Latinas grow lettuce or tomatoes?  How many transgendered people raise hogs?  How many Muslim refugees grow non-GMO wheat, barley or hops?  Get rid of ordinary American White people and you say goodbye to having an ice cold beer with your BLT.

Liberals are demanding a Cultural Revolution based on ideology instead of reality, just like Mao: wiping out monuments to the past, punishing people for what they think, next step is to send commisars to the farms to re-educate peasants in fly-over land.  Then starvation, which will be proof that the kulaks are counter-revolutionaries who must be slaughtered for their own good.  We’ve heard that song before and it never ends well.

Same with Mac-Groveland ELCA-haired Liberals who support Black Lives Matters’ demand that the police be defunded and disbanded.  Wait until their house is broken into, or kid is beat up or raped, or car stolen, then what?  How to restore social order after you’ve thrown it away?  Drum circles?

Future civilizations will look back and say “I don’t get it, they had everything, how could they lose it?  It’s as if they intentionally destroyed the foundations underpinning their own civilization.  Who could be that short-sighted?  No wonder they’re extinct.”

Joe Doakes

It’s a little like all the “workers movements” through the past 200 years that have been mostly college students.

Kevin Williamson:

Americans can be — and often are — everything our critics say we are: impulsive, vulgar, oafish, clumsy, greedy, vain, belligerent, sanctimonious, hypocritical. But we are something else: a catalyst.

We’ve had 241 years of hit-and-miss government, but imagine going back to 1776 with a prophecy that one day, in the not-too-distant future, the English, French, Germans, Spanish, and Italians — to say nothing of the Israelis and the Japanese and the Indians — would form a restive and sometimes turbulent but enduring alliance against tyranny and oppression, and that this alliance would be loosely and imperfectly organized around something like the ideals ratified on July 4, 1776.

We have our political, economic, and religious disagreements with our friends and allies, but everywhere in the world where people fight against tyranny, we hear an echo of 1776. Everywhere in the world where people risk everything they have to tell the king, führer, caudillo, secretary general of the central committee, dear leader, ayatollah, or president for life to kiss their asses, we see something of ourselves. When things get bad enough, we join in, and have spent untold blood and treasure in the pursuit of other people’s liberty. Why? What’s in it for us? It is in our nature. We aren’t our politics. We aren’t our government or our president or even our Constitution, which is subject to revision from time to time. We are the people who decided that rather than just change kings, we’d do away with kings altogether under the radical theological premise that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, irrespective of the king’s good opinion.

Read the whole thing when you get a moment.

Stolen from a friend who stole it from a friend.  

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

Today on the show:

• Minneapolis’ new minimum wage should solve everything.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  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
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Join us!