NPR’s Robert Siegel  interviews a Harvard researcher – Professor Thomas Abt, of Harverd’s Law School and Kennedy School – about the recent spike in violent crime.

They try to get Abt to blame the ownership of guns by law-abiding civilians.

Abt doesn’t:

SIEGEL: First, let me put to you a very common reaction to rising violent crime or rising murder rates. It’s guns. It’s the number of guns that are out there. Can we say that’s a cause?

ABT: I think it’s unlikely. The reason is I don’t think anything is fundamentally changed in the gun markets in the United States. The second reason is because overwhelmingly gun crime is perpetrated with weapons that are already illegal.

SIEGEL: So there’s a relationship to violent crime, but it’s not necessarily a relationship to a spike in violent crime over the past couple of years.

ABT: Yes. That’s the tension. On all sides, there is an urge to simplify these issues down to one factor, and it’s usually the factor that that particular person or constituency cares most about.

And NPR actually ran it.

My shocked face doesn’t translate to print well, unfortunately.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

 

All that hype about the wonderful Obama economy turns out to have been . . . hype.  It’s not wonderful at all.

The solution chosen by the Federal Reserve – raising interest rates to throw the brakes on rampant inflation – turns out to have been the wrong solution.

Was the wrong solution chosen because the economic numbers were wrong?  Because their analysis was wrong?  Or because the President who got elected was the wrong person and Lord knows, we can’t allow That Guy to have a robust economy?

Yes, I am that cynical.

Joe Doakes

No action on that bet.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A friend of your blog mentioned a MinnPost article, in a column captioned Big Words.  Since it’s the MinnPost, you have to wade through the stage-setting lies to search for a possible grain of wisdom.

Lie #1.  Trump did not refer to Kaepernick as a son-of-a-bitch, Trump explicitly referred to present players who take the knee.

Lie #2.  Kneeling is not about “a persistent American injustice” since Kaepernick himself was quoted in the article saying it’s no longer about police brutality, it’s about general unfairness.

Lie #3.  The world does not wonder if Trump seeks a return to pre-Jackie Robinson days, the author imputes that, groundlessly.

Lie #4.  Trump did not receive comeuppance from the players last week; viewership was down another 11% as fans heeded his advice to skip the game and owners now beg them to return.

Lie #5.  It’s true that Trump was elected by a minority of Americans, just like every modern President.  Half of Americans don’t vote at all; the winner is the person who gets half of the half that do – meaning a quarter of the whole.  The implication that Trump therefore lacks a mandate is not true, his quarter gives him the same mandate as Obama or Bush or Clinton.

Lie #6.  Trump’s approval rating has not fallen as a result of these tweets, it’s still hovering around 40% which is all he ever had

Lie #7.  Trump is not the person threatening the destroy the entire nation, that’s Rocket Man, who was subsidized and enabled by prior administrations kicking the can down the road.

After all those lies, what is the author left with?  Wishful thinking about impeachment.  Hope that Trump will get bored and quit (bad news – that doesn’t get you Hillary, it gets you Pence).  Exhortation to sit during the national anthem, because that’ll show him.  None of those will work and everybody knows it, even the author of the article.

He urges us to pray.  I agree, but I’m astonished MinnPost printed it.  Pray?  Pray to the God that Democrats repeatedly rejected at their convention, the God that Liberals have banned from schools, the God whose Commandments must be removed from the courthouse lawn?

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn occasionally.  I’m thrilled this author found his.  I’m just sorry it cost him so many lies to get there.

Joe Doakes

All in a day’s work at the MinnPost.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There are 32 teams in the NFL and each team has a 53-man roster, for a total of 1,696 players in the NFL.

There are 15,588 college seniors who are eligible to be drafted from the NCAA to the NFL.  Add in a few more from other, non-NCAA schools, and we’re talking about 17,000 or a 1-in-10 ratio.  But most players last several years, which means that for every man that makes it into the NFL, many more don’t make the cut.  How many, I don’t know.  20?  30?  50?

What’s the qualitative difference between the guys who make it versus the guys who don’t?  Aside from the Heisman Trophy Winner, I’d bet it’s a razor-thin margin. Which means the NFL could afford to dump a powerful number of existing players to replace them with almost-as-good players, at least for a while.  Ever see the Keanau Reeves movie “Replacements?”  Like that.

Wouldn’t even have to do it.  Just threaten it.  Call in some of those replacements for tryouts.  Let the regulars know their replacements are warming up.  “See that line of guys out the door and down the block?  They all want your job.  How badly do YOU want your job?  If you are more interested in social justice antics than playing football . . . .”

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Army helicopter flying over Staten Island had a mid-air collision with a quad-copter (which the media calls a drone).

Civilians are supposed to fly them lower than 400 feet but since there’s no altimeter, that’s hard to gauge.  The helicopter claims they were slightly above that altitude and maybe they were.  The article expresses alarm because bits of the drone wreckage nearly made it into the transmission housing, could have caused catastrophic failure and crashed the helicopter.

The Liberal response, of course, will be to ban anybody from flying anything that might interfere with helicopters, despite the fact that responsible operators know the rules and where to fly.  But Amazon will be sold out in a matter of minutes, as soon as Sheik Mohammad realizes he can bring down Blackhawks with $100 drones operated by children.  The skies above conflict areas will be swarming with them.  Maybe we need a more robust solution?

Joe Doakes

Maybe more, smaller drones to bring the bigger drones down first?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I live in Vikings territory so I learned to ignore NFL games years ago, long before players started kneeling to protest the nation that made them rich.

(more…)

Lots of external sturm und drang today – so I’m going to be having a Joe Doakes marathon.  Back to regular posting Monday.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The school bus company requires boys to sit on one side of the aisle, girls to sit on the other side, most likely the result of insurance company lawyers trying to avoid claims of inappropriate touching, sexual harassment or sexual assault occurring on the bus while under the driver’s control which would make the school bus company likely to get sued for failing to protect the students.
Two girls choose to sit on the boy’s side of the bus and won’t move back.  The driver puts them off the bus.  Outrage occurs because the girls claim to be pre-operative transgender boys.  They look like girls, they dress like girls, they act like girls, they flirt like girls . . . but in their secret innermost thoughts, for today anyway, they’re boys.  So asking them to sit on the girls’ side of the bus is a hateful act of gender discrimination . . . which makes the bus company likely to get sued for failing to protect those students.
Thus we see the problem with attempting to establish rules for ordering society based on subjective, secret, ever-changing and unverifiable criteria, rather than based on objective, obvious, easily established criteria.
Joe Doakes

What “duckspeak” is to language, our “elites'” current conception of “gender” is to biology.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Six hours after the hurricane, city inspectors were handing out code violation notices.

It’s people like them what cause unrest.

Joe Doakes

Just because your house is gone doesn’t mean you won’t be extorted into supporting the graft machine.

Democrats’ confidence in the mass media rises dramatically in the past year.

Democrats’ trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” has jumped from 51% in 2016 to 72% this year — fueling a rise in Americans’ overall confidence to 41%. Independents’ trust has risen modestly to 37%, while Republicans’ trust is unchanged at 14%.

They paid for it.  They’d better like it.

A friend of the blog writes:

Citizen Trump can criticize NFL players all he wants. But, I am a little upset that he is using his Presidential podium to suggest speech is a reason to be fired. (Leave that to the private employers and private customers to decide). But, as this is Trump, I am sure the issue is not the NFL. It seems there is the most hype when something else is going on. Our “wonderful” media, however, chooses to focus on hype rather than news, and Trump understands this more than most.

Then, I read this in the MinnPost.

And, it reminded me that this writer is on to something. When the government begins to threaten our Constitutional rights, it is important to stand up for those rights, no matter how out of place one feels. There may be public harassment, but that’s part of standing up for your rights. Gun owners have been doing it for years at open carry events.

Trump is playing to his audience – and it’s not a good thing in this case.

I had friends in Kansas City asking me if that foul rotting odor they detected was the smell of Betsy Hodges’ campaign, wafting all the way down to the Kansas/Missouri border.

It was not.  It wasn’t funny at all, either; a Kansas man sat, dead and unnoticed, at the Kansas City airport, apparently for eight months.

Government at work.

That, and a few thousand oblivious travelers.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Gun deaths will go unexplained, because there’s no federal money to research them.  The horror.

I’d bet a brand new nickel they’re not interested in research showing the overwhelming percentage of murders are committed by a tiny group of People Whose Lives Matter in discrete geographical locations; or that gun violence increased after President Obama simultaneously inflamed racial tensions while hobbling law enforcement; or in balancing lives saved by pre-emptively disarming everyone to make suicide-by-gun more difficult versus lives lost when the newly-disarmed are unable to defend themselves from deadly attack.

In the olden days, government funded research gave us the moon.  Nowadays, government funded research gave us Solyndra.  I can do without it.  Divert that spending where it will do some good.  Build The Wall.

Joe Doakes

No action on that nickel bet.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG walks into Sluggo’s, a sports bar on University [1].  NFL games are on on six big-screen TVs around the room.  Around five, there are small, dilatory groups watching games.  Around one TV, though, there are a group of people crowded around; men in “Che Guevara” and “Don’t Park the Bus” t-shirts, a few younger women in similar attire, older women in “peasant” dresses.   BERG recognizes several people from the group:  Avery LIBRELLE, Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, Inge CARROLL, Edmund DUCHEY, Brian FURIOUS, Sol GALLIVAN, Gutterball GARY, Cat SCAT, Professor William KRIEPPI, Gretel STROMBERG, Betty Rae TORSTENGAARDSEN and other liberal activism / alt-media / blogging mainstays.

BERG:  So…uh, hey.  Watching some Football?

LIBRELLE:  Yes, Merg.  It’s the American pastime!

BERG:  (thinks about it, decides not to pursue the error).  Huh.  So all of…(points at the crowd, who seem to be staring, uncomprehending, at the screen)…you are football fans.

DUCHEY:  My whole life.  While you’ve been writing “Sh*t in the Park” (some of the other gathered liberals snicker) I’ve been watching the Vikings greats like Pele and Bill Havlicek.

BERG:  Huh.

(BERG looks, notices that the teams have not yet taken the field.  Suddenly, it dawns on him).

BERG:  So – you all remember Tim Tebow, right?

(General incomprehension breaks out.  Then Gutterball GARY chimes in).

GARY:  He is the Christianist who took a knee before games.

(General hissssssssssssing breaks out from the crowd)

CARROLL:  He hates women!

STROMBERG (sotto voce):  “womenandtheirchildren”

CARROLL:  (sotto voce right back)  What, ,you think women are defined by their children?

SCAT:  He was a racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, classist, Christianist… (trails off)

(CARROLL and STROMBERG continue to argue.  On the TV, the teams are coming out onto the field)

BERG:  So – Tim Tebow was all sorts of awful things because he exercised his First Amendment right to express his faith in public.

(Generalized booing and hissing).

FURIOUS:  Everybody shut up.  It’s starting.

SCAT:   Oooh, I love the suspense.

(The national anthem starts.  The camera pans over dozens of player taking knees.   FURIOUS and DUCHEY frantically note the names and numbers of players that remain standing.   Cheers break out throughout the crowd)

BERG:  So – NFL players  who take a knee over “social justice causes”…

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  Heroes speaking truth to power.

BERG:  While Tim Tebow…

BIRKENSTOCK:  Racist sexist classist ableist cisgenderist Nazi who is literally Hitler.

(Anthem finishes.  The entire crowd risers from their chairs and heads for the exits)

DUCHEY (to GARY) Good game.  Good game.

(Within seconds, the table is empty.   The WAITRESS comes over.)

WAITRESS:  35  people at a table, and I got six dollars in tips.

BERG:  Wow.  They stiffed you pretty bad.

WAITRESS:  Well, technically, kind of – they ordered about $100 worth of kombucha, artisanal tea and one “gluten free lite beer”, and the rest just had water.

BERG:  You don’t even have kombucha or artisanal tea here, do you?

WAITRESS:  I can’t hear you. Naaah naaah naaaah.  (Walks away)

(And SCENE)

(more…)

A flyer circulated by “Anti”-Fa protesters at Berkeley:

The people in black suits with gas masks are “the most vulnerable”.  Ayep.

Being able to disagree is a dying art – and a vital one:

To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community. But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. G

Diagreeing civilly and productively is what makes representative government possible.  We’re losing that ability.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why Puerto Rico is still without power, and will be for a long time.  Money quotes:
“The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, is unable to complete the task of restoring power on its own: It is bankrupt, just like the Puerto Rican government . . .
“Maria delivered a near-knockout blow to PREPA, which was in deep crisis before any storm hit. For many years, it was unable, or unwilling, to invest in its four-decade-old power plants, which still burn imported oil, and above-ground power lines that were vulnerable to storms. Rolling blackouts and brownouts become common . . .
“PREPA struggled with a multi-billion-dollar deficit and a worker shortage — all while charging some of the highest rates in the United States. The utility relies on its own cash reserves to operate, and has no access to capital markets, a shortfall that is expected to worsen as its revenue collections cease during the power outage . . .
“Once the damage assessment is done, PREPA, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S Department of Energy and the APPA, can send workers and equipment to the island to help . . .
Oddly, the article fails to mention WHY the government is bankrupt.  It’s an island paradise, tourism is strong, where did the money go?  Bad luck?  Hurricanes?  Trump?
No, they pissed it all away through the usual Blue State shenanigans:  social programs, cronyism, and union benefits for government workers.  And you’re going to pay for it.  It’ll be the largest bailout to date, and it’ll be snuck through as emergency assistance, including loans that will never be repaid, grants, and just look in the fine print and the back pages and total up the amounts that will be tacked on for public art, ecological impact studies, culture and race equity assessments and payouts, etc.
Those poor children, suffering, how can you refuse to help?  You should be happy to pay for a better Puerto Rico.  And once you’ve paid for them, how can you refuse to pay for Chicago?  

Joe Doakes

Never waste a crisis.

Last week, I wrote a bunch of pieces on an editorial that appeared in the Strib the weekend before last.

The Strib complained about the growing street crime – in particular about the consequences of some local and higher court rulings that make enforcement against crimes like public intoxication and panhandling harder without specific legislative intervention.  (They also proposed the same impotent diversions on gun control that every DFL metrocrat shill runs to when faced with a wave of violence).

All the problems come back to one thing – a mayor and city council that may or may not be unable to grapple with the issues, but are certainly unwilling to interrupt the consequence-free virtue-signaling – like strong-arming local businesses with minimum wage hikes and sick time benefits, and social justice warrior-mongering – that obsesses so many of them.

Betsy Hodges in “action”. Crime skyrockets – but Target “Raises its minimum wage”.  Of course, technology has led to them cutting thousands of entry-level jobs, already.  Just like we warned you.  More to come. 

And this is the city council that, in large part, the Strib has supported to a fine sheen for the past sixty years.

And the mayor they’ve supported all along as well; I take you back to October, 2013, when the Strib editorial board endorsed Hodges for mayor:

Hodges is aligned with this page on the need for improved transit, including streetcars and enhanced bus service, as a driver of economic development citywide. As mayor, she’d play a key role in deciding the future of the Southwest Corridor light-rail project.

Although the school board operates independently from City Hall, Hodges says that as mayor she would seek to build consensus around the increasingly desperate need to close the city’s achievement gap, and she puts the right emphasis on early childhood development and prenatal health programs with her proposed “Cradle-to-K” cabinet. She’s talked generally about longer school days, more flexibility for administrators in teacher labor agreements, and support for reforms proposed by Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson.

Hodges doesn’t promise lower property taxes, but her record suggests she’ll be a strong steward of city resources and taxpayer dollars.

Hodges also promises to be aggressive in using technology to enhance public safety and would seek more accountability in hiring, training and disciplining cops. In a recent meeting with the Editorial Board, she acknowledged that the police union contract makes it too difficult to fire bad cops.

Does any of this – which reflects the express wishes and position of the most influential editorial board / DFL PR firm in the state – sound like what’s actually happened since the voters gave the Strib, yet again, exactly what they wanted?

Own it, Strib.  You got your wishes in the North Loop, as you have throughout the city.  You did your best to break it.  You fix it.

Andrew Klavan finds pretty much the entire left in Jimmy Kimmel.

Read the whole thing – but the conclusion does, well, conclude things pretty well:

Kimmel doesn’t matter. He’s just another half-smart big mouth Hollywood multi-millionaire. But they’re all Kimmel, all the left. They’re all doing the Kimmel Three-Step: 1. Emotion. 2. Hectoring. 3. Violence. Trying to get you to give them and their government your money and your freedom.

In short, and in order, Kimmel follows Big Left’s template:

1. Lead with emotion
2. If that doesn’t shut up the opposition, follow with name-calling
3. If that doesn’t work, move to the violence.

It’s been the case with just about every lefty pundit I’ve ever dealt with.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Powerline discusses income inequality.  It’s almost entirely caused by White Privilege but not in the way the Left means it.

The newest study says highest income goes to people who stayed in school, stayed out of trouble, got a job and kept it, got married before having kids and stayed married, and have at least two children.   In other words, traditional, conservative, “acting White” behaviors that Leftists call “White Privilege” but we call “normal” or “common sense.”  And those behaviors pay off.

Plainly, this is unfair.  The only solution is to make everyone come out equal:

Prevent studious children from getting better grades than goof-offs by doing away with grades;

Prevent scholars from getting better educations than drop-outs by teaching nothing useful in the schools;

Prevent the law-abiding from having better records than troublemakers by declining to prosecute or by plea bargaining, expunging and eliminating ‘the box’ on employment applications;

Prevent the industrious from having better work records than slackers by making all jobs part-time and temporary, even if it means we must impose exorbitant overhead like Obama-care premiums and $15 minimum wages;

Prevent the burden of dealing with the consequences of sex outside marriage by paying to kill “oops” babies;

Prevent marriage by making it a farce available to every perversion, and punish men who try by making family court a life sentence of penury.

America will only be a Fair society when we all live identical lives and since we can’t elevate everyone to the penthouse, we’ll have to reduce everyone to the trailer park to live solitary, poor, nasty and brutish lives.

We’re well on the way and ordinary Americans know it.

Which might be why Trump’s campaign slogan resonated with so many people.

Joe Doakes

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is back in the studio, making talk radio great again!

Today on the show:

• The Star Tribune is shocked, shocked, that the North Loop is prone to violence.
• The Methodists – fighting the culture war from the other side.

Too much program for two hours?  In the lands of a lesser host, yes, but not me.  Tune in!

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
• 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!

Last week, the Strib put out a breathtakingly obtuse editorial about the wave of crime sweeping the North Loop in Minneapolis – even as crime statewide continues a long-term downward trend.

The Strib’s editorial board blamed court for limiting the cops’ ability to arrest drunk and panhandlers – but, mirabile dictu, not a single word about getting the Mayor and City Council to take time off from virtue-signaling, political posturing, and  building exquisitely expensive monuments to their own wisdom.

But now, it’s time for the scapegoating:

There’s another, more intractable problem that Freeman, Segal, Arradondo and others wrestle with: guns. “We as a society have refused to provide law enforcement with the resources and laws needed to reduce the number of guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them,” Freeman said.

Bravo!

Getting guns out of the hands of those who should not have them!   That’s just brilliant!

So the MPD will start focusing on straw buyers, gangs and habitual offenders?

Don’t be silly, fellow peasant; it’s Minneapolis:

Options here are few, especially in light of the strength of the gun lobby.

Let’s make this absolutely clear:  the “Gun Lobby” is the only party to this discussion proposing anything that will actually affect crime; upcharging gun criminals,

Some attempts at municipal restrictions have been struck down. One notable exception is New York City, where carrying a gun requires a special city permit issued by the police commissioner.

And where crime 35 years ago was off the charts – with the same, exact laws they have today.  It was Giuliani and his “stop and frisk” and “broken windows” policies – none of which the government of Minneapolis would ever condone – that actually lowered crime in NYC.   And by the way – have you noticed how crime is trending since DiBlasio reversed Giuliani and Bloomberg’s policies?

Minnesota typically has had strong Second Amendment protections, but it may be time for Minneapolis to explore its own carve-out.

Because of all the carry permittees that are shooting people up in the North Loop?

Because all those north side gang bangers will get permits?

Because holding out bitterly against the rights of the law-abiding citizen has served Chicago so well?

The legislative delegations from Minneapolis and St. Paul, with assists from city leaders, should make their voices heard on resurrecting a gun safety bill that would require criminal background checks for gun sales made at gun shows, privately and online.  These are the same background checks gun shop owners are required to conduct, and a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll last year found strong support for such a measure — 82 percent.

Which only proves that 82 percent of the Strib’s remaining film of readers are idiots.   Criminals don’t take background checks.

No.  The responsibility for the carnage on the North Side and in the North Loop lies precisely in the laps of Mayor Hodges and the pack of virtue-signaling, PC fops that amuse themselves playing “government” at City Hall.  It is they that continue the policies that keep the North Side hopeless, keep the Minneapolis PD busy chasing PC trends, and keep the city as a whole ripe pickings for the criminal class.

Perhaps it’s Minneapolis’ idiot political class that should be taking background checks.

See you

Only on the American left can someone with this sort of public/self image…:

…Write something like this…

…unironically.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Democrats ran to the microphone to claim Trump made a deal, he says he didn’t.
This sounds familiar but I can’t find a link.
Didn’t Minnesota democrats do that? Maybe to Pawlenty? Leave a meeting, run out to claim a deal, then when it’s denied, shame Republicans for failing to honor the deal they never made?
Joe Doakes

Note:  it’s been a couple of crushingly busy days, and not really in a good way.    This same piece went out in raw-notes form yesterday.  I’m going to re-release it with, y’know, some actual writing. 

In theran an editorial this past week proposing some solutions in the tony, hip North Loop last week, the Strib editorial board pondered what to do about the rising crime rates in the North Loop, whose problems are a result of policies the DFL supports.  On Tuesday, we noted that the problem is falling exactly into line with urban theorist Joel Kotkin’s theories on the subject (cities are turning into donuts – holes full of the very wealthy, surrounded by a doughy ring of poverty warehoused in the neighborhoods for the convenience of the social service bureaucracy.

Today?  After decades of drawing bars to the North Loops, the City Council is shocked, shocked to discover drunkenness:

Police have lost some tools in the past couple of years that in particular appear to have affected quality-of-life issues. Public drunkenness and aggressive panhandling are more than nuisances — they can be threats to safety. Police used to be able to book inebriates who drank in public. But an order issued by then-Hennepin County Chief Judge Peter Cahill in early 2016 quashed that, allowing only ticketing for public drinking.

“Now you see someone with a bottle at 4th and Hennepin and you write a ticket,” Sullivan said. “A half-hour later, they’re at 5th and Hennepin, then 6th and Hennepin. Before, we could interrupt the cycle, get them off the streets and maybe even get them some help.” Hennepin County is the only jurisdiction in the state operating under such an order. Cahill said that his standing order can be changed, but that to his knowledge no such request has been made. It should be, and city officials should make it.

Right.

But the Hodges administration is too busy virtue-signalling against Donald Trump, and the city council – the only group of people in the metro not well-placed to mock Alondra Cano – are too busy building monuiments to themselves and keeping the graft wagon greased to be bothered, apparently.

Other efforts to help those with addictions should continue, but having created a neighborhood, city officials now have an obligation to ensure that public drunkenness is dealt with effectively.

Is it sexy enough for Minneapolis’ juvenile City Council to bother with?

Panhandling is tougher to deal with, since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 — Reed vs. the town of Gilbert — has been widely interpreted as a prohibition on panhandling laws thought to restrict free speech. The high court did not make a specific ruling on that issue, but the Columbia Law Review recently noted that “there is a real danger that virtually all panhandling laws will be invalidated, even though some serve to protect pedestrians and others.”

Isn’t that rich?  Panhandling is better-protected than political dissent from the right in Minneapolis.

Similarly, businesses and patrons alike complain about the large number of young people at night whom some see as intimidating…bars and clubs downtown that lure the 18-and-older set with cover charges that can be cheaper than a movie ticket…Once in, they can party until 2 a.m.

Teenagers and booze mix about as well as politicians and power.  One might think the bars would see a self-interest in curbing packs of drunk teen…

…but then, with a $15/hour minimum wage and mandatory sick time coming up, they have other best interests to see to.

Minneapolis isn’t serious about solving any social problem; the whole city is a vehicle for virtue-signaling.

Tomorrow:  The Same Old Crap About Guns