It’s convention time.

Time for groups trying to influence the political process to wield the power of their numbers, finances and organizing skill to benefit the candidate they choose.

For a group with serious power – human, financial or moral – it’s time to apply that power to the endorsement of candidates for key state offices. And the big office at play in this weekend’s state conventions will be Governor.

Pressure groups, grassroots organizers, PACs and lobbies will be judiciously applying their clout to the candidates that seem most closely to track their interests and goals, with the skill and restraint of an eye surgeon operating around an optic nerve (or, in the case of Education Minnesota, a street worker jackhammering a piece of cement).

Which brings us to “Protect” Minnesota.

Yesterday, the criminal-safety group gave its “Orange Star” to gubernatorial candidate and state auditor Rebecca Otto.

The Otto campaign, being led by Rebecca Otto – which has been flailing in the candidate count lately, and which fired its manager last week – no doubt took some encouragement in the vote of confidence. It’s probably the only “good” news the Ottos got last week.

And the Orange Star right before the DFL convention might tend to indicate that the group was playing it a little safe, endorsing a female candidate who is anti-gun – but hasn’t wrapped herself around the issue, either.    That’d be an interesting signal of pragmatism from the group.

Well, until a little bit later – when this came out:

On the veritable eve of the convention, they gave another orange star to CD1 congressman and putative front runner Tim Walz, who has flipped from an “A”-rating from the NRA and the Gun Owners Caucus to being a rabid anti (for purposes of swaying the metro progressives he needs to win the convention, no doubt before flopping before the inevitable primary challenge to try to woo outstate voters, including his gun-owning base in the south of the state.

Still – two coveted orange stars would indicate that “Protect” MN was taking a broad, pragmatic stand against Erin Murphy, who has all but made campaign videos of herself pantomiming going door to door to seize guns; she’s that anti-gun.   It’d be an interesting take on “P”M’s part.

Until a few minutes later, when this arrived in our inboxes:

So – on the eve of the DFL convention, “Protect” MInnesota has basically gotten behind…all the DFLers?

They’ll exercise a keen focus on…everyone?

With such mad political skills, it’s hard to believe Nancy Nord Bence hasn’t taken the state by storm.

If there’s a subject on which I’ve taken more than my fair share of crap from fellow conservatives, it’s on the Death Penalty.

I support it for every possible reason, with one exception – the inevitability of executing the innocent.

There is no rational doubt that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent of the arson murder for which he was executed in Texas in 2004; the “settled science” that convicted him of the murder of his sons turned out to be baked monkey doodle.

And even though the evidence against him read like an episode of Reno 911…

The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.

…it appears likely to happen again.

The whole piece is worth a listen- especially the part near 16:03 where the host and his guest (the NYTimes’ Nick Kristof) express amazement that this could happen in blue, liberal, Democrat California, on the watch of Jerry Brown and former state Attorney General Kamala Harris.

While I’ve  been a Trump skeptic and non-fan for, literally, 60% of my life, and am lukewarm on many aspects of his presidency (and especially of the personality cult that’s built up around him), I’ll give him points for a bunch of things:  Gorsuch, rattling the Norks, his cabinet, his deregulatory frenzy, his initiatives in the Middle East…

…and the big kahuna of ’em all, his appeal to the sense that America is a good, not bad, thing.

To Big Left, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Robert “Not the Population Bomb Guy” Ehrlich writes:

Recall a lifetime ago (actually it was 2008), when a certified dove won the presidency in a landslide. One of his first official acts was to undertake a trip to a number of Muslim countries, wherein apologies were offered for America’s “imperialist” past. Assurances were also made: The cowboy Bush and his warmongering neocons were gone. Mr. Obama would now inform the world that America had learned its lesson. The U.S. would no longer manifest its arrogance on the world stage. We would henceforth strive to have the world like us — especially our charismatic but unthreatening young president, who was counterintuitive himself, seeming to act on the premise that if the United States was ostentatiously embarrassed about its dominance and power, we would be better liked. And we were better liked, but much more endangered and much less intimidating…And then one day the unlikeliest of political leaders appeared. Many voters (including some who ended up voting for him) saw Mr. Trump as unprepared to tackle the world’s most intractable problems…But there was one aspect to the Trump phenomena that all of his supporters firmly believed: that the “kick me” sign that had hung around America’s neck for eight years would be gone. Good riddance.

I’ve found Progs’ antipathy toward the US – one of few countries in the world that’d indulge their fripperies, legally or economically – curious and, at one point in my life, off-putting enough to give me one of the many little shoves it took to move me from left to right.

In my mind, it’s yet another reason to think about an amicable national divorce, splitting the nation into a country that doesn’t care about itself very miuch, and one that does.

You’re saying that a woman who said bankers should be beheaded, who did an “ironic” version of the National Anthem that would have been tossed out of a karaoke bar, who claimed (apparently falsely) to be an incest survivor, who posed as Adolph Hitler in a Jewish satire magazine, who tweeted out George Zimmerman’s parent’s address and phone number (and called Zimmerman a “vigilante”), said something stupid and outrageous?

I need to be writing this down.

You can’t talk about everything with everyone.  That’s just not how people are.

Charlie Martin notes that there are five signs to look for to know if you can or can’t talk with someone about climate change.

Example:

5. Are they willing to question the “accepted” values for actual warming?

The apparent mismatch between the modeled values and the measured values for temperature lead to the next question. The number of interest is the global average surface temperature, or GAST. One argument that comes up sometimes is that this is not even a meaningful number, but that’s wrong and kind of silly. The Earth has a surface, every point on it has a temperature, and the average of that temperature can be computed. Of course, we don’t have thermometers on every point on the Earth’s surface and we aren’t recording the temperature for every thermometer we do have. But that just turns GAST from a measurable value into a statistical quantity, with an error interval.

The whole thing is worth a read.

And it occurs to me – we need a similar scale to judge whether it’s worth trying – or possible – to discuss guns.

It’s a concise but useful list:

Do perpetrators ever find their way into the story?  If they describe “gun crime” without ever putting someone at the trigger?  If they realize that a gun without an evil person to use it is an inert object, while an evil person without a gun is an evil person who’ll switch to fertilizer, trucks,knives, gasoline or planes, you might actually have a shot at a conversation.

Do they realize what has actually happened with crime rates?   If they still think that crime rates are rising, you’ll be in for a tough slog.

Will they examine their own chanting points?   When you point out the fact that Universal Background Checks can not, logically, affect crime in any way?

Do they use the phrase “Right to be Safe?”: If they believe there’s any such thing, there’s going to be a failure to communicate.

Do they know the difference between security and security theater?  If they natter on about magazine sizes, without mentioning gang violence,

If you can get 2-3 of those to break right, you might have a shot.

You might also have a miracle on your hands.

Over the Memorial Day weekend “Protect” Minnesota just couldn’t help itself; they had to appropriate a solemn national observance to their mission:

Normally, something like this would end up in me wading into the fever swamp to smack them down.

Especially when you get people like this chiming in:

(Would someone please tell me what the “Right to be Safe” is?   Is it the same as the “Right not to have a car accident?”    There is no such right – merely a responsibility to drive carefully.  There is a responsibility to protect one’s self, family, property and community.  That’s it).

(more…)

A longtime friend of the blog writes:

Common-sense knife control – this has to work right?

Well, maybe…:

…provided that “work” means “inure society to being almost comically helpless in the face of evil”.

Driscoll:  “Forget Blazing Saddles – could they even make SCTV today?”

Mitch answers:  Forget today.  They couldn’t have made it fifteen years ago.

Well – nothing but an hour of “Prickly Heat”, anyway.

“Die-in” at a Publix supermarket (an employee-owned supermarket whose thoughtcrime was to donate money to a pro-2nd-Amendment legislator)?

Or outbreak of passive sexual assault?

You know where my money is.

SIDE NOTE:  I’m going to guess more than a few left that supermarket and joined the NRA out of pure spite.

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

• Socratic debate – Minneapolis style!
• Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer,  from the US Nuclear Strategy forum and fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, on the Iran and North Korean nuclear situations.
• Andy Cilek of the MN Voters Alliance on their suit against the MN election authorities.
• You can fool most MInneapolitans all the time.

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.

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Join us!

Evergreen State College – the ultra-“progressive” school in Washington State that’s spent the past couple years in an orgy of virtue-signaling and PC-witchhunting – has seen its enrollment projections drop by 20% this year – and its budget is accordingly in freefall:’

Both announcements come nearly a year after the college endured persistent riots following former professor Bret Weinstein’s decision to question the “day of absence,” an initiative that asked white students to leave campus for a day of off-campus diversity workshops, while people of color participated in on-campus workshops.

After besieging Weinstein in his classroom, student protesters proceeded to hold school President George Bridges and several other administrators hostage in the president’s office, temporarily refusing even to let Bridges use the bathroom unless he agreed to adopt their demands for additional diversity-related initiatives.

Carmichael warned employees that “it is impossible” to make a budget cut of such magnitude without “affecting some programs and services,” noting that the college “can’t afford” things like “theatrical productions in the Experimental Theater.”

Evergreen has been “experimental theater” for some time now.

But back on point – it almost seems like people looking for an education these days would prefer less pompous, often threatening and sometimes violent virtue-signaling and more…

…education?

It hardly seems possible, does it?

A man walked into an Oklahoma restaurant…

… It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It’s not. He opened fire, injuring four.

Then, a good guy with a gun saved the day:

A man “opened fire” Thursday in an Oklahoma restaurant, leaving at least four people injured, before he was fatally shot by a bystander, police said.

I’m going to guess there aren’t going to be a lot of restaurant shootings in Oklahoma anytime soon.

One of the most evergreen topics for any out-of-power party is the gas prices this time of year.

Here’s a hint – the sitting president has almost nothing to do with fluctuations in spot gas prices (and no, I said pretty much the same thing when gas prices rose to $4, twice, during the Obama years; long-term prices are another matter, but the fracking boom blunted Obama’s efforts there).

Anyway – it‘s a new administration, and a new minority party,  and it’s baaaack:

Now it’s evidently Democrats’ turn again. The Daily Beast reports Monday that they plan to make rising gas prices the centerpiece of their summer election-year attacks against President Donald Trump. Already Chuck Schumer has taken to the Senate floor to attack Trump on the issue, blaming the price increases on his decision to pull out of the Iran deal (an Iran deal Schumer supposedly opposes, but good luck figuring that one out).

But as with the attacks against Bush and Obama, the attack on Trump lacks teeth. Economists widely accept that presidents have only minimal control over gas prices. As University of Chicago economist and Obama advisor Richard H. Thaler noted in 2012, while most Americans think presidents can control gas prices, “any respectable economist” will tell you they cannot.

It’s not like there’s no real news out there, I mean…

I caught a few seconds of the Today show for the first time in five years this morning (I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the TV – I literally haven’t watched a network prime-time show since the finale of The Office in July of 2013).  The “Top Story” on “Today” was the President’s statements on NFL players kneeling during the anthem.

Trump’s greatest genius may be his flair for distracting our idiot media, and people who take it seriously. 

A court has ruled that President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his critics on Twitter.

Last July, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on behalf of seven individuals arguing that blocking users on the @realDonaldTrump account who disagreed with the president’s policies violated freedom of speech.

The blocked plaintiffs are Maryland professor Philip Cohen, Tennessee Dr. Eugene Gu, Seattle songwriter Holly Figueroa, New York comedy writer Nicholas Pappas, Pittsburgh author Joseph Papp, D.C. legal analyst Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, and Houston police officer Brandon Neely.

“When I found out the president blocked me, it felt as though my opinion didn’t matter,” Neely said last year. “After devoting five years of my life to serving this country, the president — who is supposed to represent the views of all Americans — did not care what I had to say.”

I say bravo, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald.   Elected officials should have keep their social media open to everyone that pays their salary.

I’m looking at you, all you DFL reps that blocked me – most of them without having ever engaged with me.

More to come.

“Woman” (probably) throws drink at conservative minx Tomi Lahren – local liberal hamsters applaud like trained chimps.

This article by the City Pages’ relentlessly dumb Mike Mullen:

The Fox News contributor apparently stopped and turned back to confront the water-thrower’s table, at which point a man yelled, “Fuck that bitch!,” “Fuck that hoe!,” “Racist-ass bitch!,” before asking: “Why you even out here?”

Within a couple seconds, she wasn’t: Lahren ended the confrontation and left the scene.The woman left standing there talking to patrons after Tomi retreats might just be Lahren’s mom: TMZ reports “some of the water got on Tomi’s mom as well.”

TMZ also passes along information from “sources close to Tomi,” who report that this drink-throwing was “completely unprovoked.” Completely! Except for, like, 500 things she’s said on national television.

That anyone can make me actually root for Lahren should tell you something.

And the fact is (and it is a fact), at best Minnesota “progressives'” notion of debate runs to:

• One round of factoids
• A round or two of logical fallacies (mostly ad hominem and strawmen)
• A round or two of name-calling
• If they haven’t broken off and run away, physical violence.

But let’s just bask in all that Minneapolis “progressive” tolerance.

The argument amongst Minneapolis’s self-appointed “elites” isn’t whether to make Minneapolis into a high-rise, high-density city full of condos for the well-to-do and poverty-warehouses for the poor – but just how dense to make things.

Pun intended.

But as Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all time.  Even people who vote for Alondra Cano¹.  As the Strib found:

A city staffer explained the rising burden of rental prices on poor residents, and gently pushed a central theme of the draft plan — that the city must build more homes in more places — to a group peppered with skeptics.

“If you just let the market promote density, that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to affordable housing,” said Lara Norkus-Crampton, a south Minneapolis resident. “If it was just density that provided affordable housing, then Hong Kong and New York City would be the most affordable places on the planet, and they’re not.”

Norkus-Crampton’s view cuts to the core of the debate as the city takes public comment on a comprehensive plan that will be finalized before the end of the year. It would be a bold experiment, allowing fourplexes the same size as a large home in every residential neighborhood, and dramatically loosening restrictions on the height and type of buildings allowed on dozens of transit routes throughout the city as part of an effort to drive down rental prices.

Not a bad grasp of economics for someone who clearly votes DFL (the hyphen is the tell); if you make something more scarce (by artificially jiggering the availability of crappy apartments by crappy transit, for example), the price will rise.

The plan, we’re told, is to eventually bar all new single-family homes from the city – turning it into a hipster haunt and poverty warehouse (depending on the neighborhood) with a thin film  of the wealthy grandfathered in around Lake of the Isles and Minnehaha Creek and West River Road (someone’s gotta administer all the rest of the housing – and it’s so hard to concentrate on other peoples’ best interest when you’re jammed into a four plex next to a train station…

¹Just kidding.  You can convince Alondra Cano’s voters of pretty much anything.   Someday, I may turn to short con games in her ward for a little side income.

I was thinking the other day – if it turns out that, after almost two years of Democrats claiming that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians it turns out that the Democrats were the ones who actually colluded with Putin?

It’d mean that Berg’s Seventh Law is not only an inviolable law of human political behavior, but in fact one of the core truths about the American political system today.

Former Iron Range legislator Carly Melin (who has since gone on to the great non-profit sinecure reward that awaits all DFL legislators) on the protests at the Blue Line on Fort Snelling yesterday:

The same people who oppose public transit are mad that public transit was disrupted by a demonstration and even though those demonstrators were arrested there should have been more laws to arrest them under.🤦🏼‍♀️

— Carly Melin (@carlymelin) May 22, 2018

Er, Ms. Melin? Why shouldn’t we be mad? We paid for it.

God knows you didn’t.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

From a commenter on Powerline at this article:

As with all things “progressive” – it’s only satire until it’s law.

Or, in this case, both.

So far, at least.

It’s from Toby Young, a former British pratfall journalist who’s become a charter school advocate in the UK.   The entire article is worth a read (and I urge you to do just that) and illuminates exactly how much Big Left hates apostates.

But the quote is so important in so many other areas:

In today’s world, actually doing things to aid the disadvantaged counts less than making dumb jokes. If you’ve done the latter, you’re no longer allowed to do the former. As Young puts it, “Virtue-signaling is more important than being virtuous.”

I’m going to remember this (to the extent that I didn’t already think it) every time I (accidentally) watch The Daily Show, (inadvertently) catch a bit of Chelsea Handler, watch the ELCA-coiffed  criminal-safety protesters gamboling about the Capitol sputtering their half-understood nonsense, or watching collect kids barking at the moon over the threat other peoples’ free speech poses them.

…but it’s not.

It’s comically, yet tragically, not.

My Colt: The Story of Traveller was written by Margaret Samdahl, who worked at the Lee Chapel Museum for 13 years. Samdahl says that she decided to write the book to respond to Lee Chapel patrons’ demands for a child-friendly book on Traveller. Using the Special Collections archive at Washington and Lee as well as other research materials available at Leyburn Library on W&L’s campus, Mrs. Samdahl embarked on a decade-long effort to bring the story of Traveller to a younger audience.

Lee Chapel purchased copies of My Colt on February 27, and the University Bookstore followed suit on March 3.

However, after the book and a book signing event at the university were advertised in the daily Campus Notices on March 8, the administration received a complaint from a professor who objected to the content of the book. It was subsequently removed from both the Museum Shop and the University Bookstore, and the book signing event was abruptly cancelled on March 9.

Here’s the part that blows my mind: one idiot professor can, in effect, burn books.

If memory serves, even the Nazis did it in groups.

Obama’s education secretary urges people to boycott schools “until gun laws are changed”:

Duncan said in an interview Saturday that the idea was intended to be provocative but that an aggressive approach like a school boycott is needed if gun laws are ever going to change. He has school-age children and said if this idea were to gain traction, his family would participate.

“It’s wildly impractical and difficult,” Duncan said. “But I think it’s wildly impractical and difficult that kids are shot when they are sent to school.”

44 kids in five years.  It’s 44 too many, of course.

But kids are safer in school than at home, on the street, at the mall – anywhere.

Former Secretary Duncan – the poor children of liberal parents managed to survive ’til birth without getting killed; why do you keep putting them in danger?

The Reverend Nord Bence sent out one of her tl;dr news releases yesterday, including this curious little passage:

There will be no Protect Minnesota protest at the Capitol today.

The pro-gun rights Majority is dug in, no sensible gun bills will be passed today, and we’re not going to give them the satisfaction of smugly walking past our protesters any more this session.

Now, if you’re not Nancy Nord Bence, you might think that today – the last substantive day of legislative activity, when all anti-gun bills have been scrubbed from existence – would be the perfect day to go to the capitol in your ELCA hair and your orange shirt and your waves of uninformed sanctimony and try to gun-shame some people who were elected by a decisive majority of voters.

And you’d be right!

But then this isn’t about Nancy Nord Bence wanting to send a moral message by her/their absence.

No. It’s about this:

Photo courtesy Brian McDaniel.

They rallied on Saturday, when there was still a long shot of getting something passed (had hell frozen over on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon).  Nancy Nord Bence put out a call for warm, uninformed bodies to come to the capitol to shake down the thunder on the legislators.

And that’s what they got.

Nord Bence tried to put a brave face on it:

They’ve made their beds. We will remember. And we’ll spend all summer and fall helping the electorate to remember as well.

Oh, so will I, Nancy.

So will I.