SCENE:   Mitch BERG is browsing for saw chains at Menards’ in the Midway, when Fudd GLUNK, vice chair of the Ramsey County chapter of “Sharia is Coming!  Sharia is Coming!”, walks around the corner.

GLUNK:  Merg!

BERG:  Er…hey, Fudd…

GLUNK:  Islam’s goal is to impose Sharia Law on all of us!

BERG:  [Looking as if he knows he’ll regreat asking] And we know this how…

GLUNK:  Because the Koran say so!

BERG:  And because Muslims, like all the the world’s major faiths, always follow their holy texts to the absolute word, in exactly the same way.

GLUNK:   Yes!

BERG: Which is why you will never, ever find a Catholic gettng divorced, a Jew eating bacon, an Evanglical protestant fornicating, or a Hindu eating beef, ever.

GLUNK:  They’re different.

BERG:  Different how?

GLUNK:  Because the Koran tells them exactly what to do.

BERG:  As opposed to the BIble, the Torah…

GLUNK:  Their goal, every last one of them, is to impose Sharia on the world.  By force if needed, by guile if possible.  They Koran allows no exceptions.

BERG:  So Muslims, unlike all the world’s faiths, are unanimously diligent in obeying their various holy texts.

GLUNK:  Yes.  The Koran says so.  There is only one Koran.

BERG:  That’s pure baked wind.  There are six major branches of Islam, and probably six dozen minor ones – they may be more fragmented even than Christianity with its 3-4 major divisions.  And one of the things they fragment over is waht “Jihad” actually means.  To radical fundamentalist Sunni like ISIS, and radical fundamentalist Shi’a like the Iranians, it means “impose Islam by all means necessary”, while Sufis are downright pacifistic, and have gotten clobbered through the centuries by their Sunni and Shi’ite neighbors for the trouble.

And pretty much any imam can tack on his own interpretation beyond that – which was why the Imam at exactly one mosque in Minneapolis decided that touching pork, not eating it, and being in the presence of dogs rather than owning and being in contact with them, was a sin, thus becoming the only Muslims in America to actually practice such beliefs.

GLUNK: Haha, Merg. The Koran says that all apostates must be killed!

BERG: And among the acts that qualify as “apostasy” in purist Islam are living in a non-theocratic country – Muslim or not – much less voting for a government, since the only non-apostatic government is the Caliph. And all those Muslim girls in our public school systems? They and their parents are all in biiiiiig Koranic trouble, since educating girls is trayf.

GLUNK: Trayf?

BERG: Never mind.

GLUNK: The Koran allows Muslims to deceive the infidel! It’s called tak…er, takk…

BERG: Taqqiya.

GLUNK: Yeah!

BERG: So every Muslim in a non-theocratic Muslim country is a sleeper agent?

GLUNK: The Koran says so!

BERG: You’re aware that the Christian churches of Europe, after decades of free fall, have finally plateaued, almost entirely from Muslims converting?

GLUNK:  They are just laying low until they get their opportunity.

BERG:  Yeah, that must be it.  Interesting fact; the first mosque in the United States was in Ross, North Dakota; the Syrian/Lebanese community that built it pretty much intermarried with the local Swedes and Germans, and is pretty much indistinguishable from the locals 120 years later – in fact, I went to high school with some of their descendants and didn’t even know about it.

If they’re sleeper agents, they’re pretty dang effective.

GLUNK:  You must be some kind of Muslim accomodationist!

BERG:  Not at all.  I’m a Christian, a conservative, and an American nationalist and exceptionalist.    I’d never convert to Islam, and I can argue articulately exactly why.    Our nation needs to accept immigrants – and insist that they assimilate.  Which is why when we get a Muslim coming to the GOP, I welcome them – because “going to a Republican party event” is as assimilatory as buying a house in Burnsville with a freaking white picket fence.

GLUNK:  You’re just a useful idiot for Sharia Law!

BERG:  About half a percent of Minnesota’s population is Muslim.  If we get Sharia imposed on us by half a percent of the population, we’ll probably deserve it.

But think about this for a moment.  Radical Islam – the Wahhabi, the Shi’ite fundies in Iran – that is most definitely a danger.

But progressivism is a danger to this country right now – and if we take every single new immigrant to this country and, via ignorant intolerance, turn them into Democrat / “progressive’ voters, we’ll be doing for our enemies what they could never do for ourselves.

GLUNK:  I suppose now you’re going to come up with some clever punchline to end this sketch?

BERG:   At this point, it’d be redundant, wouldn’t it?

And SCENE

Florida candidate tweets out an explicit solicitation to election fraud:

Tweet was removed. Of course.

When Dems talk about “vote suppression?” They’re projecting. Every f*****g time.

“Anti”-Fa thugs terrorize Tucker Carlson’s family.

And then journalistic Dash OK, “journalistic” Dash thugs justify it:

The reason Big Left talks so much about the “wave of right ing terror” that’s sure to be coming any day now for the past twenty years is that they desperately need something to actually fit their narrative; raw projection alone only carries you so far outside the Democrat base…

Barack Obama was on the campaign trail in the weeks leading up to mid-terms…

…and it’d seem he had the same results at mid-terms that he did as president:

TREND:

Over the past 5 days, President Obama flew into the states of Georgia, Florida & Indiana to personally campaign for big-name Democrat candidates in those states.

Here's how they did:

Joe Donnelly: Lost
Andrew Gillum: Lost
Bill Nelson: Lost
Stacey Abrams: Lost

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 7, 2018

Now – if only we can get the Dems to endorse Elizabeth Warren, and get Obama to stump for her…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Fox News reports that the ‘caravan’ migrants are boarding busses chartered by the local government in Mexico.  They don’t want the migrants in their area so they’re paying for busses to ship the migrants North, passing the buck to America.

Can’t blame them.  Can we hire busses to ship them to Canada?

Nice idea – but the Canadians actually enforce their borders and immigration rules.

It’s rapidly becoming a Berg’s Law – liberals are usually good for one round of “debate”, until the one round of chanting points they “know” about the subject (they don’t actually know them; they’re regurgitating) get struck down.  Then they switch to ad hominem, ad hominem, ofay mockery, and worse.  .

It’s true on most subject – guns, sexual harassment, gay  marriage, whatever – but healthcare is far from an exception.

And in the chanting points that make up their world, “Single Payer Healthcare” is an immaculate, unimpeachable concept.    None have ever been shown the drastic falloff in outcomes (as opposed to coverage – which is the easy part.

Enter Forbes:

Consider one nurse’s letter explaining why she quit the profession. She described horrific working conditions. Medical professionals worked 12-hour shifts with little time for necessities like bathroom breaks or food. Managers felt they couldn’t do anything to change unsafe conditions created by overcrowded hospitals. “You cannot safely practice under such conditions,” she wrote. “Mistakes will be made and people will be harmed, some fatally.”

The shortage of providers has resulted in longer wait times for patients. In May, 4.3 million people in the United Kingdom were on waiting lists for surgery, a 10-year high. Adjusting for population, that would be like having everyone in the state of Florida on waiting lists. Roughly 3,500 British patients have been on hospital waiting lists for more than a year.

More than one in five British cancer patients waits longer than two months to begin treatment after receiving a referral from a general practitioner. In Scotland, fewer than 80 percent of patients receive needed diagnostic tests — endoscopies, MRIs, CT, scans and the like — within three months.

These delays are deadly. An analysis that covered just half of England’s hospitals found that almost 30,000 patients died in the past year while waiting for treatment — an increase of 57 percent compared to 2013.

Looking at how patients actually do  on NHS should be enough to cure any reasonable, informed, logical person of their infatuation…

…but I guess I just summed up the problem, didnt I?

Rachel Packer at Marie Claire tells us that Trump makes her regret adopting her Chinese daughters:

But now I worry that we made a tragic mistake.

I pulled those two beautiful babies away from a rising power and into a damaged democracy. I brought two girls of color into a society where it’s clear that their word and their bodies are worth less than a man’s—and where open, overt racism has become even more likely now than it was a decade ago. And unfortunately, my worries aren’t exactly tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoia.

After which she carries on with a couple column-feet of tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoia and unhinged virtue-signaling.

I bring this up not so much to castigate Ms. Packer’s dubious grasp of reality, but to illustrate what seems to matter to liberals; freedom from want, from cognitive dissonance, from opposition, rather than, well, freedom.

Lord, I hope those girls grow up to be conservatives.

In the past few months, I’ve been treated to the sight of Saint Paulites – almost all of them people who’d never dream of voting for anything but a DFLer – reacting with Major-Renault-like shock, shock, that…

• Saint Paul’s Mafia-style trash-collection system costs more, offers fewer options and miserable customer service, all delivered with the sort of arrogance we’ve come to expect from Saint Paul’s government (Motto: “Government is the things we do together, arrogantly and imcompetently”).
• Mayor Carter’s shunting of budget from police and fire to “Sustainability” (e.g. institutional virtue-signaling) would pave the way for more crime
• The Soccer stadium, ballyhooed as the core of an urban renaissance with green space,  shops with walkable access and the rest of the urban planning buzzwords – is going to wind up being precisely the plutocrat plaything in the middle of a sea of asphalt that all of us skeptics predicted.

And, now, Saint Paul’s school-building spree turns out to make the Pentagon look like a Bemidji Norwegian Lutheran church’s decoration committee.

St. Paul Public Schools vastly underestimated the cost of an ambitious 2016 plan to improve the look and function of every building it owns.

Eight major school projects that got underway last year will cost the district a total of $214 million, according to the latest figures from the school district.

That’s $63 million more than the district estimated in 2016, a Pioneer Press analysis has found, a difference of 42 percent.

New estimates for the next eight large projects, all scheduled to break ground in the coming five years, total $220 million. That’s $91 million, or 70 percent, higher than the 2016 estimate.

There will be shock.

And then a majority of them will vote for an even further-left Democrat next election.  ∂

Anti-bullying programs seem to result in…more bullying?  

Seokjin Jeong and Byung Hyn Lee set out to discover how bullying prevention programs could be effectively transferred from individual schools to schools on a national level. To their surprise, they discovered that bullying prevention programs don’t always produced the expected results:

“Surprisingly, bullying prevention had a negative effect on peer victimization. Contrary to our hypothesis, students attending schools with bullying prevention programs were more likely to have experienced peer victimization, compared to those attending schools without bullying prevention programs. It is possible that bullies have learned a variety of antibullying techniques but chose not to practice what they have learned from the program.”

Such findings bring up an important point. We spend a lot of time promoting awareness of different issues today. But while awareness of a problem should be raised, is it possible to fixate on that problem so much that we actually increase it?

The fact is, high attention on any one issue can work both ways. On the one hand, it raises focus on the victim. Being able to come out and say, “Yes, I’ve suffered, too,” even for the smallest thing, can be oddly gratifying and status boosting. On the flip side, perpetrators also stand to receive a certain level of prestige and attention for their actions, however wrong they may be.

In much the same way as saturation coverage of mass shootings creates more mass shootings I suspect.

In previous years, I’ve given way to gusts of logorrhea and come up with “100 Reasions…” to vote (for the most part) for the GOP slate.

I don’t need 100 this year.    If you’re a thinking person who cares about having a Representative Republic with checks and balances, you shouldn’t either.

The notion of Angie Craig, Tina Smith, Amy Klobuchar, Dean Phillips and Dan Feehan “representing” you in DC should terrify you, if you care about living in a representative republic that believes (as imperfectly as the GOP practices this belief) in rights and powers enumerated to the states and the people should terrify you.   They’re the party that is actively taking not only about eliminating the Electoral College, but in some circles applying the Popular Vote on a national level to the House of Representatives (because winning a share of the nation’s districts by 40 points and losing most of the nation by 11-3 points isn’t enough of a verdict for them).

And the Dems’ rhetoric this cycle has been the greatest, most systematic violation of Berg’s Seventh Law I hope ever to see; jabbering about white right wing conservative violence (that never happens) while studiously ignoring the steady drizzle of attacks by their people; yakking about “voter suppression” while benefitting from decades of gerrymandering (hello, CD4 and 5).

And they’re barely bothering with the pretense that “Gun Safety” and “Gun VIolence Prevention” isn’t about disarming the law-abiding anymore.

And if the though of Keith Ellison being the state’s chief law enforcement office doesn’t fill you with thoughts of heading for the woods and going off the grid, the notion of a Governor Walz driving the 2020 redistricting as the state loses a Rep and yet another DFL-leaning judicial committee gerrymanders the state to give Metrocrats yet another ten year stranglehold on your pocketbook should.

I’ve said it before; while I have voted for Democrats, even in the 35 years since I became a conservative, it needs to be said:  while Ronald Reagan would be a tad to the right of the mainstream national GOP today, a DFL party that rejected Lori Swanson would pelt John F. Kennedy with rocks and garbage – and Kennedy governed to the right of Erik Paulsen.

So I’ll be #resisting the Democrats, and the DFL, by voting a straight GOP ticket.  Not because I think the GOP has done the job I wanted them . (and voted for them) to do, but because the Democrats are actively working to destroy what this country is  supposed to  be about.

….you see it in black and white:  Big Left’s “elites” really, really don’t understand the Constitution, federalism, checks and balances…representative republican government.

I don't think people are ready for the crisis that will follow if Democrats win the House popular vote but not the majority.

After Kavanaugh, Trump, Garland, Citizens United, Bush v. Gore, etc, the party is on the edge of losing faith in the system (and reasonably so).

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 5, 2018

There are times the idea of complete national divorce – preferably peaceful – sounds almost dreamy.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The King in the old joke says: “I know I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?”  In this election, I don’t think Conservatives are paranoid enough.

We know from history that Liberals routinely cheat in elections.  Why shouldn’t they?  The integrity of the process is secondary to obtaining the correct result.  The ends justify the means.  And if they can’t win by cheating at the polls, Liberals litigate before Liberal judges to steal elections (looking at you, Al Franken).

Liberals cheated in 2016 to get Hillary the nomination, to spend other candidates’ money for her, and to spy on the Trump campaign.  They stuffed enough ballot boxes that some districts had more votes than voters.  But they were shocked to learn they hadn’t cheated enough.  Trump still won.

I doubt that will happen this time.  The polling places in Miami ran out of ballots on Monday.  I suspect those ballots are already marked, sitting in trunks of cars, waiting to be counted.

No need for you to stand in line, we’ve already cast your ballot, several times.  You can thank us later.

Satire?   Yes, but the line between satire and fact these days is almost nonexistant.

When “Babylon Bee” is a better source of news than CNN, you know we’ve got a problem.

Is another stealth “red wave” about to break?

Well, being a fundamental pessimist, I’d say “probably not” –  but I’ve been wrong before, most noticeably two years about tomorrow.

But according to Rasmusson, there might just be something sneaking out of the fog.: I’m adding emphasis:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 60% of Likely Democratic Voters say they are more likely to let others know how they intend to vote this year compared to previous congressional elections. This compares to 49% of Republicans and 40% of voters not affiliated with either major political party. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

In August 2016, 52% of Democrats were more likely to let others know how they intended to vote in the upcoming presidential election, compared to 46% of Republicans and 34% of unaffiliated voters. Some analysts before and after Donald Trump’s upset victory suggested that most pollsters missed his hidden support among voters fearful of criticism who were unwilling to say where they stood.

I can’t tell you the number of people who voted for Truimp who’d have never admitted it in public, fearing ostracism and reprisals.

Happening again?

We’ll know tomorrow.

Syndicated talk show host Michael Savage once had a huge hit with the book “Liberalism Is A Mental Illness”.

The implication was inflammatory – as Savage fully intended, being Michael Savage.

But science shows he was incorrect; new evidence shows it may be more a matter of brain damage:

A joint team of American and British scientists have discovered that powerful magnetic pulses to the brain can temporarily change people’s feelings on a variety of subjects…researchers have now found that by targeting the part of the brain that deals with threats, they can temporarily change people’s beliefs and views…

Amongst those who received the strong magnetic dose, 32.8 per cent fewer had decreased beliefs in God, angels and heaven compared to the control group who received no dose.

And 25.8 per cent more of those who had received TMS [Transcranial magnetic stimulation – magnetism applied to parts of the brain] had a more positive response to the immigrant who had written a negative letter about their country.

What this nation needs is commonsense magnetism control.

Remember this when Democrats coo condescendingly about how all they want is “common sense reforms”:

Not saying I believe this is the Democrat mainstream, per se.

Just that the notion that the end justifies the means is underneath every single “progressive” policy, from the income tax to the Gulag.

Dave Hughes has a strong shot at shocking the world up on the Minnesota Seventh.  Every dollar helps.

Shane Mekeland is running for MN House in 15B . He’ll be replacing Jim Newberger up in the greater Becker area.

Jason Lewis is running for re-election in MN CD2.  He could use a hand.

Pam Myhra is running for State Auditor – the only auditor among the two major-party candidates.  She could use a hand.

Jim Newberger is running for US Senate against Amy “The Kavanator” Klobuchar – rated as the worst boss in the US Senate.   Please help him out.

And yes, you can help Doug Wardlow usher Keith Ellison out of public life.   Please do.

I’m doing something tonight I should have done 35 years ago – going to see Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul at the Ames in Burnsville.

“Who?”

He’s better known as Steve Van Zandt – aka “Miami Steve” from the E Street Band, or Silvio Dante from The Sopranos.  And as I wrote in this space six years ago, the band’s debut album Men Without Women is one of my three favorite albums.  Ever.

Ever!

Men Without Women was a horn-driven “white soul” record reminiscent of Stax/Volt, that reminded some critics of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street.   It was recorded with an all-star cast of New York / New Jersey artists – Dino Danelli and Max Weinberg on drums, Felix Cavaliere and Roy Bittan on keys, Jean Bouvoir on bass, and the horn section from the Asbury Jukes (and, later, the Max Weinberg Seven and, today, the E Street Band).

And it was glorious. This was from two years ago:

This? Probably more like thirty years back, with the Asbury Jukes:

And from Mw/oW, for my money my favorite:

Van Zandt didn’t follow up with retro soul; his next album, Voice of America, was garage rock delivered with all the subtlety of an Angie Craig ad.  His nest three records all descended into worldbeat and a concomitant shrill far-left politics.  His sales reacted accordingly.

He was able to fall back on The Sopranos, his gig in the E Street Band, and Little Steven’s Underground Garage, one of the best syndicated music radio shows in the business.   But somewhere along the way he got the message; people liked the original Disciples.

And so that’s what he’s put together for this tour – not quite the original, but close:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/BjOmE-45Abk” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

So my phone’ll be off from 7PM til further notice tonight…

Last week, the Pioneer Press did a comical dive into the shallow end of the journalism pool, digging up – Sorry, no. They “dug” nothing up about Doug Wardlow’s purported junior high days.   A DFL operative spent weeks shopping the story to every local news outlet.  Only the increasingly loathsome PiPress would take it.

But while the Twin Cities media digs back a couple of decades to find dirt to prop up the increasingly unviable Ellison campaign, the rich journalistic vein that is Keith Ellison’s past remains untapped.

Which is why we had these things called “blogs” 15 years ago.

Thanksfully, some have kept the faith.  Over at Powerline, Scott Johnson just keeps  shining the light down the memory hole – in this case, to 25 years ago, after the murder of Minneapolis police officer Jerry Haaf:

Ellison publicly supported the Haaf murder defendants. In February 1993, he spoke at a demonstration for one of them during his trial. Ellison led the crowd assembled at the courthouse in a chant that was ominous in the context of Haaf’s cold-blooded murder: “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace.” Ellison’s working relationship with Sharif Willis finally came to an end in February 1995, when Willis was convicted in federal court on several counts of drug and gun-related crimes and sent back to prison for 20 years.

Now Keith Ellison seeks Minnesota’s top law enforcement job. In the video below, Doug Wardlow does the job that the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune refuse to do. He tells the highly relevant truth about Keith Ellison.

Oh, there’s more.

–

The Minnesota 7th CD is the great long-term hope for the MN GOP; someday, when Collin Peterson finally leaves office, the district – I call it “East Dakota” – will never elect another Democrat again.  Ever.

But incumbency is everything in a rural district like the 7th.

But maybe lightning can strike.  I’ve had a few friends tell me “Watch out for Dave Hughes”, the second-time candidate against Peterson.   The district went for Trump by 30 points in 2016, and Hughes is a likeable and hard-working guy.

And today’s news makes for intrigueing reading.  Here’s John Hinderaker at Powerline:

Until now, hardly anyone has taken seriously the chance that Republican David Hughes can upset longtime Congressman Collin Peterson in Minnesota’s 7th. But, in a stunning move, Real Clear Politics now rates the contest a tossup.

Peterson has represented the 7th in Congress for 28 years, and has been personally popular in the district. But his vote totals have been slipping with each cycle, and the 7th went for President Trump by 30 points. Peterson has gotten less energetic over the years, and one suspects that he would like to retire. I liken him to Ruth Bader Ginsburg; the Democrats no doubt are pressuring him to stay on, knowing the seat will flip as soon as he retires.

Personal aside:  I listened to Hughes debating Peterson on MPR a few weeks ago.  Peterson sounded tired, like he was literally phoning it in.   If it were a boxing match, Hughes would have won by call.

But maybe the voters don’t want to wait that long. As a practical matter, Peterson, like all House Democrats, is little more than a vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. David Hughes has essentially no money, but door knockers in the 7th report that they are seeing five or six Hughes lawn signs for every Peterson lawn sign.

Hughes has no money to speak of – so if you have a few bucks to spare, it could go to much worse causes.

A friend of the blog writes:

Looking at the video footage of the “Caravan” I was reminded of the Carter tenure when the Mariel Boatlift happened. Then as now a compliant MSM was thrilled at the prospect of capturing all the touching, even heart-wrenching, human interest stories of photogenic brown-skinned people being pulled from the drink while the likes of Dan Rather or David Brinkley uttered cliched platitudes in the voiceover.It was campaign gold for the Democrats who could burnish their bona fides with the non-white voting block they wished to keep on the plantation.

The Marielitos were the solution to a few problems for Castro too. In the process Castro dumped 127,000 of his citizens;  all his mentally ill, incorrigible criminals, homosexuals, anti-socialists, and political disidents onto the US. He was also able to smuggle, according to one congressional hearing source nearly 7,000 intelligence agents and drug running logistics experts into the US for long term intelligence gathering, while locking up and exploiting the burgeoning drug market.  At least 300 of the spies were rolled up in the 1st couple years which lead to “The Year of the Spy”. The NYT addresses the Marielito spies in this article(paywall):

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/01/us/cuban-ties-boatlift-to-drug-trade.html
here’s a pull quote:
“The Cuban Government used the 1980 Mariel boatlift to send as many as 7,000 spies to the United States, some of whom were ordered to help drug smugglers ”flood” this country with illegal narcotics, one such spy said today.
The Cuban agent, Mario Estevez Gonzalez, testifying at a United States Senate hearing here, said some of the spies travel freely in small boats between their Communist homeland and the United States. Mr. Estevez, who has been convicted of drug smuggling, said some agents were in this country for propaganda purposes and others were to create ”chaos” in the event of war.”
The Miami Herald from the same date had this story;
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/drugs/testimony.htm
this pull quote underscores the issue
“The U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Thomas Boyatt, was more blunt.
“I’m telling you that it happened,” he insisted during an interview before his testimony. “The Cuban government, as a matter of policy, for a long period of time, until exposed, was involved in drug smuggling.
“It was a [Cuban intelligence] operation with the blessing of Fidel,” he said. “

Leftists suffer from severely retarded imaginations (just look at Hollywood’s output for the last 10 years) but when they hit on something that seems to work they do it over and over. The Mariel Boatlift worked and would have been even more successful had Jimmy Carter not lost his re-election bid. Reagan wasn’t having any.

There is no reason to believe that the current Caravan is not another form of the Mariel Boatlift, already another Caravan has formed in El Salvador,  soon there will be another. The Socialists(Communists)and Castro proteges, Maduro, Castro and Ortega, all recognize that the Mariel Boatlift was a hugely successful intelligence operation and they profited enormously from the spy networks established in the 80s by Castro that survived Reagan’s spy hunt.

This Caravan solves a problem that the Tyrannical Troika has been struggling with; how to get identities and access to the US for their agents. The Caravan made up seemingly of compasinos with little or no documentation show up “seeking asylum” and the first thing the US govt does is generate identity paperwork for them, those who survive the asylum vetting process are embraced without further suspicion and best of all in 5 or 7 years when they become active they’ll have USA passports and identities. That’ll all work out well.

Now am I just a cynical bastard for thinking that 300-400 of these Caravanistas are actually intelligence agents from Venezuela, Cuba, and El Salvador? Time will tell.

Keith Ellison is trying to paint Keith Ellison as…

…soft on guns?

We’ll come back to that.

Klieglightitis – When I was in high school, my dad – a speech teacher – used to run this exercise where he’s give out clippings from newspaper articles and magazines, and give us thirty seconds to come up with a short speech on the subject.

I got a TV Guide article about Forrest Tucker, TV star of the sixites and seventies (famous for the original Ghostbusters, which unknown to most was actually a Saturday morning kids show before it was a movie).

As I walked up to the front of the class, I had the name “Forrest Tucker” roiling through my head, reminding myself not to make the uttelry obvious error…

…that, iI”m sure you guessed, was the first thing out of my mouth.   I was so busy concentrating on not pronouncing “Forrest Tucker” as “F****er”, it was pretty much inevitable.

A Slip Of The Lip:  And so when I saw Doug Wardlow say in his last debate on 10/22 that he “supported universal background checks”, I attributed it to nerves on a TV set in the midst of a high-pressure debate.

To read Ellison and the Strib describe it, they apparently don’t.

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison hit his Republican opponent for attorney general, Doug Wardlow, on Wednesday for shifting his stance on background checks for gun sales, and Wardlow lobbed a new ad digging into Ellison’s past links to controversial figures.

Ahem.

There was no “past stance” on background checks.  There was a slip of the lip under pressure.

Of course, Keith Ellison is getting desperate:

Ellison pointed to Wardlow’s response during their Oct. 22 debate, where he said he would support criminal background checks on all gun sales.

Keith Ellison, holding conservatives to conservative stances on the Second Amendment, something Ellison wants to repeal?

We’ve slipped through the looking glass.

But look who pops up (emphasis added):

He later rejected that position when asked to clarify it by the Minnesota Gun Owner’s Caucus and during a conservative talk radio interview.

“Just to be clear, I absolutely do not support background checks for private sales,” Wardlow told Northern Alliance Radio’s Mitch Berg on Oct. 27. “I do not support a gun registry. I don’t actually support any new gun laws.”

I asked the question straight up.  He answered it straight up.   There was no reversal; merely a correction of a slip.

But in case that wasn’t clear enough: I’ve known Doug Wardlow a long time.  I did my first fundraiser for his first House race in 2010.    I did it again in 2012, and have done a few for his Attorney General campaign in the past year.

And if I had ever had the faintest whiff of a hint that Doug Wardlow – or any candidate – harbored “moderate” opinions on the Second Amendment and the law abiding American’s God-given right to defend their lives, property, community and freedom, I would never, ever do a fundraiser for them.

Ever!

I”m going to soooo enjoy watching Ellison flame out on Tuesday.

Don Lemon pulls off a rhetorical triple Salchow:

It took me a couple of reads to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

I missed this over a very busy winter; Arkady Wajspapir, one of the prime movers in the Sobibor Uprising (which I covered on its 70th anniversary) passed away last February.

He was 96 – 75 more than he had any reason to expect on the day when a train dropped him off at the death camp in rural eastern Poland.

There, he linked up with other Soviet military inmates of Jewish descent, and made common cause with the Polish, Dutch and German Jews who had also been spared the gas chamber to work endless days under brutal conditions.

There – over the course of a few weeks after Soviet soldiers arrived – they plotted their desperate escape:

The uprising began in the late afternoon of Oct. 14. Mr. Wajspapir and another Jewish prisoner, Yehuda Lerner, armed with axes, hid behind a curtain in the shop until their target, Siegfried Graetschus, the German SS officer in charge of the Ukrainian guards, entered. While Graetschus tried on a coat that had been made for him, Mr. Wajspapir, by his account, emerged and attacked him with his ax, striking his head.

“Graetschus let out a scream, did not immediately fall to the ground but tumbled head first because the blow was obviously not forceful enough,” Mr. Wajspapir said in a 1975 article on the website Sobibor Interviews. He and Mr. Lerner then finished off Graetschus.

Here, he tells his own story:

Reading stories like this – as I’ve been doing since I was a teenager (I was familiar with Wajspapir, if only by name, from reading about the Sobibor Uprising as a kid) periodically remind me of a couple of eternal truths:

1. People calling themselves “#Resistance” today Because Trump are pathetic hamsters.
2. You will have my gun when those behind you step over your body to pry it from my cold, dead hand.

That is all.

And a belated RIP to Mr. Wajspapir.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You have a choice of shipping company.  FedEx just dropped its NRA discount.

Given FedEx’s performances this last couple years, the NRA might be getting the better end of that deal.

But while I haven’t used FedEx in quite some time, I am never using them again.