I’ve said it in the past – the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence, the director of “Protect Minnesota“, has never, not once made a statement about guns, gun laws, gun owners, the Second Amendment, the history of the Second Amendment, or gun crime that is simultaneously substantial, original and true.

Not once.

Yes, I can back that up, if you want to sit down and go through her record point by point. It’s not even close.

She may have sunk to a new low today; she sent this out in her email blast to her organization.

Of course, she is (let’s give her the benefit of the doubt) mistaken; the relentlessly civil and polite to a fault Rob Doar said no such thing. She is referring to Benjamin Dorr , leader of the fraud/huckster Fundraising scam “Minnesota Gun Rights”, Who is (in my relentlessly accurate opinion) a fraud and a loathsome person to boot.

Nord Bence has been informed of her “error” and told to retract. She still has not.

This is the voice of gun control in Minnesota.

UPDATE:  As of Monday night, the statement had been removed from Facebook.  However, as yet no retraction has gone to the dozens who get “P”M’s emails.

Last night, the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence called out to the frenzied hordes of “grassroots”activists with “Protect Minnesota”; a “rally” was needed to support the DFL’s gun grab bills, and a rally they got.

Behold the might of “Protect”Minnesota:

This was at 7:05 PM – five minutes after the rally started.

Or, as people who watch “Protect” Minnesota refer to it, “peak frenzy”.

Oops.

An Editors' Note to appear in Monday’s international edition. pic.twitter.com/1rl2vXoTB3

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) April 27, 2019

Before it disappears down the memory hole forever, here’s the cartoon:

I’ll say this – even Steve Sack isn’t this depraved.

(SACK: “Hold my kombucha”).

A city that can’t stop its own residents from pooping in the streets is uncivilized, regardless of how many cool apps they develop to track the city’s decline.
Lack of affordable housing is caused entirely by liberal policies: rent vouchers, zoning and subdivision regulations, public housing subsidies, housing inspectors. 
The author has absolutely no idea how the real world works.  It’s telling that her editor approved this piece, and the magazine published it, and subscribers didn’t burn down the offices in derision.  None of them have a clue, either.  They only know Trump is obsessed with poop.  He’s a Big Poopie Head.  He’s the reason San Francisco is sliding toward catastrophe.

There are a lot of “hallmarks of civilization” – but one of the things that makes advanced, healthy civilization possible is the orderly removal of, um, waste. A society that forgets that might not realize exactly why civilization is becoming less…civil in so many vital ways.

For all of their bluster between the election and the beginning of session, it seems the DFL doesn’t have enough votes to pass their Registration and Red flag Confiscation bills on their own. Not even close.

Which is weird. You would think a bill with “90% public support“ would be a cakewalk. Apparently not his; if you rely on the star Tribune for a fact on this issue, that’s pretty much the norm. The DFL are trying to bury the bills in the Public Safety omnibus spending bill

It’s the weasel‘s way out. But hey, Ryan Winkler. Say no more.

Anyway – if you are a supporter of Minnesotans’ Second Amendment human rights, now is the time to pylon. Call your legislator. Tell them you are not amused.

A whole lot of suburban DFL‘s seem to have gotten cold feet. Let’s make them colder.

Back about the time I took my first carry permit training, the late great Joel Rosenberg told the story of the time in the early 2000s, during a spate of attacks on synagogues, when a very “progressive”, DFL-leaning local congregation called him and a few other prominent gun rights activists who are also of the tribe, and asked if they might not mind – privately and discretely, mind you – bringing a little “insurance” to services with them.

Just in case.

To the best of my knowledge, they did.

It was probably 2-3 years ago I interviewed the guys from Archway Defense, who discussed how frequently places of worship of all faiths are targeted, by everyone from mentally disturbed vandals to outright hate-criminals and terrorists. The rate – for Christians and Muslims, but especially Jews, is far out of proportion with their numbers in society.

And for all the smug, self-righteous virtue signaling of some congregations, the record is pretty clear; congregations who at least quietly take self-defense into their own hands and leave temporal forgiveness to God tend to do better when someone decides to stage their final blaze of glory in their “sanctuary“.

And common sense is driving some of those congregants and congregations to ask the questions that need to be asked.

And Minnesota’s Second Amendment community has some answers.

Remember – if you want to deter a spree killer, the only thing that needs to be publicly recognized as “potentially armed” is your congregation, school or group’s reputation.

SCENE: Mitch BERG, in home office, writing. Hears loud, unison yelling.

BERG (thinking): “Is my neighbor watching “Triumph Of The Will” with the window open again?”

Listens carefully.

“Nope. Just a “MN United” game. A mile away”.

And SCENE

I’m pleased that Governor Walz is taking concrete steps to end rampant racial discrimination in state government hiring.  For far too long, the State has relied on affirmative action implemented through voluntary goals and timetables.  Now that we know proportional representation is the ultimate indicator of perfectly just society, we can set about hiring an exactly proportional workforce: 85.3% White employees, 5.2% Black, 4% Asian, 1.2% Native, and fill the rest of the jobs with people who are uncertain or have no opinion.

The funny thing is, in my vocational field, I believe I know of one black practitioner in the Twin Cities. That’s it. A black student wanting to make a decent living could pretty much write their own ticket in UX.

Sometime back around the time Steven Colbert got a job on late-night TV, late night TV stopped being funny.

Well, funny in the conventional sense, meaning “it arouses some kind of amused reaction from me”.

And it’s not a political thing; I laughed at Dennis Miller just as hard when he was a smug liberal as I do now that he’s a 9/11 conservative of sorts. His White Album – a one-hour monologue from 25-odd years ago – is no less funny than it was when it came out. I didn’t laugh any harder at Norm MacDonald after his low-key and sometimes incongruous conservatism started coming out – he’s just a comic genius. Chris Rock, Dennis Leary, Sam Kinison – all of them are hilarious, and to some degree or another way, way to my left.

There may be no greater litmus test of American social views than one’s opinion of Michelle Wolf’s “comic” routine at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Most people think it was pretty dreadful – but the consensus among NPR hosts for the past year has been pretty rapturous. (The free market spoke loud and clear – her Netflix talk show flamed out faster than the sales curve on a Mick Jagger solo album).

Judge for yourself:

The noted conservative tool Andrew Ferguson, and that noted conservative fishwrap The Atlantic, calls it out…:

There had been lots of anti-Trump demonstrations lately, Wolf noted, with protesters carrying homemade signs. How many signs? “Poster board is flying off the shelves faster than Robert Mueller can say, ‘You’ve been subpoenaed!’” If there’s humor in Paul Ryan’s circumcision—and I’m willing to be persuaded—she failed to find it. Chris Christie, Wolf suggested, was fat. She provided her own kind of abortion counseling: If you do terminate a pregnancy, she advised, motioning oddly with her elbow, “you’ve gotta get that baby outa there.” At her last line she leaned intimately into the microphone: “Flint still doesn’t have clean water.”

…among many examples of the complete death of comedy. He refers to late night TV – but I’m pretty sure it’s all of pop culture; political “comedy”, at least as understood by mainstream popular culture, is dead.

The twitter account of the “non-partisan” State Board of Public Defense retweeted Senator Latz’s twitter-heckling of the Senate’s Public Safety omnibus bill yesterday:

Makes me wonder what caliber of defense a PD would give a defendant with a “Reagan/Bush 1984” t-shirt in their booking photo…

It’s about a year and a half too early to be making big assumptions about such things, but its entirely possible Trump (and relentless Democrat intersectional class warfare) has driven Ohio out of “Swing State” status:

The first hint that Ohio might have lost its bellwether status came in 2016. If you’ll recall from my Wargaming the Electoral College series for the presidential election, Ohio was never in play for Hillary Clinton. While that should have been a coal mine canary that Trump’s chances of winning were far better than the polls indicated, most every expert (and Yours Truly) glossed over that indicator as we pored over our 270toWin maps.

Previously, Barack Obama won Ohio handily in 2008 and 2012. George Bush’s electoral mastermind, Karl Rove, bet big on Ohio twice — and won twice, too. In fact, as Roll Call’s Ben Peters reminds us, “Going back to 1896, the Buckeye State has backed the winning candidate in all but two elections — the best record for any state in recent history.” Looking ahead, he writes, “Election handicappers largely put Ohio in the GOP column for 2020 — Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the state’s presidential race Likely Republican.”

It’s good news in a sense – it’ll take the Dems a while, and a lot of illegal-alien voting, to get Ohio back in the gray zone – but it further shows that the nation’s cultural divide is becoming gnarlier.

And given how far to the extreme left the Democrat party is pulling, I’m almost afraid to see what “the center” looks like anymore.

The one question people never ask about transgender athletic competition is why.  Why do we have separate Boys’ and Girls’ sports?  If boys and girls are identical in every way that matters, with lifestyle differences simply a matter of personal choice that can be changed at whim, why don’t we have one competition for all?
Minnesota State High School record holders:
Boys’ 100-yard dash: 9.6
Girls’ 100-yard dash: 10.8
Boy’s Shot Put: 65 feet 6 inches
Girls’ Shot Put: 54 feet 8.5 inches.
It’s not about personal choice, it’s about biology.  The fastest girl is slower than every one of the top 10 boys.  The strongest girl’s throw is 11 feet shorter.  At the margin where champions are determined, girls cannot compete against boys.  It sucks.  It’s unfair.  But it’s reality.
People who deny reality are delusional.  We should not allow delusional people to make decisions affecting our children.

And if you ask the the question, the subject gets changed.

Every. Single. Time.

Since Big Media can’t quite bring itself to utter the “C” word in reference to the victims of Easter’s bombings in Sri Lanka, the Bee has come up with a handy list of alternative names for all the world’s major faiths:

We hope this helps.

I support capital punishment for every possible reason but one – the inevitability of executing the innocent. And that’s all I need to oppose it on principle.

But I’m not going to raise a huge fuss about this particular execution:

BREAKING: Texas has executed John William King, a white supremacist who orchestrated the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr., one of the most gruesome hate crimes in U.S. history. https://t.co/conLbMnmzt

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 25, 2019

It’s amazing how little actual white supremacy there’s been in the wild in the past 20-odd years, other than the gaslight-y stuff the media’s promoting – that’s the only word for it – these days.

…is that it has to be plausible enough that you think “Wait – is this true? It can’t be…” before the payoff.

Too implausible? Too obviously mugging at reality, rather than a clever send-up of news almost too absurd to be parody? It’s not really satire anymore.

Seen on (and observed about) a snowflake protest sign:

You guys, the campus socialists might have one-upped Westborough Baptist 😂 pic.twitter.com/SGcTNfJ9OP— Daniel G. Weldon II 🌴☀️ (@DanWeldonFL) April 24, 2019

It’s an astute observation – but Big Left’s control over the entire education system is a lot more dangerous than Westboro, even with their platoon of carnivorous attack lawyers.

Bernie Sanders wants to let felons vote while in prison.
The point of voting is to choose wise leaders to make sensible laws.  The point of restrictions on voting is to ensure the people doing the choosing are, themselves, wise people.  Children, the mentally infirm, and felons are, by definition, not wise people.  Felons have already demonstrated they’re not willing to follow sensible laws so they no longer get to participate in choosing who makes the laws.  This isn’t a new concept – it’s been the law for thousands of years for the simple reason that it works.
Watering down wise peoples’ votes by extending the franchise to unwise people, can only result in decisions that are less wise.  And that’s how we get Democrats in office: dumb voters making bad decisions.  This can’t end well.

It’s not intended to.

The MN Department of Revenue points out that Governor Walz’s Tax Orgy is going to hit…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…the poor hardest.

Unexpectedly, natch.

Gov. Tim Walz’s plan to increase taxes would hit the lowest-income Minnesotans the hardest, according to a new analysis by his own Department of Revenue.
Minnesotans on the bottom half of the income ladder would absorb an average 9.9 % tax increase. For every $100 they earn, these Minnesotans would pay well more than an extra dollar in taxes. The poorest 10 % of Minnesotans would pay an extra $2.37 in taxes for every $100 they earn.
The upper half of Minnesotans would pay an additional 5.9 %, although the wealthy would wind up paying far more in actual dollars than lower-income Minnesotans.

This is of course exactly what happened under Dayton, although the media didn’t bother reporting that beyond the most basic lip service, either.

Management ordered Building Maintenance to turn down the heat to fight global warming and save the world. Employees complain they are freezing.
The maintenance guy uses a fancy electronic thermometer to verify the temperature is 68 degrees, precisely as ordered, therefore people can’t be cold.  He is mixing units.  Degrees are a measurement of heat activity, not of comfort. “68 degrees” and “chilly” are perfectly consistent descriptions of the same office space.
Americans have this problem on a broader scale, with politics. We don’t define what we’re measuring, so we can’t explain why we think America was once great and could be again, and why they think it was never great and won’t be until they replace it with something else.
Joe doakes

I think it’s more a matter of intentionally avoiding defining what we’re measuring.

To:  All Democrats and “Progressives”, Nationwide
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: 2020

All,

You owe it to your country, and your progressive souls (well, you know, whatever) to accept nothing less than the following in a Presidential, Congressional, State Executive and Legislative, and city candidate:

• Push for impeachment.   Tirelessly.  Every news cycle.  Every time you’re on MSNBC or CNN.   And out to dinner.  And while alone in the bathroom.
• Support banning guns, by executive order if you can’t make it happen via the legislative process.
• Insist that taxpayers eat $2,000 for every man, woman and child to pay for other peoples’ voluntary borrowing.
• Support diluting the franchise that is one of the hallmarks of our freedom until it becomes just another bit of graft to be apportioned by our betters.

Accept nothing less.  No matter what it takes.

SCENE:   Mitch BERG is riding a Lime scooter through downtown Minneapolis when he sees Avery LIBRELLE haggling with a PANHANDLER.  BERG pulls over – before getting that look on his face that says “I already regret this”

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE:  It’s time to give Medicare to everyone!

BERG:   Medicare even as it is is going to be insolvent right about the time I might, hypothetically, maybe, retire.

LIBRELLE:   The best way to save a program is to make sure everyone depends on it.  Give it to everyone!  (To PANHANDLER).  Right?

PANHANDLER:  My car broke down, and my wife and daughter are in it, out on the freeway.

LIBRELLE:  Have you tried holding a press conference and demonstration at City Hall?

PANHANDLER: No, ma’a…er, si…er… (Looks wanly at BERG, who shrugs).   Er, not yet.

(BERG quietly presses the accelerator)

And SCENE

Ohio Democrat tries to exempt black infants from the legislature’s fetal heartbeat bill.

Because…:

Rep. Janine Boyd proposed Amendment 0291 which would have provided an exception for black mothers to abort their babies. 
Boyd suggested protecting black children from abortion is akin to slavery.
“Black slaves were once treated like cattle and put out to stud in order to create generations of more slaves,” she said during her remarks, which were broadcast on The Ohio Channel. “Our country is not far enough beyond our history to legislate as if it is.”

So – life = slavery?

In case you were wondering if the Democrat “Stupid Caucus” has a deep enough bench waiting in line behind Jerry Nadler, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the like, fear not.

There is a proposal making the rounds to change the name of Saint Croix State Park to honor former Minnesota Senator and Vice President, Walter Mondale.

Of course, there’s some pushback. The park already has a perfectly good name with history that matters to the area and the state:

People who live near the park, which opened in 1943 and featured dozens of New Deal-era buildings, say history would be lost as a result of renaming. They are circulating petitions seeking to keep the current St. Croix name.

“Yes, (Mondale) did some wonderful things for our waterways,” said Maria Nichols, who lives one mile from the park. “But I have been to the point where I’ve almost thought of calling him and saying, ‘Help us!’”

It should surprise nobody that Ryan Winkler wants to jam the name down anyway.

Since my role in this world seems to be “solve other peoples’ problems”, I”ll step in here.

Let’s rename Lilydale State Park after the former Vice President.

Since it suffers from landslides.

Lunatic extremist kills dozens of Muslims in New Zealand (with a semiautomatic ugly black gun): Saturation coverage.

Lunatic extremists kill hundreds of Christians with bombs: Dilatory coverage.

If only the Columbo attackers had used AK47s…

And, well, these days it is pretty much true.