The PO police are setting their crosshairs on Home Depot:

Shoppers have taken to Twitter and other social media platforms to call for a boycott of Home Depot following news that one of its founders will back Donald Trump’s bid for a second term in the White House. 
In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bernie Marcus said that he intends to support Trump’s re-election campaign, saying that while the president “sucks” at communication, his impact on employment and aggressive stances toward China and Iran have been positive.
Many on Twitter appeared to disagree.

Side note: Any “news” story that uses “…many people” as the source for a PC assertion should be required to name them all.

But I digress. This being modern Snowflake America, there are no doubt “many” people like this:

And being modern America, some execudrones are being pusillanimous.

Some executives just haven’t learned the lesson of this past decade .

To wit: Real Americans respect companies that stick to principle. They desert companies that don’t.

Using law enforcement and the federal bureaucracy to “target” immigrants who are breaking multiple levers of the law (not just being here illegally, but defying deportation orders) is a bad thing…

… while targeting tea party members is just no big deal?

The downtown “Crave” restaurant, which suffered a shooting over the weekend, has been called on the carpet by Mother City:

In the wake of a brazen double-shooting at a downtown Minneapolis restaurant, the city’s licensing division wants the owners of Crave American Kitchen & Sushi Bar to establish stricter security protocols to protect its patrons.
The city sent a letter to Crave owner Keyvan Talebi on Monday citing two code violations related to the early Saturday shooting, including failing to provide adequate security to prevent criminal activity. The letter asks Talebi to provide an updated security plan for staff training, how management will stop people from bringing in guns and how staff can work better with police in case of an emergency. The plan must be submitted to the downtown police precinct by July 23.

They were already a “gun free zone”.

Y’mean, that doesn’t work?

Huh.

If I walked into your store with a sawed-off shotgun, demanded you hand over all your money, turned to leave with the loot, slipped on a banana peel, and cracked my head open, gushing blood all over the floor and rating a trip to the ER, would the local newspaper say I’d “donated blood” and “brought extra income to the local hospital?”

Only if I were a “progressive” who was the vessel of all the area’s media and Big Left felt about themselves.

At the end of a dismal midterm broadcast last November, I wrapped up the show by observing that the one thing in which conservatives and other Real Americans could take comfort was the inevitability of Democrat overreach. They would take the normal first-term mid-term surge as a mandate to go crazy.

Progressive gonna progressive, in other words.

As Peggy Noonan notes, all is going exactly as foretold – and among the symptoms are Minneapolis’ own Ilhan Omar. I’ve added a bit of emphasis here and there:

The more serious Democratic Party problem with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Omar is not that their great talent seems to be for political manipulation, or that they constantly set fires, portray the universe as consisting of angels and demons, and put people off with their arrogance while exciting them with their ferocity—though all these things are true.
It is that in doing these dramatic things, and amplifying them through their impressive social-media skills, or compulsions, they have fully broken through and made their mark. In their fame and celebrity they altered the face and feel of the party into something that appears more radical, more hissing and accusatory, more hard-left.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s success last June scared fellow Democrats across the country into thinking she is the future, that they must get aboard and get with her program, which many of the party’s presidential nominees have. She has very effectively changed the ideologicalshape of the Democratic Party with her de facto open-borders policy and other extremisms.
Mature liberals and moderates know this will come back to bite them.
She does this from a completely safe district. She can’t be primaried from the left. She feels a job security no Democratic moderate can feel. Nancy Pelosi said a glass of water could be elected in her district if it were a Democrat, and it’s true.
For all these reasons Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been destructive to her party’s chances in 2020. She is a one woman Committee to Re-Elect the President.

As embarassing and toxic as Ilhan Omar is, she is a gift that will keep giving to conservatives for …

…well, being in the Fifth CD, for as long as she wants.

Democrat candidates for President are in a bidding war for votes. Free college, home ownership for blacks, Medicare for everybody, the new green deal, universal basic income, slavery reparations… trillions of dollars and they haven’t even got to the good stuff yet.
Not one candidate has offered me bread and circuses, the traditional bribe for ignorant voters. To hell with them, I’m sticking with Republicans.
Joe Doakes.

Democrats gonna democrat.

Scarlett Johannson lashing back, in her own way, at the PC police’s affect on acting:

She addressed was she called the ‘political correctness’ in casting without directly mentioning her controversial casting in Rub & Tug. 
‘You know, as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job,’ she said point blank.
She continued: ‘I feel like it’s a trend in my business and it needs to happen for various social reasons, yet there are times it does get uncomfortable when it affects the art because I feel art should be free of restrictions.’ 
‘I think society would be more connected if we just allowed others to have their own feelings and not expect everyone to feel the way we do.’

Between that and supporting Israel, she’s never gonna do lunch at Spago again.

But you know what? The interview was in conjunction with a very style-y retro photo shoot for a magazine. I’m gonna focus on that, if that’s OK. Thanks.

President Trump’s “go back where you came from” Twitter jape against The Four Horsewomen of the Derpocalypse (hat tip to Sean Sorrentino), Reps. Omar, Pressley, Tlaib and Ocasio Cortez may be his dumbest yet.

But let me ask you this:

Let me describe someone who is:’

• Not really cut out for their office
• Given to petulant ranting on social media
• Elected by people whose politics and logic I frequently don’t respect a lot
• Supported by a lot of people, staff, and a narrative intended to logroll and gaslight skeptics into silence and submission
• Does, seemingly, little but jab back at their many, many critics, to the point where you wonder if you’re watching someone in junior high

Which of the five am I describing?

By the way – if you’re a Democrat, it is your duty to rally around the Four Horsewomen, to the exclusion of all else (except working toward impeachment). If you do not, the ghost of Wellstone will cry.

Last week, I caught Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix special.

I’ve always like Ansari. This special is far and away the best thing he’s done in his career.

Is it connected to his getting caught up in the #MeToo purges?

Perhaps.

But far from groveling to “woke” culture, gives the PC horde the sort of response it’s been needing from more participants in pop culture – an astringent satirical enema:

From Robert Verbruggen’s review:

Perhaps the most memorable routine, though, involves the famous Pizza Hut swastika story, where a restaurant was accused of making a pizza with the pepperoni arranged in the shape of a Nazi symbol — but some people saw it as just a regular pizza. Ansari asks the audience to clap if they thought it was a swastika, and then if they thought otherwise.
The story is made up. There never was a swastika pizza. But some audience members take sides and clap anyway. One even identifies the news source where he read about the incident. It’s a stunning illustration of how political polarization rots the brain, and it fits into a broader theme that we could do with less outrage and more honest discussion among people with differing opinions — a point Ansari makes more explicitly when discussing the uproar over a white teenager who wore a traditional Chinese dress to prom.
Refreshingly, Ansari avoids the incessant and usually unfunny Trump-bashing too many comedians rely on when short on better material. To the contrary, he points out how trivial modern America’s problems are relative to what previous generations dealt with. “Could you imagine if we had a draft with today’s people?”

It’s worth a watch.

Modern journalists are innumerate.  The numbers in this article don’t work.  270 million people world-wide were lifted out of poverty, 271 million of them in India, alone.  Huh?
But far more importantly, HOW was it done?  Taxing the rich?  Foreign aid?  Free college?  Moving to the US?  The article is conspicuously silent.
Perhaps . . . say it softly . . . capitalism works?
Joe Doakes

Typos happen – especially now that “layers and layers of gatekeepers” have gone through fifteen years of layoffs are are now just a metaphorical doorbell camera.

But altering the fundemantal principles of most journos’ lives? That capitalism has, at best, yuge problems, just like their profs used to say?

Good luck with that.

Big fight over whether the Trump Administration can ask census respondents about their citizenship. The census is used to determine who gets seats in the House of Representatives. So the real issue becomes who are we counting them for?
If the House of Representatives is supposed to represent the citizens living in a district, then we need to know how many of the people responding to the census are citizens. They’re the only ones who should count in determining proportional representation.
If the House is supposed to represent all the residents of a district, then we don’t care about citizenship.
I strongly suspect this is a holdover from slavery days. Slaves didn’t count as full citizens for purposes of proportional representation. And neither do illegal aliens. But people who think they will pick up votes, want them to.
I doubt counting foreigners was the intent of the framers of the Constitution. I foubt counting illegal aliens was the intent of the Voting Rights Act. I think Americans all along, have wanted the House to represent the citizens who reside in the district, not everybody wandering through the district.
I don’t think the court should be meddling with that intent. Add the question.
Joe doakes

I coudln’t agree more. Of all the great scams that Big Left has foisted on us, positing open borders as “kindness” is the most cynical of all.

#Fatality, as the kids say.

(The kids still say #Fatality, right?)

Why, wouldn’t it be cool if Jason ran against Smith?

So they don’t run out of bullets before their attacker runs out of attack.

Or attackers, plural:

Marion County sheriff’s officials say a homeowner armed with an AR-15 shot and killed two intruders and was injured himself during a home invasion robbery in Summerfield Wednesday night.
Two other robbery suspects — Robert John Hamilton, 19, of Ocala, and Seth Adam Rodriguez, 22, of Belleview — were detained near the scene, according to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.
Nigel Doyle, 22, of Summerfield, and Keith Jackson Jr., 21, Ocala, were killed. The homeowner, whose name was not released by the Sheriff’s Office, was in stable condition at a hospital Thursday afternoon.

But they were good kids, just about to start school to become missionary medics:

Sgt. Micah Moore found Doyle with a gunshot wound and a shotgun next to him on the ground. Deputies entered the home and found Jackson dead on the dining room floor. Detectives said he was wearing a “Jason” mask on top of his head, gloves on both hands, jeans and a black shirt.

Wait – indicting a criminal for murder when one of their accomplices is killed during their spree?

Why, if the Ramco Attorney office learns about this, law and order might break out.

My office assistant is a nice young lady, pink hair and piercings, knows nothing but she’s cheerful and shows up every morning, which is about as much as you can expect these days.
She complains that she has no money, living in her uncle’s basement cuz the rent is cheap, then says she has to take her kitten to the vet to be neutered. Wait a minute, you already have a bird and a dog, why’d you buy a kitten? Oh, she didn’t, someone gave her a free kitten but now she’s looking at vet bills that she can’t afford.
I didn’t even bother to suggest giving it to the animal shelter. I knew that would be unacceptable, because they kill animals that no one wants, and that’s cruel.
How do you explain to someone that their entire view of the world is slanted the wrong direction? If you can’t afford to support yourself, then you can’t afford to support any animals. And you certainly can’t afford to go clubbing in Minneapolis, or have your hair done a brighter color, or a new tattoo. No, just no. You can’t afford it. That’s not cruel, that’s just the way it is.
I am officially a fuddy-duddy.
Joe Doakes.

I’ve had more than a few conversations with “broke” (and woke? I dunno) Millennials with “Sleeves” of tattoos up and down their arms, and wondered “how much less broke would you be without that collection of tacky, tasteless, ugly ink all over you?”

Among other things.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is taking a walk through a local winery, when he notices Avery LIBRELLE trying to open the tap at the bottom. He tries to reverse course, but LIBRELLE, as always, notices him.

LIBRELLE: Merg! You’re a racist misogynist!

BERG: Uh, OK. Why now?

LIBRELLE: On, no reason. It’s just my new greeting. But Trump is holding children in squalor on the border.

BERG: Separating kids from their parents is a bad thing. But this speaks to the same incompetence that covers most aspects of dealing with the bureaucracy. Nothing to see here.

LIBRELLE: We must treat pre-documented immigrants of color with the respect they deserve.

BERG: Question for you, Avery. Is the US the world’s policeman?

LIBRELLE: No. We can not solve all the world’s problems with the military.

BERG: OK. Are we the the world’s moral arbiter?

LIBRELLE: It is to laugh! We are the most corrupt, least just society on earth!

BERG: Huh. Is the spread of American culture through the world a good thing?

LIBRELLE: We have the most despicable culture there is, buried to its eyeballs in racism and hate. The world’s authentic cultures must be preserved.

BERG: Does the US have anything to teach the world?

LIBRELLE: How to be hateful and horrible.

BERG: So can we keep people from coming here, with or without regard to the law?

LIBRELLE: What are you, a fascist? Everyone has an absolute right to come to the US!

BERG: So if someone comes to this country illegally, or uses an exceptionally broad asylum statute to gain entry to this hateful, horrible, despicable, racist, corrupt, militaristic place, then we are in fact the world’s ATM machine?

LIBRELLE: Why yes! (Turns back to trying to open the tap on the fermentation keg).

BERG: I know I’ll hate myself for asking, but what are you doing?

LIBRELLE: Wine is an appropriation of California culture.

BERG: Of course it is.

And SCENE

As Glenn Reynolds says, if you see the mainstream media as Democrat PR flaks with bylines, it helps.

One Ron letnes (it’s his capitalization – and reading the rest of his not-very literate screed, I’m pretty sure it’s not a “style” thing), who writes for “Engage”, the “progressive” Evangelical Lutheran Church’s anti-gun propaganda blog, took a trip to Europe.

And he writes…:

Linda and I spent a month touring Europe this summer. We anticipated a wave of discomfort because of the global immigration demands for life and safety. We anticipated verbal antagonisms and increased gun visibility by persons and authorities. We anticipated the isolation of Muslim and African peoples from events and sites.

In other words, he “anticipated” exactly everything that the narrative police are telling the demented lunatic fringe to anticipate.

Have a free range cigar, Ron.

If you listen to Minnesota’s gun control activists, do you think this state had become South Bronx in 1970 – because of law-abiding gun owners, naturally.

But statistics are pesky little buggers.

Minnesota – with one of the highest gun ownership rates in the country, more carry permit holders per capita than Texas, and not coincidentally one of the safest states in the country with a major metropolitan area in it – just keeps getting safer.

And one of the most satisfying exercises in all of gun-rights-activist-dom is getting grabbers to admit they just don’t realize how the world has left them behind, and watching them deflect from street crime to “mass shootings”.

And then do that badly.

… but, almost incredibly, it’s not:

Megan Rapiinoe isn’t boring and irrelevant to me because she’s a women’s soccer player and a “progressive”.

She’s boring and irrelevant to me because she’s a soccer player and a “progressive”.

Glad we could settle that.

THE WORLD: “Tide Pod Evita, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar are the most toxic form of “progressive” there is.”

ALONDRA CANO: Hold my kombucha:

From somewhere in the great beyond, Tailgunner Joe is yelling “Dial it back, toots – you’re embarrassing John Birch and George Wallace”.

It’s the aftermath of the Independence Day weekend. It’s July, and the Twins are seriously in contention.

We shouldn’t HAVE to think about Soccer. I’d hope that we are better, as a society, than that. Our forefathers fought and died so that we’d be *free* of things like Eurovision, parliamentary government, and soccer. And this time of year, I like to honor and respect their sacrifice.
But I’m genuinely curious about something, and would love to find some genuine answers.
With the US Women’s Soccer team winning their fourth World Cup, they’ve proven themselves to be the most successful soccer team in the US. Which is a little like being “the best funk band in Sweden”, but certainly deserves respect.

But now, the news is full of their next story – going to court for “equal pay”. The US Men’s soccer team – which qualifies for the World Cup about as often as Swedish funk groups got on Soul Train – gets paid more, for fewer games, and enjoys much less success than the women. They enjoy other benefits – like better hotels, better facilities, better travel arrangements, and not being identifiable as “soccer players” by most Americans. The women play more, are more successful – and, some say, should be paid much better for their time.
I don’t have a problem with that, as far as it goes; also, I don’t care ,because again, it’s only soccer.

Men’s World Cup soccer is, of course, the most popular athletic spectacle in the world. There’s an insane amount of money changing hands due to that Godforsaken sport.
Does anyone know if the US women generate more money than the men do? Or that women’s World Cup, worldwide, generates as much / more money than the men’s sport?
I’ve heard various reporters and opinion-mongers say it’s only be “Fair” for the women to get paid more – but on economic matters, most journos are…well, we’re back to “Swedish Funk Band” analogies again.

Does anyone know how the numbers – all of ’em, not just the cherrypicked ones – break out?

If you only take one message away from this blog, it should be…

Well, it should be “Freedom is good and must be defended without reset, since tyranny never sleeps”. 

But if you take another message from this blog, it’s…

…well, Berg’s Seventh Law. 

But if you get three messages from this blog, number three should be “The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence and “Protect” Minnedsota have never, not once, made a statement about guns, gun rights, gun laws, gun crime, gun crime stats, gun rights groups, or the history, construction or meaning of the 2nd Amendment that is simultaneously substantial, original and true.  

As such, it’s almost pointless to “fact-check: the Lying Reverend:  it’s like looking for damp spots in an aquarium. 

But this particular social media excrescence deserves attention for its special level of depravity:

Take a moment to enjoy the battle between racism and illogic – if one is “never” safer with a gun (statistically untrue, but work with me here), how can some state be “Especially” never?  Infantilizing black people much?  And it’s not the gun that makes black carry permittees unsafe; in this case, it was the panicky cop.  

Worse?  To the “Reverend” Nord Bence, while people with carry permits are hapless delusional morons, if they’re black, they are apparently even less competent.  

But take your leave of that bit of frivolity for a moment, and note the record show that the MInnesota Gun Owners Caucus neither “remained silent” nor “defended” Officer Yanez – the Caucus was on the record and on TV defending our fellow law-abiding citizen before the “Reverend” Nord Bence knew the name of the guy she was stereotyping:

https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2016/11/16/philando-permit/

Castile did not say he had a permit, but he did say he had a gun. In general, that is what firearms instructors teach, according to Rob Doar, a leader of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus and a firearms safety instructor…“I recommend that you turn the car off, you turn the lights on in the vehicle, you keep your hands on the wheel,” Doar said. “I do believe that Philando Castile acted as a responsible permit holder.”

If is a given that if the “Reverend” Nord Bence says it, and it’s about anything to do with guns, presume it’s contemptuous bull***t.

The casual racism – while predicable from the lily-white turnout and lily-whiter locations of all “P”M events – s new.

The daughter of Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua (who we last encountered in this space eight years ago) is going to be clerking for Justice Kavanaugh…

…after she said she wouldn’t be…

…after her Mom praised Kavanaugh – apparently accurately. I’ll be adding emphsis:

Which is where our story today picks up.

Chua, [a Yale law professor and the author of the book “Tiger Mom”, a manifesto for ruthlessly deliberate parenting] who serves on the school’s clerkship committee, wrote that her daughter had accepted an appellate clerkship from Kavanaugh, but that she would find a different judge to clerk with if his nomination was successful.
She also described Kavanaugh as a “mentor to women.”
The op-ed drew severe criticism, with many arguing that she wrote it aiming to guarantee her daughter a Supreme Court clerkship.

Brief aside: using “many” as a source is becoming my journalistic pet peeve.

But let’s go one step beyond. Would a woman who wrote an entire book on parenting, which included parenting tips such as…:

…a total ban on TV-watching, play dates and sleepovers. Chua wrote of how when Lulu was 4, she rejected her daughter’s homemade birthday card for looking sloppy.
Lulu was ordered to practice the violin six hours a day, and both girls were required to play the piano flawlessly — or Chua would threaten to burn their stuffed animals. The merest hint of failure was met with name-calling: Sophia was “garbage,” Lulu a “disgrace as a daughter.”

…bat an eye at brown-nosing a SCOTUS nominee?

Dear “Many”: Your promotion from Captain to Major Obvious is granted. Congrats.

Canoeing while drinking.  Is there any other way? 


Joe Doakes

The rationale sounds strained enough to be a Minnesota Supreme Court majroity opinion:

…Justice West concluded that yes, canoes count — and so does pretty much anything else that transports you over water. In the eyes of the law, then, being drunk while paddling an inflatable dinghy is the same thing as being drunk while driving a pickup truck. Smoking a joint and paddling a canoe is equal to smoking a joint and driving a car. All of the same penalties, including mandatory minimum sentences, apply. Yet you cannot be charged for impaired operation of a bike, because the Criminal Code says land vehicles must be motorized to count.

Of course it does.

There’s plenty of actual tragedy in the story, too, unfortunatlely.