The Dems’ impeachment mania is a sign, not of Dem strength, and certainly not necessarily of offenses warranting nullifying an election (and maybe two), but rather a sign of desperation and weakness.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election.
“To defeat him at the polls would do history a disservice, would do our nation a disservice,” Green said.  “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.”
Translated, that means Green accepts either that Trump’s record is too formidable or that the agendas of his own party’s presidential candidates are too frightening for the American people to elect one of them. And that possibility is simply not permissible. Thus, impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency—on a purely partisan vote to preclude an election, and thus contrary to the outlines of impeachment as set out by the Constitution.

It’d explain a lot of the Democrat tactics; declining to hold hearings, relying on “evidence” gleaned from the results of their changes to the law permitting pure hearsay, and fighting the battle almost exclusively in media aimed at their three most important opinion constituencies; Entitled Americans, Dim Americans and Outrage-Addicted Americans.

Hanson has a lot of analysis – read it. Pullquote:

We are starting to see the outlines of a progressive fantasy on the horizon: Biden will be sacrificed. The party will unite around Warren. The left-wing media narrative will be, “We took out one of our own, now it is your turn to depose Trump.” Chaos overload for two or three weeks might keep Trump’s polling low.
Long-term, however, Trump wins.
We still have a number of government audits coming from Michael Horowitz, John Durham, and John Huber—and the targets are not Trump. The Senate will not convict the president under any foreseeable circumstances. The full story of the whistleblower has not been told, but there are a lot of narratives to come about the sudden rules allowing hearsay, DNC involvement, and who knew far in advance about the complainant’s writ. Once the Democratic debates continue, the candidates’ screaming and hysterics return, and the impeachment hearings descend into a Kavanaugh-esque farce, the public will begin to get scared again by the Left’s shrieking Jacobins…Voters soon will surmise that the only thing between their 401k plans and socialism is Donald J. Trump.

And they’ll be right.

My hunch: Dem polling is showing that even the more “moderate” Democrats terrify Main Street, and there are no other options coming out of the woodwork, and their base will having nothing but a Trump inquisition, so this is the best way forward they have.

It’s not about evidence. It’s about having “Disgraced and Impeached” as a chanting point for 2020.

College Republican display at the U of M’s annual “Paint the Bridge” party vandalized.

For the fourth year in a row:

The group said their panel, which included text reading, “Donald Trump The Wall,” “Draining the Swamp,” and “America FIRST mentality,” was covered up within a day.

I wonder, sometimes, if the Democrats wonder what they’re messing with, here?

Conservatives on American campuses, after swimming upstream for four years and enduring the kind of abuse they endure, are going to be tougher than mule jerky.

In adult life, when those “kids” go up against the left’s generation of children of feckless entitled privlege, they’re going to slash through them like a lawn mower through a cabbage patch.

Campus Republican at Yale terms campus lefties’ eternal rage “Protester Derangement Syndrome”:

Sit-ins, hunger strikes and angry mobs: These are all things I became accustomed to in my late teens and early 20s. No, I haven’t been living in a country experiencing severe political unrest. I am living in New Haven, Conn., and attending Yale University as an undergrad.
While this may sound bizarre to you, behavior typical of a severely oppressed society has taken hold among students who are part of the Ivory Tower. I call it Protester Derangement Syndrome, or PDS for short.
Yale students enjoy luxuries akin to European aristocracy. Students live in resort-style housing that includes lavish feasts, massage parlors and recreational spaces that boast everything from a printing press to a pottery studio. However, Yale students afflicted with PDS display derangement symptoms similar to an oppressed religious cult. They refuse to interact with the world around them. They have demanded the buildings be renamed. They support the desecration of art. They sanitize history by demanding professors exclude certain authors from syllabi.
The Yale administration believes they can treat PDS through concessions and pacification. Unfortunately, their prescription has been ineffective.

I’m gonna so enjoy being “the real world” for these little twerps. Or at least the few of them that actually make it into the productive parts of the private sector, anyway.

Last week, I wondered if liberals would be so thrilled about red flag laws if Sheriff Bull Connor decided to seek orders removing guns from black men between the ages of 18 and 30, since they’re the ones committing most of the murders in America today. I suspected liberals would be less than impressed.
Turns out, I was right. Gangs, terrorists, illegal immigrants, would be exempt. They explicitly acknowledge that the law would not apply to criminals, and I strongly suspect it’s because their desire to avoid being called racist is greater than their desire to prevent actual killings.
In the olden days, we used to joke that when guns are outlawed, only Outlaws will have guns. Nowadays, you can’t even make this stuff up.
Joe doakes

Berg’s 21st Law states “When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law”

Like all “Berg’s Laws”, it has no exceptions.

When the several states joined forces to become the “United States”, they did it by signing a contract with one another; they’d cede out control of certain issues that the states couldn’t handle as efficiently and effectively as the states to a central, national government. The contract was called a Constitution,.

Under the terms of that contract government had certain enumerated powers; the states had some more; The People had the rest.

As part of that contract, that central government had checks and balances:

• The power of the chief executive and their branch was limited; appropriations and foreign treaties could only be approved by Congress; a Supreme Court could constrain all three of their ambitions – or, put another way, hold them to the contract.
• The lower chamber would be directly elected. The upper chamber would represent states, not a direct nose-count of the population.
• The chief executive would be chosen by a system that would pare back a little of the power of the more populous areas. Furthermore, the entire system was predicated on the idea that the chief executive, while an important and powerful position, would not be a “winner-take-all” choice as far as governent power when: small states wouldn’t “lose’ because they had the Senate to temper the passions of the mob; larger population centers weren’t disenfranchised because the combination of the directly-elected House and usually-directly-elected President counterbalanced the, er, counterbalancing effect of the Senate and the electoral college. You weren’t just voting for a President; you were voting for a complete package at the Federal level.

That’s the system that made this country what it is. For worse or, mostly, better.

Lately, though – and it’s hardly the first time, even in my lifetime, although the dumb power of raw numbers seems to make it louder this time – there are those talking about “making the country more representative”; they propose:

• Eliminating the Electoral College, electing the president by popular vote.
• Making the Senate a popularly-elected body, or eliminating it altogether.
• Adding term limits to the Supreme Court, or allowing Presidents greater leeway to change its composition.

These proposed changes to the contract accompany many other more or less drastic proposals to alter the fabric of this nation; various guttings of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments are all current events these days. And for many of those constitutional guarantees, the fact this nation’s contract enforces a sort of gridlock designed to constrain the passions of the dumb masses is the only thing standing in the way.

So let me make a proposal – and when I say “proposal”, I guess I’m shading more toward “manifesto”.

A Not At All Modest Proposal

Go ahead. Change the Electoral College, the Senate, the SCOTUS. Jam down anything you want, in fact.

But consider those changes an abrogation of the contract under which this nation was formed.

California, New York, New Engalnd, Illinois and the Mid-Atlantic states can form their own parliamentary democracy with popular president and enshrined powers of the majority. They can basically turn their nation into a glorified city government, like that of MInneapolis (or Chicago, Newark, Baltimore, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle or Saint Paul) with aircraft carriers, giving all power to the most populous areas, essentially making the less populous areas, the Inland Empires and Southern Illinois’ and upstate New Yorks taxed without representation – and with the contract now null and void, the rest of the nation can be free to choose something less stupid.

But you can not have one without the other. One party to a contract can not force a change in contract terms on the other parties without a negotiation – and that includes the freedom to walk away. Not legally. Not with any talk of forcing everyone to remain in a contract that’s been abrogated, rendered null and void.

I’m fine either way. But nowhere in between.

One or the other.

It’s worth having a knock-down, drag-out national debate over. Wars have been fought over much less. Let’s try not to do that.

It’s about 23 months.

Mayor Frey, 2017; tribalism bad:

There is often a deviation of strategy in getting there, and that’s OK. We need to stop villainizing one another over slight differences of strategy and policy. You want to disagree? Go for it. That’s great. But the villainizing and the personal attacks? They are counterproductive and will have no place in my administration. There has been a real push to divide and conquer. I’m biased, but I think I’ve been the brunt of it. The mayor has too. Everybody. It’s got to stop. It’s been really nasty.

Mayor Frey, 2019: Get off my [er, collective] lawn.

Officials in Minneapolis were quick to blast the visit. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said while he would typically welcome a visit from a sitting president, Trump’s “actions have been reprehensible and his rhetoric has made it clear that he does not value the perspectives or rights of Minneapolis’ diverse communities.”
“Our entire city will stand not behind the President, but behind the communities and people who continue to make our city — and this country — great,” Frey said. “While there is no legal mechanism to prevent the president from visiting, his message of hatred will never be welcome in Minneapolis.”

They’re willing to eschew “tribalism” – with the right people. Not the opponents they actually have, of course. The imaginary ones that Lori Sturdevant keeps reacing across the aisle to.

Beto urges banks to refuse service to people Beto doesn’t like.  This is a good start, but it’s not sufficient. I recommend we take principle farther
Urge Banks to cut off business with anyone who has an abortion.
Urge Banks to cut off credit for all Methodist’s.
Urge Banks to refuse to do business with companies that sell or Support rap music
Urge banks to cut off credit card transactions at liquor stores, pizza parlors, State Fair cheese curd booth, and other unhealthy food vendors. Also, no credit cards for Vaping, tobacco, fireworks, p*** movies, adult novelty store sales, or tap dancing shoes, which are totally legal but they annoy me.
Yes, I think he’s really onto something here.
Joe Doakes

Where “onto something” = “desperately trying to get traction with an ever-loonier Democrat far left”.

My band, “Elephant in the Room”, is at the Stillwater Bowl and Lanes on Saturday night.

“A bowling alley?”

It’s the bar next to the the bowling alley – and it’s actually a fun room! And it’s got those “edge of the metro” prices if you are getting a little wallet fatigue from $7 beer and $10 cocktails.

Come on out!

To: “Live From Here”
From: Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
Re: “Out In America” with Tom Papa

Have you ever listened to a putative “comic” bit where a “comedian” reads a (for purposes of argument) “comic” monologue of intermittently (very very intermittently) amusing observations, interrupted with a tag line that isn’t especially funny the first time, but gets repeated 3-5 times every episode, to the point where you want to spray him with spray cheese on stage?

I have.

When I was in high school, it was generally (although not universally) known that making gay kids “act straight” – in other words, forcing them to be what they aren’t – could cause long-lasting irreparable damage.

This was decades ago.

Society spends thirty years treating “boyhood” as a pathology, often treatable (i.e. suppressible) with medication.

The school system actively suppresses “normal” boyhood traits; aggressive play, restless physical activity and physical rather than verbal socialization are treated as conditions to be eradicated, rather than evolutionary male traits that are socially adapted and productively channeled.

School was turned into a training camp for young-girl-style socialization; not merely teaching young boys to take the roughest of edges off their masculinity, but teaching them that approaching the world the way evolution taught boys and men to approach the world will earn you castigation, denigration, medication and remediation.

Soon, people who were “woke” enough to know 30 years ago that making a gay child act straight would cause immense, irreparable psychological damage, were mildly alarmed to see that boys were lagging at school – or, put another way, checking out of an oppressive, misandrist system that actively suppressed who they really were.

Boys stopped going to college – and, increasingly, the ones that did were the ones that could stick with the ever-more-accelerated demand to turn in their evolutionary “male” card. There’s demographic evidence that before long, after decades of turning education at all levels into 12-16 years of counter-evolutionary indoctrination and browbeating over what they are, girls will outnumber boys 2:1 in higher education

And today, those same people are wondering why women are having a hard time finding husbands who earn what they do.

The good news: Brain to machine interfaces are on the near horizon.

The bad news: you just know it; their first applications will end up being controlling Instagram selfies and running the DMV.

It’s too confusing to keep track of all the different ways that liberals impugn conservatives. And the words don’t mean the same thing each time they’re used; the meaning shifts depending on the user, the victim, the situation.
I would prefer that liberals adopt one general-purpose word to use for everyone and everything they don’t like. How about “poop?”  Short, easy for Joe Biden to remember, think how much fun the debates would become.
You’re a poop. No you’re a big poop. You’re the biggest poop. Yeah, well your ideas are poop. Your mother is a poop.  Fun!
Joe Doakes

Orwel posited that the eventual goal of “Ingsoc” was to reduce all language to “duckspeak” – semiliterate grunts that put guardrails on the limits of human thought.

This fits right in.

To: Mayor Melvin Carter, the City Council, and Mayors and Councilors going back 30 years, except Norm Coleman
From: Mitch Berg, deplorable peasant
Re: Here

You’ve all given us years of obsessive emphasis and spending on virtue-signaling programs to appease upper-middle-class progressives – “Resilience”, bikeability, making the city less habitable for cars, as well as focusing on toxic trifles like pushing up the minimum wage (driving down employment), “sanctuary” (bringing more low-wage, low-skill labor to the city, driving down wages for poor, low-skill workers right here), light rail (destroying more jobs and businesses and increasing blight) and “density” (of housing for upper-middle-class progs), taking money and city attention from public safety.

Spending less on police; carrying on his predecessors’ policy of failing to up-charge gun offenders, basically abandoning pursuit of property crimes, keeping the city focused on punishing property owners rather than criminals, and acting as if there’s really no problem.

And while you and city council don’t run the public school system, they are part of the same political machine that does. The ongoing collapse of the public school system (except for a few islands where the relatively few children of the “high density” progressive caste go, when they don’t go to private school) is correlated with crime in the community. They knew this in New York in the sixties; kids who graduate with terrible educations (as St. Paul kids increasingly do) and limited prospects for the undereducated (as Saint Paul increasingly has) are more vulnerable to being enticed into crime, gangs, and becoming part of the blight. As the schools get worse (and they are, and nothing the School Board is doing will ever stop it), it’ll contribute more to the city’s blight. And while blight may not cause crime, you don’t have to be a sociologist to note the correlation.

As a result? Calls go unanswered, crimes go unsolved, property gets less secure, people who value secure property move elsewhere, “high density” makes housing less affordable while housing policy drives down values outside the high density areas, making owning property in the city a terrible investment, spurring more flight and more blight. Violent crime, defying a nationwide down trend, is surging.

It’s the same recipe that made San Francisco and Manhattan unlivable for people making less than mid six figures and drove out poor people to the inner ‘burbs; it’s in the process of doing the same for Seattle and Portland, while making vast swathes of Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Chicago, North Minneapolis and other cities into blighted shooting galleries.
None of it’s new.

And the voters of this city will keep voting you, your council, and the same policies into office. Just watch.

Not sure how you all pulled it off – getting a lifetime sinecure for jobs you’re currently failing at, and have been for decades, and I’m gonna bet you continue to fail at.

Kudos.

That is all.

Liberals are thrilled with the notion that law enforcement should be able to petition the court to seize firearms owned by potential bad guys. The evidence presented would be rumor, innuendo, gossip, accusation.  The standard of proof would be “he’s more likely than not, to do something bad someday.”
If Sheriff Bull Connor petitions the court to seize guns from suspected troublemakers using the red flag laws as his authority, but 99% of the people he flags are African American males between the ages of 13 and 30 (on the grounds that they tend to be the most likely to shoot up the neighborhood), will liberals continue to be thrilled?

Joe Doakes

Those who take the “Liberal” thing seriously probably will.

“Progressives”, on the other hand, won’t care. It’s about neither safety nor equality. Sometimes you gotta break eggs to make an omelet. Some of those eggs are black.

Told my wife we should get The Clapper so she doesn’t have to get out of bed to shut off the lights when I’m done reading. She scoffed – do they even make those anymore?
Yes.  Amazon.  $17.  Order by 6:00 on Friday, guaranteed delivery on Sunday.  Seriously?  How is that possible? 
Yes, I understand they have a 850,000 square foot warehouse in Shakopee, a building as big as my entire city block. But surely they must prioritize inventory?  Amazon updates its list of “Most Popular Items on Amazon” hourly, so I can keep up with the Jones.  Obviously, they’d have a huge inventory of in-demand items.
But how much demand can there possibly be for The Clapper?  And yet they have them in stock locally for two day delivery?  Unbelievable.  There’s a reason Amazon is kicking every other retailer’s a**.  It’s called “Customer Service.”
Joe Doakes

And yet, someday, just like Microsoft, Time/Warner/AOL, IBM, AOL, General Motors and US Steel, something will come along to knock it off the top of the heap.

Steven Miller on Twitter:

Make the next president of the NRA a 15 year old. Then we’ll see how far that “how dare you cyber bully a teenager” holds up with our media betters.

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) September 24, 2019

Speaking of “cyberbullying”: so when a teenager smiles awkwardly at guy tacitly harassing him at a rally in DC, it’s racism – but when a teenager rants at the UN like a junior Mussolini, before taking a “green” trip to the next stop on her agenda and thence home on $10M sailing yacht? Voice of a generation!

But sometimes, Twitter loves me:

There is also not one sane law abiding g gun owner who believes giving up their legally owned guns will save any lives. Red Herring rejected.

— Mitch Berg (@mitchpberg) September 19, 2019

The nation’s political class is currently paralyzed with rage over people dying of vaping.

Ignoring the fact that vaping has likely saved thousands of lives by helping people stop smoking, and more people never start – never mind! A death toll in single digits, almost entirely from using home-made vaping fluids or the occasional extremely rare lung condition, and Big Government, Big Left and, presumably, Big Tobacco are on the warpath against legal vaping.

Over less than ten deaths out of 320 million people in a decade.

And our political class is beating the whole world over the head with climate change – a crisis that has killed nobody, but has terrorized hundreds of thousands of school kids into turning into protest droogs on command. .

So I got to looking at the records for the Twin Cities’ three rail lines – the Blue and Green (“Vomit Comet”) light rail lines and the North Star heavy commuter line.

Now, I expected these deeply dim-witted projects to rack up a death toll.

I wasn’t ready for what I found.

Currently, the lines have claimed 26 lives in fifteen years.

I’m adtually a bit surprised that the death toll on the North Star is as high as it is; the intersections tend to be pretty well-controlled, and the trains run on existing right of way.

On the other hand? The death toll on the Green Line astounds me – and the number for the Blue Lline kinda snuck into double digits when I wasn’t looking too.

That’s 26 people dead. 26 families forever altered. 26 Transit employees scarred.

Something has to be done.

June 23, 2020. That’s the 16th anniversary of the start of regular Blue Line service. And I’m going to observe it as Transit Memorial Day. A day of solemn rememrance of the 26 people (so far) whose lives have been sacrificed…

…for what?

To support the Met Council and the Political class’s urge to feel like a real big city? To build a monument to the government’s power?

Yeah, totally worth it.

See you June 23.

Bruce Springsteen turns 70 today.

Once upon a time, a then-local “progressive” activist asked via Twitter “To all you conservative Springsteen fans; have you actually listened to the records?”

My response was “yes – much more than you“. I went on to write one of my favorite series – the one showing that Bruce Springsteen was America’s best conservative songwriter.

Not something as trivial as “a conservative who wrote music” – but someone who, at his best, wrote music that resonated deeply with Conservatives, for reasons that were utterly conservative, and for many of us utterly profound.

Ann Althouse once noted (with a hat tip to regular commenter Macarthur Wheeler):

“To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.”

His best music – Nebraska, Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love and The Rising, but especially the “Holy Trinity” (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The RIver) were just that; stories about the struggles, yes, but also the strength and worth of individuals; their failures and their redemptions, sin and consequences, and forgiveness.

And for anyone that misses the point, I’d urge you to watch the Netflix version of Springsteen on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning one-man show that closed last year, in which Bruce admitted – with deference and joy – that the best music in his career was about his father; that he, a guy who’d never punched a clock in his life, had written a 45-year-long litany of tales of sorrow and inspiration and warning and cool rockin’ daddies about Douglass Springsteen, his father, and his mother Adele, who plugged away for decades, sacrificing and slogging away to keep their three kids fed and sheltered.

A few months back, I went to the movie Blinded By The Light – and noted that I felt it in the pit of my stomach more than enjoying it (although I enjoyed it a lot).

Now, the protagonist (it’s closely based on a true story) was the opposite of me, socially and politically; a Pakistani Brit who skewed plenty left, like Brit teenagers do. And yet I felt it in my liver; the discovery, and the epiphany, were the same for both of us.

“See, Mitch – those traits are universal and human, and progressives can gel with them too!”.
Artistically? Sure, why not? But let’s debate what “Reason to Believe”, “Johnny 99” or “My Hometown” are really about first. Or, for that matter, the implications of what Sarfraz Manzoor wrote about – being seen as a person rather than a caricature or, dare I say, an “identity”. Then we’ll talk.

Because “progressivism” is about perfecting humanity; conservatism is about living with, dealing with the consequences of, clawing back from, and sometimes, just sometimes, triumphing over mankind’s, and one’s own, imperfections.

And if you’re lucky, passing some of that on:

I, too, believe in a Promised Land.

To: ESPN
From: Mitch Berg, cranky but eclectic peasant
Re: Missed Opportunity

ESPN,

Why is this not on your programming schedule?

That is all

MBerg

Stouts Pub at Snelling and Larpenteur opened as an English pub, serving bangers and mash, fish and chips, and Guinness beer on tap. Lately, with the cool wet weather, I’ve been feeling a need for comfort food. Mutton stew with thick warm bread. Maybe a shepherd’s pie.
But when I looked at their menu online today, it’s all trendy stuff, the kind you could get at Applebee’s or Chili’s. Spinach and artichoke dip. Cheeseburger with sharp cheddar and applewood bacon. Margherita pizza. Chipotle BLT. And all kinds of wraps and salads.  Yuppie Paradise.
I don’t blame them, that’s where the money is. But what happens to us crusty curmudgeons? Where can I go to get my pre hibernation food?

Joe doakes

You got me. Most “comfort food” is well outside my diet these days.

But let’s hear it, hive mind. Comfort food sources in the Metro?

The Dilbert cartoon I discussed.

And hope you can make it to the rally against Comprensive Sex Education tomorrow at the Capitol

A roundup of climate panic advocates’ recrods shows…

…well, you know:

“While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited,” they added.
Some examples:

1967 — Stanford University expert Paul Erlich predicted “time of famines” in 1975.
1971 — A top NASA expert predicted an “ice age” by 2021.
1988 — It was predicted that the Maldives [Ahem – usually referred to as “The Falklands” – Ed] would be under water by last year.
2008 — Gore said the Arctic would be free of ice by 2013.
2009 — Charles said there was just 96 months left to save the world.
Starting Friday, there is a global climate strike set to last for a week. According to the organizers, “Our house is on fire — let’s act like it. We demand climate justice for everyone.”

And my favorite: 1988, Ted Danson predicting that the growing hole in the ozone would kill us all in 15 years.

My go-to response to the whole thing: let’s say for sake of argument that they get one right; let’s say that the climate is irreversibly warming due to human activity.

Why is the solution to turn the keys to the world’s economies over to the kind of people who gave us Srebrenica, or Chicago city politics or MN-LARS?

I’ll wait.

One of the guarantees in the invisible NPR tote bag of goodies and spiffs that “Urban Progressive Privilege” is, is the knowledge that not only will the institutions that participate in that privilege with you will actively ensure your worldview never gets challenged, but they’ll make sure the “oopses” in your worldview won’t influence anyone, either.

Gwen Walz – the First Lady of Minnesota – apparently had a very bad evening on a panel about racism in the justice system.

But were it not for Alpha News, we’d never, ever know this – because Channel 2 deleted the embarassing interview from public view:

The moderator of this discussion was Toussaint Morrison, a black man.
Soft-ball questions that Morrison was supposed to ask were circulated ahead of time“within the Department of Corrections and the governor’s office.”
But when the audience noticed that most of the men behind bars in the documentary were non-white, the issue of race came up—indeed, racial minorities make up around 20 percentof Minnesota’s overall population, but account for about half of Minnesota’s prison inmates. 
Morrison ran with those questions about race, and Gwen Walz appeared to be stumped. Some in the crowd felt she was sidestepping the race issue entirely….Once the event was over, the Walz administration scrambled to get the video of the event deleted.

Kristin Beckmann, deputy chief of staff for Democrat Governor Tim Walz is alleged to have put pressure on TPT President and CEO Jim Pagliarini to delete the tape. 
Sarah Walker, a former Department of Corrections (DOC) employee who was pushed out over a lobbying scandal, was also on the panel. Walker seems to suggest that her not properly defending Gwen Walz during that panel led to her eventual exit from the DOC. Walker told MPR that Beckmann, Walz’s deputy chief of staff, told Walker over the phone: “It’s taken care of … We talked to TPT.” According to Walker, Beckmann continued to say that “The TPT president has now apologized and agreed to destroy all of the videotapes that were made of the event.”
That’s further confirmed by Donna Saul Millen, managing director of events and engagement at TPT, who wrote in an email: “The short answer … the first lady’s office made the request and we didn’t have plans to use it (at least not at that time) … The obvious answer [to explain TPT’s action to delete the tape is that] it was an easy way to smooth out ruffled feathers.”

Urban Progressive Privilege is knowing you’ll never be held accountable by “your” people.

“Feminist” attorneys Gloria Allred and her daughter Lisa Bloom – the Godmothers of woke law – managed to profit from silencing Harvey Weinstein’s critics.

Amazingly enough, the NYTimes actually reports – unflatteringly – on a couple of feminist icons.

I guess defending Weinstein voids the immunity…

Dear Walmart Marketing Department:
You know the common element between the Gauntlet of Gum in the checkout aisle, the blinking coupon dispenser in the detergent aisle, pallets of pumpkins in the produce aisle, and Girl Scouts standing outside the door selling cookies? They only work if people actually come to your store. If people shop online, none of that stuff affects their purchase.
Based on your new policy, I will no longer be coming to your store. I’m just curious, is your CEO secretly a Bezos plant? Because it looks like your biggest online rival, Amazon, is about to eat your lunch.
Joe Doakes

See also: Chick Fil-A, Carl’s Junior, Gibson’s Bakery, and on, and on.