Ilhan Omar votes “present” on a resolution recognizing Turkey’s genocide of Armenians.

And in her statement about that decision, she appears to have learned her rhetorical skills from leaving comments in the Star-Tribune comment section:

Put another way – “the resolution’s silence about other genocides – mostly the ones involving the US, the country that welcomed me to it – speaks volumes“.

And if accounting for genocide is “Paramount”, then what’s “academic consensus” got to do with it?

And we did “acknowledge” the slave trade, Rep. Omar: with the bloodiest war in our country’s history.

Note to Tom Emmer: Write a resolution condemning the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide. See what she does.

“Progressives”, 2005 – “Question Authoritah! Speech is the greatest of rights!”

“Progressives”, 2019 – “I’m from the non-profit/industrial complex, and I’m here to protect you from all that ‘freedom'”.

I’m waiting for the first of them to say free speech is “against peoples’ best interests”.

Monday, Governor Walz held a press conference about the dangers of e-cigarettes – the device that allows “vaping”.

During the press conference, more Minnesotans died from diseases related to smoking tobacco – From Match Minnesota government profits handsome Levi a tax collections – than have died throughout vaping’s entire history of the state.

Ilhan Omar, credibly charged with marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud, is pretty.  Not a Hollywood knockout, but pretty.  Katie Hill, who just got caught in a three-way sex scandal, is pretty.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, promoter of the Green New Deal, is pretty.  They’re all young, pretty, first term members of Congress and they’re all having trouble – with family, party, and the media.  I think I see the problem. Congress is unfair to pretty girls.
Everybody knows that pretty girls don’t have to.  They don’t have to . . . anything.  They don’t have to worry about finding a date for the dance, they don’t have to wait in line to get into the nightclub, they don’t have to pay for dinner or drinks.  Pretty girls do whatever they want and everyone lets them get away with it, because they’re pretty.
But suddenly, these pretty girls get to Washington and Congress has weird rules expecting pretty girls to act the same as ugly girls and dweeby boys and OLD people. That’s ridiculous. They’ve never had to play by those rules their entire lives.  Like they’re going to play by them now?  Totally unfair.
Joe Doakes

And with all the people identifying as pretty girls these days, it’s gonna get outta hand.

So was there a pattern of passive-aggressive abuse in Mayor Frey’s manipulation of the Minneapolis Police Department, ensuring that they would in turn not inconvenience DFL politicians in the crowd and simultaneously not be around when mobs of droogs septuple-teamed, sucker-punched and spat on the elderly and female (but, curiously, rarely if ever young, fit male) Trump supporters?

I’m not saying “Hell yes, definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt” – but I’m strongly hinting that you wouldn’t be wrong if you said it.

Also not saying that Mayor Frey is a soy-boi that strongly supports mobs of “toughs” roaming around picking off the elderly and female Trump supporters. I am, most directly, saying that if Jacob Frey pisses off the passive-aggressive soy-bois and social “justice” tyranny harpies, he’ll be looking for a new job come the next election time, since they control the DFL party to which Frey owes his career.

There is no chance of dealing with this through the City Council – that’s going to be a one-party fantasyland until some catastrophe makes conservatives of all the survivors.

Democrats so far have refused to answer any questions about the violent protest. This is especially important, given that one of their own—DFL state rep Aisha Gomez—was among the leftwing mob.
Specifically questions that have not been answered are: 
“Do you disavow the protestors who threw urine at cops, and hit and spit on Trump supporters?”
“Do you disavow the use of rhetoric like ‘kill a cop, save a life,’ and ‘blue lives don’t matter’?” 
“Do you disavow political violence?” 
“Do you disavow Mayor Frey for not allowing the Minneapolis Police to defend themselves?”
“Do you disavow state rep. Aisha Gomez for associating herself with the most violent group of protestors?”

Disavow? He owes them his livelihood.

But the courts offer some slim hope of justice:

Anyone hurt during the rally should seek legal counsel and file a suit against Frey on the basis of a civil rights violation (42 USC 1983).

Pass it along.

You thought the DFL was crazy-left?

It is.

But tomorrow’s DFL is demented batspittle-crazy:

A bevy of progressives are challenging longtime Democratic incumbents in the Legislature in next year’s elections, potentially sending more women, millennials and people of color to the State Capitol while shifting the DFL dialogue to the left.
The movement is a muscular show of influence among emerging voter blocs that have already transformed the DFL coalition but now seek the real prize: an election certificate that will earn them a seat at the table and the opportunity to move billions of dollars in state funding.

Farther to the left than Alice “The Phantom” Hausman?

Oh, yes.

Tanner Sunderman, a 25-year-old Roseville resident challenging longtime Rep. Alice Hausman of St. Paul in the first-ring suburbs, said now is the time. “We’re done waiting,” he said.

On election night 2018, watching the disappointing results, I urged conservatives not to go off the ledge; Democrats with power are like crack addicts with a stolen Amex card. They just can’t stop.

ANCHOR: “There are some who say the death of Al-Zarquawi isn’t that important, given that he was at the head of an asymmetric worldwide terror organization. How important was his death, really?”

EXPERT: “While it is true that asymmetric terror organizations are built to survive, on the other hand, if you’re talking about the history of a putative “caliphate“, the death of the “caliph” might be considered an, I dunno, setback or something…”

Finally, someone else arrives at the conclusion I reached back when Obama was welcoming floods of Mexicans riding atop trains.  
Don’t mend it, end it.  Moratorium on ALL immigration to allow time for assimilation – probably two generations, maybe three, going by history.  
Close the gates.  Pull up the drawbridge. Build the wall. 
Joe Doakes

Or – y’know – do what Canada, Japan, Australia and…you guessed it, Mexico do; make potential immigrants prove their value to the country before getting that visa. 

Anyone remember Dave Mindeman?

About ten years ago or so, he ran a blog – “MNPAct” – which was a website for putative organization Dave putatively ran.

Now, let me be clear: Dave was one of a small handful of “progressive” Metro-area bloggers from blogging’s heyday in the ’00s that didn’t and, to the best of my knowledge, still doesn’t belong under police surveillance; when my garage burned down, he didn’t feel compelled to disavow responsibility for it.

So there’s that. When you’re a conservative in the metro, you become thankful for the small things.

But that’s not to say Dave knows how to frame an argument any better than the rest of them ever did.

Example – last week, Dave felt the need to post this on Twitter:

Of course, Dave – confident as he seems to be in his side’s chanting points – didn’t know that Shannon Watts, like Nancy Nrd Bence (and Heather Martens before) has never, not once, said anything about guns, gun laws, gun owners, gun crime or gun statistics that’s simultaneously original, substantial and true; Lott’s “recent” testimony was 16 years ago.

I responded, natch – knowing, all along, I’d regret it, but such is the life of the contrarian.

It drew a “response” from Mindeman – one that was pretty clearly the fruits of a quick google for “John Lott Sucks” or some other “Dog Gone”-caliber thrashing about. Dave came up with…:

Mother Jones.

Now, if you are of a certain age, you might remember when MoJo was known for some capable journalism, even if it was always hard-left.

But the once-fabled counterculture investigative publication has fallen on risibly hard times; Babylon Bee doesn’t even bother parodying them anymore. What would be the point? (Interesting to see, by the way, that MoJo’s current “CEO” is City Pages hanger-on Monika Bauerlein).

Anyway.

The article – by “Writing Fellow” (read: glorified intern who’s hoping not to have to look for a job at Buzzfeed next) Gloria Exstrum, covers research Lott did on abortion and immigration, in addition to his usual gun research. I can’t comment on the abortion and immigration stuff – I cover my zone – but once it turns to the gun stuff, Exstrum’s article is proof that you never, ever use MoJo as a source on anything Second Amendment.

Exstrum writes:

Following the 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, President Barack Obama and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urged Congress to pass gun control legislation. “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings,” Obama said in a statement after the incident, “this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”
In a 2015 post on theCrime Prevention Research Center website, Lott’s group argues that “this claim is simply not true.”The analysis points out that, during the Obama administration, the United States ranks below several European countries in death rate per million people from mass public shootings. Predictably, conservative media outlets picked up the story, and Lott wrote a column for Fox News referencing his findings after the Las Vegas shooting.

So far so good. She got the basic assertions right – which is not something you can take for granted these days.

But here’s a challenge: try to figure out what the esteemed “writing fellow” is saying in response to Lott in this next bit. Honestly, I’m sort of at a loss, here:

However, as a Media Matters for America analysis points out, Lott’s claims only focus on public mass shootings involving machine guns, a criteria which excludes deadly incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and the Pulse nightclub shooting.

For a “writing fellow”, Ms. Exstrum is either a terrible researcher, a lousy reporter (evidence toward this: using “Media Matters” as a source), a substandard writer, or – who knows? – maybe any 2-3 of the above. Whatever it is, I have read this sentence a dozen times, and I can’t figure out what she’s trying to say. But I’ll give it a try, here:

Is she saying Lott excluded mass shootings involving machine guns?   Well, yeah – there’s never been mass shooting by a legally-owned machine gun – meaning “fully automatic weapon” – in US history, at least not since the 1934 National Firearms Act (shaddap about the Valentine’s Day Massacre).  Lott “excluded” them because history and fact “excluded” them.  They don’t exist in the past 85 years, to say nothing of the six year time frame of the study Ms. Exstrum is yapping about.  

Is she saying that the overseas shootings used “machine guns” – well, no, the raw data points out that non-US mass shootings used a variety of firearms – the vast majority of them subject to stringent gun control, by the way, which would tend to reinforce Lott’s point, not Exstrum’s.   The list below includes incidents with “machine guns” (notably the 11/13 Paris massacre, carried out with military-grade AK47s – which are as illegal in France as they are here) , semi-automatic weapons, even manual repeaters:

Is the dispositive point that Lott focuses on foreign “public” “mass shootings?”    It makes no sense – Lott’s list of shootings in the US from 2009-2015 includes all sorts of locations – almost all public, mostly “gun-free zones”:

LIterally, there is no way to read “writing fellow” Exstrum’s sentence that makes it jibe with the facts.

I’m open to suggestions, here.

Exstrum also wrote – sort of – about Lott’s foray into police-on-black-citizen shootings:

In a 2016 study, Lott and co-author Carlisle Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary and a member of the Crime Prevention Research Center’s academic advisory board, argue that white police officers do not unfairly discriminate against black suspects. In a Fox News op-ed about the study, Lott says, “Many people incorrectly believe the police are racist.”

To which she adds:

Of course, ample research has concluded that black suspects are much more likely to be shot by police than white ones. But the study nonetheless received coverage from the National Review, Breitbart, and the Washington Times, with Breitbart saying Lott’s research “runs against the claims of groups like Black Lives Matter.”

 “Ample research”.   Is anyone but me seeing a google search for “shooting black people consensus” as Ms. Exstrum’s “research”?

Of course, there’s ample research on the other side as well – including this one, by Harvard professor Roland Fryor – that confirms at least the broad outline of Lott’s conclusion.  Fryer happens to be black, and also happened to have started his research believing he’s find the opposite conclusion – so this finding, against interest (where “interest” <> intellectual honesty). 

Conclusions  Er, don’t start a land war in Asia, and don’t use MoJo as a source against someone who’s been paying attention? 

Trump goes to hostile areas – Minneapolis, the Nationals’ stadium.

“Progressives” – spoiled, entitled public unioneers, academics, PR flaks disguised as journalists, “students” and non-profiteers, eternal beneficiaries of a prosperity they had nothing to do with creating – act like spoiled toddlers, continuing the tantrum that started three years ago and looks unlikely to stop until 2025 at least.

In Minneapolis, hundreds of testosterone-raging post-adolescent rage-o-holics and their soy-boi significant others/servants beclowned themselves and ganged up on the occasional lone, elderly or diminuitive rally-goer, presumably feeling the earth move in the process.

And in DC?

And I have to think that Trump has got to be looking at more such appearances in “Blue” territory; these outbursts of toddler tantrum-mongering have got to be racking up the contributions, the votes, and the moderate Democrats thinking “OMFG, who are these clowns?”

Mayor Carter, presiding over the worst murder rate in almost a quarter century (even as crime outside the metro continues to fall) is holding a series of meetings:

In the midst of an uptick in gun violence in St. Paul, Mayor Melvin Carter announced on Monday that he’ll host three community meetings about public safety.
Carter said last week he’s considering proposing a supplemental public safety budget to the City Council. The Council is slated to vote on next year’s city budget in December.
The community conversations will be at the following St. Paul locations:
Thursday, Nov. 7, 6:30-8 p.m., Central Baptist Church, 420 N. Roy St.
Tuesday, Nov. 12, 6:30-8 p.m., Rice Recreation Center, 1021 Marion St.
Saturday, Nov. 16, 1-2:30 p.m., Arlington Hills Community Center, 1200 Payne Ave.

I’m going to go out on a limb, and guess that ending pre-emption and “universal” background checks will be the only subjects seriously discussed.

It’s about time for President Trump to suggest that Congress repeal Title IX and eliminate Girls’ Sports on the grounds that since Boys can compete in Girls sports simply by declaring themselves Girls, having a separate sports system is a wasteful, duplicative, expensive boondoggle. 
We’ll just have one system, winner take all. True, boys will win everything forever, but that’s where we’re headed anyway so might as well jump right into it.
The money we save can be used to build The Wall.
Joe Doakes

Joe, of course, is aware of Berg’s 21st Law: “When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law.”

And satire, like Joe’s sarcastic note, is closer to the news than the news is. 

I mean, is it any dumber than the WaPo’s headline about Al-Baghdadi? 

One suspects had Obama ordered the raid that erased Baghdadi, the headline would have been a little less…conciliatory toward the man who brought seventh-century horrors back to the world, murdering thousands in ways designed to cow and horrify his enemies, the stuff of legends of the Mongols.  

California congresswoman Katie Hill is a pretty loathsome person (and that’s without even referring to  her ideology, which seeks to do to the entire country what it’s done to Califonia, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, NOLA and Baltimore), whose sex scandal – she was apparnently doing with her husband (asterisk; west coast version), a female campaign staffer, and another guy on the side – is nothing more than her doing with three other people what the entire Democrat party is trying to do to the United States without the courtesy of buying dinner [1] first…

…but this article (which has NSFW photography, unless you work in a pr0n theater, an art gallery, a tabloid, or the curriculum office of a blue-city elementary school), among many others, makes a key story point out of the notion that she has a  “Nazi” tattoo in the headline – a reference to a tattoo visible just outside her fun zone in one of the bluer photos in the article

Thats just wrong.

The Iron Cross was the emblem of Prussia, and then the German monarchy, for hundreds of years, up until 1918, and of the Republic until 1933. The Nazis kept it around as a decoration (the “Iron Cross” was sort of like the American “Bronze Star”), but it was German, not Nazi.

Those Eisernkreuze can be distinguished from the regular German ones by the, y’know, swastika the Nazis incorporated.

It’s what the kids call “Cultural Appropriation” these days.

But after the war, the “Eisernkreuz” survived Germany’s stringent “De-Nazification” with flying colors, seventy years ago, to become part of the utterly non-Nazi Federal Republic’s regalia. It is still the emblem of the German military; you find it today on all German planes, tanks and ships.

Not defending Ms. Hill – that’s MSNBC’s job. Just checking facts.

Something nobody in the media seems to care about doing anymore.

[1] And heaven forefend the Democrats socialize “dinner”; it’ll be a 2,000 page bill that costs $400 billion a year for ten years and feeds us dogfood.

Saint Paul’s new garbage hauling program is a rousing success and if you don’t vote to continue it, taxes will increase dramatically to pay for the five-year contract the City illegally signed.
Mayor Carter’s statements in the linked article defy common sense, casting doubt on his credibility.
We have significantly reduced emissions from our garbage trucks.  Really?  You monitor that, somehow, and have data to prove it?  Can I see it? 
We have significantly reduced wear and tear on our streets, too many potholes.  Really?  In just the few months the program has been in operation, you’ve been able to measure the wear and tear on streets, and have data to prove it?  Can I see it? 
We have significantly reduced truck traffic through neighborhoods where children are playing. What, in the streets?  Well, there’s your problem right there – those kids gotta learn to stop running out in front of garbage trucks. 
And Hizzonor is going to address gun violence, not by hiring new cops but by having a meeting with his cabinet, as soon as we can get those key players together.  What’s the hold-up? They’re your cabinet, Mel.  Don’t they report to you? 
It sounds as if the Mayor is reciting talking points, not taking action.  I wonder if that’s because he has no idea what to do about the mess he finds himself in?
Am I the only one getting the impression this Mayor is not ready for prime time? 
Joe Doakes

Why, it’s almost if the Saint Paul DFL has taken “Perception is Reality” to its logical extreme.  

The last living Bataan Death March survivor in Brainerd – and, one suspects, one of few remaining anywhere – turns 100:

A once unthinkable centennial looms large on Walt Straka’s calendar.
It’s led to a host of reflections for the former prisoner of war, who didn’t believe he had a snowball’s chance of surviving Bataan, let alone 10 years after the war.
Let alone to the age of 100.
But, nevertheless, it’s real and it’s here. On Thursday, Oct. 24, Walt Straka is 100 years old, the last Minnesotan survivor of the 60-mile journey of torture and death, followed by 43 months of incomprehensible captivity in sub-human conditions. He also stands among the few remaining members of a shrinking club: the veterans of World War II and all their living, breathing connections to a century of seismic changes and events.
“Oh God, I never dreamt I’d ever get that old,” Walt said. “I never thought I’d get there. It’s almost unbelievable. It’s almost unbelievable. I’m happy. I’m just thankful to be alive.

It needs to be pointed out that Brainerd had a higher than normal concentration of Bataan survivors; a National Guard tank battalion from the town was sent to the Philippines and fought against the Japanese invasion in the opening weeks of the war. 64 left Brainerd; three died in action, 29 more in captivity.

I grew up influenced by these people, pretty much daily; several of my high school teachers, and principal, were veterans. They didn’t talk much about the war – some showed it (one teacher still flattened out on the ground when some idiot would pop a paper bag behind him). But the examples they set, behaviors learned during the best years of their lives spent fighting overseas, that stuck with me. Calm down. Focus. Get your damn job done. Your feelings and 50 cents will get you a cup of coffee – what do you have to deliver tangibly?

Happy birthday, Walt Straka, and as many more as you can manage, God willing.

Why isn’t Trump getting credit for this?


Joe Doakes

Heh. 

Along those lines:  while I’m the Twin Cities’ best feminist, I am actually 104% male, so I have to wonder; do women ever feel patronized by all the “First Female…” <fill in the event> hype?  Especially given that the event took place on the shoulders of a lot of brilliant men who built the space program from its inception?

Also – am I the only one who feels like his teeth are being filed with a cheese grater at the term “HERstory?”

Without government, who would “inspect” the retro-pinup girls before they visit vets at the VA?

Pin Ups for Vets received an email from the San Diego Veterans Hospital on Monday banning the calendar and telling them the outfits of their volunteers must be scrutinized in advance. Additionally, the costumed volunteers will not be allowed to hand out their signature calendar.
“It’s insulting that our outfits have to be preapproved,” Gina Elise told the Washington Examiner. “It feels like it’s discriminatory behavior. Is that happening with every single visitor that comes in the hospital?”

Feeling proud, yet?

…if “educators” – secondary and university-level – in the “humanities” know anything about the history of the “humanities”.

Teachers are worried about teaching the otherwise (ostensibly) brilliant work of artists whose personal lives are, well, problematic, in the #MeToo era:

For Martina Myers, a high school English teacher on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, Sherman Alexie’s novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” seemed too good to be true: funny, well-crafted and focused on Native American youth.
Her students at Piñon High School, many of whom struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, took to it immediately. They wrote poems in response, on native pride, addiction, self-acceptance and suicide attempts.
So when Ms. Myers learned last year of the allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Alexie, who issued a statement admitting he had “harmed other people,” she felt two waves of betrayal — first for her students and then for herself, a survivor of abuse.
“When the #MeToo movement happened I told my story,” Ms. Myers said. She knew some of her students, too, had experienced sexual assault.

Where do these hamsters come from?

The history of arts and humanities is clogged with deeply dysfunctional people. The drive to be an artist seems, in fact, to be closely linked with personal and emotional instability.

And the “artists” that fit neatly into the bounds of what’s considered socially acceptable today largely aren’t that interesting.

Why, it’s almost as if someone is trying to dumb society down, or something…

I knew actors were an odd bunch, but now the Guthrie Theater is embracing its inner drag queen with a special event.  And on Armistice Day, no doubt to honor all the cross dressers who died in the trenches.  
I don’t think I’ll be going. 
Joe Doakes.

I could not be dragged – as it were – kicking and screaming to the event.

It’s become a little like the classic movie “Groundhog Day”.

A new scandal comes that will supposedly rend the Trump Administration to its core.

It turns out to be a damp squib.

Lather, rinse, repeat, until 2020.

Why do people still trust the media at all?

Joel Kotkin – who’s moved from being America’s foremost urban planning critic to one of our best social critics – has noticed:

This divide can be seen in public perceptions of the news media. Although somewhat improved from its low point in 2016, only 40 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, trust the media, compared to over 50 percent in 1999. As befits the media’s increasingly partisan stance, the small improvement over 2016 comes almost entirely from Democrats. Only 15% of Republicans and barely a third of independents now trust media compared to nearly 70% of Democrats.
Once the news business had enough sense of propriety and professionalism to at least maintain an appearance of objectivity.  There’s ample reason, as Glenn Reynolds suggests, to see many mainstream journalists as little more than “Democrats with bylines,” willing participants in what long-time leftist and fiercely anti-Trump reporter Matt Taibbi describes as the upper bureaucracy’s “permanent coup” against Trump. If this “coup” now actually succeeds, it will be one that will simply accentuate hostility to the media among a large segment of the population.

The whole thing is worth a read, naturally.

And it matters, because democratic society needs institutions – law-enforcement, courts, a news media – that it can trust to hold all parties accountable.

And this past decade has shown that we really have none of them.

According to at least one bit of research (qualify accordingly), turns out testosterone isn’t linked with rage and other mood problems.

On the other hand, this factoid is cited as an apparent part of the ongoing effort by Big Lefty Culture to erase the perception of differences between the sexes, so there’s that.

Greta Thunberg is used to swimming in the warm water of the adulation of the deluded blue-state masses.

But getting outside the moldy blue confines of the parts of this country that take CNN seriously is a whole ‘nother thing.

Even if it’s the red part of Canada:

I’m a member of a gun club just East of The Cities. Every member volunteers two days to serve as range safety officer while members of the public use the range to sight their hunting rifles. It’s always an eye-opener to see all ages, races, genders, incomes, occupations, coming together to get ready for their annual family deer hunt. And uniformly, they are grateful to have a place to do it.
If Republicans made a bigger show of supporting hunting, I think they’d have stronger grassroots support.
Joe Doakes

I agree.

And gun rights groups – while rightfully disdaining all too many hunters’ myopia over gun rights (all too many believe the fight over the AR15 will never affect their deer rifle or duck gun) – would do well to reach out to hunters as well.

Oh, look – the Trib has another badly worded poll intended to elicit results to be used as blunt-force DFL rhetoric. In this case, on Minnesotans’ views on gun registration – AKA “Universal Background Checks”

And yes, it’s dishonest. I add emphasis:

A strong majority of Minnesota voters support universal background checks on all gun sales and a ban on semiautomatic military-style rifles like the AR-15, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

It’s not “gun sales”. It’s all transfers; lending or borrowing, inheritance, any transfer at all.

And – again – there is no way for “background checks” to be “universal” without trackjng the various transfers through a firearm’s lifetime.

Each of those transactions over time is a data point.

In the world of IT, we have a term for tracking data points; a database.

You can not call this anything but gun registration – and given the DFL’s tack on guns, you can not look at it as anything other than a prelude to confiscation.

Not. One. More. Compromise.