My take on the debates:

BIDEN: “Trump [as opposed to Democrat governors and their idiotic lockdowns] tanked the economy”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “He let the Russians put bounties on our troops!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “He said the Nazis at Charlottesville were perfectly fine people!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “I was brought in to solve the 2008 recession, and I did it!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “Trump inherited massive job gains [not a dead cat bounce, nosirreebob]!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “He called the military ‘losers’!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “Hunter was completely exonerated!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “Nobody has ever established that there has ever been any election fraud!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “Climate changed causes stores that ahve already wiped away entire counties!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “Trump didn’t do anything about Covid!”

THE LEFT AND MEDIA (PTR): (Bobs heads approvingly)

BIDEN: “Antifa doesn’t really exist, but roaming gangs of White Supremacists do!”

MITCH: Trump needed to shut up and let Biden talk more. The more Biden talked, the more Wallace had to step in to rescue him. He was meat on the hoof, especially about forty minutes into the debate.

Mr. President, for your own good, practice shutting the front door up.

Once upon a time, I got some great life advice.

“Find what you’re good at, and run with it”.

John Thompson, would-be DFL rep from District 67A, the East Side, apparently got and practices the same advice.

He does seem to like burning down suburbs. Or at least talking about it.

A lot:

Sure, that’ll solve police overreach against blacks. Run with it.

Hey, DFLers – this is the mainstream of your party.

Representative Omar, in a recent interview:

I am, by nature, a starter of fires

Ooofda.

A friend of the blog emails:

Downtown St Paul does need some improvement. It has been pretty lifeless for a while.

But, I don’t think collecting more money from the few businesses that remain there is quite the way to improve it, though I guess it is better than burning it down as they did for the Midway Improvement Project.

If you see both projects as glorified transfers of wealth from whatever private sector remains in Saint Paul to the political class, it all makes perfect sense.

Netflix is taking heat for a show about young girls dancing.  They dress in skimpy outfits, wear makeup, do sexually suggestive dance moves like running their hands over each other, twerking their little behinds and thrusting their tiny pelvises.  People are outraged at the implicit pedophilia.

Bad news, people, you’re about 30 years late.  Dance teachers were putting kids in these costumes and teaching them the same moves, when my daughter was a kid.  At that time, all the sophisticated people assured me it was adorable, not perverse.

Of course, that was before Pizzagate and #metoo and Epstein.  Has the pendulum begun to swing back?

Joe Doakes

When you’re in the middle of a bad swing, it’s hard to remember that pendula do – or at least can -move both ways.

These tweets have made the rounds of conservative social, cable and broadcast media.

Which doesn’t mean they don’t need to be splattered far and wide.

Berg’s Seventh Law is omnipresent:

“Irony” – Judge Coney Barrett is already one of the nation’s most powerful jurists, even if she never gets on the SCOTUS (and here’s hoping she does, and soon). She’s accomplished more in her life, so far, than any of the people yapping on Twitter about “The Handmaids Tale” “parallels” in her faith life.

Just saying – if “People of Praise” preaches “subservience for women”, they’re doing a terrible job of it.

Oh, yeah – Berg’s Seventh Law”

If the left didn’t have double standards…

…well, you know where we go from here.

Nearly every American partisan voter will tell you one presidential candidate is not of sound mind.

Half of us have documentary evidence:

Freedom is slavery.

Truth is lies.

And, to Los Angeles Democrats – in this case, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti – homelessness is prosperity:

Babylon Bee can’t keep up anymore.

June – Minneapolis City Council President on CNN – expecting police to prevent crime comes from a place of white privilege.

June, July, August – Minneapolis City Council to all Minneapolis Police Officers: You’re horrible people and we’re going to de-fund your entire department, to start from scratch and reinvent public safety. 

September – Minneapolis City Council to Minneapolis Police Chief: Crime is out of control and residents are terrified.  Why aren’t police officers doing a better job of preventing crime?

The Minneapolis Chief of Police is Medaria Arrando, a Black man.  When the Council fires him, he’ll join the ranks of other Black police chiefs fired as scapegoats for White city council virtue-signaling gone wild including Le’Ron Singletary, Carmen Best, and U. Renee Hall. 

But firing the Black police chief flies in the face of a study claiming to prove that police departments run by Black police chiefs have Fewer shootings.

It’s almost as if Liberals don’t care about actual results, only about looking good to the media.

Joe Doakes

Among “progressives”, participation trophies are good enough.

Also mandatory.

I joke, fairly often, that satire is more like the news than the news is, these days – and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

But sometimes, actual journalism is the best journalism there is.

The latest from Project Veritas:

And it’s in Minneapolis.

This is what Republicans face in the Metro.

If this were a Republican plot to stuff ballot boxes, the Justice Department would have both Cities wrapped up in a consent decree faster than you can say “l’etat c’es mon mére“

#ShockedFace

Any bets on whether the Strib can be shamed out of its smug indolence?

A friend of the blog emails:

Do I have this right? The pandemic has reduced commuter travel as employees and students work from home. The buses all say “essential travel only” and are not allowing the crowds they once had. Honestly, they probably don’t even have the crowds- fewer people are using the bus right now. I haven’t been on a bus lately, but I still get the texts about reduced service. Several times a day, buses aren’t running for all sorts of reasons.

Yet, despite all of this, Metro Transit employees were set to get a 2.5% raise and a $1500 bonus? The hospital where I work cancelled raises, eliminated CEU money, and cancelled the Holiday parties and meals because elective surgeries were cancelled for 2 months. Yet, these transit employees think their bonus and 2.5% raise are “crappy offers” and rejected the offer, voting for a strike?????

 I rarely use such language, but seriously, WTF is wrong with these people? I mean, look around- they ought to be happy with being employed, let alone a raise this year.

If Metro Transit struck now, who would know? 

Other than the people the DFL and their public employee union enablers want to keep miserable anyway? 

Fans booed the players in the Kansas City – Texas NFL game [a week or so back – Ed].  Players, announcers, coaches and owners insist the fans are wrong.  No live anthem, anti-racism messages on the scoreboard, players kneeling instead of standing for the flag, banning fans from cheering with the tomahawk chop and war paint, NFL allowing “victim” names on helmets . . . it’s all justified and necessary and the fans should just get over it.

The NFL is already worried about losing billions of dollars if the fans can’t attend because of Covid.  But what happens if the fans won’t attend because they’re insulted?

What’s that saying again?  The customer is always . . . racist?  The customer is always . . . wrong?  The customer is always . . . it’ll come to me.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.  Gimme a minute.

Joe Doakes

The customer, whatever their politics, is always conservative – at least when it comes to spending their entertainment dollar.

Which the NFL is.

Well, used to be.

When law-abiding citizens realize they can’t count on their government for justice – and they are – they’ll establish order for themselves. As we noted earlier, that isn’t always a “good” thing in any sense a modern American would understand.

But for the first time since the thirties – the seventies, in some quarters – people are thinking about it:

NSSF president and CEO Joe Bartozzi spoke at the 2020 Gun Rights Policy Conference over the weekend where he delivered the news on the surge in ammunition sales. He also noted that gun sales were 95 percent higher in the first six months of 2020 than they were during the same time period in 2019.

Bartozzi noted there were nearly five million first-time gun buyers in the first part of the year. He explained that “of all firearms sold to first-time gun buyers, 40 percent were sold to women and personal protection was by far the main purchase driver.”

He suggested there are a few driving factors behind the current surge in gun and ammo sales — one of the key ones being the anti-gun rhetoric of Joe Biden. He suggested Biden looks at gun makers as “the enemy” and recounted Biden’s vow “to bring them down.” He observed that the talk of “mandatory buybacks” of certain firearms is a driving force as well.

We noted some time ago that in most of the country – geographically, at least – gun rights have long since gone viral, and stand to win the parts of the culture war that’s taking place there.

Has the last six months moved the needle in Blue America? We’ll see.

Just remember – according to the mainstream media, Andrew Cuomo is the smart governor.

Nearly 90% of New York bars and restaurants didn’t make their rent last month:

Eighty-seven percent of bars, restaurants, nightclubs and event spaces in the five boroughs could not pay their full August rent, according to data from 457 businesses surveyed between Aug. 25 and Sept. 11, in a new study released Monday by the nonprofit NYC Hospitality Alliance.

It’s a 7 percentage-point increase from June and a four-point jump from July, darkening the dire picture for eateries desperately seeking relief following six months of partial — and in some cases total — closure due to COVID-19 shutdowns.

Some 34 percent of this group said they could not pay rent at all last month, and only 12.9 percent were able to meet full payments.

With winter coming up, and an administration of Karens running things, NYC’s restaurant and night life scene may just start looking like the proverbial “cold Omaha”.

Although Omaha is faring much better these days.

Professor Larry Jacobs on Twitter last week:

On, if only.

But, sadly, no.

I watched Family Feud last night.  Joe Biden told me he’d impose a national mask mandate to save us all from Covid, so I should vote for him.

Now, it seems he won’t. 

So . . . no reason to vote for you, then, Joe?  Might as well stick with the devil we know?

Good by me.

Joe Doakes

He’s vamping.

Well, no – the people feeling him his lines – they’re vamping.

The NYTimes is trying to disappear some of their own paper’s history in re the “1619 Project”, which claimed that, based on the premise that America was founded primarily to exalt slavery, the nation was really founded when the first slave arrived.

Or…so they said. For a while:

Editors recently removed (without explanation or acknowledgment) the provocative statement that the project “aim[s] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” from the article series’ online introduction. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones has repeatedly claimed it is a myth that the project proposes 1619 rather than 1776 as the country’s birth year: She blamed bad-faith critics on the right for tricking the media into believing otherwise.

“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

Forget for a moment that Hannah-Jones’ Twitter banner is a picture of 1776 crossed out and replaced with 1619. Forget that multiple progressive media outlets that were sympathetic to the project’s aims used the 1619-as-true-founding summary in order to explain it. Forget that a year ago, after the articles were published, both Hannah-Jones and New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein described the project in exactly these terms: “We sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as the foundational date of the country, rather than 1776, it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of American history.” Just consider one last piece of evidence that Hannah-Jones is being deceptive about who invented the 1619-not-1776 framing.

My guess – she’s not being “deceptive”. She, and the Times, are backfilling and memory-holing because Identity Politics stands to cost the Democrats.

Again.

British vacationer follows the “wear a mask, except when eating or drinking” rule to avoid wearing a mask throughout a four hour flight:

A British tourist has bragged about making a tube of Pringles last ‘four hours’ so he could avoid wearing a face mask on his flight to Tenerife.

Holidaymaker Michael Richards, 41, bought the tube of salt and vinegar Pringles on board the easyJet flight and nibbled on one every two-and-a-half minutes.

A man, a dream, a plan…

…a victory. 

When convenient (and/or ordered by leadership), Angie Craig is a climate change chicken little.

But when embroiled in a tough battle for those soccer moms in CD2…?

What’s that she’s driving?

A gas-guzzling Jeep.

She clearly hates the children.

Am I the only one watching the various prosecutions underway from the riots a couple weeks ago, and wondering which ones are the “white supremacists?”

Any guesses?

I’m sure stumped.

Just saw a Joe Biden ad. If he’s president, on day one, he will implement the plan he’s been advocating since March. Okay, what is it? Nope, not going to tell us, it’s a secret plan to defeat the virus. But it does include masks.

Joe Doakes 

I watch those Joe Biden ads – it seems the old duffer has a plan for everything.

If it’s borrowed from Andrew Cuomo, I’ll pass.

By the way – those TV spots are the audio equivalent of those old ransom notes cut together from letters from magazines and newspapers; the audio is clearly stitched together from coherent sentences.

It’s like the stress and emphasis changes within a single sentence.

They may be better off hiring a Biden impersonator.

Bruce Springsteen turns 71 today.

I’ve written about Bruce a bit over the years, including my thesis that Springsteen, notwithstanding his lefty-populist politics, has written some of the best conservative music there is over the course of his fifty-odd year career.

After Western Stars – his album and concert film from last year – I read an interview in which he seemed to be saying the days of the eighteen-month tour of four hour rock and roll revivals were done, and that he was a different place. Ironically, he skipped the tour the year before all communal fun got tanked by the Blue City Flu.

But Bruce did actually plan a tour in support of Letter To You – a very rock and roll album, recorded in five frenzied days with the E Street Band. Until, y’know, Covid:

There may be no bringing together the E Street Band right now, a group almost big enough to constitute a mass gathering in its own right. But Letter to You sounds live enough to make you feel a little guilty listening to it, as if you’re violating quarantine. That makes the album feel all the more precious, and the lack of a tour all the more painful. Letter to You is the first time since Born in the U.S.A. that Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded live in the studio to this extent, and possibly the rawest album they’ve ever made, with close to zero overdubs. “It’s the only album where it’s the entire band playing at one time,” says Springsteen, “with all the vocals and everything completely live.” (A few of Springsteen’s twangy guitar leads, played on a Gretsch, are among the only exceptions.)

“It was really like the old days,” says drummer Max Weinberg. “Just pure musical energy, with the hard-earned musical and professional wisdom of guys in their 70s, or close to 70.” It also happens to bethe most classically, unabashedly E Street-sounding album since at least The River. It’s a late-period rebirth of sorts, and it started with thoughts of death.

And the piece officially notes something I’d wondered about starting with Tunnel of Love: originally, the band would hash out songs in the rehearsal space or studio, the old fashioned way, arranging the songs on the fly with the input of the entire band. But along about the time of Nebraska, Bruce started recording everything as demos, himself, at home or later on in a home studio, basically giving the band faits accompli that sounded…

…well, not like the E Steet Band anymore.

And with Letter To Youbeen rol, that seems to have rolled way, way back:

Springsteen kept making demos even after he resumed recording with the E Street Band on The Rising (which, somehow, is now 18 years old, a fact Springsteen finds “mind-boggling,” since “that’s one of my new albums!”). But last year, he finally saw a reason to stop. “When I demo, I start putting things on to see if it works,” says Springsteen. “And suddenly, I’m locked into an arrangement. And then the band has to fit themselves into an arrangement. And suddenly, we don’t have an E Street Band album. So I intentionally did not demo anything.” Bypassing his studio, he captured the songs only on his iPhone, in quick solo-acoustic renditions, to make sure he remembered them.

The whole Rolling Stone interview – less, of course, a few puerile paragraphs of progressive palaver – is worth a read.

Anyway – Happy Birthday, Bruce. It ain’t no sin that I’m glad you’re alive – and kicking. Looking forward to the next tour.

It’s possible that the collapse of public education isn’t a plot to make society dumber and more susceptible to totalitarian meddling.

But it’s hard to figure how they’d do a better job of it if they were trying:

Nearly 20 percent of millennials and Gen Z in New York believe Jews caused the Holocaust, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

The findings come from the first-ever 50-state survey on the Holocaust knowledge of American millennials and Gen Z, which was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

For instance, although there were more than 40,000 camps and ghettos during World War II, 58 percent of respondents in New York cannot name a single one.

Additionally, 60 percent of respondents in New York do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

It was my observation when my kids were in school – over a decade ago, in the Saint Paul Public Schools – that the only things they learned in their various social studies classes were slavery and civil rights.

No “Federalist Papers” or origins of the Constitution. Nothing about the Civil War but slavery.

Nothing about the rise of progressivism, the causes of the Depression, World War II. Nothing about the sixties but Civil Rights.

Again – that was anecdotal, and entirely possibly wrong. But I’ve found little reason to not assume I’m at least largely right on this.

And this article is certainly a plaintiff’s exhibit.

There’s a myth that the United States of America began with the
Revolution in 1776 and continues today. I say it’s a myth, because the
name is the same, but the contents have changed.

In 1776 to 1787, we fought a war and then attempted to form a nation
under the Articles of Confederation. Not the same form of government we
have now.

 From 1787 until 1861, we had a free association of independent units
under one Constitution collectively called “the United States” but that
union perished when the southern states attempted to leave and the
northern states invaded and conquered them.

 From 1865 until about 1935, we had a weak central government to handle
constitutional responsibilities with foreign nations and a collection of
state governments to handle local affairs. That nearly died with the
Great Depression and FDR’s gigantic increase in the size, scope and
domestic power of federal government. It was finished off by 1975, with
LBJ Great Society, immigration reform, anti-war protest, affirmative
action, feminism. We are living in the ruins with transgender rights,
systemic white privilege, antifa, and ever-smaller warring factions. The
nation is disintegrating; we simply haven’t started the shooting in earnest.

The final proof is that every Governor can invoke emergency powers to
suspend the Constitution and no one blinks an eye. Walz banned religion.
He banned the right to make a living, except for favored contributors. 
He issued a state-wide house arrest restricting travel. These acts would
have been unthinkable under previous versions of the United States but
today they are not only accepted, they are vigorously defended by half
the population.

I don’t know what the next country will be like. It will not be a
collection of independent, proud, pioneers pulling themselves up by
their bootstraps. That country is long dead. When enough people get sick
of the uncertainty and violence, I fear they will turn to a strong man,
a dictator, to impose order by ridding the country of independent,
proud, people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Small
business men. Entrepreneurs. Independent thinkers. Me.

Not looking forward to it.

Joe Doakes

Nope.

In the eighties, the televangelists had the best grift going. Money pouring in, and for many years no real scrutiny of what they were doing for, or with, all that money.

But that train largely left the station (I’m looking at you, Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar).

But the grift? That just goes on and on.

Ibran X. Xendi is like the Jim Bakker of critical race theory – only his grift involves gaslighting all of western culture.

“Anti-Racism” is a political belief (which in many ways only tangentially intersects with attitudes about race at all), having little to do with ethnics, morality or behavior. Xendi’s statement is pure cultural gaslighting.

Helpfully, Xendi elaborates:

He’s a PhD, remember, and yet doesn’t apparently know the difference between a word and a phrase.

And yet he’s got the kind of scam running that Jim Bakker could only dream about:

Gotta admire Xendi’s ability to cater to a market – even if it’s just self-loathing progressive academics, hangers-on, and NPR personalities.