Death by Powerpoint, Gov. Klink style.

And – not only back, but better than ever, by popular demand – it’s the weekly playlist!

Decades ago, in an effort to keep housing “affordable”, the city of New York imposed rent control. No existing rental unit could increase its price, absent jumping throught a Byzantine series of bureaucratic hoops.

The “market” responded to the bureaucratic muddling – at first, creatively. The rent control stayed with the the renter. When the renter died or moved, the rental rate could move with the market. But the “ownership” of the rental could be passed down through any semblance of the original renters families – so children, nephews and nieces, stepchildren, further-order descendants, and utterly phony descendants – a fraud that was almost never investigated. Also, renters (and their descendants) could, and did, sublet, and even subdivide, apartments, renting the spaces out at much better than market rates and making a tidy profit on the deal. People are pretty creative when it comes to skirting rules, and New York City government is equally thud-witted and uncreative at creating the rules people skirt. It became almost

The second-order consequences were less salutary. While rents were frozen, utilities and property taxes were not – so landlords got squeezed hard. Landlords with sufficient means sold their properties to “co-ops”, or went condo, or found the few available loopholes – and there were very few, since the powers that be (and are) in New York treated landlords as a populist enemy to be demonized for political gain. The less affluent landlords fell behind on taxes. Squeezed by the city to pay up, repairs sufferend. Eventually these landlords stopped repairing their properties in less desirable areas, which quickly became even less desirable; vast swathes of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Harlem fell into deep blight, with block after block of apartments abandoned…

…in a city with an “affordable housing crisis” where even in the 1980s, it was impossible to find a place to live for under $2,000 a month in 1985 dollars (which is $4,500 to 5,000 today).

Of course, all that blight begat crime. By the late ’70s, much of New York was a shooting gallery, wit over 2,000 dead per year.

Of course, there is a lot of money in New York, and a lot of people want to be there, so the real estate didn’t sit idle for too long – begetting the third-order consequences: developers moved in, took over the blighted, abandoned real estate, and built it back up. Of course, given New York’s regulatory “zeal” and astronomical taxes, it wasn’t just any developers. It was the ones with enough money to do the building, to navigate the bureaucracy (read “Money”) and pay the taxes (read – “keep the money coming”). The up-front costs were high – and the rest was even higher.

So after decades of “rent control”, one can not live in a decent place on Manhattan with an income of less than $500,000 a year.

I write this to highlight the path that the Minneapolis City Council – known among those in the know as “the dumbest city council between Chicago and Los Angeles” – is drooling to drive Minneapolis down.

Neo-populist progressive economicallly-illiterate stupidity – a barrel that, in Minneapolis, has no bottom.

Henco attorney Mike Freeman isn’t happy about the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” repeatedly bailing out violent offenders who can be linked, however tenuously, to political protest.

Which is fine, as far as it goes.

But have you noticed, in the wake of all the collective slander about “white supremacists” being “the real culprits” behind last spring’s riots, that not a single media report or government objection notes that the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” is financed by progressive plutocrats and aristocrats,

And why would they be bailing out “white supremacists?”

I keep asking Twin Cities media figured “reporting” on the story, to the extent anyone ever does.

There’s never an answer.

#Unexpected.

The one, potential silver lining to the Democrat sweep at the federal level is the inevitability of “Progressive” overreach. With luck and a GOP that isn’t completely indolent, that could turn into a 2022 midterms that make 1994 look like Lena Dunham in a Swedish Women’s Beach Volleyball tournament.

And that overreach is happening. From the “Moderate” “Uniter” Joe Biden, no less.

To quote that great moral authority Dan Rather, “Courage”.

Republican legislators are trying to change the Governor’s emergency powers. I applaud that effort.

An “emergency” is an unforeseen combination of events requiring immediate action. A tornado, a blizzard, a flood, even a disease outbreak, can all be emergencies.

But for how long? At what point is “immediate” action no longer required, and “deliberate” action should replace it? At what point should the Governor return power to the people’s elected representatives to make decisions?

Presently, the law says his power continues until a majority of both houses revokes it. That’s backwards. It should end unless a majority of both houses extends it.

Joe Doakes

The provision, if it was given much thought at all, was (I suspect) written with the assumption that all future goverors would operate from a basis of integrity and concern, mutually held with a statesmanlike legislature, for the balancing of order and liberty.

Events have shown that to be a poor assumption.

Events have also shown us that the Second Amendment movement got it right in 2015 when they pushed through limitations on the Governor’s emergency powers in re confiscating guns and curbing gun rights under a “state of emergency”.

We need to do that with the rest of state law.

Assuming the opposition can ever prevail.

Governor Walz released…

…well, he called it his “education plan”, earlier this week.

Those of us who work in business – which significantly, has never included anyone in our executive branch – can identify what this…thing, is.

It’s a two page list of platitudes. One and a half when you leave out the header.

None of it has specifics. None of it is testable to see if it’s working or isn’t, in any way. And while we are assured that there’s more “plan” coming, mark my words – there’ll be no more substance in the thousands of pages of institutional gobbledigook that are surely to come.

But let’s translate the terms from their current Educational/Bureaucratic dialect – the form of English with the lowest signal to noise ratio of all our many argots – into actual English:

• “‘Caring and Qualified’ Teachers” – Get ready to get logrolled with a few years of sob stories about how underpaid teachers, especially in the Metro, are.
• “Expand opportunities and mental health staff” – Full employment for soft-science and non-profiteers in the school system.
• “Statewide Mentor Program to help retain teachers” –
• “Expand full service community school model statewide” – We need to expand the system’s efficiency at transferring taxpayer dollars, not just to Education Minnesota, but to the non-profit/industrial complex that’s attached to it like a remora fish – and all you schools in greater Minnesota need to step up and do your bit.
• “Establish an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Center” – Because why should we pay Pacific Consulting Group millions to screw up our schools when we’ve got PCG-trained career bureaucrats who can do it for us. Although we’ll still be transferring plenty of wealth to PCG.
• “Expand rigorous coursework options” – You bought an education system! Now, for just a few billion more, you can have one that actually teaches stuff to kids! Maybe!
• “Prioritize school funding to the students that need it most” and “Guarantee that compensatory aid funding supports students traditionally left behind” – jigger the various knobs and levers to move more money to the Metro.
• “One time investment to ensure pandemic enrollment loss does not negatively affect students.” – parents and students are bailing on the public schools in record numbers. We need a bailout.
• “Strengthen community and school partnerships” – No “community” non-profit left behind.

Hope that helps.

Where did all the ammo go?

People hoping to get out the range without having to take out a second mortgage to afford to replace their stock are asking (as I might have, before all my guns fell into Superior).

The conspiracies are…colorful:

• Companies are stockpiling their product to drive up demand
• Ammo plants have shutdown completely
• Ammo companies are in cahoots to stop selling to civilians and are now selling only to the Feds and law enforcement.
• OJ bought all of it in his search for the real killers. 

The reality? More mundane:

Spread the word.

Senate File 26 passed the Republican-controlled Minnesota Senate unanimously and is headed for a vote in the Democrat-controlled House.  The bill makes it easier for people to obtain marriage licenses during the Walz Dictatorship.

Weren’t Republicans going to fight to end the dictatorship, rather than enabling it to continue? 

What was so urgent about this bill that Republicans had to go along with it, rather than hold it up to force concessions?

I get that they’re all amateurs, citizen-legislators, but isn’t there anybody up there who knows how to play this game? 

Joe Doakes

I’ve wondered the same, from time to time.

But political parties are run by those who show up.

Every conservative that’s stayed home out of anger over Trump being nominated, or Trump losing the 2016 caucuses, or failture to retroactively condemn or canonize Tim Pawlenty or Michele Bachmann, or Jennifer Carnahan-Hagedorn’s performance as chair?

The party reflects those who show up. In some places – the 7th CD – that’s a good thing. In some – CD4 – it’s deeply problematic.

But it”s those who show up that pick the people who get elected that fight the fight.

I’ve been out for the past couple years – call it burnout.

I”ll be back.

As we noted last week, “Stand your Ground” and ‘Constitutional Carry” bills have been introduced in the Legislature.

And they have a shot, potentially – there are enough red-district DFLers with legitimate fears of being retired in 2022 to maybe soften the DFL’s stance, and Governor Klink might need to weigh his fealty to the Progressives against gun control’s dismal record outside 494 and 694. A veto will be held against him, and every outstate DFLer, in 2022. Smart DFLers (like Bakk and Tomassoni) remember 2002, when every single outstate DFLer who opposed “Shall Issue” was defeated in the ’02 mid-terms.

Remember – it took seven years to get Shall Issue reform passed, culminating in the ’02 pro-gun election sweep.

Gun rights are a long game.

This, against a backdrop of 40% of gun buyers in 2020 being new purchasers, and 40% of them being women and, at least anecdotally, a substantial number of them being formerly ambivalent about firearms.

The left gets this. And so we get articles like this in the Strib – all but portraying Constitutional Carry as a tool of the Klan.

My suspicion? Big Left realizes they are losing the gun battle, and has to gaslight the minority who still opposes them into becoming more die-hard, to avoid losing more ground outside the Blue coasts and Chicago.

President Biden, we’re told, is a devout Catholic, which is a good thing…

…as opposed to Amy Coney Barrett, for whom it was a bad thing.

Also – “Ascendant liberal Christianity is an eternal hope on Big Left. Sort of like Blue Texas. There’s anways been a “blue” church: mainline Presbyterians, white Methodists and Episcopoals, ELCA Lutherans, and an awful lot of mainstream Catholics, who have made their peace with abortion in exchange for programs just as easily as “Feminists” made theirs with Bill Clinton.

The “blue” church is “ascendant” because one of its own is in power. These also happen to be the denominations that are in demogrpaphic free-fall.

But there is no narrative but the narrative.

The party that defended Ted Kennedy’s sluffing his way through legacy admissions to Ivy League undergrad and law school, to say nothing of allowing a woman to slowly die in his car as he staggered around Chappiquiddick looking for sobriety and an alibi with all the conviction of OJ looking for the real killers…

…is tittering over Lauren Bobert’s education, and a “criminal record” matching those of an awful lot of teens and 20-somethings.

Berg’s Eighth Law is universal. There is nothing a Prog needs to destroy more than one of “their” people – women, minorities, the underclass – leaving the plantation.

Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.

A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.

The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).

ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.

That’s the “good” news.

The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.

Migrants waiting in Mexico to get into the United States are thrilled that Joe Biden is now President.  

Two more migrant caravans are on the way.

Their optimism is based on news reports that President Biden will issue executive orders affecting immigration.

Maybe if I brush up my Rosetta Stone Spanish, I can get some yard work done cheap.

Joe Doakes

Unless, of course, they wind up subject to the $15 an hour minimum wage – which means most of them will never find legal work, and will wind up on the dole.

According to plan.

Joe, you might have to hire a neighborhood kid. If American neighborhood kids still do yard work…

I was debating whether to call this episode….

…”Peak ‘Urban Progressive Privilege” – 100+ overschooled/badly educated, middle-on-up class, likely 20/30-something junior members of “the elite” media who have experienced so little struggle and dissonance in their lives that they consider publishing a Ben Shapiro column a mortal threat, and feel entitled enough to whine about it in public.

Is it “peak”?

If I say so, there will be another, worse example tomorrow.

This next two years, at the minimum, are going to be for Urban Progressive Privilege what 1977 was to white polyester suits and mens necklaces.

“Know what’d be better for halting Covid than wearing a mask? Wearing two masks. Let’s all do it.

But wait – you know what’d be better than wearing two masks? Three masks! Let’s get on board…

Hang on – you know what’d be better than wearing three masks? Four masks! That’s like four times the protection! So…

Jst a doggone minute – you know what’d be better than wearing four masks? Five masks! Bam!

Whoa, dudes, dudettes and non-binariliy-duded – you know what’d be better than wearing five masks? Si masks! Let’s smoke this brisket…

But…ay caramba – you know what’d be better than wearing six masks? Seven masks! Holy cow, we got the virus on the run now…

But hold your horses, hombres – you know what’d be better than wearing seven masks? Eight masks! Can you smell the victory…

Wow – wow wow wow – you know what’d be better than wearing eight masks? Nine masks! This must be what Jonas Salk felt like…

Oh, maaaaaan – you know where I’m going, right? 10 masks! Let’s get on board…

D’oh – I’m such a silly. Why stop at 10 when 11 masks are sitting right in front…no, wait, 12! 12 masks!…

… more horrifyingly Orwellian than the title of this proposed cabinet post…

… is the actual proposal itself.

They’re building bridges over their roads for the reindeer to cross safely.

In fact, let’s go one step farther.  Let’s dig tunnels under the roads for raccoons to cross safely.  And paint different colored stripes for bicycles to cross safely.  And lower speed limits so jaywalkers can cross safely.

You know what?  Why are we messing around with half-measures?  If we’re going to do it, just do it right.

Ban vehicles and tear up the roads completely, so everyone and everything can cross safely.  Because what’s more important – moving people and goods efficiently, or signaling our virtue?

Do it . . . for the reindeer.

Joe Doakes

To be fair, not only are “we” doing it…

…but the “we” in this case is the Utah Highway and Natural Resources departments – arguably less likely to be swayed by bizarre priorities than Texas.

Say what you will – it’s a fascinating watch.

Two bands I’ve never much cared for are Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. Part of it was punky contrarianism; they were both very popular when I was in high school. Naturally, I had to zag away from the zigging crowd.

And yet if I had to pick three guitarists whose style mine most resembles, they’d be David Gilmour and Jerry Garcia (along with Mike Campbell).

I’d never have called myself a huge fan. And yet here I am – someone who wound up learning the guitar from their examples.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Talk radio and cable TV legend Larry King died over the weekend. He was 87.

“For 63 years and across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry’s many thousands of interviews, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster,” read the statement [from his production company]

“Larry always viewed his interview subjects as the true stars of his programs, and himself as merely an unbiased conduit between the guest and audience,” it continued. “Whether he was interviewing a U.S. president, foreign leader, celebrity, scandal-ridden personage, or an everyman, Larry liked to ask short, direct, and uncomplicated questions. He believed concise questions usually provided the best answers, and he was not wrong in that belief.”

King predated “talk radio” as we have known it since the repeal of the “Fairness Doctrine” by a solid decade and change. He was one of a generation of talkers – Joe Pyne, Tom Leykis, Morton Downey Jr., Bob Grant, and for that matter Don Vogel and Geoff Charles – who definitely had political views, but had to wrap them in enough information and entertainment to not get their stations, and eventually affiliates, licenses challenged with the FCC.

———-

We didn’t have a lot of talk radio in North Dakota when I was growing up.

There was the occasional “talk show”, of course. The boss at my first station did a half-hour interview with some local figure or another, every afternoon during the station’s evening news block. WDAY in Fargo had a morning talk show – “Live Line”, or some such innocuity – that was more or less the same, on weekday mornings. Mostly, they were done to fulfill a station’s “Public Service” requirement – the vague rule that they had to do something to “serve the public” with their federal broadcast license.

I was coming back from a Who concert in Minneapolis in 1982, ridingi shotgun through the night back to Fargo with a friend and fellow Who fan and much better night driver than I, when I first heard Larry King, and a whole different way of doing radio – talking about whatever grabbed the host’s fancy and making it…

…well, “interesting”, yes – but more importantly, injecting his personality into the subject. It was a conversation, more or less – but it was Larry King’s conversation.

I wasn’t bowled over.

Three years later – almost to the day, in fact – I moved to Minneapolis. And via an improbable series of events, I encountered modern talk radio, accidentally getting a job at KSTP-AM when “talk radio” still called itself “News/Talk” in an attempt to try to mix journalistic legitimacy with the chatter.

The station carried King – but I had other things going on in the evening. I didn’t listen much.

Along the way, as I was doing the ongoing pitch for my own talk show, I read one of King’s columns in USA Today. And it had some advice for would-be interviewers that’s stuck with me for the past 34 years.

Never prep for interviews.

It sounds lazy – and I’d be lying if I haven’t used it to rationalize a little endemic laziness. And it’s not right for every interview; if you’re talking with someone about a particularly fraught issue – something where defamation charges could be on the line, for example – then getting the key facts, and your approach to presenting them, straight is very much in order.

But for most interviews? Knowing nothing about the subject or the content, King said, forced you to approach the subject in exactly the same depth as most of your audience has to – from the absolute ground level up.

Of course, the craft comes from moving from that elementary level to one where you can have a meaningful, interesting conversation, quickly enough to make for good radio.

It didn’t always work – over 63 years, what does? But the example he provided – starting an interview small and working up to something you could (often as not) sink your teeth into – was pretty earthshaking for someone who aspired to try to do the same.

So, utterly counterintuitively, while I would never have called myself a huge Larry King fan, he (along with Don Vogel) probably influenced me more than anyone else in the business.

To: The above-mentioned Swath
From: Mitch Berg, irascible, deplorable peasant
Re: Your Offensive

I couldn’t help but notice this from (where else) NPR the other day:

Oh, I can help.

For starters, you can beg for forgiveness for having appropriated a bit of culture – the term “Resistance” – you never earned.

For starters, you were a bunch of entitled, white, upper-middle-class plush-bottom yoonoos whose “resistance” involved posting irate Instagram selfies while running between your morning frappuccino and your Pilates class, appropriating a term that people who fought against real Nazis, who risked their lives and those of their families and friends during a war in which millions like them vanished without a trace. My contempt for y our self-aggrandizing drama should be apparent on this count alone – but if you’d like, I can be clearer.

Beyond that? Calling yourself a “resistance” is a little like Colin Kaepernick pleading “oppression” between meeting with his financial planner and running to a CNN interview. You people are part of the class that controlled much of the most powerful parts of society – the media, the bureaucracy, the educational-industrial complex…NPR, for that matter.

Just stop.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails with a great idea

How about a new series of posts entitled something like “Walking it
Back” in which we detail the lies told during the Trump administration
which now are admitted to have been lies?

Exhibit one.

Joe Doakes

Keep ’em coming in the comment section.

Please note – comments that are not examples of media and Democrat (ptr) lies about Trump will be deleted, sooner than later. 99.9% of the posts on this blog have barely-moderated comment threads (on both sides). This is an exception.

Carry on.

Imagine this: you are walking through downtown…er, Brainerd. It’s dark out, with a tinge of fog in the air.

A car full of rural youth with mischief on their minds rolls up and jumps out. One has a gun, another a baseball bat. They are making loud, aggressive, rural-youth-y noises.

In a split second, you discern:

1. Your life is in immediate danger
2. They, not you, are the aggressors
3. You being a middle-aged man or woman, and they being spry rural teens, you don’t reasonably have the means or opportunity to run away.

In a split second, you decide that your concealed handgun is the best way to resolve the situation – whether you shoot or not.

And after the episode is resolved – via the youths fleeing or, heaven forfend, violently – you call the police, lawyer up, and get ready for the process of proving to the prosecutor (if all goes well) or a court and jury (if it doesn’t) that your decision was correct.

Here’s where it gets complicated.

For the next several weeks a county attorney, sitting in a warm, safe office with a Keurig and stacks of law books and protected by metal detectors and deputies, working from the police report, will pick over the life-or-death decision you were forced, against your will, to make on a cold, dark, foggy night in Brainerd, with a grisly death potentially seconds away, to see if your attempt to flee was satisfactory enough under not only statute, but according to at least a dozen entries in Minnesota case law.

Your freedom for the next seven to life is at stake – to say nothing of your life’s savings, home, and your family’s future.

Seem reasonable?

If so – in what world? Seriously?

———-

Self-defense reform bills – SF 13 and HF131 – have been introduced in the House and Senate that would remove Minnesota’s ambiguous, legalistic and opaque “duty to retreat” requirement in self-defense situations – where the other criteria for self-defense (see the list above) are met.

They will NOT let people shoot people because they don’t like the way they looked at them.

They will NOT provide open season for the current usual cultural suspects (WhitesupremacistnazitransphobeKKKsciencedeniers) to kill people (indeed, in states with “Stand your Ground” laws, “people of color’ use them more often than white defendants – successfully).
There is literally no *rational* reason not to pass this measure into law. Reflexively chanting “Duty to retreat! Duty to retreat!” will earn you an invite to re-read the opening scenario.

If you’re in Minnesota, contact your legislator.  I imagine most of you know yours, but the MN Gun Owners Caucus tool above has a legislative contact tool that’ll find ’em in case yo don’t.  

It’s kind of nice to be on the offensive again, isn’t it?

(The bills are of purely intellectual interest to me of course – any firearms I may have owned fell into Mille Lacs last summer. And guns terrify me. I’d never own one again).

LIke MInneaolis doesn’t have enough problems…

Jacob “McDreamy” Frey is going to run for re-election.

As one wag noted:

Suggested camaign motto: “Stay the Curse”.

The thing about Minneapolis, of course, is that if Frey gets unseated, it’ll be to someone from the left.

And that person will be unseated by someone from their left.

I’m afraid the vortex is unescapable.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

On his very first day in office, President Biden ended Girls’ Sports. From now on, there will be Boys Champions and Boys in Dresses Champions but no girl champions because they’ll be physically unable to compete.

Good! Gives the girls more time to work on sewing and baking cookies and raising babies, being properly ladylike instead of roughhousing tomboys.

Joe Doakes

Why, it’s almost as if every single “progressive“ policy destroys the things that they are ostensibly trying to promote.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is out on his porch waiting for some food delivery. He’s committed – can’t go inside yet – when Avery LIBRELLE happens around the corner.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Uh, hey, Avery…

LIBRELLE: Stop with all the scare talk. Joe Biden is a moderate.

BERG: Biden is a moderate in the exact same sense that Brooke Shields was George Michael’s girlfriend in the ’80s.

LIBRELLE: What? Go on…

BERG: In the ’80s, various publicists circulated the story that Brooke Shields was dating George Michael – a fantastic singer who tripped every ‘gaydar’ set in the world when “Wham UK” started releasing music videos.

The “Relationship” was imposed on the couple, and the world, by the execs at Michael’s label for a bunch of reasons; in an age when being “gay” was still pretty closet-y and the likes of Freddy Mercury and Elton John kept their orientations very much under the radar, it protected Michael’s marketability. It benefitted both of their careers. It kept the whole “is he gay?” discussion from hampering record sales. And it was neither of their idea – it was a concoction of publicists working for their various record, studio and management companies, to keep everyone’s nests feathered.

LIBRELLE: And…?

BERG: Biden is the same thing. He was brought in to put a “crazy grampa” veneer on a party whose extremism has exploded like a diet Coke with a Mento dropped in. To make incipient communism less scary for soccer moms.

LIBRELLE: That’s just…

BERG: Just what?

LIBRELLE: I’m torn between “Racist” and “Anti-Palestinian”.

BERG: Naturally…

BERG’s delivery arrives.

And SCENE

They’re Democrats.

They’re in power.

I mean, what do you expect?

That may be the good news, in the long run.