In 2010, faced with running against charismatic Republican Tea Party firebrand Tom Emmer with somnolent and visibly addled Mark Dayton, Big Leftymoney rallied enough money to prop up “moderate” “Republican” bureaucrat Tom Horner, an Arne Carlson/Dave Durenberger-era functionary designed to soak up “moderate” “Republican” votes from Republicans who found themselves disaffected by Tom Emmer’s “extremist” (as established in the coordinated media campaign supported by the same big leftymoney).

It worked. Horner soaked up enough squishes to give Dayton his margin of victory.

They’re trying again:

The signs are all there; Hepola gives off all the indications of being Leftymoney astroturf.

Of course, times are a little more parlous than they were in 2010. And the DFL faces two legal weed parties on the ballot, which will eat up a lot of younger DFL voters.

So the rationale is as clear as the provenance is murky.

By the way, I hereby invite Mr. Hepola on my show. I may be the only person in Twin Cities media who doesn’t paint his toenails on the air, which will likely be the showtopper, but the offer is made.

Given the modern left newfound love for an armed populace, maybe this will go over OK:

Oh, not for me of course. I’m about 10 inches too tall to fit in one of those things.

Idaho bill would require prosectors to reimburse people with successful self-defense claims, whom they opt to prosecute anyway:

If enacted, the legislation would require the county or prosecuting state agency where the person was charged with a crime to reimburse the defendant for “all reasonable costs” if they are found not guilty by reason of self defense. Reasonable costs would include lost wages, the costs of any lost business opportunities and legal costs including bail, expert witness fees, attorney’s bills and other expenses. The bill also includes a “safety net” to protect defendants if they are sued by victim in a self-defense case, she said.

It’s intended to provide consequences for the sort of malicious, specious prosecution of people like Kyle Rittenhouse – cases with lots of political sturm und drang but little to no actual evidence of unjustifiable homicide.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Russia invades Ukraine, a massive war on par with WW II. Photos don’t look like it. Looks pretty quiet to me. Cleanest war since January 6th.

One wrecked bus shelter. A traffic jam of cars leaving town. People talking on cell phones, waiting to catch public transportation. This could be Minneapolis any day of the week.

There’s one radar antenna damaged and one apartment building on fire (I wonder if it was accidentally hit by rounds intended for the military installation which fell short, or if it was set on fire by mostly peaceful protesters?) Nobody pushing a wheelbarrow with all their belongings. No mile-long columns of marching soldiers. No piles of bodies in the streets.

Ukraine has had weeks to fortify the area but apparently did not. I see no reason the US should do it now.

Oh wait, scroll down a bit to the blonde wearing pink. Now I understand why Lesko Brandon wants the United States involved. I’ll bet her hair smells terrific.

Joe Doakes

Events have perhaps left some of the events in this email behind in recent days…

I don’t even qualify as an armchair private, much less an armchair general.

But watching the Russian army‘s performance in Ukraine, I cooked up a theory.

Modern dictators know they can’t trust their armies; They have to find some way to counterbalance them. That is usually some combination of a smaller, fanatically loyal, better equipped force to serve as a backstop against potential disloyalty from the regular army.

Hitler had the SS (and even then, kept the SS divided against itself, including a special force within the SS that was even more loyal to Hitler). Hussein had the Republican guards. In addition to infiltrating the entire army with the KGB, the Soviets actually built two parallel armies (KGB “border forces “and MVD “internal security troops”) to protect the regime against perfidy by the Red Army,

Even the modern British Army has some vestigial remnants of that same practice; the Guards regiments are technically separate from the rest of the army (hence they are still called “Household Troops”), A throwback to a time when the monarch had a private army to guard itself. The practice is more a nod to the tradition and esprit de corps that is such a huge part of British military practice – nobody thinks the Coldstream Guard will need to beat back a coup by the Rifle Regiment – but that’s basically where i tall started.

Under the Soviet system, the army was kept at a lower state of readiness than the KGB and MVD. And of course they were informants everywhere. Whenever the army bate became too “good “, or a general two popular, the KGB and the party would unite to get rid of them, and cut the army down to size. Frequent purges, with the commensurate loss in combat effectiveness (to the Soviets immense grief in the Winter War with Finland, and the first year of the war against Germany – were deemed acceptable, at least initially, compared to the risk of a coup.

And then the Soviet Union fell.and then the Soviet Union fell.

I am speculating, here – but I suspect modern Russia’s diminished circumstances, and the need to line a lot of oligarchs pockets (including his own), means, I suspect, that Putin may not be able to afford as elaborate a set of redundant military precautions, and may have to keep his army even less capable than before, for his own safety‘s sake.

That’s the only theory I can think of, after 10 years of the Russian military supposedly evolving into a force capable of competing with the first world.

(Want an actual expert? Try this guy).

For the first time in 2021, over 100,000 carry permits were issued in one year in the state of Minnesota.

There are currently well over 350,000 permits in circulation. in 2003, the MN House research department estimated no more than 90,000 would ever be issued.

That is close to 10% of all eligible Minnesota adults. which has to mean in greater Minnesota, at least a fifth of adults have permits.

Only 90% to go.Only 90% to go.

“Everything the Left touches, it destroys”
— Dennis Prager

To add a corollary: everything modern, left-infused culture touches, it also destroys.

For a variety of reasons, Cyrano De Bergerac was one of the bits of literature I grew up positively steeped in. I won’t say Dad – a speech, writing and literature teacher – was obsessed, per se, with the De Rostand book and the many theatrical and film versions that’ve appeared over the years (Jose Ferrer’s version was a particular favorite, especially once we got a VHS) being fairly constant fare at the Berg house.

And if you’re not familiar, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. I won’t spoil it; it’s most accessible version to Americans maybe the 1987 Steve Martin version ,Roxanne, which is as 1980’s a Steve Martin comedy as you can think of, but I think is an underrated adaptation…

…that stayed fairly faithful to the concept of the original story.

Which is more than we can say for what Woke Hollywood’s done with it.

If they decide to do a “woke” remake of Casablanca or It’s a Wonderful Life or Best Years of our Lives…

Oh, I fear I’ve already said too much…

The Soviet Union, as formidable as it once appeared, has been a dead letter for over 30 years. While Vladimir Putin may have one reliable client state in Belarus, the rest of the former Soviet republics and the entirety of the Eastern Bloc have little interest in getting the band back together, so while the endgame remains in doubt, it’s highly unlikely Putin’s latest gambit will redound to his benefit. 

If your day is gone, and you want to ride on, Ukraine
Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back, Ukraine

Apologies to J. J. Cale. But have you noticed the near lockstep unanimity on social media about Ukraine? Something about it seems, I dunno, off. Victor Davis Hanson offers a few thoughts about the narrative:

On cue, an embarrassed Left now offers some surreal takes on why Putin went into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and again into all of Ukraine in 2022—while mysteriously bookending the four invasion-free Trump years. We are told that hiatus was because Putin got all he wanted from Trump and rewarded him by not invading any of his neighbors.

Really?

And Hanson is just getting started:

Were Vladimir Putin and his advisors more or less delighted that their poodle Trump thankfully flooded the world with price-crashing oil? They were thankful Trump at least had killed Russian mercenaries in Syria?

Putin himself was content that the United States got out of his own advantageous missile deal? Was he thrilled that Trump sold once-taboo U.S. offensive weapons to Ukraine? Did the Kremlin grow ecstatic when Trump upped the U.S. defense budget? And was Russia especially thankful that Trump jawboned NATO into spending another $100 billion on defense? Did Putin clap when Trump killed Soleimani and Baghdadi, and bombed ISIS out of existence?

About that oil. . . 

It’s not a coincidence that Russia, an oil-producing country, was pretty flush in 2014, which made Putin’s adventurism at that time cost-effective. Things changed after the Light Bringer left office; while the price of oil fluctuated in the first two years of the Bad Orange Man administration, prices dropped thereafter, before the huge drop in 2020 which was entirely related to the world economy grinding to a halt. Since 2021, the trajectory has been back toward the price levels of the Obama years. We all see the impact at the pump and energy costs are a huge factor in inflation generally, even beyond the Fed making the money printers go brrrrrr. So if the money is flowing into Russia and the current administration has shut down the pipelines and the frackers, are we particularly surprised that ol’ Putin has gauged this moment as the time to make a move?

There’s more, of course. Back to Hanson:

Joe threatened the toughest sanctions in history that on Wednesday would deter an invasion and by Saturday were never meant to at all. But Biden promises someday a “conversation” to decide whether at some time he still will issue the toughest sanctions in history. Until then, he invites Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy safe passage out of Kyiv—the quickest way to destroy the dogged Ukrainian resistance.

Left unsaid are the years of rapacious Biden family profiteering in Ukraine, a decade of leftist passive-aggressive love and hate of Russia, from obsequious reset to greedy Uranium One to pathetic “tell Vladimir . . .” to unhinged vetoing of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Oh, there’s more to be said, a lot more. But for this moment one thing seems to be clear — the fog of war is less from the battlefield and more from the fog machines all around us.

A”. This badly.

Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan are officially launching a statewide public safety tour.

So – Governor “We’ll Send the Guard To Your Riot When You Fax Out the TPS Report” Walz is feeling the string.

And to show how serious he is about crime, he’s taking his “Lieutenant” Governor – who was against law and order before she was for it, and whose commitment to law and order is so firm she just has mobs of supporters skirt the rules she finds inconvenient – out on the road.

This should be interesting.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

National Guard going to DC in anticipation of another mostly peaceful protest.

I wonder, which President holds the record for “Days Under Martial Law During Peacetime” in Washington, D.C.? What with the inauguration, January 6, and now the upcoming truck parade, I’ve gotta believe Lesko Brandon takes the cake. Any historians in the SITD readership?
Joe Doakes

I would imagine it would have to be FDR in the 30s. But that is a speculation.