Know a high school girl – public, private, charter or home-schooled – with an interest in public spoeaking? Let her know about “Speaking Proudly“. It’s an eight minute speech on a subject related to our nation. This years subject is “Securing the Blessings oif Liberty”. $2,000 first price, plus lots more! Let the high school girl in your life with a yen toward public speaking know!

Here’s our song list for today:

To: Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan
From: Mitch Berg, Irasicble Peasant
Re: Judging A Book By The Cover?

Lt. Governor Flanagan,

Two data points aren’t a trend – but you do seem to be trying to make your attire a campaign issue.

We talked about this a few months back – your, um, exchange with “Baaaaahb from FRID-ley” over your, well, attire:

As I noted at the time, I found the whole thing implausibe at best, gratingly classist at worst: you are, after all, one of the four most powerful people in MInnesota. You are arguably the most powerful Lieutenant Governor in recent Minnesota history, since the Governor only serves at the pleasure of the extreme “progressive” caucus you lead, and to court whom Governor Walz put you on his ticket in the first place.

And it scarcely needs to be said, you’re a member of the political class, from a social echo chamber in you can do pretty much anything you want, without any consequences whatsoever (and, indeed, have done just that). You could wear aluminum foil pants and a 2LiveCrew t-shirt, or pretty much anything but a MAGA cap, and nobody significant would say “boo” about it.

Indeed – since you’ve never worked in the private sector, I have to ask – have you ever worked at a job where your attire was even a factor?

But no matter – because while neither I nor anyone but the (apocryphal) Baaaaahb from FRID-ley cares what you wear to, uh, work, you most certainly seem to:

I’m going to go out on a short and sturdy limb and guess that maybe half of Minnesotans know what the Lieutenant Governor is.

A little further out? Of that half, maybe 25% could pick you out of a lineup, whatever your attire, unless you were wearing a T-shirt that said “I’M PEGGY FLANAGAN, THE SITTING LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR” in big letters.

And of that (checks figures) 12.5% of the state, I’m going to hazard a guess than maybe 10% would have an opinion, positive or negative, about what you wear.

If I may be so bold, it strikes me as if you, one of the four most powerful people in Minnesota, are trying to find some little bit of grievance, however contrived, to wrap yourself in, to generate “sympathy” in the home stretch of the election.

But then, I’m just a middle-Minnesotan taxpaying schmuck, so nobody cares what I think, either.

That is all.

Angela Lansbury died earlier this week. She was just short of her 97th birthday.

I’m from a generation, sociology and geography that mostly knows her from Murder She Wrote and thousand viewings of Beauty and the Beast when my kids were little, and the bit of trivia that she was in, and exceptional, in one of my favorites, Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.

But if I ever want to know how important an actor really is, today as in 2004, I go to Sheila O’Malley:

If you think there is another career like Angela Lansbury’s – if you think a comparison can be made to somebody else’s career – you’re wrong. There IS nobody else. If Judy Garland were still around, doing television and movies and Broadway, then MAYBE. But other than that: Angela Lansbury stands (stood) alone. Angela Lansbury never rested on her laurels, and never stopped working. She showed up everywhere. She was bone-chilling in The Manchurian Candidate. She was sassy and insouciant as Elizabeth Taylor’s teenage sister in National Velvet. She was Auntie Mame. She was Mrs. Lovett. She was Jessica Fletcher, dammit.

It’s high time I watched Gaslight again.

Parents shut down a Dearborn, Michigan school board meeting over the distribution of “woke” books:

A school-board meeting in Dearborn, Mich. was shut down earlier this week by hundreds of protesters opposing the circulation of LGBTQ books across the city’s public-school system.

Viral videos recorded by a Detroit Free Press reporter circulated on Twitter showing pandemonium breaking out at the meeting Monday night. Many of the protesters carried signs in English and Arabic: “Keep Your Dirty Books in the Closet,” “Stop Grooming Our Kids,” and “Homosexuality Big Sin,” some read.

Darn those redneck fascists with their signs in English and…

…uh, what now?

Ooof. A protected class going after a couple of protected classes. That’s gotta be awkward.

Wonder what Rashida Tlaib has to say about it?

We must, we are told by the current powers that be, respect the chosen genders, no matter how outlandish, of every person, on command.

The government ha, however, has carved itself out a little bit of insanity to actually get some business done:

Trans women still have to register for the draft. Trans men are exempt.

According to the Selective Service System website, nearly “all male US citizens and male immigrants, who are 18 through 25, are required to register with Selective Service.” The website states that all biological males must register for the draft, including “U.S. citizens or immigrants who are born male and have changed their gender to female.”

What are they – biologists?

In my ears as a single guy, I’ve gotten used to women running background checks before meeting me for a drink. It’s only common sense, these days, what with n ews and the Lifetime network getting women convinced that men are serial killers oh or Keith Ellison until proven otherwise. I can’t say I blame them.

But a new dating app apparently goes above and beyond.

The app, called The Right Stuff, starts with two strikes against it; it’s invite only, it doesn’t have a whole lot of women on it (which is not all that unusual on any dating sites and apps)…

… and it also appears to draw FBI attention. (ia Power Line):

But now, a third complaint is emerging from users — that answering a profile prompt question that asked “January 6 was …” has led to them being contacted by law enforcement.

A quick scroll through the reviews in the app store reveal several comments complaining of having a phone call from the FBI shortly after filling out the profile.

And it’s online feedback for a dating app.

But does anybody honestly think this sort of thing would be above Joe Biden‘s FBI?

Whenever a Democrat campaign ad features a “lifelong Republican” who has, mirabile dictu, changed affiliation over whatever the issue du jour is, my first reflex is to reply “no, they most likely are not”.

Angie Craig seems to have a particular facility for finding these miraculous “Lifelong Republicans” who nonetheless agree with her completely on one divisive issue or another – like this self-termed “NRA Sharpshooter” (who trashed all of the rules of gun-handling, on camera, in the on-air ad Angie Craig ran in 2020) who agreed, as luck would have it, with Craig and Michael Bloomberg on every point of their gun control agenda (which made sense, given that he’d been a gun control activist for quite a while).

So when a “lifelong Republican” – and biker, no less! – popped up on a Craig ad to talk about how Craig was singlehandedly making insulin affordable, I thought “there is just no way”.

And I was right. It’s a lie.

“When Dave [Vesledahl] called me to share his story, I promised him that I would continue to do everything in my power to lower prescription drug costs for Minnesotans,” Craig said in a statement. “Everyone deserves access to high-quality, affordable health care—and I’ll be fighting back against the pharmaceutical companies every step of the way.”

But Vesledahl no longer lives in Craig’s district since Minnesota redrew its congressional map this year. He lives in Nerstrand, Minn., which is located in the state’s First Congressional District. Vesledahl’s claim that he’s a “lifelong Republican” is also contradicted by the fact that he voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, according to voter files obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

But thats OK – he identifies as a former Republican:

“Dave describes himself as a lifelong Republican, and his voter file registers him as a ‘Lean Republican,’ Craig’s spokeswoman told the Free Beacon.

And I’m a “former Democrat”. When I was young and impressionable and not very bright and, let’s be honest, the perfect Democrat voter.

Some Brits have had enough of wokies blocking the already-impassible London streets.

And it’s glorious.

Check the guy at 1:14:

And the people who come off the sidewalk to help.

There is hope.

Tulsi Gabbard is sick and tired of the Democrat party, and she’s not going to take it anymore:

A few thoughts:

The Key Log: As Berg’s Seventh Law foretells, one of the reasons that Democrats like to harp on the “extremism” of the GOP is to deflect away from their own. One can hope the popular Senator from the very blue state might be the crack in the dam that brings out this century’s “Reagan Republicans”.

Speaking of Reagan: There’s at least some conventional wisdom that Gabbard has made this move to put her name in the VP stakes for 2024.

“She’s a LIBERAL”, some of my conservative friends say.

Let’s back up a moment.

One of Ronald Reagan’s great bits of genius was his ability to reach across the aisle to get people to pull together on the issues that mattered to his agenda. His agenda, by the way, was two items: right the economic ship, and destroy communism. He used his bully pulpit to push others to make headway on other issues – abortion, 2nd Amendment, the border – but he kept his own political powder dry to get the deals he needed made with Dems like Tip O’Neil on the 1982 Tax Cuts, and with the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland on assisting the Eastern European labor movement against the USSR.

So – could a future Republican president focused on our society’s current enemies – the deep state, stagflation and China – benefit from reaching across the aisle to a center-left “libertarian” Democrat who shares those concerns (in as many words, in her statement above)?

It’s worth a look.

When pop culture went through a phase of giggling at videos of school kids “ducking and covering” to practice for nuclear attacks?

I have a hunch that people in the 2040s are going to do the same with video of some of today’s dimmer, more dissociative bulbs:

That is to say, if they stop winning all the elections.

Rep. Omar:

So, Rep. Omar – are you condemning the regime’s actions?

Because by your logic, the women of Iran are fighting against being forced to don the hijab…

…which you call “Islamophobia” when Americans say it.

Just want to be clear, here.

If I were on the Nobel Committee, this simple meme would be my nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year:

It’s simple, and it sums up the modern culture war to a “T”.

We warned you that if marriage got redefined to something other than “a guy and a gal” to “two people getting together to enjoy the legal benefits of a contractual status”, there was literally no logical or moral reason that couldn’t be extended to two or more people – or not necessarily people at all”.

“That’s never gonna happen, and you’re paranoid and weird”, they said.

Of course we were right:

But remember – nobody’s coming for your guns, there’s no such thing as election fraud, there’s no way January 6 was a shake and bake…

I don’t, as a rule, go to “romantic comedies“ unless I’m dating someone who wants me to go to one.

As I am about as straight as a cis gender white male can get, the odds of me going to a gay romcom are right down there with Stevie Wonder pitching a called third strike against Luis Arraez.

Billy Eichner, the inexplicably famous producer and star of the LGBTQRomcom “Bros”, has spent the last week blaming people like me for his movie catastrophically taking the previous weekend.

So it’s mildly entertaining to see Matt Brennan, the LA Times entertainment writer and deputy A & E editor, throw a bucket of cold water on a Richner’s snit.

“No one wants to support a movie at the point of a bayonet.”

Openers spiraling rant last week reminded me of a conversation I had with an LGBTQ activist probably 15 years ago. The person said “tolerance“ for gas wasn’t enough; what they we’re looking for was to have the lifestyle “celebrated“.

And which I responded, as a conservative who’s participated in a gay bashing on the side of the gay guy, that I didn’t have time or spare energy to celebrate my own sexuality. He’s just going to have to get in line.

Note to Billy Eichner: want me to show up to a movie? Do it gay film noir.

I still probably won’t go, but at least you’ll have a shot

It seems some people found my inadvertent posting early in the day – something that I was originally banked for the week before the election.

That may make out of their appearance yet.

But since people seem to feel the need to threadjack, I figured I would give them a space to romp and play.

Yesterday, just in time for midterms, President Brandon “pardoned” all people in federal custody for marijuana possession charges, and urged states to do the same.

Mentioned in the closing seconds of NPR’s report on the subject: the number of people in Federal custody solely for marijuana possession is…

(checks his notes)

…zero.

Literally nobody will be affected by this bit of campaign fluffery.

But if campaigns are to be fluffed, Peggy Flanagan will be there:

It must be a month before a hotly-contested election: the Flanagan/Klink administration is making noises about legalizing weed.

A week after a massive, potentially catastrophic hurricane, and the media is fairly quiet about things.

It’s because while it was a disaster, they haven’t been able to pin anything on Ron DeSantis.

They’ve tried. Oh, Lord, they’ve tried.

But the attacks have bounced off like lawn darts off an M1 Abrams. Even the complete fabrications squibbed:

So come on, Dems. If you think you’re gonna convict Trump of something, do it, so DeSantis can sweep unopposed to the nom in 2024.

Keith Ellison, after three years and 9 months of glorifying, aiding and abetting crime and the collapse of the rule of law…

…is “tackling gun crime“.

The lawsuit, filed in Hennepin County District Court, alleges Fleet Farm sold at least 37 firearms to two straw purchasers over the course of 16 months, despite red flags that some buyers were trafficking the guns to criminals and those otherwise prohibited from legally purchasing guns themselves. 

But – is it really “tackling gun crime”.

Pay attention. It’s Keith Ellison. Of course it’s a cynical artifice.

The alleged straw buyers were already arrested, tried and sentenced…

…by the Feds. Not by Mike Freeman, John Choi or Keith Ellison, none of whom cares about straw buyers, since it’s not a “sexy” crime (until five weeks before the election, anyway); nobody ever got elected Senator for chasing down a gang-banger’s grandmother.

It’s their job – but none of them are doing it.

Rob Doar at the MN Gun Owners Caucus explains the stuff the media won’t re Ellison’s deeply cynical action. Read the whole thread:

This lawsuit is just for show – to deflect away from three years and nine months of sloth and indifference…

…no. That goes too easy on Ellison.

He’s trying to deflect way from almost four years of using crime as a campaign prop.

Henco Sheriff David Hutchinson continues to get concierge service from the “criminal justice” system.

Minnesota’s Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) has suspended the license of Hennepin County Sheriff Dave Hutchinson for 30 days, starting next month…The board voted to suspend his license for 180 days, however 150 days are stayed on the condition he doesn’t commit any similar offenses in the next three years.

So – he got his whiz test delayed, he got a VIP booking involving no jail time, he got the lightest possible charge, low enough not to cause his cashiering from the Sheriff’s Department, and now he’s getting a slap on the wrist from the POST board.

Think a GOP politician, to say nothing of a private schlub, would get this sort of treatment?

That’s a direct quote from Mayor Frey, from a presser yesterday.

I could shred that statement myself, using facts and stuff

Or I could let Keith Ellison do it, far more delightfully, starting around :12 seconds into this video:

When Keith Ellison‘s BS detector explodes, spewing shrapnel about the room, you know you’ve got a problem.

This is the message going out to recipients of the state “Hero Pay” checks:

Why, it’s almost like he wants people to ponder “his” magnanimity at election time, as early voting begins.

Aaaaalmost…

UPDATE: Wait, it gets better:

Further proof that not only was David Gilmour the brains and heart and (along with Mason and Wright) talent of Pink Floyd, he was the leader of the band who wasn’t a complete cretin.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails, for the first time in a bit:

Hayward is a smart guy but he’s making the same mistake as all the other tuxedo conservatives: he assumes the people at the Fed know what they’re doing and are trying their best in good faith to make things better. I’m not convinced that’s true.

If the cause of rampant inflation was easy credit causing “too much consumin’ goin’ on,” then tightening interest rates would reduce the credit, reduce consumption thereby and reduce inflation. If the cause of rampant inflation is lack of supply, tightening interest rates does nothing to generate more supply so it won’t bring down inflation. 

Case in point, trailers in the senior citizens mobile home park last year were selling for $80,000 when we bought ours. There were plenty to choose from. After Hurricane Ian there are two for sale, the cheapest is $120,000. Interest rates have nothing to do with it: this is a supply problem. Raising rates won’t put more trailers online.

Similarly, strangling American oil production limits supply, causing prices to rise for everything that needs oil, including consumer gasoline, but also higher priced diesel for trucks and trains to haul goods and higher priced electricity made from natural gas.  Raising interest rates won’t put more oil online. 

In fact, raising interest rates makes it harder for business to afford the higher priced oil, giving them a double whammy. Hayward’s asks whether the Fed is raising rates too fast. I question whether they should be raising rates at all.

Either I’m dumb as a box of rocks, completely failing to understand economics, or the Fed is pushing the rate hike button because it’s the only button they have to push.  It’s not going to work and they know it  so they need some distraction for the voters. Hence Putin, Ukraine, Trump, slavery…

Joe Doakes 

Or “Fascists in the bushes”.

Legitimate (as far as we know) food non-profits are concerned that the Feeding our Future scandal will make it harder for them to fundraise.

I can see why. If it became harder to launder money through non-profits, the DFL would have nothing but “progressive” billionaires to fund them.

Speaking of laundering money, Bill Glahn – one of about ten actual journalists in the Twin Cities – has a list of political contributions from those indicted in the “Feeding our Future” DFL money laundering scam…

…so far.

Any guesses as to who the money went to?

Any guesses as to why the DFL noise machine is wall to wall abortion and litter pans?

UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Power Line fans!

Let’s talk about Cayler Ellingson.

“Berg’s 18th Law” says that after any politically and emotionally fraught event – mass shootings, police killings, riots, pretty much any event over which people disagree – we need to wait at least 72 hours before taking anything we hear seriously from the media, since they will be more interested in scooping the competition than getting facts straight. I made an executive decision to stretch that deadline to a full week, since on a good day the mainstream media might know how to find North Dakota on a map.

Here are the things we know after a couple weeks:

1. After a street dance in McHenry, ND (population 64) on September 18, an extended altercation of some sort happened between the 18 year old Ellingson and 41 year old Shannon Brandt, of nearby Glenfield (population 94).
2. After a back-and-forth that went long enough for Ellingson to call his mother several times to ask for a ride home, Brandt hit Ellingson with his truck, and drove home.
3. Brandt, who has a DUI and some other low-level crimes on his record, was arrested there a few hours later, intoxicated. Ellingson died shortly after.
4. While being interviewed later, he said he thought Ellingson was an “Extremist Republican” who was calling friends to come and get him.
5. The Foster County [1] prosecutor (They’re called “states attorneys“ in North Dakota) initially charged Brandt with vehicular homicide, and released him on $50K in bail.

This – and a complete absence of coverage in mainstream media outside North Dakota – led to a tsunami of anger in conservative media, based around two points:

• the charges and bail seemed ridiculously lenient – and, according to some, politically so.
• the media coverage was lackadaisical, given the politics involved.

Let’s talk about both.

On the show, I pushed back on the first point; the job of Foster County’s State’s Attorney Kara Brinster is to bring charges she and her (tiny [2]) office can prove beyond a reasonable doubt given the evidence they have, without regard to public opinion or pressure. My theory – Brandt’s statement made “Criminal Vehicular Homicide” a slam dunk right away the morning after Ellingson’s death. Anything beyond that would take investigation – and the States Attorney has all the time they need to do that. The national criticism – up to and including Tucker Carlson – apparently didn’t faze Brinster. She investigated, got the evidence she needed, and had Brandt re-arrested on murder charges. He’s being held in the Stutsman County Jail [3]. If convicted of murder, he could get life without parole.

Some think it happened because of the national attention. I say BS – Brinster ignored the media (none of whom came within 100 miles of the story, literally) and did her job. Keith Ellison should so as well [4]. Criminal justice everywhere should be as lucky.

As to calling the original charge, and (statutory) bail, politically motivated? That’s a good way to show you have no idea about North Dakota politics. It’s perhaps the most conservative state in the union. Trump won by 30 points – and most of the Democrats live within ten miles of the Minnesota border; the Democrats who live west of ND Highway 1 would fit into two booths at Kroll’s Diner in Minot. State’s Attorney Brinster was elected in a county that likely voted 3:1 for Republicans.

So let’s park those allegations in the back 40 and let them quietly rust away.

Now let’s talk about the politics that are involved.

I’m not even talking about the fairly trite point – if a Republican had run down an 18 year old Democrat, it’d be national news, with commentators furrowing their brows and declaiming about tribalism and right-wing violence., regardless of the actual facts.

That’s a given; it’s background scenery with today’s media.

But let’s focus on the details of this case.

Shannon Brandt, according to reports, as a reputation around Glenfield of being a little mentally ill, possibly with a bit of a drinking problem. By appearances and reports, he’s the kind of doughy but dimly malevolent loser that everyone from a small town recognizes, polishing bar stools in double-wide taverns off of two-lane roads until they get enough liquid articulation to start talking, then yelling, and so on.

So he went to a street dance, gets into a fight with a kid less than half. his age, allegedly chases him down, runs him down and kills him…

…and the first thing he thinks of to try to excuse, or get sympathy for, his action is to claim he thought his victim was an “Extremist Republican?”

Last month, in an address full of bizarre thirties-retro authoritarian imagery, President Biden called Republicans “fascists”. An awful lot of Democrats took that statement very, ebulliently, gleefully seriously; they want to believe that the other half are part of a political philsosophy against which our grandparents went to war, fighting whom 412,000 of their generation died; people that anscestors, some of the still with us, spent the best years of their lives killing.

And lo and behold, mere days later, a demented drunk, whether acting out of considered political malice or drunk and mentally ill self-preservation, picks *that* excuse to ennoble, excuse, or at least try to explain killing a human being?

Have we connected those dots yet?

[1] Trivial but topical disclosure – I lived in Foster County, briefly, while working at the radio station in the county seat, Carrington. Being a ND native, I’d imagine I know people who know both the perp and victim, and likely the county attorney and the law enforcement involved, if I asked around for thirty seconds.

[2] The population of Foster County – the whole county – was 3,231 in 2020. About 2,000 of them live in Carrington alone.

[3] Further trivial disclosure – it’s two blocks from the house I grew up in.

[4] But can’t, and won’t.