Today’s song list – all artists that left us in the past year:

SCENE: It’s MSNBC. A commentator is bellowing at the camera.

COMMENTATOR: Long Island Republican Congressman-elect George Santos is lying! Which means he’s no different than all Republicans!

SCENE: In a South African jail cell, three inmates are watching MSNBC

JOE BIDEN: The commentator is right. Republicans all lie.

CORN POP: Word up.

NELSON MANDELA: I”m so glad you left the leadership of the Delaware Civil RIghts movmement to come to jail, here in South Africa.

SCENE: In a classroom in Boulder, CO, watching MSNBC

RACHEL DOLEZAL: That’s right! Can I get an amen!

CLASROOM: (A few half-hearted or sarcastic “amens” ensue)

SCENE: A Hill somewhere in the Mekong Delta. Two men in jungle fatigues, M-16s smoking, stand amid a pile of slain Viet Cong and piles of cartridge cases, watching MSNBC on a black and white console TV set.

JOHN KERRY: Let me be clear. I agree with this perspective. All Republicans lie through their teeth.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: (Spitting a plug of tobacco into the foxhole, wiping blood off his K-Bar knife on his pants leg). Yup. All of ’em.

SCENE: At a steak house in Newark, New Jersey. MSNBC is playing on a TV over the bar.

T-BONE: Wotchuthinkabout dat?

COREY BOOKER: He’s right. All Republicans lie, all the time.

SCENE: A runway in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina. A group of American officials, Secret Service, and a blondish woman huddle behind a brick wall as sniper five spatters the ground around them. A racket of gunfire as Bosnian troops return fire, trying to clear the airfield for the woman to get on her plane. On a TV behind the wall, MSNBC blares.

HILLARY CLINTON: Damn straight they’re all liars!

SCENE: At a Native American observance, with drums and dancers, on the quad at Harvard University, as a TV blares MSNBC in the distance.

ELIZABETH WARREN: The great spirit that is the true law professor of the universe agrees. Republicans are liars. As the first woman of color at this law school, I agree.

The drums continue to beat, as crowds of pasty white liberals shuffle past.

SCENE: At a spa in Hollywood, a man and woman lie on their backs, cucumber slices over their eyes, listening to MSNBC on a TV in the background.

HILARIA BALDWIN: Repobelicans are de woorst liahrs.

ALEC BALDWIN: I oughtta kill them all.

SCENE: At the Saint Paul Grill. Editors and Executive Producers from the Star-Tribune, KARE, WCCO-TV and the Pioneer Press are having cocktails with Ken Martin as MSNBC plays above the bar.

EDITORS AND PRODUCER AND MARTIN: Heh.

SCENE: in the back of a limousine, driving through the District of Columbia. Ilhan OMAR is sitting in the back with husband Tim MYNETT, watching MSNBC on a mobile device.

OMAR: I was never married to my brother.

MYNETT: Literally nobody in the world believes you were, darling.

AND SCENE/S.

Black owned detailing shops, immigrant owned restaurants and Vietnamese run nail salons come and go constantly throughout Minnesota. They come and go without much comments from the gatekeepers of popular culture.

but high concept, restaurants, especially the ones that clean closely to the progressive narrative? They get saturation media coverage, coming and going.

“Common Roots”, a high concept restaurant in south Minneapolis, got breathless media coverage when it opened a few years back. And with a mission statement like this, it’s no wonder:

‘According to their website, the eatery was operated around the values of supporting local farmers, being environmentally sustainable and providing living wages and benefits for employees.’

With a set up like that, you know how the story ends, don’t you?

“While we dramatically reduced our monthly losses during the course of the year, the business still will end 2022 with a large financial loss. We are still only operating at roughly half the sales we did prior to the pandemic. Our margins were thin in good times, but there’s absolutely no possibility of the budget working at anywhere near the volume we are at now,” Schwartzman wrote.

And I’m sure there’s no link, no way, no, how, between the fact that principal collided with reality:

He added that last week he was informed that staff wanted to unionize, which forced him to “take a fresh look at the overall state of the business.”

“I fully support the labor movement and would have loved being able to run a union business,” Schwartzman wrote, but said he “couldn’t commit to moving forward if I didn’t have confidence I would be able to keep the business open under all the very many different strains the business is under.”

Huh.

So, your principles have unsustainable prices?

Weird.

“It’s Been a Minute” (henceforth IBaM) s one of the current plague of podcasts repackaged as radio shows that plagues both public and commercial broadcasting. As we discussed yesterday, some are better than others – some are OK radio, some are utterly dreadful as radio.

IBaM is pretty clearly trying to sell infotainment coverage smothered in public broadcasting convention, but to a black audience. It is, by public radio standards, breezy, sometimes to the point of sounding just a little contrived. But radio standards, it’s not the worst podcast on the air.

But this past weekend’s episode – about the wave of social media misogyny aimed at rapper “Megan Thee Stallion”, after she was shot in the foot by her…uh, paramour, rapper Tory Lanez. It features a “senior producer” from, guess what, another NPR podcast – Gabby Bulgarelli from a podcast called “Louder than a Riot”, and you’re on your own with that one.

Dog Bites Man. There’s an old newsroom bromide, passed down through Journalism 101 classes throughout the past 100-odd years. “Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news”. If something is the norm, the expected, the utterly mundane? If you’re not the man being bit, it’s not realy news.

Anyway – I listened to this epi of IBaM, so you don’t have to. But if you’re curious – smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Here’s the part I wanted to focus on. It’s around 6:00 into the segment:

BRITNEY LEWIS (HOST): The coverage of this trial feels somewhat muted compared to the coverage of another trail that gained a lot of public attention this year, Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Why do you think that this case feels so different?

BULGARELLI: One, nobody cares about black people. Two, it’s close to the holidays. Three, because it’s a closed court…in some ways they feel similar. A lot of the arguing (sic) against Megan feels similar to how people rallied against Amber in support of Johnny Depp…

LEWIS: Mmm Hmmm

BULGARELLI: …the way Megan has been made out to be a liar – I don’t think anyone believes Megan to be a victim, so they don’t care…

I can’t comment on the merits of Bulgarelli’s argument, presuming there are any.

But she’s ignoring two elephants in the room:

• Rappers shooting rappers is, regrettably and tragically, dog bites man. No, seriously – the list is long, and spans genres, coasts, even nations. It’s been a generation, and we still haven’t a conclusive idea who killed Tupac and Biggie. Ms. Thee Stallion was shot in the foot during a domestic squabble. It’s senseless, and stupid – but Ms. Thee Stallion survived, and will no doubt see her profile increase as a result. Oh, yeah – violent misogyny in the world of hip-hop doesn’t even rise to the level of dog-bites-man; it’s more like “Dog Licks Dog” . It’s ugly, and awful, and it’s the norm, to the point that pushing back against it is, in fact, the news in the show-biz press.
• On the other hand, what – besides skin color – distinguishes the Depp/Heard trial from the Lanez/Thee Stallion dust-up? A woman’s claims of victimhood have been torpedoed by overwhelming, sworn evidence that she was in fact an emotional and violent abuser – something mainstream narrative denies exists. Millions of men who’ve suffered, either in silence or in the face of open derision from cops, social service professionals and society at large saw at least some vindication, even if only vicarious. The dominant narrative – “the power differential means only men can commit abuse” – was stomped flat, opening the door for millions of men to perhaps, one day, be taken seriously.

The inconvenient truth for identity-thrashers like Bulgarelli is the Lanez/Thee Stallion is “Dog Bites Man”; Heard/Depp is “Man puts mayo and a slice of tomato on a dog and takes a big chomp”, trashing a different bit of identitarian dogma outside Bulgarelli’s career specialty.

Think anyone at NPR will cover that angle?

Governor Walz released his plan to address, rampant fraud in his executive branch.

Long story short: transfer more money to the political class.

Bill Glahn, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment who has closely tracked the case, said the proposals mainly consist of “hiring more bureaucrats.”

“That so many different state agencies are involved points to part of the problem: too many cooks, too many fiefdoms, and no central location where the buck stops,” Glahn wrote in an article this week. 

That should solve things.

Berg’s 20th Law is clear and unambiguous . To wit:

All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

Is the Law right about the recent case at the U of Cincinnati, about which so many prog brows were furrowed in recent days?

What do you think?

Call me a curmudgeon if you will. I don’t care. If caring about the classic art and craft of doing radio makes me a curmudgeon, then I’ll get a “Curmudgeon” face tattoo and wear it with pride.

Figuratively speaking. Face tattoos are a horror.

Anyway.

There are two plagues afoot in the world of radio.

Decline And Fall: Broadcasters – especially big broadcast networks – have been strapped for cash for a decade and a half. Big chains, like IHeart, went on leveraged buying sprees in the mid 2000s, just in time for the advertising market to collapse in 2008. The revenue never really bounced all the way back – the recovery from 2008 coincided with the rise of streaming, “renting” music, and a near complete collapse of the music radio market that had kept radio handsomely afloat from the late fifties to the early 2000s.

So big radio networks are in the same bind as companies that manufacture white-out, paper checks and rotary phones; they cater to a market that’s shrinking by the month. Outside of conservative talk, Spanish and sports radio, most of the radio industry involves trying to coax a shrinking cohort of baby boomers and Gen-Xers to tune in to morning shows. Music radio, once the marketing cornerstone of the music industry, is scarcely relevant.

The traditional talent pool in broadcast, up until probably the 1990s, worked a little like this: people started as disk jockeys, usually in small markets, and via combination of talent, perseverance, opportunism and luck, worked their slow, laborious way up the ladder of market size; from Cody Wyoming to Casper, thence to Palm Springs, then on to San Diego and finally Los Angeles was a typical trajectory, with each echelon in the market weeding out tranches of non-hackers, who went into sales or real estate or managing Shopkos, leaving only the most talented, determined and lucky to make it on the air in the big-money markets.

Rush Limbaugh altered that dynamic in talk radio – pre-empting the bottom of the talk food chain with his syndicated shows; joined by Hannity and Pagliorulo and Prager and Hewitt and the rest, the middle of the ladder pretty much evaporated as well.

And then in the rest of radio – with little money left in the industry, and most of what was there soaked up by the Dave Ryans and Tom Barnards who were left in the business, most of the “disk jockey” jobs at the bottom, and then the middle and upper-middle, of the ladder transformed into “voice tracking” – recording bits onto computer files which would be stitched into place between songs by computer. A jock might earn decent money – but be tracking for several stations during a given shift, not really building up an identity as a “star” anywhere. Which was fine, given that stardom was more or less irrelevant.

And so with the talent pool in both music and talk radio disrupted, the big broadcasters needed to find another source of talent to fill in slots when the holdovers from the golden ages of music and talk started leaving the scene.

The Plaguecast. And so major broadcasters – commercial and public – turned to the pool of “podcasters” that sprang up around the time streaming began supplanting broadcast.

And it’s been mostly dreadful.

Here’s why.

Good radio is the original social medium. Since the dawn of music and talk radio, the hallmark of good radio is being able to reach through the signal chain – the microphone, the transmitter, the electromagnetic spectrum, your receiver, and finally to you – and give you the impression the announcer, the host, is talking to, playing a record for, telling a joke or story, to and for you. To be able to push that “live” energy through all those layers of misdirection, not to talk at you, but to talk to you. Personally. Or at least give you that feeling deep down in your gut. Its a live medium (or used to be), a conversation with stimulus and response traveling back and forth at the speed of sound and, in between us, the speed of light.

Podcasts, on the other hand, is one or more people talking into a microphone and getting recorded. There is no fact, much less illusion, of pushing energy out to real, live people. Podcasts are, at best, storytelling (which can be wonderful, but is not interactive; it’s tellers, and it’s listeners, and never the twain shall meet. At worst? It’s a group of people having a conversation that you listen to.

And you can tell when someone who’s started in that medium tries to transpose that style to live (or live-ish) radio. Buck Sexton and Clay Travis (or is it Buck Travis and Clay Sexton? I have no idea, to be honest), who sit in Rush Limbaugh’s time slot ‘cross much of the land, but can’t seriously be said to have “replaced” him, are classic examples. They chatter through the issues of the day – but unlike Limbaugh, who pushed an energy down the signal chain that felt like he was in your car with you, talking to you. Clay and Buck came up through the world of podcasting, and they were very successful at it. And they sound like a couple of guys kibitzing – because they are a couple of guys kibitzing, via a digital connection, watching each other via Skype.

The format makes a little more sense on NPR – because public radio has always given the impression that it’s a room full of “elites” talking to each other (barring a few old-timers, like “Weekend Edition”‘s Bob Simon, who is one of the most gloriously talented and utterly underrated broadcasters on NPR…

…which is rapidly becoming a podcast network, in the worst sense of the term.

We’ll come back to that later today.

Chatter. Speaking of Public Radio…

One of the iron clad bits of craft in traditional radio is “Don’t half-ass it with an open mic. Say something, or be silent. Don’t create background chatter”, whether that chatter be walking over other voices, or just making inchoate noises in the background. They are a distraction. They divert the energy you’re trying to push out in the world.

But over this past 2-3 years, something has crept into the NPR style guide that annoys the crap out of me.

It goes a little something like this:

The Strib hails the…uh, “diversity” of the incoming class at the MN Legislature.

As Alan Dershowitz said, the Strib’s and DFL’s (pardon the redundancy) idea of “diversity” is…

…someone in with different color skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you.

I’m not sure if the Strib noted the fact that the House MInority leader and several other incoming GOP freshmen in both chambers are “Republicans of Color” – but I suspect most echo the words of former Representative and now Senator Eric Lucero:

As a Hispanic minority myself married to an Indian minority, I categorically reject the Democrat definition diversity equals skin color. I firmly hold to the truth content of character over color of skin and true diversity equals diversity of thought and ideas.

Which is a message today’s Left actively disparages.

Adam Kinzinger proves he knows nothing about the constitution by saying it in as many words.

No. Really.

The only thing that bothers me as much is the Trump personality cult is the anti-Trump personality cult

“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
– Elwood Blues

I don’t know that I laughed any harder than anyone else at that classic line from “The Blues Brothers“ when I first saw it, back in high school.

But if I had known how important the idea of “Taking absurd, improbable chances that, in retrospect, seem completely crazy“ would be in my life, I might’ve laughed even harder.

I had no plan for my life when I got out of college – so I moved to the Twin Cities on a drunken whim.

Once I got here? Nobody gets a job in major market radio by just walking up and asking for one. I ‘d been in radio for six years by the time I was 22 – even I knew it was delusional. I hadn’t even moved to the Twin Cities with getting back into radio in the back of my mind. But I did it anyway.

And it worked.

No 23 year old gets a talk show on a 50,000 watt station by nagging his boss into putting them on the air. But I did it – and he did.

Nobody builds a career by teaching themself something that (at least at the time) most people had a masters degree in psychology to get into. But I didn’t know any better – so I did, and it worked out.

Nobody gets a major market talk show by gathering a bunch of bloggers together, walking into a radio station and saying “ mind if we do a show on your station?“. But here we are.

It doesn’t always work – that’s kind of what my marriage was, too; “what the heck, who says it couldn’t work out ok?“. But that’s where my kids came from, so I can’t say it didn’t work, either.

No question about it – I’ve been blessed, and lucky, to turn a pattern of scatterbrained opportunism into a career and a life I enjoy.

And every once in a while, I hit one of those restless moments when I think “what’s my next opportunity to grab half a pack of cigarettes, put on my sunglasses, and drive off into the darkness looking for my next questionable decision?”

I’m kind of having one of those moments now.

Remember when Ron DeSantis sent fifty migrants to posh, leafy Martha’s Vineyard?

And the American left wrenched their shoulders out of socket patting themselves on the back by feeding them before having the hired help bus them to a nearby military base?

Maybe it’s time for some of them to start ponying up. Yuma, Arizona’s hospital is stretched beyond its capacity treating migrants:

An Arizona border hospital has been left with $20 million in unpaid medial services from the massive influx of illegal immigrants over the past six months.

Yuma Regional Medical President Dr. Robert Transchel joined “Fox & Friends” Friday to discuss how the migrant crisis has burdened hospitals as experts warn the end of Title 42 will escalate border crossings.

Transchel said anyone coming to the hospital receives the “same level of medical care” regardless of immigration status, including surgeries and intensive care.

“People always think they’re coming in with coughs and colds, but that’s not really the case,” Transchel said. “You have individuals come in that need dialysis, that need heart surgery, that need cardiac catheterization. We’ve had women come into our labor and delivery unit that have delivered infants that need to be in the neonatal ICU for sometimes months at a time.”

Maybe James Taylor and John Kerry can write some checks?

Driving home from a Christmas party, I flipped over to national public radio and listened to the networks most explicit Christmas tradition – the inevitable airing of the insipid David Sedaris story about being a Santas elf at Macy’s back in the 1970s.

I listened to it, so you don’t have to. but here it is anyway.

It’s a Christmas story for people who hate Christmas. Feel free not to listen. I certainly couldn’t -. I flipped it off after about five minutes. God only knows how many times I’ve sat through the whole thing. 20? No – twice.

Anyway, it filled me with an urge to hear a Christmas story that didn’t fill me with rage.

So I thought I would switch to a different, much better Christmas story.

I’ve written about it in the space before; the dark, scary winter of 1981, when the communists shut down the Solidarity, labor movement in Poland. Poland’s ambassador, a lifelong communist atheist converted to Catholicism by his devout wife, had an attack of conscience and patriotism, just before Christmas of 1981, and defected to the United States.

One hesitates to think how the Biden administration would react.

But the president was Ronald Reagan. And his reaction was one for the ages.

I was still a couple years away from being a conservative. But I remember Reagan’s speech that night.

Since NPR will never replay it – mustn’t divert airtime from David F****ng Sedaris – I will:

Anyway, – Christmas greetings, from a time when the president was on America’s side.

For when the kids – or grandkids – ask:

I’m going to be off today, and probably Monday. But I’ll be back raring to go on Tuesday!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

…when dissenting from forced civil rituals was considered the height of Patriotism.

Why, it was only Kaepernick years ago.

How things have changed:

Look – as someone who supported Ukrainian independence back when Democrats universally said the USSR was here to stay, I have one request: Show the share of the money that actually goes to weapons, logistics and training.

Because I’ve seen estimates that 2/3 of the money we “send to Ukraine” ends up in the pockets of consultants and special interests in the US that don’t include building weapons (or replacing them in US units and inventories), shipping them, or training Ukrainians to use them.

And what better way to avoid that accounting than to hold yet another ongoing witchhunt against “badthink?”

What’s officially a Christmas movie?

Ask no more. It’s settled:

This meme has been making the rounds:

This is false. Both are problems.

There is literally *zero* excuse for following closer than two seconds behind someone, no matter how slow they are going.

Seriously – when did MN stop teaching drivers “leave two seconds between you and the car in front of you (and double that in rain and on ice)”? I don’t know – but clearly, once the state passed its “left lane” law, a whole new caste of drivers started thinking they were entitled to drive in the left lane, no matter what.

And here’s a little note for some of you Minnesota drivers: if someone’s in the “passing” lane and going too slow – pass on the right, morons.

Last week, I kid you not, while driving I drove past a line of 6-8 drivers in the left lane, all less than half a second behind each other. I’d bet a shiny new quarter every last one of them was drooling “Muh Left Lane!” and cursing the “slowpoke” at the front of the parade.

Someday, if I’m ever king, shooting tailgaters will not only be legal, but I’ll pay a bounty.

Why, yes. I hate tailgaters.

While people focus on Minneapolis’s ongoing decay, Saint Paul just broke its homicide record:

And there’s plenty of time to run up the score before New Years.

Remember – in 2016, there were 81 homicides in the entire state – 30 in Minneapolis, and (IIRC) 18 in Saint Paul.

Hard to believe Saint Paul is the sane city…

Over the past few weeks, Stanford issued its “List of Allowable Words”.

They don’t call it that, of course. The official title is the output of the “Elimination of Harmful Language” initiative.

And if you expect something that the Babylon Bee might have passed on as too implausible, you’re half right. The Bee makes better satire. But if you work in modern corporate culture, it’s all too plausible.

The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020.

The list has gotten a raft of derisive coverage – all of it justified.

Pick a favorite.

Mine (so far):

• Seminal: Replace with “Leading, Groundbreaking”. Term reinforces male-dominated langauge.

Well, no – Seminal (and “Semen”) are derived from the Latin term for “Seed”. A “seminal” thing is something from which something bigger grows. It’s not “male-dominated”, it’s Latin-dominated.

But :

• Transgendered: replace with “Transgender”. This term avoids connections that being transgender is something that is done to a person and/or that some kind of transition is required.

Grammatically? That’s just bizarre. Adding “ed” is a common way to turn a noun into an adjective.

Biologically? That’s even more bizarre. The word “Trans” itself means some sort of, uh, transition is required.

Oh, go ahead. Pick out your favorite and leave it in the comment section. I can’t fight the language war by myself.

I listen – as rarely as I can – to NPR’s “On the Media”. The show is basically an unthinking cheerleader for America’s “elite” media.

And their latest theme is participating in the war on “Nostalgia” – particularly, against the notion of looking to the past for lessons that might help with the present and the future.

The first segment was keynoted by a fellow – some sort of historian – who declaimed in an adenoidal ,mid-Atlantic voice no different than a thousand others on NPR “What does nostalgia for the fifties get you? It gets you dead, sooner! The life expectancy was 66 years! Now it’s 78!”

That’s right – if you think society could gain by returning to some of the social and moral stanards of the past, you also have to roll back science! And bring the Klan back too!

Not really exaggerating that last bit – because nostalgia isn’t just wanting to derive some wisdom from another time. Nosirreebob, it’s bringing Hitler back to life!

You’re not learning from the past. You’re begging to repeat it, all of it, especially the worst of it.

We can not defund NPR fast enough.

Anti-gun groups peddled influence in the Centers for Disease Control to gundeck research that showed defensive gun uses by civilians are common. It’s just bad for business, if you’re a gun grabber.

The decision to remove a CDC-commissioned report from the agency’s website on gun statistics at the apparent behest of gun-control advocates may further strain its relationship with Congressional overseers, especially pro-gun Republicans who are set to take control of the House next year. The relationship between the two, already frayed over the Coronavirus pandemic, could reach new lows not seen in decades. During the 1990s, Congress put restrictions on CDC funding in response to officials openly working with gun-control groups to try and ban handguns.

“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes,” Mark Rosenberg, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention, told The Washington Post in 1994. “It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol–cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly–and banned.”

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

Kleck – a Democrat – has been a Thomas Becket to the gun grabbers’ Henry II for three decades now. Seems the grabbers have decided to cut out the middleman.

First Covid, now putting a finger on the scale re guns.

I’m building a list of alphabet agencies some future GOP administration is going to need to gut, using the Marines if necessary.

UPDATE: Becket. Not More. Blah

I used to think DFLers merely counted on voters being ignorant.

I was young and naive.

They actively promote ignorance:

Senator Morrison is an M.D, so she certainly isn’t stupid. She must know that the imponderably vast majority of those “children”. are boys aged 14+ who are involved in crime, mostly murdered by other young men like themselves, likewise started on the wrong path bright and early in life.

She must know that the only things that actually work to prevent that sort of carnage are:

• Using the sentencing enhancements for gun crimes that so helped in cleaning up New York City thirty years ago – the type that Mike Freeman and John Choi never use on criminals of any age, and that Mary Moriarty hahahahahahaha I can’t even finish the sentence with a straight face.
• Intervening with youth at risk of going into The Life.

Certainly she’s had this shown to her. There’s no way that hasn’t happened.

So she’s counting on promoting ignorance.

Look for a lot of that this session.

II had to double-check to see I hadn’t clicked onto the Babylon Bee by accident.

Alas, no.

Minneapolis, reacting to the latest round of retail closures, is starting a – I swear, I’m not making this up – “Vibrant Downtown Storefronts Workgroup” to try to make downtown, for lack of a better term, suck less:

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey convened a “Vibrant Downtown Storefronts Workgroup” this week following a string of recent high-profile closures.

“Cities that see the most success post-pandemic won’t cling to the old ways that are now changed forever,” Frey said in a press release. “Here in Minneapolis, we will step boldly into the future, guided by the top experts in our region, prepared to innovate and adapt. Minneapolis has always been a hub of commerce and innovation, and I am confident that this workgroup will help ensure we continue carrying that legacy forward.”

The workgroup will be co-chaired by Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the mpls downtown council, and Gabrielle Grier, managing director of Juxtaposition Arts.

So – downtown is starting a vibrant storefronts working group but downtown is back and it never really left and if you say otherwise you probably drive a minivan and live in Maple Grove.

Today’s setlist!

This bit, from Thomas Sowell, seems appropriate…:

…in light of Big Media’s meltdown over a number of Twitter suspending the accounts of a number of “journalists” who were, by any rational definition, doxxing Elon Musk.

And after two years of social media canceling those who said there are two genders, that masks are pointless, and even writing satire (the Babylon Bee just got reinstated recently)…

…suddenly we’re looking at a crisis!

But don’t you dare claim that the media only cares about its own civil rights.

The funniest part? Journos who didn’t get suspended, trying to grab their own little slice of victimhood:

There’s a reason people trust used car salesmen more than journos these days.