It appears the Vegetable In Chief has browbeaten Netanyahu into letting Hamas live to rape, burn and mutilate another day:

Very discouraging news out of Israel today that the IDF is pulling its forces out of southern Gaza, supposedly to “rest, regroup, and re-supply” after four months of hard fighting. Let us hope this is true, but one can’t help but suspect that this move may be in response to demands from the Biden Administration that will inevitably lead to a permanent cease-fire which will amount to a Hamas victory, because Hamas will have survived a hard Israeli punch but will now have time and room to rebuild. (Axios is now reporting that Biden delivered an ultimatum to Netanyahu.)

Biden appears to be well on his way to making Jimmy Carter look like a foreign policy titan:

When I heard the news of the IDF strike that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, my first instinct was that the aid workers were set up by Hamas through false or deceptive intelligence sent to the Israelis. We know Hamas uses civilians as human shields and welcomes civilian casualties as a means of propaganda, and foreign civilian casualties are the best propaganda of all. Maybe an Israeli officer was hasty and had a twitchy trigger, but I doubt it. In any case, it gave the feckless and craven Biden Administration the excuse it needed to break with Israel (as I predicted it eventually would), in the biggest betrayal of an ally since Munich in 1938.

I have never been more ashamed to be an American.

Minneapolis is “among the best cities for first time home buyers”:

Also on the list, Mariupol, Beirut, Kabul, Damascus…

Today’s song list:

And I hope you can join Jack, Brad, a few dozen of our closest friends and I tonight at Exchange Food and Drink in New Brighton, 7 PM until we finish or 10PM, whichever comes first!

History doesn’t repeat – but it rhymes.

The world’s major powers are rattling their sabers as they spar in secondary theaters.

The economies are in the hands of people who love to tinker with the levers and buttons of the Big State.

And young intellectually over-stimulated but underendowed bobbleheads are romping and playing:

Everything old is new again.

Guy gets ambushed by girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend in a Minneapolis apartment hallway.

Gets shot 15 times.

At 5-12 foot range

With a .45 ACP.

And lives to return fire.

And then performs first aid on himself until the cops arrived.

And, three years later, tells his story:

And whatever your stance on self-defense, this is an amazing story.

Minnesota used to significantly outperform the rest of the US in germs of gross and per capita GDP growth.

Today?

[Since] 2019 — the last pre-COVID year — Minnesota’s real GDP growth has ranked 36th out of the fifty states, coming in at 4.0%, less than half the national rate of 8.1%.

The gross GDP growth comparison is bad. The per capita numbers, even worse:

Minnesota’s recent performance is relatively poor. As Figure 2 shows, between 2019 and 2023, Minnesota’s real, per capita GDP growth ranked 39th out of the fifty states. Again, with growth of 3.1%, Minnesota’s real, per capita GDP growth was less than half that of the United States, 6.6%.

The Walz regime will respond, no doubt, as it always does; with a selfie of “Lieutenant” Governor Flanagan feeding Governor Klink a pronto pup.

Capital, productive citizens and the college kids who are the productive citizens of the future are fleeing. Businesses have been moving their non-white-collar operations out of MInnesota for decades.

You may not win along with it, but that’s your fault for denying reality.

Speaking of denying reality: we warned MInneapolis about the inevitable end results of rent control, high taxes and onerous regulations (aka “everything the Met Council does re housing and transit policy”).

And yet every $%#$%$@# time their chickens come home to roost, they act surprised and angry:

The comments in that thread are lit, by the way; every metro housing advocate’s inner Lenin is showing.

“President” Biden, last Friday:

“I, Joseph R. Biden … do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” said the White House proclamation issued Friday and signed by Mr. Biden.

Biden, Sunday:

As he left the 144th annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Mr. Biden was quizzed by reporters about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s denunciation of the transgender proclamation as “outrageous and abhorrent.”

“Speaker Johnson called it ‘outrageous’ that Easter Sunday was Transgender Day of Visibility. What do you say to Speaker Johnson?” asked a reporter, according to the White House pool report.

Mr. Biden replied: “He’s thoroughly uninformed.”

When pressed for details, the president responded: “I didn’t do that.”

The “observance” has been on March 31 for about 15 years, now – it was going to coincide with Easter someday, one way or another.

Which, of course, doesnt’ explain why the White House gave it equal billing with the holiest day of the faith the President throws about as a prop when it suits him (or, more likely, his comms staff).

Now, if it coincided with Ramadan, or May Day? That’s a needle I look forward to seeing the “President” try to thread.

And I’m sure he will get his chance, as just about every other day is some sort of LGBTQ+ observance or another.

A significant chunk of the far-left clacque that runs politics in the metro are Marxists, either overtly or under the hood.

And an amazing number of them subscribe to the “Labor Theory of Value” – the idea that labor, as opposed to the other three factors (Capitol, Management and Land) is the dispositive factor of production.

I have been challenging adherents for years – test the theory by taking a group of fast food workers, plopping them on a vacant lot, and seeing if a Hardee’s springs up around them.

It’s an absurd test – exactly the one the theory deserves.

I used to say nobody had taken the challenge.

But it appears that, at least indirectly, someone just might.

One of the big quasi-empirical drivers to “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in the business world was a McKinsey consulting study from almost ten years ago, whose results claimed that diversity was strength, not just for virtue-signaling purposes, but in bottom line terms.

If it seemed like a stretch – it was. A new study can’t reproduce McKinsey’s results:

However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.

Full study here.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that corporate America is going to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube; that would be a free market response, and Human Resources is a little bit of government, with all the attendant hidebound inflexibility and mulishness, embedded into the market.

…what surprised me more – that a Catholic church in Manhattan has bouncers…

…or that they did this with some Palestine/Climate/[fill in the cause] protesters on Easter:

My only regret? No clubs were used.

Remember during the oil boom in North Dakota?

When the Strib and every prog pundit with a blog was patronizingly intoning how dangerous all that unseemly oil money was going to be for all the hayseeds out on the prairie? When our cultural elites prowled the prairie looking for the evil that lies at the intersection of rural, Christian and suddenly prosperous?

The boom has moved on.

Progressives have not. Whenever they see new energy, and new money, they are there to whiz in the cereal.

But someone, gloriously, pushed back. This is Ibraham Ali, President of Guyana (via Powerline). And he is not amused by a BBC hack’s by-the-woke-numbers first-world nattering:

I saw this mere moments after I read this piece below – Musa Al Garbi’s observations about the endemic racism of upper-middle-class honkies in Manhattan.

It’s not just Manhattan, and it’s not just race.

As you may recall, our “Lieutenant”/co-governor and state’s designated Karen, Peggy Flanagan, filled out her March Madness bracket based on the schools’ home state abortion laws.

She got well under half right in the first round. She was down to two of the Elite Eight, and one – UConn, seeded #1 in its quarter of the bracket – left in the Final Four.

So “abortions laws” might not be a great predictor of basketball success.

What is?

Carry permit laws and Contitutional Carry. Seven out of the “Elite Eight” were either shall-issue or Constitutional Carry, and Connecticut has always been the most liberal of the mid-Atlantic states as re issuing permits.