“Klan” leaflet with “German”-style type appearing “according to a pastor” in Springfield Ohio:

“Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope?”

Berg’s 20th Law governs:

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.

Now, let’s take bets on how long it takes for the story to come out as a hoax. 

Closest without going over?

(And that German-style font?   Isn’t it just amazing how “white supremacists” are mouth-breathing cretins who also love to slip in sly historical illusions via graphic presentation?

John Nagel is running for the MN House in District 46A.

Kim Rich? He’s running for 46B

And Nathan Herschbach? If you’re in 53A, your mission is clear.

And here’s today’s music list. 

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who look at statements like this and think:

And, moreover

…either:

“WHAT?  Government doesn’t have a plan for me?  Ehrmuhgerd what will I do?“

Or

“Well, good.  That’s why my ancestors came to America; so we could have our own plan and not worry about government’s “plan” for us.

Am I the only one that finds this more than a lot creepy?

Big Left’s greatest achievement may have been convincing a plurality of Americans tthat “freedom” means satiety and freedom from material want in exchange for, y’know, freedom.

Amongf the Kamala Harris lies that ABC at the debates was the idea that “crime is down”:

It means you have a functioning BS detector. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which measures Americans interactions with crimes not reported to the cops, unlike the FBI report Muir was flogging.

And it’s not good:

Overall, the NCVS indicate that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.

Ironically, the NCVS had lower numbers for violent victimizations for 2020 and 2021, despite the widespread perception that crime got significantly worse during the pandemic. In 2018 the figure was 23.8, in 2019 it was 21, it was 16.4 in 2020 — remember, lots of people were stuck at home, and fewer people on the street means less street crime — and in 2021 it was 16.5.

 

And a look at the Minneapolis crime dashboard, counting only crimes reported to the cops, is also a little instructive: as of today,

• homicide, larceny and robbery are up from last year
• Assault and sex offenses are up above the 3 year average (and that counts 2021, one of the worst years on record)
• Vandalism and domestic assault are up over both last year and the average. 

One of the things that always drew me to blogging was the notion of having a voice to shoot back (figuratively) at Big Media’s stultifying echo chamber. 

I had no idea, 22 years on, that we’d be this busy at it.

It may be a symptom of how complete the “Great Sort” has been – but the safer a Democrat is, the more comfortable they feel “saying the quiet part out loud”, as the kids say these days:

By the way, Governor Newsom:  No.  Denied. 

Now what?

Now, Warnock feeling safe? Well, he is, for another couple years anyway:

On the other hand…:

Anyway – if you are a Democrat, you need to make absolutely certain your candidates accept nothing less than completely confiscation, publicly, and immediately.

Minneapolis has a crime problem. 

Even some Democrat-voting locals appear to be on the ragged brink of figuring it out:

Nothing is being done about it?

Balderdash!

Minneapolis DFL leaders are posting photos of people biking, and sunsets!

Who are you going to believe?  Your lying eyes?

If the Harris/Walz ticket wins the presidential race, taht means Minnesota will be left with Peggy Flanagan as governor.  Not only is Flanagan a died-in-the-wood radical, she is one of the least likeable people in Minnesota politics (or was, until we met the DFL’s legislative class of 2023).

And if Trump wins, Walz will return to Minnesota most likely weakened after running into a media that asks him questions more probing than “Pronto Pups vs. Corn Dogs – what’s your take?” for the first time in his political career. 

This is an opportunity.

Now, some will say “The MNGOP will just screw it up”.

Let’s talk about that. 

Let’s start off with two points:

1. MNGOP has MUCH less power over who runs for office and what they say than the MNDFL does.
2. Unlike the MNDFL, the MNGOP is controlled by activists (defined as “people who show up, who support candidate, and who try to convince people to vote along with them”). But it takes something MN Republicans are bad at; patience and sustained effort. Let’s talk about both.

The Car, Not The Driver

Like a lot of people who rail on about politics without having been all that involved, I used to think the MNGOP drives policy.

A very smart person who worked at the MNGOP grabbed me and hauled me off to lunch and explained things to me.  Turns out…

…It doesn’t.

Campaigns, candidates and (eventually) elected representatives do.

So when people say “The MNGOP needs to DO something”? Their job is to support candidates who will…DO something. But you need the candidates.

If GOP activists bubbled up from the districts and endorsed 201 Michelle Bensons, Peg Scotts, Harry Niskas, Walter Hudsons, Mary Fransons and Jim Nashes, we’d be a red state and the MNGOP would reflect that will. If they kept that momentum doing and endorsed people of that caliber for govenor, the party would reflect that will – eventually.  We’ll come back to that.

Point being, the party isn’t a policy-driving organization.  Oh, it keeps the party’s platform – which is an enormous, unenforceable and occasionally self-contradictory agglommeration of wishes.  And it runs the process by which those caucus, BPOU and district endorsements waft up to the state level. 

But it doesn’t set policy.

If the activists endorse a majority of candidates who believe that the state anthem should be “Friends in Low Places”, and those candidates win elections, and the activists who nominated them and worked toward their elections stay active in the party and win seats in the State Central, then at some point in the future the policy of the MNGOP will be to enshrine that Garth Brooks song. 

Provided they show up and win.

The Arena

But the party reflects what the activists who show up, and KEEP showing up, bring to the table.

And the activists control how the party works – via various BPOU, District and eventually State Central Committees.

Thing is, it takes a couple of years of concerted effort to take State Central. As in, *sustained* effort.

Remember the Ron Paul crowd? They came,they actually took over the 2012 convention, they sent their delegates to Tampa…

…and then largely left.  A few of them stuck with the party and the process. 

Before them – remember the Tea Party? They came, they *slaughtered* the DFL in 2010 – and they left (or got hijacked by the “confrontation is BETTER than winning!” crowd).

In other words the party is controlled, not by the people who showed up at caucuses last February, but by the people who showed up the previous 2-5 caucuses, and kept showing up.

That is very unlike the DFL, btw. The GOP honors the decisions of the party’s activists, even when they make clearly doomed endorsements.

In contrast, the last activist-endorsed DFL governor candidate (for an open seat) was Mike Hatch. In every open seat election since then, the DFL party leadership has stepped in to assert its will – in 2010 pushing Mark Dayton past Margaret Anderson-Kelliher in the primaries, and in 2018 dragging Tim Walz over the finish line against Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade. 

For better or worse, the GOP goes with its activists.

Answers?

The answers are simple, but not easy or glamorous:

• Show up
• Endrose solid candidates for everything from school board to legislature to Governor and Senator
• Suipport them – with caucus time, money, work (!), and convincing neighbors. 
• Keep doing ti – even if you lose some races. 2022 (and, let’s be honest, every statewide race since 2008) was a heartbreaker.  So suck it up. 

The Minnesota GOP reflects the will of those who show up and keep showing up”. It sounds like a platitude.

It’s not – for better or worse. It’s a challenge, and sometimes it feels like a curse.   Democracy is so much easier when someone gives it to you, isn’t it?

Knock off the despair. If the Minneapolis City GOP can go out and scrap it out for every seat, people in Andover and Apple Valley can show up and win your purple ‘burbs.

Harris didn’t do as badly as she could have.

Trump didn’t do as well as he should have.

Both told howlers that got their opponents exercised.

The moderators were awful.

Nothing will change.

I predict there will be no second debate. 

Thoughts?

#3:  No matter how well they start and how promising they look, the Vikings will break your heart.

#2:   “Keith Olbermann needs to put down the phone and get out a little.  

#1:  Jen Rubin has departed controlled intellectual flight:

It’s an evergreen statement. And yet periodically she outdoes herself.

During the heyday of blogging, in the late 2000s, two of the big guidelines were “update predictably” and “give people reasons to keep coming back”. 

Where those two guidelines converged was this blog’s publication schedule. 

In 2007, I did some research, and discovered that something like half of this blog’s traffic hit before betwen 5AM and 9AM – and 80% had visited by 1PM. 

So I developed the habit of having stuff rolling out a 6, and sometimes 5 and 7, AM, and then a follow-up around 11ish, to catch the lunch-time crowd. 

And that’s been the rhythm of this blog since George W Bush was president.

Another constant on this blog, since 2006?   I’ve run it on WordPress. 

Unfortunately, WordPress keeps making “improvements”.

One of those seems to have broken the ability to schedule posts reliably; the past few days, posts I’ve scheduled for 6AM have not rolled out; I’ve needed to push them myself, after I noticed there was a problem – at, like, 8AM. 

So until that’s fixed, I’m tempted to just start running all my posts manually in the morning, since the day job’s demands get pretty sticky during the middle of the day. 

I’ll revert to the mean as soon as WordPress takes out the improvements. 

“Hunters for Gun Control”.

“Kulaks for Lenin”

“Chickens for Foxes”.

Two of those are made up.

This next one…:

…I give about 50-50.

Show me the “Republican” who supports price controls, open borders, defunding police, gun confiscation, soical decline, packing the SCOTUS, creating two new Democrat states to pack the Senate, explosive debt, and a foreign policy as firm as a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, and I’ll show you the real problem. 

I mean, it’s only Grenell. 

But, if true…:

…I mean, it’s not like I need more reasons not to vote for Kamala Harris. Picking one of the only attorneys-general worse than Eric Holder would be one.

But since the idea of appointing Ellison to AG is so egregiously stupid, one needs to ask – why?

• Is a potential Harris/Walz regime not being perceived as anti-Semitic enough?
• Did Harris’s polling slip in MN after picking Klink spook her that much?

Thoughts?

The BIden/Harris administration seems to be slowly figuring out something that most of the rest of the world knew last October 6: Hamas are evil people who don’t want a “deal”, except one that leaves them able to keep killing Jews.

Not that it’s sitting well with them:

They could not get Hamas on board, but that did not stop the president from retreating into what must be the comforting fiction that Benjamin Netanyahu is all that stands between Joe Biden and the Nobel Prize. “No,” Biden said simply when asked if, in the wake of the execution-style murder of six Hamas hostages, including an American citizen, Netanyahu was doing enough to secure a peace deal. And yet, not only had the Israeli government agreed to the conditions Biden floated for a temporary cease-fire back in June, it had agreed to the terms Biden outlined in January, March, April, and May in similar fashion. Know who didn’t? Hamas!

If there is a political strategy in the Biden administration’s performative exasperation, it’s hard to see its value. The White House has cast itself as an impotent, easily dismissed bit player in a drama over which it still maintains it has some control. Even now, the administration seems incapable of admitting to itself what most Americans already know: The terrorists who murder Americans without fear of U.S. reprisal are meting out near-daily embarrassments to the country and its president.

And yet, in her disastrous interview the week before last, Harris’s view was still “We support Israel but there has to be a cease-fire”.

It’s pure delusion.

To be fair, it’s better than Walz’s version:

I’d mock him for running away, but really, Biden and Harris are doing exactly the same thing. 

FIve’ll get you ten she’s a teacher

Someone’s gonna get discovered alone in an apartment full of cats after drinking too much boxed wine:

SCENE:   Governor Walz’s command post van, parked out back of the Minnesota State Fair.  Governor WALZ enters, dressed in his “regular Joe” costume, trailed by Lieutenant Governor FLANAGAN, sans turquoise earrings.  Trailing after in the entourage are the Governor’s press secretary, Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, and Lt. Gov. Flanagan’s press aide Cat SCAT.   WALZ’s face is red, causing his eyebrows to stand out like little white flares on a dark night.  Several other staffers, as well as FLANAGAN’s husband, former MPR political reporter and NPR’s MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, and Betty Rae TORSTENGAARDSEN, a writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, and Lac Qui Parle County Dairy Princess in 1987, and voted “most likely to end up as a freelance political writer” by her sorority at U of M Morris in 1992.

WALZ:  What the hell was that?

FLANAGAN:  Weren’t they tooooold of the policy?

BIRKENSTOCK:  It was on the handout (SCAT produces the handout); “The state fair is only about food and baby animals“. 

WALZ:   Then what the hell was this?

BIRKENSTOCK: It was all that out of town media.

WALZ:  Well, what can we do about them? 

SILBERMAN:  What do you mean, “do”?

WALZ:  Can we get rid of them until they know the rules?  I mean, just look at this:

WALZ: I mean, what happened to the reporters who knows the rules? Peggy, what did you do with that guy from Public Minnesota Radio?

FLANAGAN:  Dated and married him? (WEBER gushes).

WALZ:  Can one of you date and marry that woman?

(BIRKENSTOCK and SCAT trade nervous glances)

BIRKENSTOCK:  Uhhhhh…

WALZ:  Look – the Minnesota media knows their place.  What’s it gonna take to get these national people to follow the rules?

SILBERMAN:  I probably shouldn’t be talking here, but playing games with access usually does the trick.

BIRKENSTOCK:  I know, we gotta get in control of that.

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  Or – and this may seem a little radical – you could answer policy questions from the press…

(Everyone in the room looks at TORSTENGAARDSEN as if she’s farted in church)

WALZ:  Get her the hell out of here.

(Security guards and Secret Service pass TORSTENGAARDSEN out of the van like it’s a mosh pit in 1992). 

WALZ:  OK.  Serious discussion here.  National media.  What the hell?  Think, people…

And SCENE

Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz for her running mate appears to be hurting her…

…in Minnesota:

Only 52% of Minnesota voters see him as an excellent or good choice, with 12% saying he’s a fair selection, and a staggering 34% saying he’s a poor pick.

Walz is underwater with men, with 49% approving of his selection and 50% opposing it. About 40% of male respondents called him a poor choice of running mate.

Voters under the age of 35, a key demographic Harris needs in November, also aren’t enthusiastic: 49% called Walz an excellent or good pick; the other 51% regarded him unfavorably. These voters make up 25% of the anticipated November electorate.

Walz is also one percentage point underwater with parents, with 48% regarding him favorably and 49% panning the pick. Among people with children, 35% say he was a poor selection.

And who knows him better than the people he’s been governing, badly and opaquely, for six years?

As one local wag put it…:

What she said.

Leave him at the door, America.

This past week, Brazil’s “supreme court” ordered a shutdown of “X” (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk declined to participate in a sham court proceeding. 

The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using VPNs to access it.

OK – so you say “banana repubics gonna banana republic”.   They got themselves a socialist PM, so it’s to be expected.

Yes, indeed; banana republics gonna banana republic:

In a just world, this would be a disqualifier for further service as an “Attorney General”, as actual lawyer and state rep Harry Niska points out:

Now, Niska’s not new at this – he knows most Twin Cities media only supports their free speech. But rules are rules.

Speaking of which – Ellison is certainly trashing the spirit of Minnesota law, if not the actual letter::

Tack this onto Governor Klink’s clear ambivalence about free speech, and the Twin Cities news media’s trite juvenility about doing its putative duty to democracy…:

…and it’s hard to know which is the bigger banana republic, Brazil or Minnesota.

This one’s gotta leave a mark on Trump:

How much did these two clods spend to make their twenty second video?

BTW – burn calories, not flags. Jeez.

Freedom.

It’s such a big deal, our “elites” don’t think you can be trusted with it:

Keith Ellison thanks the authoritarian socialist government of Brazil for threatening to criminalize Twitter:

Kamala Harris thinks free speech is a privilege, and needs supervision.

Democrats are warning me democracy itself is at stake.

I guess they’re right.  

Kamala Harris’s campaign has been hiding her and Governor Walz from unscripted public view for over a month.  They’re content to led the media do their mythmaking for them, and so are able to slop the trough with an endless stream of chanting points.  

Look familiar?

If you live in Minnesota, it sure should.

My theory – Democrats in Minnesota have figured out that you don’t really need candidates; you need figureheads; moderate-ish looking people who serve as social media conduits for chanting points.  Mark Dayton was one – he barely poked his nose out of his office fior eight years.  He was irrelevant; Ken Martin and Tina Smith did all the thinking. 

Walz is a little more active – in a social media sense.   He’s no less opaque than Dayton was, but is a more bald-faced conduit for the state’s non-profit/industrial complex.   He’s nothing but a stream of Tweets about the State Fair and “full bellies”.  

And it worked. 

And Democrats are trying the same thing nationwide; take an empty skirt, wrap it in platitudes and social media imagery, and blow enough “joy” up peoples pant legs to move enough numbers into the “D” column.  

Forget “forever chemicals” – this  system may be Minnesota’s most toxic export.  

I saw the Reagan biopic last week.

The movie was…good.  

Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:

Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.

The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.

As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly.  Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python.  Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.

So the movie was…good.   It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it. 

But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation.  Probably two generations. 

Is Reagan the movie to do it?  Maybe not. 

If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?  

Now there, we’re onto something. 

Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment.   At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within. 

And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president. 

The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale);  the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR. 

But this’ll do for now. 

For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home. 

But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.

Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing. 

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

 

The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.

Pass it along.

There must be a new reporter on the campaign beat. 

Nobody told her – Governor Walz doesn’t answer questions.  Not when asked by Dana Bash in a pre-taped interview…

…much less at the state fair, where the media’s job for the six years of. his regime so far has been to ask him about food and fishing, as his social media team takes gauzy photos of him holding piglets and getting fed corn dogs by Peggy Flanagan. 

Nobody told the new girl. And it got awkward:

Friggin’ interlopers. Is nothing sacred?

To:  Amanda Taylor, Candidate for the Missouri House
From:  Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re:  SCIENCE!!!

Ms. Taylor,

Your bio claims you’re both a biochemist and running for the Missouri House 

Last week, you dropped an “Ack-Shyu-Ally” bomb on someone:

So,  question for Ms. Taylor:

Let’s ignore for a moment that Karyotypes aren’t, themselves, “sexes”, rather than medical conditions that don’t actually kill a fetus. 

Let’s say for purposes of argument that there are six actual first-class sexes. 

How many of those six sexes are precipitated by the subject’s emotional attitude, psychological condition or fervent belief?

Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter.

That is all.