Hope Walz – a 25 year old reportedly working as some kind of social worker – on the Mamdani election:

“The top 1% that exploit all of us down below?”  

She’s been the child of a Congressional representative or governor since she was five years old, and has had every form of access, power and privilege imaginable.  

Like Mamdani himself – not to mention most “revolutionaries” – she’s is a “One Percenter”.  

Now, if there’s a field that’s worse than teaching when it comes to requiring lots of paper credentials to advance, or hold a job, it’s social work -and Ms. Walz has decided that graduate school is a form of privilege and won’t be attending.

Which means she’s going to be going for a “job” in “public service”, doesn’t it?

The Piglet can’t be happy about this latest Star-Tribune poll:

Gov. Tim Walz’s approval rating has dipped below 50% since his failed run for vice president last year, and about half of Minnesotans say he shouldn’t run for a third consecutive term in 2026, according to a new poll. The results suggest the DFL governor could face headwinds if he runs for re-election again, particularly from voters in greater Minnesota and the suburbs outside Hennepin and Ramsey counties. He also faces opposition from a majority of independents who disapprove of his performance.

The new Star Tribune/Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication Minnesota Poll found 49% approve of Walz’s performance and 50% disapprove. A previous Minnesota Poll conducted last September found 53% of Minnesotans approved of Walz’s performance while 44% disapproved.

It’s only the second time Walz’s approval rating has fallen below 50% in the Minnesota Poll.\

It’s hard to read much history into this “Minnesota” Poll; the poll has changed hands so many times since its heyday from 1989-2012.  

But this is not great news for Walz.  

I don’t expect him to go out without a fight, of course; he – or Gwen – palpably craves national office.  The question is, given:

• the extraordinary nature of a third term as governor
• Walz’s unpopularity (which I’m going to guess is worse than even this latest re-dressing of the MN Poll shows, becasue that’s never a bad bet)
• The emergence of other contenders in the DFL – radicals like Peggy Flanagan (who’s terribly overmatched in her Senate race against Angie Craig), and relative moderates like Dean Philips…

…will the Tim Walz brand support another run?

I suspect we’re going to see a huge reconstruction effort.  Which I frankly hope succeeds, at least through DFL convention season. 

Postscript:  wouldn’t now be a great time for the MNGOP to suspend its circular firing squad and actually focus on fundraising and fighting a campaign?

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office recently hosted an all-day continuing legal education program titled, “Price, Access, and Power: Exploring Grocery Costs, Food Access, and Competition.” Several speakers advocated for breaking up grocery retailers and establishing government grocery stores in areas that don’t have them, such as high crime zones and Indian reservations.

A leading candidate for mayor of New York City favors government-operated grocery stores (and you know whatever they get, Minneapolis must have).

The next Democrat crusade is food. They want to take over your grocery store and run it “fairly,” you know, like the Post Office or the DMV.

Thomas Sowell quipped, “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” This sounds like more of that.

I just have one question. After Democrats have made private grocery stores unprofitable and replaced them with government grocery stores, what happens to consumers when AFSCME goes on strike??

Joe Doakes, Wal-Mart Grocery shopper

If government groceries work as well as government schools, we’ll have a raft of remedial programs and consultants and…

…aaaah.  I get it now. 

December 6, 1941: “A modern war would inevitably turn into a trench quagmire like the First World War”

June 24, 1950: “The next war will be, at best, a mobile industrial clash of titans, and likeliy end with mutual nuclear annihilation”

March 7, 1965: “This war is going to be a conventional war to contain Communist aggression”

August 1, 1990: “This war is going to devolve into a quagmire that will destroy a generation and enervate a nation”

October 3, 1993: “American technological power and training will enable us to walk all over these primitive tribesmen, and restore order just the way we did in Kuwait”

October 18, 2001: “As we discovered in Mogadishu, the Islamist terrorist’s willingness to die will make any war between us an endless quagmore

March 19, 2003: “American technological prowess and our experience liberating Afghanistan in record time will enable us to prevail against the Iraqi Army, Republican Guard and Fedayeen in short order.

June 22, 2025: “Iran will inevitably be another Iraq”.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Transgender people claim they just want to be accepted.  I can do that. But my idea of “accepted” is the way Colonel Potter treated Corporal Klinger on the television show M.A.S.H., more “tolerated” than “celebrated.”

 

You want to wear a dress? Fine, go right ahead.  But it doesn’t get you out of standing watch. It doesn’t get you into the nurse’s shower with Major Hoolahan. It doesn’t get you any special privileges at all.

 

Certain males Want to act like girls, but everyone knows they’re Not girls, so we aren’t willing to Treat them as girls.  Your transgender fantasy is your own.  I am not required to participate in your fantasy, not even with your choice of pronoun.

 

 Wear a dress if it makes you feel pretty. But you don’t get to shower with the girls or pitch on their softball team.  Being weird doesn’t make you special. It just makes you weird in a dress. 

 

If you have a problem with that attitude, well then, you have a problem. Don’t whine about it, deal with it.  As a real woman would. 

I’m old enough to remember Tim Walz saying we needed to change our political rhetoric.  

And if you’re older than a week, so are you. 

How’s that going?

So, back to normal. 

Hey – check this out:

Suddenly the media does know what a woman is!

Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,  I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”.

Not much I can say or do about the former. 

But as to the latter?

Just War Doctrine outlines reasons that war might be morally justified. It requires a legitimate cause (like self-defense), proportionality in response (there’s your bugaboo right there), and due discretion to minimize harm to non-combatants. It also says you need a legitimate authority to declare war, a reasonable chance of success, and war as a last resort after running out of peaceful alternatives. The doctrine is an academic attempt to balance the moral complexities of armed conflict with the pursuit of peace.

I’ve seen a few of my liberal Christian friends dunk on the Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuke program and military, even though by any *rational* measure, the Israeli strikes satisfy all of these criteria.

Self defense? Iran has been bankrolling terror against the US (not to mention Israel)  for over forty years. The Marine Embassy bombing? Funding and arming Hamas, Hizb’allah, the Palestinian Authority, the Houthis and other terror movements throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia? Funding all the Intifadas, paying big money to the families of suicide bombers, funding decades of rockets attacks on Israel (and others), having their fingers directly on the October 7 pogrom, and having “eradicating Israel” as a foundational goal (inclding for their nuke program)?

Too many of my liberal Christian friends seem to have gone past “Just War” doctrine and straight on to “Groundhog Day Doctrine” – forgetting all of history when they wake up every morning and starting the entire Middle East conflict over from a clean slate every morning. Israel “attacked Iran” – 40-odd years of terrorism, direct attacks, and apocalyptic ,eliminationist rhetoric be darned.

Proportionality? Forget for a moment that it’s not only an academic concept when actual self-defense is involved – “proportionality” taking to the ridiculous extreme too many history-challenged liberal Christians do, it actually makes wars worse and less “just”. Think about it: a “proportional” response to Pearl Harbor would have involved sinking Japanese ships and calling it even; in 1939, the Allies should have retaken Poland and left everything else in place; Israel should presumably send goons into rural Iran on an anti-Farsi pogrom, taking hostages and killing 1200-ish people – in all cases, leaving the *root cause* of the wars (Japanese and German expansionism, elimination antisemitism) in place.

But you’d have a hard time showing a more “proportional” response in all of military history than Israel’s attack on Iran – thus far, at least. No carpet-bombing, no “Search and Destroy” missions through villages – no conventional ground troops at all. And hardly any contact with civilians outside the nuke program at all (it’s likely 90% of the Iranian population has had no contact with the war outside whatever media reports they’re getting.

They’re not a lot different than Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, in their own way.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning, or re-beginning, of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in most cases unwittingly – to further Minnesota’s political class’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.

It was a relatively quiet year on the rail lines – if you leave out crime at the train stations and on board the trains, of course. But the trains didn’t run over anyone new.

Still:

• The Blue Line has mowed down 20 so far – including a pedestrian and a cyclist on back to back days just a few weeks ago. That’s an average of almost one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested 13 victims in 11 years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. Over the past year, the line clamed a pedestrian this past March. There was also a murder on a Green Line trade last November, right after Thanksgiving.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far. The last was in 2019 – which, to be fair, was about the last time anyone rode the Northstar.

That’s 31 dead, so far. 31 lives snuffed out so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government narcissism and megalomania.

We’ve had a week of gyrations and caterwauling about “right wing violence” after the ghastly shooting spree carried out by Vance Boulter, who is tenuously associated with the Republican Party.  

We now return to regular programming:

Now, you might think the fact that no party was mentioned is a sure sign that he was a Democrat. 

And you’d be right:

The “expletive” in question was alleged to have been Rep. Jim Nash of Waconia.

So, to borrow a phrase from David Byrne, “same as it ever was”.

Mere months after DOGE took a chainsaw to fuzzy discretionary spending…

A party whose approval is in the 20s, clearly living on graft, and that seems to be having trouble keeping its own house in order?  

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. 

Don’t get cocky.  The Democrats still have all the money in the world, and plenty of “talent” in the wings.  

But I’m loving the flailing. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

 

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Devil’s advocate says: John Thompson wants to make sure Boelter gets competently prosecuted?

The man who was, for three terms, the worst president of my lifetime:

“Every single way but on paper”. 

“Look, Ms. Banker – my credit rating is 740- in every way but on paper.  Where, yes, it says 515”. 

“Why yes, I hold several records in sports from high school and college.  Not on paper, of course”. 

“Anna Kendrick and I are a thing.  Just not on paper”.  

“Officer, I’m a legitimate driver in every way but on plastic.  And my car is insured and registered in everry way but on paper.”

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Why is there a rebate for electric bicycles, what’s wrong with the old-fashioned Schwinn bicycle?

 

Why do teacher pensions need a boost from the state, why aren’t they paid from teacher contributions?

 

Why do any illegal aliens get free healthcare whether they are children or not? Why do we want to encourage them to stay instead of encouraging them to leave?

 

Joe Doakes

The terms “perverse incentives” and “unintended consequences” is always the answer, one way or the other.

My eyes groaned and squeaked open around 6:15 Saturday morning, after a little less than four hours of sleep.  My band had been at a gig, and I hadn’t gotten home until after 2AM, and it took a while to get to sleep after that.  

A dim little echo rattled around my sleep-fogged mind: “I’ve got four ‘stop the presses’ stories to figure out how to talk about on the show today”.  Keith Ellison admitting he’d maybe talked with some Feeding Our Future defendants just a little; the “No Kings” group therapy sessions; the end of the special session; war between Israel and Iran.  

But I figured I could get another couple hours of sleep. 

But I made the mistake of checking Twitter, and saw “Minnesota Legislators shot” and, well, the day kicked off.  

So I need to do more radio. 

Berg’s 18th Law got its biggest workout ever over this past weekend.  

Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident.  It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.

 

Starting with the first roujnd of tweets at 6AM, the story morphed from:

1. A rabid Trump supporter must have done it
2. An insane narcissist who wanted to go out in a misguided blaze of glory did it. 
3. A DFL irate over the vote over the “healthcare for illegals” vote last week (which Senator Hoffman didn’t buck the DFL on)
4. A Dayton and Walz appointee did it!
5. A guy whose non-profit got gutted by USAID cuts did it. 
6. A Pro-Lifer did it!
7. A guy with a bizarre and incongruous resume did it. 

I started at #2, and due to the 18th Law, gravitated back there by late Saturday afternoon.  I just hoped we’d catch the guy alive. 

And they did:

But the questions are just starting.

This take seems very plausible, given what we know…

With the qualifier “given what we know” doing a lot of lifting.

And again, knowing what we know now, if I had to guess (and I don’t, but I will), I’m going to guess the Boelter is a grab bag opportunist with some vague right-wing trappings, a history of grifting, and a building wave of mental illness.  

One thing I don’t have to guess about:  he won’t be to the right what Luigi Mangione is to the left:

I might have met Speaker Hortman twice, and didn’t form much of a personal opinion – but although I disagreed with 150% of her policies, by all accounts she was a perfectly wonderful human being:

The boundaries of Berg’s 18th Law are arbitrary – 48 hours was a good place to start.   With Boulter in custody, we may start getting things in order.  

Speculation later.  

You’re a security guy. 

You’re securing a public figure – part of an administration brings out the crazy in the crazies, and who has herself gotten plenty of “admiration” from the “Professor Bill” set. She completely meets the criteria set down in Berg’s 8th Law.

You’re securing her in a crowded room full of people you have to keep your eye on.  

Suddenly, someone comes in the room, bellowing DO YOU KNOW WHO I AAAAAAAM?

You do not know who he is.  He looks like pretty much 100,000 other people within a 10 mile radius.   

But he just won’t shut up.  

So, with visions of John Thompson and Butler PA and Rand Paul in mind, you do your freaking job. 

And this is what you get:

The entire left – no, the entire left – is up in a snit about it. 

I mean, who does he think he is?  Someone trying to go to church in 2020?

Normies: “Happy Flag Day”

Droogs: “ACK-shyu-ally, BeTSy RoSs diDn’t sEw TEh flAg, AnD hTe wh0L3 story is a mYth”.

Normies: “Right. Nations and cultures have mythologies that encapsulate parts of what their cultures are about. Not just the USA. ALL of them”.

Droogs: “iT Is tEH Lie!”

Normies: “In the same sense that Hercules, the Knights of the Round Table and the Great White Buffalo are myths; they may not be documentable history, but they pass vital parts of the culture on to future generations”.

Droogs: “iT tELLs uS tEH cUlTuRE is teH LIERR!”

Normies: “It tells future generations that a humble seamstress – someone who other cultures ignored – had a vital role in the spirit that founded this nation”.

Droogs: “…”

Normies: “Yes?”

Droogs: “U r tEh whItE SpReMEcYst!”

The top-line number seems depressing, if you’re a Republican. And the DFL wants to double that down while it can:

I know, I know – it’s Survey USA. They oversample metro voters and Democrats.

It’s the second-tier result that’s interesting; on the question of whether he should run for Governor again:

He’s underwater among independents.  I think that’s a first; for some reason, “independent” voters have had a thing for the little Mussolini.  

So you can expect a huge PR effort to burnish his image as he tries to make that two year jump from 2026 to 2028 in some kind of office.  

Here’s the biggest takeaway to me:  you can ask youself who those 58% of idiots are.  Even if you write off a few percent because it’s a SUSA poll, that still means his approval is way above water.  

Which means that the “shut down the government and stick with pure conservative principle” crowd –  I’m looking at you, Action 4 Liberty – would be swimming up the PR stream from the word go, trying to convince voters of the merits of a government shutdown when they still don’t see what national voters plainly saw.  

I’m just the messenger.   

Is there another way to look at this?

Waymo moves all of its self-driving cabs out to the suburbs of Los Angeles:

It may be the most 2025 photo of all time. 

85 years ago this month, Winston Churchill unpacked the result of the Dunkirk evactuation and reminded the UK that evacuations don’t win wars.   

And fighting the DFL to stalemates doesn’t save Minnesota – not all by itself.  

But let’s make sure we’re clear on what happened:

The GOP – facing a DFL executive branch and a DFL controlled Senate with a one (possibly illegitimate, but whatever) vote minority – with only a tie in the House, managed to win a smaller budget.   

Not smaller than the one we had before the DFL’s spending spree in ’23-’24 – but that was never on the table with only a tie in one chamber.  The GOP could not pass anything remotely partisan (even HOA reform had its hiccups) – tie votes lose, and anything the House MIGHT have passed would died in a DFL-controlled Senate committee.  

But it was still a huge cut in absolute dollars, and – this is important – the first cut of any kind in recent memory.   Enough for the “burn it all down” crowd?  No, but nothing is.  

Doing better will require winning more elections.  

Can the MNGOP do it?  

I’m not sanguine about the state party – but they really only influence statewide elections (Governor, Senator, the Constitutional offices).  The  Legislative caucuses don’t depend on the state party, and the House and Senate Caucus Committees do a good job worthy of some hope.  

So suck it up. It ain’t over. 

If you were involved in any way in the 2020 riots in Minneapolis, even as a spectator, you know there was little organic and nothing spontaneous about them.  

With that in mind, I urge you to read this entire thread about the LA riots:

Babies getting tear-gassed?   

They’re just eggs for the greater omelette:

The MO points to “leftist NGOs with deep pockets”.

Who, how deep and how did they get so deep?

DataRepubliican (yes, another “X” thread) has more:

The major one appears to be “CHIRLA” (“Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights”). And yes, course you and I are paying for it:

And, oh yeah. don’t forget the leftist billionaires:

I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that Big Left’s A-team was too busy planning in Los Angeles to turn last week’s fracas in Minneapolis into the riots some clearly so deperately wanted.

This past Tuesday, scads of feds – FBI, DHS, BATFE – raided eight different businesses around the Twin Cities, serving search warrants related to human trafficking.  

Seven of the raids went off without a hitch. 

But the eighth – at Lake and Bloomington, deep in the heart of white, progressive Minneapolis – was different.  The Feds rolled in in MRAPs and full battle rattle. 

And, in their own way, so did Minneapolis’s entire progressive power structure; the video is worth a watch:

Watching the woman at around 1:15 is enough to make me realize I sold Michael Savage short: progressivism certainly appears to be a manifestation of some kind of emotional trouble.

Around 3:00 minutes in, you can see the crowd – white, progressive, lots of tattoos and man-buns – starting to push and shove the feds.  It’s almost as if someone wants to institgate another riot.  

Around 7:00, the crowd starts to dump trash barrels on the street, apparently trying to keep the feds from leaving. Around 9:30, it gets even worse.

The mace comes out around 11:30. as the MRAPs leave the area.  

This was in defense of human traffickers. 

For all the sturm und drang, it doesn’t appear that anyone involved in attacking the feds or cops got arrested for obstructing justice. 

The reactions from DFLers were…predictable. 

Putative mayoral front-runner Omar Fateh:

Senator Fateh: under “no” circumstances?

Like , not even with active human trafficking?

Weird.

Councilman Chavez – who is the primary evidence not only of Berg’s 21st Law, but of the “Cano Corollary” to the 21st Law, named after the loony-left councilwoman he replaced because she was too moderate for the local DFL – sounded off. As usual:

Remember – this is against an investigation of human trafficking (not to mention drugs and latin gangs).

The Police Union responded:

It’s not like Jacob Frey – who, let’s not forget, was the “law and order’ alternative to Ray Dehn in 2017 – is going to be much better.  Minneapolis cops should have been hauling everyone who pushed the cops downtown.  It was pure incitement – and a sign of a department that gets no support from its prosecutor. 

Because they don’t:

Minneapolis is at a crossroads:  civilization, prosperity and sanity, vs. decay, anarchy and Lord of the Flies.   

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

That’s the new Democrat line about tariffs – Trump Always Chickens Out.  He proposes high tariffs then reduces them when the other side offers concessions. He chickens out

I get that Democrats have no experience in high-stakes real estate negotiations so they have no idea how The Art of The Deal is done.  But have they never been to Mexico?  Never bargained over a souvenir?  Hell, never bought a used car or anything at a garage sale?  The seller always starts high and comes down in order to make the deal, exactly as Trump has been doing with tariffs. 

And Democrats think that means he’s chickening out?  How stupid are they?  No, how stupid do they think WE are, that we don’t understand how the game is played? 

Unbelievable.

Joe Doakes