Remember 1998? 

Minnesota was doing so well that we could play a practical joke on ourselves.   

We were one of the most successful states in the union.  The combination of “good government” Democrats – naive, misguided but not actively malevolent – and a Republican Party that in retrospect still hadn’t caught up with the Reagan Revolution gave us a government that on the one hand did too much, but on the other hand kind of left things alone enough for them to work.  

Things were so good that we could elect a professional wrestler as governor.  

And things stayed good, or at least acceptable, until…

…well, sometime after 2010.  I can’t quite place it – sometime between Mark Dayton’s election and 2020 – that that ended.   Maybe it was the fourth tier of taxes, or the takeover of Minneapolis and then the DFL by the DSA, or Walz’s idiotic response to the pandemic.  

But in that time, Minnesota has gone from one of the good states to somewhere between “laggard” and “death spiral”.  

I’m not mongering doom – I think the state can be saved.  But the slice of time where that’s possible is flying on by.  

With that in mind?  It’s convention weekend.   

The DFL

The DFL’s convention is happening in Rochester.   And the only real question is, “will it matter”?  Klobuchar is going to win the nomination and, barring an epic October Surprise on fraud or corruption from the Feds, she’ll likely become governor.   More on that when we come to the GOP side.  

The Senate race – which is no longer a race – is more interesting.  Angie Craig yesterday announced she’s headed straight to the primary, after learning 75% of the delegates were pledged to Peggy Flanagan.   

In 2010, knowing the delegates were insane, Ken Martin stepped in and poured on the money to overthrow Margaret Anderson-Kellihers endorsement at the primary, with Mark Dayton.  Eight years  later, after the convention gave the nod to the Karen twins, Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade, as well as actual Communists Matthew Pelikan for attorney general, Martin brought in the money and the public union clout to jam down Walz and Flanagan as well as the relatively moderate Ellison in the primary. 

Peggy Flanagan is likely the weakest statewide candidate the DFL has endorsed in my memory.   She could be beaten – more on that below – and I suspect smart DFLs know that Craig would be a much easier sell outside 494/694.   

If it we were talking about Ken Martin and a DFL before, say, 2020?  No question about it, the statewide DFL leadership would yet again nullify the convention and jam down a more electable candidate.  

But the DFL has changed since 2018 – they took their defeats in 2018 and 2021 (on the police funding question in Minneapolis) as a signal get really serious about taking over the DFL.  And you can say two things about Richard Carlbom; no way, no how does he look like a young Hermann Gôring, and he’s no Ken Martin.   

I wouldn’t put it past the DFL, though. I know if I were a GOP Senate candidate, I’d much rather face Flanagan.  

The MNGOP

The Governors race appears to be a tossup between Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth and Kendall Qualls, although Mike Lindell has been doing well in Central Minnesota and has some strong delegate support as well.   I suspect Demuth will win the endorsement, and I’m going to guess it goes to a. primary.  I like both Demuth and Qualls (Lindell’s got a great story, but in the general he’ll make the GOP long for the good old days of Kurt Bills), and I think Demuth has the lead with delegates so far, but let’s be honest – the real key to this election lies with the Feds, and if they drop a huge string of indictments against key DFLers in October.  And the media will be doing its best to mute even that.  

And it’s a shame, because getting a Republican – any Republican – into the executive branch to check and balance the DFL’s depredations may be the only sustainable hope the state has to pull out of the tailspin it’s in.  

So fingers crossed for the Feds.  

For the Senate race?  

This is the first time I’ve harbored any genuine hope in a Minnesota senate race since the mugging they call the 2008 election – mostly because Peggy Flanagan is such a very weak candidate. 

The three contenders are Adam Schwarze, Michelle Tafoya and Royce White.  

I follow the Buckley Commandment – vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. 

White has his proponents – mostly among the “burn it all down” crowd pushed by “Action4Liberty”.   A4L has cracked the code on weaponizing ignorance of politics and, along with “Minnesota Gun Rights”, profits from defeat. I don’t see him getting the nomination, “rocks and cows” support notwithstanding.   He will , I suspect, have enough oomph to be a kingmaker or to deny any endorsement at all.  

It’s going to be be between Adam Schwarze and Michelle Tafoya.   Schwarze likely has the lead among the delegates, although Tafoya has been working the room pretty hard for someone who is generally considered to be headed for the primary.  

Schwarze has all the things that delegates and activists love – a former SEAL, impeccable conservative credentials, and a vow to abide by the endorsement.  He’s also got next to no name recognition outside party activists, and will have to buy some by November.   

Tafoya has some cons – a stance on abortion that is simultaneously too accomodationist for many GOP activists and identical to Donald Trump’s position (12 weeks), and a “path to citizenship” stance on immigration that is a poor sell at the convention but likely not a problem in Maple Grove.  She’s also got name recognition, is raising serious money, and has at least some polling showing her close to the margin of error against Flanagan.  

I’d pay money to see either of them debating Flanagan or Craig.  

So – who is the most conservative candidate who can beat Flanagn or Craig?

I was in a discussion a few weeks ago about what the future holds for the Twin Cities. Someone – a Minneapolis booster and fan of the current administration in Minneapolis and Minnesota – said the cities’ current decline is a sign that the metro is in “the throes of a new city being born”. 

Well, maybe. Good times aren’t guaranteed to last, and any city can turn things around. And they can turn in either direction – fifty years ago Detroit was a thriving city with some worrying symptoms, and Nashville was a backwater with some music companies. The elevator goes down *and* up. 

But a whoooole lot of people, particularly boosters of the status quo in Minneapolis and Saint Paul over the past ten years, think that’s the *normal*. 

It occurs to me – when we talk about what the Twin Cities and Minnesota used to be, people under 40 have no idea what we’re talking about. Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination. It was certainly a destination when I moved here in 1985. 

Let’s recount what’s changed since I’ve lived here.

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader. It wasn’t just defense.

In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time.

This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Sure,” you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the East Side of Saint Paul. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, IBM, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Tyme; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of all kinds of music. And not just music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside New York. 

And we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy. And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices. That’s all gone now.

It wasn’t all local. Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized (freeing up a tidal wave of capital that financed the prosperity of the ’90s). Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere. 

But state tax policy was exporting jobs long before Clinton cashed the “peace dividend”, much less NAFTA. 

3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. 

And it’s not just big businesses. The startup I’ve been working on (www.storyaliz.com) moved, along with 2/3 of its staff (of, uh, three people) to the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Between taxes, regulations, the “family leave” policy and the stagnancy of the small business climate, there’s just no upside to trying to do a tech startup in Minnesota. 

And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite. 

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things.

In 1986, when I was producing the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from Fodors Travel Guides – which were where you went for information about places you wanted to travel, before there was an internet, and were pretty well-respected at the time – for the show. He’d just written an article calling the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. 

Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

So when people like the one I was talking with say “we’re watching the birth of a new city”?

Sure. It happens. 

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. 

So ask yourself this: do our current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, scotch tape, comedy, brilliant ideas and products of all kinds – or just consuming goods and services? 

Because that determines the city and state you get. 

I think there’s a very strong case that Minnesota has become a consumer, not creator, culture. 

That’s a problem.

But I have a hunch if the GOP ticket has a major chance of turning things around in Minnesota, it might just start here:

I have no idea if any of this is true – but if I were writing this as a movie, then the Republicans in the legislature, knowing full well that the law enforcement apparatus in the state reports to Keith Ellison and that one might as well report fraud to the state’s cattle herds as the Attorney General, bypassed state authorities completely and went to the Feds.   

And as the extent to which the DFL-dominated executive branch is riven with crime becomes known and more and more DFL officials are frog-walked to Leavenworth, even the densest “soccer mom” in Eden Prairie stats to realize the depravity they’ve been abetting and repents at the polls this fall. 

A guy can dream.  

Joe Doakes, erstwhile of Como Park, emails:Hind Rocket at Powerline reports on the Cuban Drone crisis, saying, “Cuba is a great example of how long an incompetent, tyrannical and utterly discredited regime can hold on to power as long as it has a monopoly on guns.”

Sure.

And given Cuban mechanics’ facility at keeping old cars going, I’d think sending the plans for Sten guns to Cuba might work, too…

I’d love to know what Peggy Flanagan is, er, “thinking”:

“Avenge” what?

The DFL has controlled the executive branch for 15 years, and most of state government the past eight.  Flanagan has been in power for eight years.  

Avenge…what?  Her regime’s actions?

I presume she’s talking about “avenging” Metro Surge – the federal operation that negated Minneapolis’s “sanctuary” status and went after the sex traffickers and drug wholesaling that made Minneapolis and other “sanctuaries” home.   And while you can disagree with some of ICE’s methods – and I do – the bulk of the disruption to the city was caused by the masses of leftists with Main Character Syndrome, organize by professional progs to spend their days roaming the city with their @#$#^ whistles and vuvuzelas making the city sound like a roaming Chuck E. Cheese. 

Avenge yourself.  

Please, MNGOP.  You could win this one. 

 

Joe Doakes, ex of Como Park, emails:

President Trump is threatening to pull US troops out of Italy because they weren’t there when we needed them to help us in Iran. It’s the right act for the wrong reason.”Tribute” is a payment from the conquered countries to the Imperial conqueror, an act of submission. Mongol Horde, Chinese Dynasty, Aztecs, Romans … they all did it.

If the United States was any kind of Imperial power, money would be flowing from the rest of the world to us; but instead money flows from us to them in the form of military aid and welfare.  Instead of them paying tribute to us, we are paying tribute to them.

Either we are the Conqueror or we are the Conquered. I prefer the former and we ought to start acting like it. Pull the US out of our subservient role in UN, WHO, NATO, and NAFTA. End foreign welfare payments. 

Notify England, Spain, Germany and Italy that we are no longer leasing our bases while giving them rights to deny our use, but instead they are gifting that land to us in exchange for our continued troop deployments there. 

Then we can talk about Greenland.

Joe Doakes

 

If we were an empire – like the British, Roman, Napoleonic or Alexandrian ones – the armies of our various cliens (let’s call ’em “vassals”) would be parts of our military. The Romans had a word for it – “auxiliaries”.

After a few months of listening to some of my Libertarian and “Alliance 4 Freedom” friends yakking about how the Trump administration and the GOP are the real gun control party – driven by a couple of dumb remarks by Kristi Noem, Jeannine Pirro and Trump himself – Joe Doakes points out something that I’ve written about over at HotAir. 

Trump, for all his northeastern ambivalence about guns and the 2nd Amendment, has done more to reinforce the right to keep and bear arms as a right (let’s not focus on “bump stocks” for right now) than any president…

….I was about to say “of my lifetime”, but the correct ending to the sentence is “…that any president has ever needed to”.  

It’s of particular interest to me – partly because of the orgy of gun grabbing that the MN Senate just passed (it’s going to die in the House, and it’s pretty much intended to rile up the Karens for mid-terms), and partly because I am a litigant against the city of Saint Paul’s peek-a-boo “assault weapons ban”.  

Anyway – Trump’s prior squishiness about binary triggers notwithstanding, I never thought I’d see a Department of Justice react to a pinheaded local and state gun control bills quite like this:

It’s a great change. 

Let’s hope it survives 2028. 

It’s safe to say I’m not a Peggy Flanagan fan.  She was the ultimate diversity hire – an ultra progressive (by 2018 standards) “minority” woman (we’ll come back to that) to help drag “moderate” Tim Walz over the DFL’s finish line.  She’s been the most visible Lieutenant Governor I can recall in Minnesota history – during Walz’s first term, I think Flanagan was listed as a co-equal, and appeared in the background of all the Governor’s social media (which ended when Flanagan started making noises about running against Walz’s third term attempt befere…well, you know).  

I think the fact that the DFL is going all-in on torpedoing Angie Craig to support P-Flan is the best thing to happen to the GOP in years, in spite of itself; it gives the GOP the best chance it’s had to win a statewide race since the 2010.  

But there’s one criticism she’s gotten, and has resurfaced, that I’m going to sit out:

In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, if I hadn’t had German, Civics, History and music, I’d have likely had a worse GPA.  I was bored stiff.  English class was always 50% literature, which I loved, and half grammar, which bored me stiff.  I knew how to talk and write, for crying out loud.  

In 10th grade I had Geometry.  My six-weekly grades were C, D, F, F, F and F.   So I musta not gotten Geometry – right?

Then I got a “B” on the final, which salvaged a “D” for the year.  

Anyway – I went on to 11th and 12th grades, and had probably a 3.7 – I cared about the classes I was taking, I’d started working at the radio station and so finally had an identity outside of “greasy-haired cello-playing athletically-inept nerd”, and things just started clicking.  

All by way of saying a number one acquires between ages 14-18 doesn’t define an adult. 

A lifetime of being a “public service” leech does.  So I’ll stick with that.