Saddled with a senile President and a party that’s divided but driven by its radical left, Democrats are reaching for one of the few weapons they have left: the appeal to ridicule.

Last year, it was Ted Cruz being (wrongly, I think) accused of abandoning Texas during the infamous ice storm (on a trip that had apparently planned for some while and, being a legislator rather than governor, he had no actual role to play. Democrats and Never-Trumpers got a few yuks out of that.

This year?

Big Left thought Ron DeSantis had “disappeared”.

The only thing that disappeared was, apparently, whatever sense of humanity Tide Pod Evita might have once claimed (emphasis added):

The governor reportedly accompanied his wife Casey to medical appointments for breast cancer on December 29 as critics claimed he had abandoned his post, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw told Fox News….DeSantis spokespeople jumped to the governor’s defense after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) suggested that the governor was “inextricably missing” [sic] and ignoring his responsibilities over the last couple of weeks. The congresswoman retorted with that comment on Twitter after she was criticized for visiting Miami Beach on a leisure trip on Friday.

“Inextricably missing?”

If Lauren Boebert had said that, it’d have made Stephen Colbert’s leg tingly for two weeks.

“Hasn’t Gov. DeSantis been inexplicably missing for like 2 weeks?” she shot back on Twitter in response to a tweet from Team DeSantis welcoming her to Florida after National Review published photos of her seated outside Doraku Sushi and Izakaya in Miami Beach Thursday afternoon, raising a cocktail in one and checking her phone in another.

Oh, yeah – speaking of leaving their district during a crisis…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

funny because it’s true

Joe Doakes

Verdict: True.

Cue the “black face of white supremacy” meme.

Think about the evolution of military equipment over the past 100 years.

In 1920, the infantryman carried a bolt-action rifle. The tanker drove a rattle-trap armored against rifle fire that could clank along at 3-4 miles an hour. Many of the navy’s ships were powered by coal, and the big cannon was the sine qua non of naval warfare. Pilots flew in planes made of wood and doped canvas – basically box kites with motors, armed with machine guns and glorified grenades.

Thirty years later, the infantry carried cyclic-fire weapons, tanks could shake off light artillery (usually) the Navy’s sunday punch was powered by oil, and planes were the piston-engine equivalent of todays’ Formula 1 cars and the first jets were duking it out in the skies, armed with cannon and the first crude guided missiles.

Thirty years after that, tanks could hit the speed limit, see in the dark and shake off big, powerful artillery. The pride of the Navy was nuclear-powered. The first “stealth” aircraft were just starting to take shape at the Skunk works, and the front-line planes were armed with radar and infrared missiles that could reach out, in some cases, 100 miles.

And forty years hence? Drones are in the field, ships are stealthy, aircraft can shoot down aircraft that have no idea they’re there.

But through each of those eras, there’s been one thing in common – the M2 (HB)

Which was, as it happens, adopted by the US Army (in this case ,the long-disbanded Coast Artillery branc) for the first time 100 years ago this year. I’m gonna throw it out today, since I have no idea what the actual date of adoption was.

Here’s a quick history and tear-down guide…:

…from a channel that’s probably the most essential source of firearms trivia on the Internet.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Apologists for the Lesko Brandon administration insist inflation is mild and getting better.  Except I know for a fact these jars were 2 for $6 last Summer, I buy it all the time, it’s a family favorite.  I noticed when the price went to 2 for $7 (if you could find them on the shelf at all) and now it’s jumped again.

That’s a 25% price hike in six months.  Okay, chip dip is not a necessity, I could lower my standard of living to get by without it.  But it’s pretty good anecdotal evidence that the state of the economy is not what Progressives claim it is.  And this is the kind of evidence ordinary people pay attention to.  It’s going to be an issue for the election.  Democrats are going to need a LOT more fake ballots to maintain control.

I’ll know Democrats are truly in a panic when Senator Warren pivots from breaking up the Big Meat monopoly to the Big Snack monopoly.  Frito-Lay, your days are numbered.

Joe Doakes

Who doesn’t get greedy…

…for Creamy Spinach dip?

2022 will mark this blog‘s 20th anniversary.

I’m kind of excited!

But first let’s talk about the weekend.

Tonight – New Year’s Eve – my band “Elephant in the Room” is playing at the American Legion in Fridley. We will be starting at 8:30 PM, and ringing in the new year. The Legion has those cool edge of the metro food and drink prices, without actually being outside the metro, which is kind of cool. Hope you can make it out there.

Tomorrow on the show? I will be talking with Rebecca Brannon about her run in with the Hennepin county machine over her reporting on Sheriff Hutchinson‘s DUI.

And tomorrow night, we will be playing at Neisen‘s Sports Bar and Grill, in Savage. I love our bars, but Nissans has a stage that makes you feel kind of like a rockstar, and a sound system that makes us sound like one. No cover.

I hope we run into each other, literally or figuratively, during any or all of the above!

Prosecuting “straw buyers“ – people with clean criminal records who buy firearms and knowingly sell or give them to criminals – isn’t especially “sexy“. No County prosecutor ever got elected to the US Congress, governor, or the state legislature by prosecuting criminals girlfriends, grandmothers, or people running side hustles moving metal to thugs.

It’s gone so far as the US attorney covering Chicago saying, basically, he just doesn’t care.

And we see how that’s worked in Chicago, right?

Hennepin county attorney Mike Freeman has also made it very clear he doesn’t care about straw buyers enough to make it a priority. He clearly doesn’t think it’s much of a problem.

It’s a problem:

And the next Hennepin county attorney is going to be Ryan Winkler, who played a disproportionate role in making sure that state legislation about straw buyers never got heard in the house, and got ruled as non-germane when brought up as amendments by Republicans.

So no, the problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“SCIENCE! CNN finally admits cloth mask don’t stop Covid!”

The late stages of this pandemic have seen, and will see more, of what used to be as accepted as heresy by Big Karen quietly being proclaimed as gospel.

There’s been a steady stream: it’s not spread by surface contact; It’s spread by nontrivial contact in confined spaces; acquired immunity works.

And masks might be perfectly adequate personal infection control under the right circumstances, but they are a useless public health measure.

And I will be in particular gratified to see cloth masks recognized as better landfill than infection control.

Earlier this week, we noted that an anonymous Hennepin county official had ordered an investigation of journalist Rebecca Brannon, who is just about the only reporter in the Twin Cities to be actively asking questions about the incident a few weeks back with sheriff Hutchinson..

Thanks to the Medina Police Department, they are apparently no longer anonymous:

So why did the Medina police decide to give up the identity of the Hennepin county official who had brought the cops sniffing after Brannon and, oddly, her parents?

Maybe somebody realizes there’s a first amendment lawsuit just waiting to happen here, and ashes need to be covered?

Reminder: I will be talking with Brannon this Saturday at 2 o’clock on the Northern Alliance.

So – will the Twin Cities main stream media, stenographers though they largely are, be shamed into actually covering the story, finally?

If you get your car jacked in Hennepin County?

The carjackers themselves will likely do less time than your vehicle.

The 1980s was the golden age of teensploitation movies; the Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink, Saint Elmo’s Fire, Risky Business, Weird Science, and many, many less memorable ones.

For me, maybe two of them have held up over time; Better Off Dead and Adventures in Babysitting.

And now, 34 years later, Elisabeth Shue talks about the making of the movie.

Your turn, John Cusack.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senator Elizabeth Warren supports court-packing. That’s really embarrassing for a Harvard law professor. Even a night-school wonder like me, knows better.

The problem with the Supreme Court is not that it’s too small. The court is too large now, to get things done expeditiously and correctly: too many egos to sooth, too many agendas to accommodate, too many compromises requiring hair-splitting decisions.

The problem is not that the court is full of justices eager to overturn precedent. If a case was wrongly decided, it should be overturned in the interest of justice.

The problem is not that the court veers away from widely held public opinion. Pandering to public opinion is Congress’ job. And it’s mostly on volatile social issues where the Court has caused the worst problems.

The problem is Marbury v. Madison, a case decided fewer than 20 years after the Constitution was adopted. That’s the case in which the Supreme Court gave itself the power to throw out legislation the Court felt was incompatible with the Constitution. The court’s power-grab flatly contradicts the entire premise of a “enumerated powers” Constitution. That decision set up the Court to make historically and horrifically bad law: Dred Scott (struck down the Missouri Compromise which allowed slavery to spread to more states), Plessy v. Fergussn (upheld racial segregation); Korematsu (upheld concentration camps for American citizens); Roe v. Wade (upheld abortion on demand); Obergefell v. Hodges (struck down gay marriage laws nationwide).

Adding more justices to a run-away court won’t rein it in from ruling on social issues. A constitutional amendment is required. And if that doesn’t curb their enthusiasm, perhaps removal from office? A Harvard law professor should understand that.

Joe Doakes

There is limited evidence that Warren understands anything but getting and holding power.

Sheriff Dave Hutchinson, to Fox9’s Mary McGuire:

Well, let’s get that reflected in statute, pronto! Everyone does it!

(Maybe he meant “everyone at the Sheriff’s Association meeting? We’ll never know – all cameras were reportedly barred. What happens near Alexandria stays near Alexandria).

And when they do, and a Henco sheriff’s deputy pulls them over and they come in with a .17 (which was what the .13 from his urine test likely was at the time of the accident), they don’t get a whiffleball home booking with not one second spent in a jail cell.

And if a Minnesotan with a carry permit is busted with over .04, they’re at very serious risk of losing their carry permit.

What happens to cops who lose their right to carry?

I’d love to ask the sheriff this question. I’m gonna guess I don’t get any chance to.

By the way – I’ll be talking with Rebecca Brannon on the show this Saturday about this story, including the blowback she’s gotten from local cops.

Five journalistic profiles in courage.

Where “courage” = not very couragfeous

Watching Minnesota media step up to serve as a loyal PR firm for Keith Ellison, Dave Hutchinson, Ilhan Omar and Ryan Winker, it’s easy to see they’re learning from the greats.

This nation has two choices, if we’re to remain a nation (or, potentially, a viable society).

One of them – by far the most radical and traumatic – is secession; from individual states, and maybe from the US itself.

(And no – that wasn’t “settled in 1865” any more than it was settled in 1776. It’s only “illegal” when the secedees have the will to bring the secessionists to heel).

Big media is noting one, fairly welll established, such movement, in greater Oregon:

In the summer of 2015, a chimney sweep in Elgin, Oregon, redrew the map of the American West. “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific Ocean,” Grant Darrow wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper. Rural Oregon, he insisted, should break its ties with the urbanites of Portland and liberals of Salem, and join Idaho. “The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable,” he argued. “Rural Oregonians in general and Eastern Oregonians in particular are growing increasingly dismayed by the manner in which Oregon’s Legislature and Oregon’s urban dwellers have marginalized their values, demonized their lifestyle, villainized their resource-based livelihoods, and classified them as second-class citizens at best.”

…

In the half decade or so since Darrow’s diatribe, a simple and outlandish idea, percolating in rural Oregon since the 1960s—what if we were just Idaho?—has grown into a grassroots secession movement. Last month, Harney County, in the high desert of eastern Oregon, became the state’s eighth to pass a nonbinding ballot measure supporting Darrow’s proposal. Move Oregon’s Border signs now dot the region’s empty highways, and Mike McCarter, a retired agricultural nurseryman and gun-club owner who runs a group pushing for the boundary reshuffle, travels the state in a bright-red trucker hat bearing the slogan. “We don’t care to move, because we’re tied to our land here,” he told me recently. “So why not just allow us to be governed by another state?” He mentioned a supporter so certain that her property will become part of Idaho that she already flies its state flag on her lawn. “We’re going to be Idaho,” she told him.

The movement has passed in nearly every county in which it’s gone to the ballot. As the article points out, it seems unlikely the Idaho legislature will accept the new border (which would drive Idaho’s western border to the Pacific – much less Oregon’s California-lite legislature full of unicorn-chasing feebs.

Let’s see – urban lotus-eaters, out of touch with and imposing their dystopian vision on the rest of the state, from a riot-torn city full of people who love central planning? Sounds familiar.

The second option – getting serious about Federalism, checks and balances, and enumerated, divided power, again – would be hypothetically simpler. And, sometimes, I think it would lead just as quickly to mass secession, as Big Left decided to hit the exits.

In the early days of the pandemic, an MIT scientist did what Americans have always done best; turned their ingenuity to solve a problem, fast, well and cheap.

She developed a fast, inexpensive Covid test – in an amasingly short time:

Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect coronavirus in 15 minutes and produce a red line on a little chemical strip. The factory where they were planning to make tests for dengue fever could quickly retool to produce at least 100,000 COVID-19 tests per week, she said, priced at less than $10 apiece, or cheaper at a higher scale

And then the FDA got involved:

In the months that followed, Bosch responded to repeated requests from FDA reviewers for data and studies. When the agency finally put out guidance that summer about the performance over-the-counter home tests needed to meet, officials required that such tests be nearly as sensitive as the lab tests used to definitively determine whether a patient has COVID-19.

That standard proved difficult to meet. Rapid tests are usually sensitive enough to detect viral antigens when someone has enough of them to be able to spread the disease. Such tests are not as good at picking up cases in either earlier or later stages of infection, when viral loads are lower.

Bosch’s tests missed the FDA’s high bar. It wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that much larger companies were able to design similar tests — relatively inexpensive, over-the-counter rapid tests — that the agency found acceptable.

“You could have antigen tests saving lives since the beginning of the pandemic,” said Bosch, sitting in her lab at MIT. “That’s the sad story.”

Sometimes it feels a little simplistic, chanting “government is what holds us back“, like some knee-jerk reductionist libertarian yahoo.

But it’s not really wrong.

Yesterday’s announcement about my escalating impatience with threadjackers might seem to fall hard on a small segment of this blog’s comment section. That perception is accurate – but appropriate.

Still, I’m nothing if not fair.

Here’s one for all the Democrats in the audience.

Please defend Brandon.

It’s your thread. Go to it.

…that Covid provides a disturbing proportion of our society with a reason to wake up in the morning; “enforcing the misery” gives their lives whatever meaning it has.

Which brings us to this:

First, kudos to the guy, who learned the important lesson: when a woman, no matter how wrong, no matter how impaired, no matter how depraved, attacks you, don’t hit back; your best bet is to hope for enough bruising (or, nowadays with video everywhere, clear video) to make your case in court.

Which I hope the guy does – winning everything this vile shrew owns or will ever own.

Back on point: as the emergency winds down, expect more of this, as Karens, bereft of their purpose and. meaning, lash out.

And – given that most “wars of religion” are really wars over other longstanding fault lines that happen to have a veneer of religious difference slapped on, what other fault lines will the pandemic adhere to?

We’ve got race, class, region, economics…?

Rebecca Brannon may be the best reporter in the Twin Cities.

Not “journalist” – reporter. Someone who goes out and gets the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story. Comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, as Nick Coleman used to say (but never do).

Speaking of saying but never doing reporting? The Twin Cities mainstream media is doing its usual job; serving as a PR firm for DFL officials:

This is “journalism” with all the heft of a Beanie Baby. Wonder if that interview came with a hot towel?

Brannon, on the other hand, is afflicting the politically comfortable, and someone doesn’t seem to like it:

Trying to intimidate reporters?

Why, isn’t that what authoritarian states do? What’s the term – we heard it all the time during the Trump administration, from reporters big and small…

“Chilling Effect on reporting and transparency?” (Whatever did happen to that term, anyway)?

Aren’t there groups of “journalists” dedicated to keeping the press free? Like the “Society of Professional Journalists of Minnesota?”

Oof. Not a whole lot.

Read Brannon’s whole thread, by the way.

In almost two decades of running this blog, I have tried to keep a hands-off approach to the comment section. I do this because I believe the answer to bad speech is more better speech. This blog has one of the smartest comment sections anywhere, so I feel little need to intervene with stupid comments – you all are more than capable of handling that.

I can count the number of people I’ve actually banned from the comment section on one hand. The last was six years ago, and it was in large part due to constant threadjacking [1].

Anyway – we’re gonna try something new.

Threadjack Policy

If you look up on the top menu, there’s a “Contact me / Report Threadjacking” item. It’s actually been there for years, but didn’t really work very well.

I fixed it over the weekend.

Anyway – if you want to complain about a threadjack, leave a note there. Please include the link or title for the post, and explain what you think the threadjack was.

My decisions will be, of course, final. I’ll do my best to explain my rationale in the related comment section, but that’s not a promise.

People who continue to jack threads? There’ll be consequences.

People who abuse the reporting process? Well, you’re all adults. I don’t think I need to get redundant, here.

[1]. Although in the case of Dog Gone, it was even more due to the fact that she took an unconscionable liberty with the fact that she knew my family, socially, decades ago, and decided to go full bore stupid.

Never go full bore stupid.

It seems the relentless watchdogs of government in the Twin Cities media are at loggerheads with the government over the Hutchinson case:

You might say that I’m a dreamer – but I remember news media that’d take government to court to get to the bottom of a story like this.

Provided they’re not a DFLer, I guess.

UPDATE: It gets worse. More at noon.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals claim Minnesota hospitals are being overwhelmed with Covid patients.  I have questions about that.

This Minnesota Department of Health chart says we only have about 1,000 total ICU beds in the state.  What happened to the 3,000 Governor Walz said we had available on 72 hours’ notice, when he extended the lockdown last Spring?  That same chart shows we almost always have 1,000 ICU beds in use and presently only 366 of the ICU beds are being used by Covid patients.  Who’s using all the other ICU beds and if we need more ICU beds, why don’t we ramp up more ICU beds to handle all the patients?

Curiously, look at the map of Minnesota located below the chart.  It shows “Staffed ICU beds.”  Why “Staffed” and not just “Beds?”  Because “ICU bed” isn’t a physical thing.  The bed itself has no therapeutic properties.  “ICU bed” is a billing code that entitles the hospital to higher reimbursement because the patient in an ICU bed is being attended by staff qualified to monitor the patient using special equipment such as a heart monitor or ventilator.  That’s why we can set up ICU beds in tents or on a ship – it’s not about the beds, it’s about the staff and ancillary equipment. 

The chart says “Staffed” because you can’t bill it as an “ICU Bed” if you don’t have enough staff.  And why aren’t there enough staff?  What happened to all the caregivers?  Burnout?  Generous unemployment benefits? 

Ask it quietly: vaccine mandates?  But don’t expect an answer.  Liberals don’t want to talk about that.

Joe Doakes

When you have to be a lawyer to decipher the law, that’s annoying.

When you have to be a lawyer to decipher the news, that’s a bureaucracy run amok.

I’ve always tried to keep a fairly hands off approach to my comment section.

I mean, it took me five years of escalating warnings to ditch the, in retrospect, utterly useless Dog Gone. That’s how hands off I try to keep things.

I’ve always figured that anyone who is still reading blogs is probably at least nominally an adult.

In recent weeks, unfortunately, that has yet again proving to be the case.

So I’m going to take this moment of Christmas cheer to pass the word; in the new year, I will be curb-stomping thread jacking without mercy.

More details to come.

Merry Christmas, and I’ve had enough.

It’s been a busy month, and I am fried to a fine sheen.So I believe I am going to take the rest of this week, and weekend, off from riding.

(UPDATE: And, of course, from writing).

I hope you all have a happy, blessed Christmas season, and I will see you all again on Monday!

A friend of the blog emails:

The Waukesha parade killer?

The MSP Terminal 2 brawlers?

The Miami high rise collapse?

Americans left in Afghanistan?

Alec Baldwin gun accident on the movie set?

And the list goes on…

Does the media have the short attention span or is it us?

(Redacted)

Not to mention Andrew Cuomo’s concurrent slaughter of senior citizens and sex crimes, Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her brother and her spouses gravy train from her campaign funds, Umbrella Man, Jacob Frey siccing “Anti”-Fa on Trump supporters, Keith Ellison’s domestic abuse allegations, hundreds of millions of dollars defrauded from Minnesota health and human services on the DFL‘s watch, Mark Dayton‘s disappearance from the office for months at a time…

Yeah, it’s got to be us citizens.