Keith Ellison has wielded in effect unlimited power for this past year, under Governor Klink’s emergency powers. Ellison has in effect been the Sammy Gravano to Tim Walz’s John Gotti – the muscle of the enterprise, making examples of business who didn’t knuckle under on command.

I mused at one point or another over this past year that it was inevitable that Ellison would turn out to have been a firebrand for liberty, if Republican were ever try try to abuse emergency power.

Was I right?

They don’t call it “Berg’s Seventh Law” for nothing.

“There is absolutely nothing more important than safeguarding the liberty of the people we are charged to represent,” Ellison said before the Minnesota Legislature when he was a state representative in 2005. This statement came during a debate about what powers the government should enjoy during times of emergency. At that time, Republican Tim Pawlenty was Minnesota’s governor.

“There should be a sunset in this bill [to provide emergency powers], we should be forced to look at this stuff on a regular basis. We should have to come back to see what works and what doesn’t and review this stuff … we are in an evolving situation as it relates to what we know,” he said.

“I hope we put ourselves in a position where we have to look at this again,” then-representative Ellison concluded. “There absolutely should be a sunset provision in here, and we’ve got to look at this thing on a regular basis, and tweak it and work it and massage it until it fits with our constitutionally-mandated duty.”

What a difference a couple of years of absolute power makes, huh?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Dear Google:
Every time you push out an update for my Chromebook, you default some (but not all) of my settings.  I have certain pages at 125% view for a reason.  Don’t change it. 
Yes, I know your programmers want to show off their clever innovations.  That’s the Microsoft model.  “See, we moved the button you need from the ribbon to a pull-down menu, isn’t that handy?”  No.  I had it there for a reason.  Don’t change it.
And yes, I’m sure it is easier for you if everyone does everything the same.  That’s the Apple model:  “We know this isn’t what you wanted but we’re so smart we know what you should want, so that’s what you’re getting.”   No. I chose Chrome for a reason. Don’t be Apple.  Leave my s*** alone. 
Joe Doakes

As a “User Experience Architect”, the manner of some companies – I’m looking at you, Apple – can only be described as “arrogant”.

SCENE: A conference room at “Minnesotans for All Progressive Causes” – a non-profit group financed by progressives with deep pockets – for the weekly message coordination meeting.

MyLyssa Silberman, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, waits in the conference room along with Betty Rae Torstengaardsen, senior staff writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, sit, along with Mesme PHURPHY, elite objective political reporter from WCCO-TV They nervously check their watches.

Eventually, Gretel Stromberg Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, and Inge “Lucky” Carroll, Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, enter the room.

CARROLL: (Looks at Silberman and Torstengaardsen and Phurphy, clears throat).

SILBERMAN, PHURPHY AND TORSTENGAARDSEN: (quickly rise from their seats)

STOMBERG: Be seated. (All sit, with STROMBERG at the head of the table). Americans are rejecting the term “insurrection” to describe the January 6 riot. We need to come up with another term.

PHURPHY: How about ‘genocide’?

CARROLL: Love the energy, Mesme, but it might be a bit of an overreach.

TORSTENGAARDSEN: I mean, ‘riot’ pretty much sums it up.

(STROMBERG and CARROLL cough nervously).

TORSTENGAARDSEN: Er…never mind.

SILBERMAN: ‘Coup’ usually implies the elites seizing control. ‘Insurrection’ implies a sustained, military campaign, like the Viet Cong or the IRA.

STROMBERG: I’ll go with “Putsch“.

(The three “journalists” sit, somewhat agape. Finally, SILBERMAN speaks)

SILBERMAN: So – a term that, outside a very thin film of political science and history academics, refers in American English solely to Hitler’s abortive 1922 Munich coup attempt?

(The three “journalists” look at each other)

PHURPHY: Works for me.

TORSTENGAARDSEN: Yep.

SILBERMAN: I hear and obey.

STROMBERG: (abruptly rising) Make it so. (Leaves the room with CARROLL).

And SCENE

A friend of the blog emails re what’s going on in Uptown Minneapolis:

If the local media doesn’t report on what’s happening does that mean it doesn’t exist?

As far as political life and the institutional history of Minneapolis at this point in history observed by our political class?

Rhetorical question, right?

Urban Progressive Privilege means never having to feel awkward about the devastation your policies inevitably lead to.

Never forget this:

And when your “progressive” friends and relatives bleat “what about January 6?”

There was never any chance that riot, stupid and despicable as it was, was going to damage, or even significantly interrupt, our democratic process. None.

On the other hand, dismantling trust in our institutions – the legal system, in this case?

That could very well do the treuck, over time.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Setting off a nuclear bomb does immediate damage, but also blasts radioactive dust into the atmosphere which will eventually settle out of the air causing deaths from radiation poisoning.  The death toll from fall-out can be far greater than the death toll from the blast itself.
Governor Walz’ Executive Orders set off a nuclear bomb on Minnesota last Spring.  The immediate blast destroyed civil liberties – placed the entire state under house arrest, banned religion, speech, assembly, and ordinary employment for all except favored groups – but the fall-out damage has yet to be fully realized. 
A family member fell over July 4th weekend, striking her head.  The Urgency Room doctors in Eagan wanted her admitted to a hospital for observation but there were no rooms available at Regions, United or St. John’s in Maplewood.  She ended up at Woodwinds in Woodbury.  She received excellent treatment and is making a fine recovery but the point is beds.  There are no hospital beds.
It’s not Covid.  It’s fall-out from Covid. Walz banned non-emergency medical treatments to keep hospital beds open for the giant surge of Covid cases which were confidently predicted by the U of M computer model.  Hospitals lost millions of dollars every day as beds sat empty. Marginally profitable facilities were closed to save money.  When Bethesda and St. Joseph’s closed in St. Paul, they took 500 beds off the inventory.  Remember our talk about Second Order effects?  This is one of them.  Prohibit hospitals from making money treating non-Covid patients, hospitals close their doors, all patients go untreated. 
We’re going to see more fall-out.  Unemployment remains high because it’s just as profitable to sit home as go to work.  Evictions and foreclosures are halted now but will explode when the moratorium is lifted, adding to the homeless problem.  Business bankruptcies are already on the rise. 
Was it really worth all this so Democrats could ‘fortify’ the election to get rid of the Bad Orange Man? 
Joe Doakes

“Government is the least effective possible way to manage scarce resources”
— Kevin Williamson

If this past year, especially in re healthcare, hasn’t emphasized this to you, then I question whether any emphasis will ever work.

Justices Alito and Gorsuch pimp-slaps the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) with a rolled-up copy of the First Amendment.

FIllmore County, with the MPCA at their backs, wanted to force a group of Amish families in Fillmore County to either put in septic tanks or be evicted from their homes:

Fillmore County in 2013 started requiring homes to have modern septic systems to dispose of “gray water” from dishwashing, laundry and such. The Amish sought an exemption, saying their religion prohibits that technology. They offered instead to use earthen basins filled with wood chips to filter water as it drains, which are allowed in some states including Montana and Wyoming. But the county went as far as seeking a court order to force 23 families from their homes if they refused to comply, Gorsuch wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the Minnesota courts “plainly misinterpreted and misapplied” the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which was also at issue in the Philadelphia case.

The act “prohibits governments from infringing sincerely held religious beliefs and practices except as a last resort,” Gorsuch wrote, urging the Minnesota court and local authorities to swiftly resolve the dispute.

“In this country, neither the Amish nor anyone else should have to choose between their farms and their faith,” he said.

Trump’s judicial legacy is looking more and more to far outweigh all stress he caused.

Rasmussen Poll shows Americans prefer a “Freedom and Equality” candidate to a “Social Justice and Equity” candidate, 54-29 .

Anyone but me worried that the GOP can actually close the circle on that message?

The National Education Association – the organization that actually does ruthlessly wield the money and influence Big Left attributes to the NRA – is tripling down on “social and economic justice” and Critical Race Theory.

You can read the article (about the NEA’s attempts to silence opposition and extend the social justice curricula) at your leisure.

My big question is one that we really need voters to be asking Republican candidates, especially in Minnesota. School choice, we’re seeing, is a winning issue; we see this in the “Tea Party”-like uprisings of parents all over the country against CRT.

And yet – will Minnesota Republican candidates ever come into the city to try to make their cases to charter school parents – overwhelmingly black, Latino, Asian or immigrant? The Democrats and the Teachers Union, pardon the redundancy – and even some of their proxy warriors want to kill charter schools and all meaningful school choice.

And yet you can count on zero fingers the number of GOP gubernatorial, Senate or Consitutitonal Office candidates who’ve even shown up to try to contest the battlefield.

Why does the Minnesota GOP need to be, and stay, so stupid?

Remember all of that “Minneapolis is re-opening“ chatter a few weeks back?

About that…:

Let’s look back at this post in about a year. I’m betting on “no”.

There was little visibility in either side’s trenches in Amiens at 4:20am on August 8th, 1918.  Between the last of the night sky and a thick fog that rolled into the battlefield in northern France, spotting any movement was at a premium.  Despite the distance between the trenches being larger than usual at nearly 500 yards (usually trenches were only 50 to 250 yards apart), the Germans felt they had a good understanding of the disposition of the British forces across from them.  While elsewhere on the newly established lines of the Western Front the Germans were either fortifying or retreating to more defensible positions following their Spring Offensive, at Amiens German troops sat largely in place.  Other than increased aerial bombing in the area, the Germans believed their intelligence that the Allies would counterattack elsewhere.  They had even held a raid that penetrated 800 yards into the Allied trenches just days earlier and had seen no evidence of an Allied build-up.

The crashing weight of 32 divisions of British, Canadian, Australian, French and American troops utterly broke the German line that morning.  Erich Ludendorff would call August 8th, 1918 “the black day of the German Army” and the Allies would eventually know the attack as the start of the “100 Days Offensive” – the last 100 days of the Great War.

British soldiers ride a tank at Amiens.  The battle saw the successful deployment of hundreds of tanks

As July of 1918 began to wind down, the positions of both the German and Allied armies were becoming clear.

German numerical superiority had vanished, with the Germans holding 207 divisions in France and Belgium and the Allies having 203 divisions to meet them.  Worse for Germany, an increasing number of these Allied divisions were Americans, meaning those divisions were typically twice as large as in any European army.  In terms of pure manpower, Germany was probably now in the minority in the West.  The German High Command estimated that they’d need at least 200,000 new soldiers a month just to make good on the rate of loss they were experiencing in France.  The next annual class of 18 year-old draftees was only 300,000 in total, and perhaps only 70,000 wounded German soldiers would be physically able to return to duty.  Germany was literally bleeding to death.  Read the rest of this entry »

…who read this bit, by race pimp and grifter Robin DiAngelo…”

Conclusion: “We must continuously educate ourselves through books, films, discussions, conferences, community groups, workbooks, and activism.” And she knows just the provider to help!

And thought about Hunter S. Thompson’s Samoan lawyer from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

It’s been 12 years since we last updated “The DFL Dictionary” – the official guide to translating from “leftist” to English.

And in today’s politics, that’s a couple of eternities, pureed to a fine sheen.

Looking back at the Second Edition, last updated in 2009, it almost looks like a trip back to a more innocent time, doesn’t it? Like an archaeological artifact when it seems like the languages were just a difference in argot, rather than rapidly diverging dialects of English?

It’s high time for an update.

I’ve got my suggestions. I welcome yours in the comments.

My Proposed Additions

Cancel Culture: It doesn’t exist, and never existed. And if you suggest otherwise, a mob will come after you, your employer and your family, as a consequence for saying things that aren’t and were never true.

Gender: (Noun) A social construct that is simultaneously dispositive on Intersectional matters, and doesn’t exist.

Hate: (noun). Any political thought that isn’t covered in the Democratic platform at the appropriate level of government.

Orwell, George: A British author who, despite his decades of activism on the left, and his own admissions, really wrote 1984 and Animal Farm about Republicans. Not leftists. Nosireebob.

Privilege: A set of class entitlements that one invokes in an argument against someone else to pre-empt them doing the same with your own class entitlements.

Racism: Systemic power. Not classism – no way, no how. And it has nothing to do with hating someone for having a different ethnicity.

Woke: The acceptable substitute for critical thought.

Need to hear someone not dragging on America, on this anniversary of the beginning of the American experience?

Well, here you go:

I am the product of the American Dream.

There was a time when that notion wasn’t soaked in cynicism and meant something to people. It must have meant something to my father, who left a budding career as an oral surgeon in the Dominican Republic and, rather than start dental school all over again, quickly got a technician’s license here so he could support us. It must have also meant something to my mother, who left the only home she’d ever known to emigrate to New York City, where she would give birth to me: their first-generation American son, born the day my father secured his visa to join us for good.

I was an infant when we lived in someone’s attic and my parents worked to make ends meet. I was two when we moved into a New York City apartment and my father ran a dental laboratory out of the spare bedroom. I was five when he opened his business in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. And I was seven when we moved into a house in a New Jersey suburb, where we would enjoy a quiet street, a backyard pool, and endless possibility. Over the next twenty years, my father’s business thrived. My mother became a schoolteacher with a master’s in bilingual education. My siblings and I lived comfortable lives, privileged enough to entertain creative pursuits without worry. Things were far from perfect, but on just about anybody’s scorecard, my parents had won.

Through all of this, neither of them ever spoke a word about the American Dream, but they didn’t have to; they lived it with every move they made. Despite the struggle and the risk, they chose to try their luck because they believed in the possibility of building something better—and they succeeded.

I’m living proof of that.

And that’s just the introduction.

All is not lost.

Here’s the article on how narcissists and sociopaths dominate their families and social circles – and, let’s be honest, societies.

Michael Totten’s piece on the decline and fall of Portland.

Angus Fox’s series, “When Sons become Daughters“, on Quillette. It’s a seven part read, and not always easy, but very worth it.

Also – Genspect is amplifying the voices of parents of gender-questioning children against the bullying and gaslighting of modern society.

Hope you all have a happy and blessed weekend – and that you can help tell someone what the day really means, if you’re so inclined.

Mr D, First Ringer and I will be off today and Monday [1] enjoying a long weekend.

But we’ll get back in the saddle bright and early next week.

[1] Actually, I have no idea what the guys will or won’t write over the next couple days – for all I know, Ringer will actually finish that tome about Italians in Abyssynia – but I for one am taking a long weekend, and I hope you all can as well.

Bill Cosby is out of jail:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the indecent assault conviction of Bill Cosby on Wednesday and ordered his release from prison after finding that he was denied protection against self-incrimination.

The court said that a prosecutor’s decision not to charge Cosby, 83, in an earlier case opened the door for him to speak freely in a lawsuit against him, thinking he would not incriminate himself criminally. A second prosecutor later used the lawsuit testimony in a criminal trial, and that testimony was key in his conviction years later.

Cosby was convicted on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault in 2018 of drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004, and was serving a three- to 10-year sentence. He has served nearly three years of the sentence.

The state Supreme Court said Cosby cannot be retried on the same charges.

Let’s be clear from the outset — I hold no brief for Bill Cosby. Based on the available evidence, he’s a flat-out monster and richly deserved punishment for his misdeeds. I do hold a brief for due process, however, and there’s no question his prosecution was a violation of his rights. The right against self-incrimination is of paramount importance. All things being equal, I would rather not see Bill Cosby’s face in the future, once we get past this round of media attention.

So yeah, Bill Cosby as he is now carries little value, but what about Bill Cosby as he once was? He was one of the best comedians of the previous century, arriving on the scene around 1960, the same time as Bob Newhart (beloved), Jonathan Winters (much missed), Don Rickles (“problematic”), and Woody Allen (reviled, mostly on merit). Cosby first became famous for his “Noah” bit, which is still hilarious nearly 60 years on:

God: (standing on a chair behind Noah, he rings a bell once) NOAH.

Noah: (Looks up) Is someone calling me? (Shrugs and goes back to his work)

God: (Ding) NOAH!!

Noah: Who is that?

God: It’s the Lord, Noah.

Noah: Right … Where are ya? What do ya want? I’ve been good.

God: I want you to build an ark.

Noah: Right … What’s an ark?

God: Get some wood and build it 300 cubits by 80 cubits by 40 cubits.

Noah: Right … What’s a cubit?

I wouldn’t want to see Noah’s Menard’s bill — that much is certain.

Between the Noah bit, his Fat Albert routines, and the decade-long kids show based on those routines that was a staple of my childhood, Cosby was ubiquitous even before his 1980s era sitcom ruled the airwaves. He was America’s Dad. It was all a lie, yes — he is also a sexual predator and a hypocrite of the first order, but he was a wonderful interpreter of the human condition. What do we do with useful monsters? It’s a conversation worth having.

John Lott talks about the hoax “online graduation” a gun control group produced.

The extraordinarily well-funded group that put on the hoax claims no edits were made – but they refuse to release the original video. Further proof, were any needed, that the typical Democrat voters is terminally gullible and incapable of critical thought.

Also proof that, when you are a conservative, you always record your own media and public appearances, so that when, not if, leftists try to yank you out of context, you can stuff it down their yappy little throats sideways.

(And if they balk at letting you record the session yourself – as “legitimate” media most often will? Walk away).

Democrats, especially their “progressive” wing, have for years claimed to be the party of the worker, the little guy/gal, the underdog.

This is posited, at least by the class that chants the chanting points, as in contrast to the GOP, the “party of big business”.

And what does Berg’s Seventh Law tell us about everything Democrats say about their contrast with Republicans?

That’s right – it’s covering for their own stances:

No one is paying much attention, but Washington is building up a vast new multitrillion-dollar welfare class: corporate America.

Deep inside President Joe Biden’s budget are hundreds of billions of dollars of loans, grants and loan guarantees for corporate America. This Aid to Dependent Corporations is most prevalent in the area of renewable energy. Despite more than $100 billion already doled out to wind and solar companies over the past 30 years, the Biden plan would enrich often-very wealthy investors in solar and wind plants with another $100 to $200 billion in the president’s green energy scheme.

Forty years after Ronald Reagan, the old lefty saw “the real welfare queens are the CEOs” is finally true.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Roe v. Wade, 1973 the Supreme Court case which legalized abortion, was wrongly decided.  The Court failed to include a necessary party in the case – the unborn child – and that failure renders the decision unconstitutional and unjust.

The Fourth Amendment say no person shall be deprived of liberty or property without due process.  Due process consists of notice of the intended action and an opportunity to be heard by a neutral decider.  Originally binding only on the federal government, due process rights were incorporated against the states by the 14th Amendment.

In Roe, the court was asked to declare that the right of the mother to end her unborn child’s life was superior to the right of the government to save that child’s life.  The Supreme Court agreed.  No lawyer appeared to argue for the rights of the unborn child.  No Guardian Ad Litem was heard.  The Court did not decide where on that spectrum the rights of the unborn child would fall. The Court held the mother could deprive the child of life, at whim.

Without explicitly saying so, the Court decided the unborn child was not a necessary party to the case because the unborn child was not a ‘person’ in the eyes of the law; therefore, the unborn child had no rights which could have been affected by the outcome of the case.  Well, but what else could the Court have done?  Either a person has rights, or they don’t.

Not so.  A person convicted of a crime loses the right to liberty when confined in prison, but not the right to life which the Warden.  A person suffering from mental disability may lose the right to control her own money because the Conservator manages it for her, but she might retain the right to vote or get married.  A minor child lacks the legal capacity to enter into contracts but is entitled to life, liberty, support, protection, and education. The Court could have determined an unborn child was a ‘person’ with diminished rights like any of those other ‘persons.’

Instead, the Court determined an unborn child has the same legal status as a Negro slave in The Old South.  The slave’s owner can kill the slave at whim.  The mother of the unborn child can, too.

We abolished slavery because it was unjust.  We should abolish abortion-on-demand on the same basis.

Joe Doakes

It’ll bve interesting to see what cases come to the SCOTUS on the subject in the next decade or so.

Governor Walz’s emergency powers ended last night.

Turns out that to the DFL it was all a bone to be thrown over budget money.

“Our agreement with our federal partners to extend [food assistancce] benefits for Minnesotans, coupled with the thoughtful plan outlined in the House Democrats’ amendment to wind down the emergency response in state government, means that we can close this chapter of our history and celebrate the brighter days ahead,” Walz said in a statement late Tuesday.

Anyone but me having a hard time buying the notion that the Governor moved his plan up a month, on a day’s notice, over some bureaucratic tittle-jotting at the USDA?

My guess – and it is a guess – is that the DFL is starting to see that Covid is eating political capital they can’t waste as they try to get ahead of the urban crime problem they’ve created.

The NYTimes tweet re the recent cheating scandal at Dartmouth Medical School:

So, the school taking radical and dubiously ethical means to root out cheating at a medical school is “sowing mistrust”.

One guess as to where else “trust” is going to be a little dodgy…?

MInneapolis City Councilor Andrea Jenkins, presumably feeling herself swaddled in Urban Progressive Privilege and Intersectional Armor, went to a demonstration.

And was promptly out-lefted:

“BLM” blocked her car, demanding she sign a list of their demands:

Which, naturally, happened.

Let’s assume for a moment that this whole spiel isn’t staged, to give Jenkins’a whiff of the intersectional activist’s most important commodity, victimhood – and the fact that “BLM” put a dorky white kid in front of the car, allowing Jenkins to bellow about “white suprmacy” just loudly enough for the camera to pick it up, lends at least casual credence to the theory…

…and the more I think about it, the more I think “staged”.

But let’s pump the brakes. What if it was legitimate and organic?

Remember – if anyone replaces the clown car that is running Minneapolis – Frey, Jenkins, Cunningham, Alondra Cano, Jeremiah Ellison – it’s going to be someone to their left.

“The Moth Radio Hour” – a public radio production featuring the modern version of “storytelling” – is an often-insufferable bit of radio, featuring stories by people who are just not especially compelling. And yes, I”m stereotyping very broadly here, but prove me wrong.

No – I’ll prove myself wrong. This story – by one Victor Levenstein, who was 94 when he was recorded for the program – told the story of his arrest and interrogation by the KGB in 1944, before a New York audience…

…which, one must imagine, is largely composed of people who unironically think The Right is the “side” in modern politics who’d bring that sort of thing back.