President Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial.

Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine,
Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of
Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined every
single Democrat in voting guilty.

No word on whether Democrats and turncoat RINOs will commence a third
impeachment attempt against the man who left office January 20th, or
whether they will instead seek to impeach a different Republican former
President such as Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover or
Abraham Lincoln.

Joe Doakes

Will the Dems try for three?

Depends on:

a) How badly Biden continues to bungle Covid, and

b) How quickly the Ted Cruz deflection peters out.

“People tell me ‘I see what’s happening, and I”m so afraid’. And I tell them ‘you should feel more afraid that they’re making yiou feel afraid'”.

Get the truth about Gina Carano, because God knows the media won’t give it to you.

It’s from Sunday’s Ben Shapiro podcast. And while Carano isn’t a highly polished radio guest, her story – then and now – is utterly fascinating.

Big Left has been ideologically cleansing academia for decades. They’ve largely consolidating their control of the educational-industrial complex. They’re consolidating Hollywood and Big Tech now. Along with that, they – and a Big Sort – are doing the same with major metro areas.

And conservatives have in many cases obliged by moving on to greener/redder pastures.

But just as Eden Prairie is following Edina into the moldy blue camp as conservatives concede the battlefield, the culture war is coming for you, wherever you are.

At some point, the good guys and gals have to draw their lines in the sand.

And to think people say the media has gone all soft now that there’s a Democrat in the White House.

Pish-tush.

Berg’s 21st Law is the governing statute:

Liberals insist their beliefs are the only acceptable beliefs and anybody who thinks differently is insane, their children should be taken away and sent to Re-education Camps, and the parents should be ‘cleansed’ from America.

Assume Liberals are not lying this time and actually go through with it.  If you knew that today was your last day of freedom before the authorities broke down your door to put you on the train heading Way Up North where you’ll spend a life sentence in a gulag counting the birches as a political prisoner, how would you spend your day?

I sat at my computer updating work instructions and form templates for the person who will replace me.  The work won’t go away, only I will go away.  But I’m leaving good notes and a clean desk instead of taking the day to goof off and leaving a mess for the new person. 

In the Bad Old Days, that’s what was known as ‘being a White Man about it.’  You made your bed.  You picked up your stuff.  You chopped wood for the next camper.  You returned the borrowed car full of gas, the lawn mower washed.  You told the grocery clerk when she undercharged you and paid the difference so her till would balance.  You did things that nobody else noticed and you wouldn’t have been punished for failing to do because . . . it was the right thing to do. 

Nowadays, of course, it’s hateful and racist and sexist to expect people to act like responsible adults, so they don’t; they burn police stations and occupy hotels and form communes called Autonomous Zones.  I’m not convinced the new way is better which is why I’ll be on the train, soon.  Best of luck to you all.  Spend your last days wisely.

Joe Doakes

The conventions that made Western Civilization – which is dependent not on skin color, but on a set of ideals commonly observed – is the enemy these days, and they don’t care what they have to do or who they have to step over to destroy them.

Whatever you do, don’t you dare suggest public schools have become leftist indoctrination factories:

According to whistleblower documents and a source within the school, a fifth-grade teacher at the inner-city William D. Kelley School designed a social studies curriculum to celebrate Davis, praising the “black communist” for her fight against “injustice and inequality.” As part of the lesson, the teacher asked students to “describe Davis’ early life,” reflect on her vision of social change, and “define communist”—presumably in favorable terms.

At the conclusion of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa and ancestral power, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.

Apologists may respond “this is an anomaly! Not all public schools try to get away with this kind of thing!”

No. Just the ones in districts so blue that there will be no consequences – serving both to socialize (heh heh) the concept with other teachers, and to lower the bar of what’s “acceptable” elsewhere; “Oh, fer gosh sakes, Edina doesn’t have them chant “Free Angela” and talk about black “ancestral power”. No, perish the thought. We just study why Angela Davis is a hero (omitting all context about her crimes and communism itself, naturally), and why “whiteness” is a social cancer. Totally different things!”

Remember – Berg’s 21st Law is pretty clear on this: “When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law”

Don’t be surprised.

Truth is a trigger, apparently.

A far-left progressive representative relates the “emotional toll” of having black female politicians’ “violent” rhetoric (if we’re using Trump’s rhetoric on January as the standard) in Trump’s defense:

“The defense council put a lot of videos out in their defense, playing clip after clip of Black women talking about fighting for a cause or an issue or a policy. It was not lost on me as so many of them were people of color, and women, Black women. Black women like myself who are sick and tired of being sick and tired for our children. Your children,” Plaskett said.

Earlier in the day on Friday, Trump’s defense attorneys spent a great deal of their closing arguments accusing Democrats of hypocrisy over their support of last summer’s protests for racial justice. In doing so, his team played video footage from the summer protests, zeroing in on the relatively rare instances of violence and looting that occurred during the demonstrations.

TL:dr – Orange Man Bad, for the children.

So either using the term “fight” is aggressive rhetoric, or it’s “incitement”. End of story.

Pick one.

Keep your triggers off my – our, Western Civilization’s – logic, laws and reasoning.

A Michigan ammo company vows not to sell ammunition to Biden voters…

…and puts its marketing where its mouth is:

“Are you really willing to walk away from a paying customer simply because they voted for Joe Biden?” the company asked rhetorically. “Yes, yes we are. We’re dead serious.”

“We don’t want your money, and you shouldn’t want us to have it because we’re going to use it to make more ammo, sell it to the citizenry, and do everything in our power to prevent Joe Biden’s administration from usurping the rights of Americans,” the company wrote.

Not just its marketing, but its sales portal:

As a way to weed out the unwanted customers, the company reportedly inserted a questionnaire into its purchasing process that asks whether prospective customers voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election. If they did, it’s no sale for them.

Some “progressive” companies led the way with partisan-based marketing after Trump’s election – Penzey’s very publicly told conservatives (not just Trump voters) to stop patronizing them (a request I could not comply with, as I’ve never shopped there before, either – which makes sense; I suspect their demographics, well-to-do white urbanites with lots of disposable income, overlaps with GOP voters only incidentally).

TL:dr – The good news: fighting cancel culture is a good thing, and I applaud Feniks.

The bad-ish news? Feniks is just as sold out of all stock as every other ammo shop.

This is interesting

Another stunning example of the ‘rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me’ attitude
which is fast becoming a Biden administration hallmark.

My question is: who paid the 10% to The Big Guy, for allowing this claim
to go forward instead of having the FBI arrest them for sedition? 
Haven’t tracked that down, yet.

Joe Doakes

I think we’re talking a four year freeze on all accountability for, well, most things.

All is proceeding exactly as Joel Kotkin predicted.

At least a decade and half ago, urbanist Kotkin predicted…the present. Even then, urban growth patterns were trending away from the core-city/bedroom suburb model of the 1950s-1980s; most real growth was occuring on the fringes of the cities, and in medium-sized cities at the periphery. Most immigration was to the suburbs, not the fabled tenements of now-unaffordable major coastal cities. Indeed, cities were returning to their historical roots; European cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, and even New York City and Boston, are mazes of smaller neighborhoods, built around settlement patterns, markets and industries (“Steinway”, in Queens, was a piano-building company town), rather than a general agglomeration of businesses.

Kotkin’s thesis – that eventually, today’s cities will become three concentric patterns:

1. An inner core of incredible wealth, as the 1% enjoys easy access to big-industry offices and core amenities.
2. A middle donut of intense poverty, a convenient place for Social Services to warehouse people on assistance.
3. An outer, exurban ring blending into the hinterlands, where most of the actual people and growth are happening.

The pandemic, and the explosive acceptance of remote white and pink-collar work, is accelerating this.

The whole piece is worth a read. This pullquote in particular grabbed me:

Referring to the internet as an “information superhighway” is retro in the most cringeworthy way. But here, the metaphor seems apt. Decades after the construction of the U.S. highway system allowed high-income families to move from downtowns to the distant suburbs, Zoom might do the same. Remote work could do to America’s residential geography in the 2020s what the highway did in the 1950s and ’60s: spread it out.

Today, the term supercommuting is often used to describe the punishment inflicted on lower-income workers who have to live far from their job because of the scarcity of affordable housing. But the remote-work revolution could spawn the rise of something a little different: the affluent supercommuter who chooses to move to a big exurban house with the expectation that she’ll make fewer, longer commutes to the office.

“Historically, people who work from home don’t commute less overall, because they just drive longer distances,” Autor told me, referring to a Federal Reserve study from 2019. One shouldn’t put too much stock in a survey of pre-pandemic behavior. But the logic of fewer-but-longer commutes should lead to small towns and suburbs experiencing the fastest price growth. And, lo and behold, that’s exactly the story the online rental data are already telling us.

I left rural America for a reason; there were things about urban life that could not be found out in the hinterland. And I’m in a career where it genuinely helps to be where the work is. Will either of those factors change when – if – this pandemic ever sunsets?

No idea.

The big winners so far are Zoom, and Joel Kotkin.

Word’s out that Rush Limbaugh has died of lung cancer. He was 70.

I never met Rush, but I certainly ran into a key part of his legacy, up front. I was 25, and had gotten riffed from my first talk radio gig, at KSTP-AM. I was down – but not out. I had what Don Vogel called the talk radio virus – once you start doing it, it’s so very, very hard to withdraw.

And so I went out on the talk radio job market. And I had some interest – stations in Raleigh, Cleveland, Orlando, New Bedford, the Bay Area, Fall River, Baton Rouge, suburban Chicago, and even New York City had some interest.

Then came Limbaugh.

And over the course of about a year, nearly every small-to-mid-sized talk station in the country that used to hire obstreporous 25 year olds to host graveyard, evening and afternoon talk shows…stopped. Why pay some kid 22-28K, when you could have Limbaugh for the price of eight ad slots an hour, AND record and repeat him in the evening, and maybe on graveyard as well?

So the market for what I wanted to do more than anything in the world pretty much disappeared.

Which isn’t to say that the talk radio market disappeared. From 1988 into the nineties, talk radio, mostly conservative talk, surged. The format went from something like 200 stations in the US in the mid-eighties to at one point close to 1000 on Limbaugh’s network alone, as ailing AM stations from coast to coast switched from country or oldies or polka to talk and started reeling in the profits. There was money in conservative talk! Today, while the shift from broadcast to digital has cut receipts all across the industry, conservative talk, along with some niches like sports, Spanish and of course Public radio are the only ones that have any financial upside at all.

It came as a shock to the media establishment – but even some of the people involved (or claiming to have been involved) in his success didn’t understand what made Rush blow up. In 1991, I interviewed for the program director job at KSTP. I got to the final round – me and one other guy. And one of the interviewers was a consultant, one of hundreds who claimed to have had some role in Rush’s ascendance. He asked me why I thought Rush had caught on so big. “He provided a voice to a lot of people who’d never had one in the media”, I responded. “No”, he said in that “you didn’t get the job” kind of tone, “it’s because he’s irreverant. Nobody cares about politics”. I didn’t get the gig – although the consultant later admitted he was completely wrong. I’ll take a partial win every time.

Because politics – especially giving voice to a vast, silent majority – was the first golden age of conservative talk, culminating with Rush playing a pivotal role in the 1994 Republican Revolution.

I spent those years listening to Rush from the outside, slowly putting that dream from my twenties in mothballs – but listening, carefully, to what made Rush, Rush.

It’s a cliche to say that Limbaugh invented conservative talk. He didn’t – Bob Grant, Joe Pyne and Morton Downey Junior were doing it as far back as the ’70s. But Limbaugh defined its new generation – brash, irreverant, fun, but combining keen knowledge with an unmatched ear for tone and nuance. Rush was a keen-eared entertainer – the entertainment always came with a dose of paleocon wisdom that stuck to your ribs. It’s a cliche to say he had many imitators but no equal – but it’s the truth.

I spent 12 years “in the cold”, in radio terms – I didn’t set foot in a studio during Rush’s glory days. But I listened. And to the extent I learned anything listening to Rush, banked away against the day I could get on the radio again (something I’d completely given up on by about 1995), it was this: have fun. To paraphrase Andrew Breitbart, political motivation is downstream of enjoying yourself – and people who enjoy what they’re doing, as they do great things they believe in, are unbeatable.

Of course, Limbaugh was a two-edged sword. He ushered in a business model that has centralized the money, and the talent – or, often, “talent”, in talk radio. After thirty years of Rush, Beck, Levin, Hannity, Dennis Prager, Laura Ingraham and other talk superstars eating up all the airtime, talk radio’s grapefruit-league and triple-A benches are sparse to none. The only “young” talkers who’ve been working their way up the system have been the ones that mined veins of material that the bigs didn’t cover (Phil Hendrie, TD Mischke), built local niches around the fringe of Rush’s empire (Bob Davis, Justice and Drew), stretched the format (a zillion Christian talkers) to…

…well, King, Brad and Me, who do it for the pure love of the game and a little extra change.

So I owe Rush a lot – for pushing me against my will to develop a different, broader, deeper, better life than I was aiming for as a 25 year old radio (I use this term advisedly and in its literal context) addict, and showing us all how it’s done.

Talent on loan from God, indeed.

The bad news: As I observed with Ann Bauer while filling in for Brad Carlson last week, lockdowns are killing kids – especially kids who are, like so many these days, predisposed to mental illness:

Millions of American kids are struggling, and their chances for long-term improved mental health is predicated on the notion that we will now prioritize their emotional well-being, which our society has tragically shown it has no intention of doing.

Our hope for raising an emotionally healthy and mentally stable generation is dissipating with every day kids are kept locked in their bedrooms and out of schools. Skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety are in no small part due to the fact that children feel neglected and forgotten, and they are not wrong to feel that way.

Our society has abandoned them and treated them as disposable. The damage caused by this abandonment is incalculable, and compounding every day we allow inertia, irrationality and the craven priorities of teachers unions to rule our decision-making.

The good news?

What, are you new around here? This is progressivism at work, operating through its wholly owned subsidiaries “Big Education” and “Big Karen”. Short of turning our culture around, there is none.

I recently suggested a new on-going feature, walking back the lies.  I have another item for the column.

The Best and Brightest people who sneered at Conservatives as ignorant, hateful racists for suggesting the debunked idea that a lab in Wuhan was the source of the virus and the Chinese were covering it up – are walking back the lie.  It seems  the virus may indeed have originated in Wuhan and the Chinese may indeed have covered it up. 

No apology of course.  No admission that Conservatives were right all along.  We don’t insist on that, don’t expect it, and would be astonished if it were forthcoming.

But somebody should remember and therefore the purpose of this ongoing feature.  We were right.  And they knew it. 

Joe Doakes

Series? Not a bad idea at all.

It’s verging on a Berg’s Law of “Fact-Checking” – something to the effect of “to the ‘fact-check’ caste, truth is directly correlated to “did a progressive say it”.

Thinking.

Policy is downstream of politics.

Politics is downstream from culture.

Culture is shaped, to a disturbing extent, by people who want to try to influence it.

And it’s been a cultural cliché for generation that television in its many forms has an overwhelming influence on society.

And as someone who spent way more time in Ramsey County family court, and dealing with culture’s assumptions about fathers and children, the subject of how media treats fatherhood has been of far more than casual interest to me for a long time.

I’ve observed since the early days of this blog that much of modern culture’s perception of fathers seems to be derived from Fred Flintstone (if you’re lucky – the cartoon rendering of Jackie Gleason was much preferable to the neutered George Jetson, albeit similar in every other way).

The good news – sociological reasarch [1] shows I’m right.

The bad news – Flintstone is a throwback to the “good old days”. Modern media, more and more, is treating fathers like incompetent, mock-worthy, if in the end lovable buffoons:

…we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.

Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.

At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.

Thing is, as more children are raised in single-parent housholds (a majority, in many communities), and given that the vast majority of those households are female-led, popular entertainment is going to have a disproportional role in shaping how children feel about what fathers are supposed to be.

I don’t watch a lot of current network TV, so it’s fairly academic to me at the moment.

But I’ve also noticed, again for over the past twenty-plus years, that the way fathers are portrayed in commercial is equally condescending [2] – but that there’s a pattern to this.

Remember – nothing in major media advertising, least of all on network or cable TV, is accidental. Every ad, down to the lowliest 10-second sweeper spot, is focus-grouped to a fine sheen before it goes near a broadcaster. The subtext of every ad is as carefully tuned as the messages themselves.

And I’ve noticed [3] that there’s a pattern:

• Spots aimed at products most commonly aimed at guys (the social group, as opposed to “men”, the sex), products like beer and athletic gear, tools, blue-collar workers’ tools, vehicles bought for work (as opposed to lifestyle accessories), tend to portray women (if at all) as improbably attractive, but not as the focus of the spot/s.
• Products aimed at women (by inference, women who lead or co-lead households, especially with children) are the ones that tend to show husbands as bumbling, dubiously competent, and very frequently not in their wives leagues, if you catch my drift.

Remembering that nothing in big-dollar advertising is accidental, what other conclusion is there than “Evidence tells advertisers that men see their women as ideal and attractive [which is sort of an evolutionary tautology], and women who spend money want to think that men – in general, and maybe their own – are hapless buffoons who’d be lying in their parents basements in a puddle of their own waste without them.”

Not sure that’s a great message for the young women or the young men of tomorrow.

[1] And yes, I now – sociology, like all soft sciences, is not a science. Soft science produces soft data, at best. And soft data is good enough for the point I’m making.

[2] Although somewhat less so if the fathers in the ads are black or Latino. And it seems that the fathers in mixed-race couples, who seem to make up a disproportionate number of couples in TV advertising these days, get portrayed pretty neutrally-to-favorably, although both of those observation are just that – impressions from a guy who doesn’t watch a whole lot of TV. Now, that would be an interesting study. And one ad that stuck out at me – the morning-TV spot for Hi-Vee supermarkets featuring the 1983 song “Our House” – indicates, albeit with a sample size of one, that even being a stay-at-home caretaker while the improbably gorgeous mom runs off to her office job doesn’t protect dad from that same level of condescension.

[3] Yep, anecdotally, not a controlled experiment bla bla bla.

It’s gotten to the point where hearing about any emotionally charged claim of abuse gets me thinking “deep breath, wait – the odds it’ll be a hoax are just about even, if not better”.

I mean, there’s a reason it’s not called “Berg’s 20th Suggestion“.

Keep it in mind, and you’re disappointed…well, pretty rarely, to be honest.

(Not gonna pullquote it – the whole thing is worth a read).

As the bad night that was the 2018 Mid-terms ground along, I pointed out something I believe to be a truism: that “progressive” overreach might be its own best limiting mechanism.

The downside (well, not the downside – one of many, indeed) is that we’re going to have to hope that’s the case, or that the opposition gets its act together, or some combination of the two. Because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Big Left is seeking both:

People need limits in their lives. Anyone who has ever seen a spoiled child knows that these children are deeply unhappy, miserably vicious, and extreme in their rages and demands. Now imagine taking that child and subjecting it to a lifetime of having its every want, need, or desire granted. You will quickly see that you’ve created a dangerous monster. Go through any list of worst rulers (this one for example), and you’ll see how damaging it is when people’s desires are always unopposed.

That’s where leftists are right now. In 2020, thanks to the Wuhan virus and BLM, they manipulated themselves into complete power and, having gained that power, they have lost their grip on sanity. Unless reality intervenes in a way leftists must address, nothing will stop their mad dash into a lunatic world, one in which “science means whatever I say it means,” the economy is no longer constrained by inexorable rules of supply and demand, race becomes the only metric by which to judge people (and whites and Jews are inherently evil), borders serve no purpose, etc.

Nations do not fare well when madmen are at the helm. And as a reminder, while Trump may have had an eccentric personal style, everything he did was within the rule of law, and the mainstream of American, Western, and human history. It was those who opposed him who had abandoned norms. Like the narcissist, who says that anyone who opposes his abuse is at fault for the resulting fights, the left used its media control to announce that anyone who challenged its anti-science, racist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian dictates was evil.

The whole thing is worth a read.

A federal judge has ruled that a law requiring a citizen to produce identification upon a police officer’s demand is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/191700.P.pdf

We have that law in Minnesota. This case is not from our district so it’s not controlling.  But it’s certainly interesting. 

Joe Doakes

Someone file a test case, already.

Every spousal abuser in history: “Yeah, sure, I hit you. But you provoked me – again. So you’re at least partly to blame. Maybe mostly. I mean, actions have consequences, baby…”

Big Left’s latest line – through one of its local mouthpieces, former Reprentative and Lt. Gov. Candidate and Urban Progressive Privilege poster child, Erin Maye Quade:

This statement ticks off nearly half of the traits one associates with someone with a serious personality disorder.

And before anyone stars a’yappin’ – I’m not saying Ms. Maye Quade suffers from any psychological illness.

Merely the movement she’s part of.

[1] Not to mention a culture of abuse, and a serious collective group personality disorder.

I really can’t boycott “Hollywood”. because given the fact that Tinseltown can’t seem to get its heart into doing much of anything but comic book movies, and I just can not bring myself to go to a comic book movie, I mean, why bother?

So I’ve never seen any of Disney’s various Star Wars spinoff productions. The last, “first” three chapters of the Star Wars saga soured me on the whole franchise to the point where I just don’t care much. I’m told The Mandalorian is worth watching – but I honestly wouldn’t know.

So when I heard Gina Carano had been jettisoned from Mandalorian, after talk of her getting her own spinoff series was making the rounds, it took me a moment to dig and find out why it mattered.

It’s alleged by some media that she was tubed for being just a little too irascibly un-woke:

Carano was the subject of much criticism recently when, in a now-deleted Instagram post, she compared being a modern-day Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust. The hashtag #FireGinaCarano has trended on social media in recent months after other incendiary comments by the television and film star.

And what were those “incendiary comments?” Especially as to “comparing” modern GOPers to German Jews in the ’30s?

Details are very, very thin. But I’ll defer to that not-remotely right-wing outlet, Variety, for the closest we have to core facts:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children,” Carano wrote Instagram. “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.” The post originated on a different Instagram account.

In other words, totalitarians turn societies against themselves?

If the Woke Mob things that’s politically incorrect, we’re gonna have a real difference of opinion in our society sooner than later.

In another post, Carano shared a photo of a person wearing multiple cloth masks with the caption, “Meanwhile in California…

If riffing on California is politically incorrect, I don’t wanna be PC.

Lowering the voting age has long been a Democrat dream.  Phyllis Khan promoted it in 1989, saying: “If we trust them to drive at 16, why don’t we trust them to vote?”  The notion is back again, this time in Congress. 

On the one hand, the notion that people aren’t mature enough to vote until 18, drink alcohol or buy certain tools until 21, or take responsibility for their own health care until 25, is a recent conceit unknown in the prior five millennia.

On the other hand, teenagers are less prone to nuanced thinking, more prone to letting their emotions over-ride their logic, which makes for good cannon fodder both for demanding social change and to send against actual cannons.

I’d be tempted to agree with lowering the age of majority if we were consistent about it.  At 16, you are an adult: you can drink, smoke, make babies, marry, divorce, be drafted, get a tattoo or sex change operation, sign a contract, take out student loans, file for bankruptcy, and vote. 

Yes, it will hasten the fall of society, as starry-eyed children vote for manipulative politicians selling promises of utopia but delivering indentured servitude.  But that’s coming anyway, so we might as well get on with it.  And there should be some entertaining moments along the way, watching idealists become disillusioned and forced to admit we conservatives were right all along.   That’ll be satisfying.

Joe Doakes

I’m not quite to the point where I can see it being that satisfying.

But I can see the path to that feeling.

Remember last spring and early summer? When New York’s catastrophic mismanagement of the Covid pandemic led to a national scandal that humiliated Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill “Squiggy” DiBlasio?

Of course not. The media tamped it down. With a contentious election already underway, Big Media and Big Left didn’t want any splatter getting on the Democrat nominee, whoever that was going to be.

But it was horrible; both New Yorks, state and city, had death rates that still dwarf the rest of the country. Over 10% of all nursing home residents died in a matter of mere weeks. The city was a charnel house. One nursing home left a few dozen bodies in a n un-refrigerated U-Haul, and hospitals were, as related by an endless stream of morose NPR stories, overwhelmed (even as a Navy hospital ship rode, almost empty, at anchor in the harbor, lest President Trump garner any credit whatsoever).

Big Left rallied around the inept Cuomo, spending nine months treating him as a saint walking among us, as an epidemiological Omar Bradley smiting the viral foe from the field, plumping up the sales for Cuomo’s absurd public health “how to” book, putting him up for an Emmy Award for his televised appearances.

Until the inauguration.

Now that Democrat are in charge, Cuomo’s stock has fallen faster than GameStop.

Seems weird?

Not at all. Cuomo is not popular on the hard left that is currently in vogue in DC. He’s too centrist. The progressive wing of the party hates him – and Mayor Squiggy has aspirations in Albany and (absurd as it seems) DC.

Two theories, not mutually exclusive:

All The Facts That Fit The Narrative: It’s verging on being a Berg’s Law – modern media “fact checking” is largely a matter of making sure Democrats get all the credit for the true stuff. Cuomo was a hero – until Big Left wanted him out of the way.

Which is not in any way discontiguous with the other theory:

Try To Find A Pickaxe In Albany. I Dare You: I think it’s a purge on the left. The “progressive” wing, which controls everything in DC (including, let’s be honest, the “Moderate” Biden – wants their slightly-too-moderate bete noir out of the way. While Cuomo’s presidential odds were likely slim and none, he certainly has a powerful bully pulpit within the party.

Well – had one.

This past week, in my observation, has been almost perfectly stage-managed – with the news of the whistleblower coming out while the Governor was in an audience with Biden.

Why? I addition to being a “moderate” (yep, you read that right – Cuomo is like Phyllis Kahn) wart on the Democrat party’s butt that can be excised, making room for more acceptable “Progressives” for the nation’s third-or-fourth-most powerful, but certainly most prestigious, governorship, it also allows Democrats to claim the “credit” for getting “justice” for all the seniors that died…

…even though conservatives owned the story from the beginning.

Like Stalin ordering Trotsky’s murder, this purge – with able assistance from the media that is giving itself leg and lip cramps kissing Biden’s ass – serves all sorts of purposes for Big Left.

Badda bing.

Owners of the iconic “Town Talk Diner” at Lake and MInnehaha in Minneapolis – which was turned into the “Town Talk Pile of Rubble” during the Floyd Riots – are sueing the City of Minneapolis for failing to protect…

…well, much of anyone or anything – notwithstanding it being one of the city’s only unambiguously legitimate jobs.

I’m not gonna do a pullquote – just read it.

And list for me in the comments:

1. How the city will respond
2. Why a “progressive” appointee will throw the case out. .

I was tempted to say “wrong answers only”, like all the kids are doing on social media these days.

But I figure even the right answers will test credulity these days.

Go to it.

My first thought in reading this story, I kid you not, is that I’m a little amazed a city government or law enforcement establishment actually did anything about an offense like this:

After a hearing last Friday and conversations with the city attorney, the employment of part-time Library Specialist Cameron Dequintez Williams was terminated on Wednesday.

He was charged with burning books from the library written by conservative authors.

Library officials said, “The city of Chattanooga Human Resources Department completed its investigation of an allegation that books were removed from the Chattanooga Public Library’s Main Branch on Dec.https://w.chattanoogan.com/photo.aspx?a=8&t=11, 2020. 

“The investigation determined that part-time Library Specialist Cameron Williams violated city and Library policies by improperly removing items from the Library’s collections.”

As one wag remarked:

Now, it remains to be seen if the real reason was that the library board wants to do all of that themselves.

Bonus observation: Am I the only one thinking Lt. Governor Flanagan feels pretty good, having not only gotten away with having ideological mercenaries do her cultural cleansing for her, but having them in effect rewarded for their efforts?

I see a posh consulting job for Flanagan, if she ever leaves office.

I feel so stupid.  I completely fell for the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory that the election was stolen.  But as this article makes clear, the election actually was SAVED. 

All those unsubstantiated Republican claims that an informal alliance of left-wing activists and business titans got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding; fended off voter-suppression lawsuits; recruited armies of poll workers; successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line; helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks; and after Election Day, monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not challenge the result including pressuring state legislators to certify dubious election results – they’re all true.  They did all those things and more.  But that’s a Good Thing.  Because they saved the election from Trump winning.

I wish I’d understood this last Fall.  I wasted so much time fretting over laws of statistics and suitcases of ballot and cardboarded-over windows but none of it mattered.  Things went exactly as planned. 

So I’m embarrassed at my credulity but one good thing came of it – I won’t have stand in line to cast my vote ever again, not when the big-shots have decided what the outcome should be and taken steps to ensure it.  So that’s nice.

Joe Doakes

Last week on his podcast, Ben Shapiro noted something I’d picked up when late, long-banned, forever-exiled commenter Dog Gone was trying to act as this blog’s “fact checker” – the difference between “true” and “false” usually boils down to whether a conservative or a progressive said it, regardless of the veracity of the fact itself.

Ryan Winkler takes a strong moral stand:

About time Ryan Winkler took a strong, courageous stand against corporate prisons…

…of which there are zero in Minnesota.

Remember when I said DFLers can count on the fact that DFL voters are overwhelmingly badly-informed and lousy at critical thought?

Any questions?

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