There is often a deviation of strategy in getting there, and that’s OK. We need to stop villainizing one another over slight differences of strategy and policy. You want to disagree? Go for it. That’s great. But the villainizing and the personal attacks? They are counterproductive and will have no place in my administration. There has been a real push to divide and conquer. I’m biased, but I think I’ve been the brunt of it. The mayor has too. Everybody. It’s got to stop. It’s been really nasty.
Officials in Minneapolis were quick to blast the visit. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said while he would typically welcome a visit from a sitting president, Trump’s “actions have been reprehensible and his rhetoric has made it clear that he does not value the perspectives or rights of Minneapolis’ diverse communities.” “Our entire city will stand not behind the President, but behind the communities and people who continue to make our city — and this country — great,” Frey said. “While there is no legal mechanism to prevent the president from visiting, his message of hatred will never be welcome in Minneapolis.”
They’re willing to eschew “tribalism” – with the right people. Not the opponents they actually have, of course. The imaginary ones that Lori Sturdevant keeps reacing across the aisle to.
Beto urges banks to refuse service to people Beto doesn’t like. This is a good start, but it’s not sufficient. I recommend we take principle farther Urge Banks to cut off business with anyone who has an abortion. Urge Banks to cut off credit for all Methodist’s. Urge Banks to refuse to do business with companies that sell or Support rap music Urge banks to cut off credit card transactions at liquor stores, pizza parlors, State Fair cheese curd booth, and other unhealthy food vendors. Also, no credit cards for Vaping, tobacco, fireworks, p*** movies, adult novelty store sales, or tap dancing shoes, which are totally legal but they annoy me. Yes, I think he’s really onto something here. Joe Doakes
Where “onto something” = “desperately trying to get traction with an ever-loonier Democrat far left”.
It’s the bar next to the the bowling alley – and it’s actually a fun room! And it’s got those “edge of the metro” prices if you are getting a little wallet fatigue from $7 beer and $10 cocktails.
To: “Live From Here” From: Mitch Berg, ornery peasant Re: “Out In America” with Tom Papa
Have you ever listened to a putative “comic” bit where a “comedian” reads a (for purposes of argument) “comic” monologue of intermittently (very very intermittently) amusing observations, interrupted with a tag line that isn’t especially funny the first time, but gets repeated 3-5 times every episode, to the point where you want to spray him with spray cheese on stage?
When I was in high school, it was generally (although not universally) known that making gay kids “act straight” – in other words, forcing them to be what they aren’t – could cause long-lasting irreparable damage.
This was decades ago.
Society spends thirty years treating “boyhood” as a pathology, often treatable (i.e. suppressible) with medication.
The school system actively suppresses “normal” boyhood traits; aggressive play, restless physical activity and physical rather than verbal socialization are treated as conditions to be eradicated, rather than evolutionary male traits that are socially adapted and productively channeled.
School was turned into a training camp for young-girl-style socialization; not merely teaching young boys to take the roughest of edges off their masculinity, but teaching them that approaching the world the way evolution taught boys and men to approach the world will earn you castigation, denigration, medication and remediation.
Soon, people who were “woke” enough to know 30 years ago that making a gay child act straight would cause immense, irreparable psychological damage, were mildly alarmed to see that boys were lagging at school – or, put another way, checking out of an oppressive, misandrist system that actively suppressed who they really were.
Boys stopped going to college – and, increasingly, the ones that did were the ones that could stick with the ever-more-accelerated demand to turn in their evolutionary “male” card. There’s demographic evidence that before long, after decades of turning education at all levels into 12-16 years of counter-evolutionary indoctrination and browbeating over what they are, girls will outnumber boys 2:1 in higher education
It’s too confusing to keep track of all the different ways that liberals impugn conservatives. And the words don’t mean the same thing each time they’re used; the meaning shifts depending on the user, the victim, the situation. I would prefer that liberals adopt one general-purpose word to use for everyone and everything they don’t like. How about “poop?” Short, easy for Joe Biden to remember, think how much fun the debates would become. You’re a poop. No you’re a big poop. You’re the biggest poop. Yeah, well your ideas are poop. Your mother is a poop. Fun! Joe Doakes
Orwel posited that the eventual goal of “Ingsoc” was to reduce all language to “duckspeak” – semiliterate grunts that put guardrails on the limits of human thought.
To: Mayor Melvin Carter, the City Council, and Mayors and Councilors going back 30 years, except Norm Coleman From: Mitch Berg, deplorable peasant Re: Here
You’ve all given us years of obsessive emphasis and spending on virtue-signaling programs to appease upper-middle-class progressives – “Resilience”, bikeability, making the city less habitable for cars, as well as focusing on toxic trifles like pushing up the minimum wage (driving down employment), “sanctuary” (bringing more low-wage, low-skill labor to the city, driving down wages for poor, low-skill workers right here), light rail (destroying more jobs and businesses and increasing blight) and “density” (of housing for upper-middle-class progs), taking money and city attention from public safety.
Spending less on police; carrying on his predecessors’ policy of failing to up-charge gun offenders, basically abandoning pursuit of property crimes, keeping the city focused on punishing property owners rather than criminals, and acting as if there’s really no problem.
And while you and city council don’t run the public school system, they are part of the same political machine that does. The ongoing collapse of the public school system (except for a few islands where the relatively few children of the “high density” progressive caste go, when they don’t go to private school) is correlated with crime in the community. They knew this in New York in the sixties; kids who graduate with terrible educations (as St. Paul kids increasingly do) and limited prospects for the undereducated (as Saint Paul increasingly has) are more vulnerable to being enticed into crime, gangs, and becoming part of the blight. As the schools get worse (and they are, and nothing the School Board is doing will ever stop it), it’ll contribute more to the city’s blight. And while blight may not cause crime, you don’t have to be a sociologist to note the correlation.
As a result? Calls go unanswered, crimes go unsolved, property gets less secure, people who value secure property move elsewhere, “high density” makes housing less affordable while housing policy drives down values outside the high density areas, making owning property in the city a terrible investment, spurring more flight and more blight. Violent crime, defying a nationwide down trend, is surging.
It’s the same recipe that made San Francisco and Manhattan unlivable for people making less than mid six figures and drove out poor people to the inner ‘burbs; it’s in the process of doing the same for Seattle and Portland, while making vast swathes of Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Chicago, North Minneapolis and other cities into blighted shooting galleries. None of it’s new.
And the voters of this city will keep voting you, your council, and the same policies into office. Just watch.
Not sure how you all pulled it off – getting a lifetime sinecure for jobs you’re currently failing at, and have been for decades, and I’m gonna bet you continue to fail at.
Liberals are thrilled with the notion that law enforcement should be able to petition the court to seize firearms owned by potential bad guys. The evidence presented would be rumor, innuendo, gossip, accusation. The standard of proof would be “he’s more likely than not, to do something bad someday.” If Sheriff Bull Connor petitions the court to seize guns from suspected troublemakers using the red flag laws as his authority, but 99% of the people he flags are African American males between the ages of 13 and 30 (on the grounds that they tend to be the most likely to shoot up the neighborhood), will liberals continue to be thrilled?
Joe Doakes
Those who take the “Liberal” thing seriously probably will.
“Progressives”, on the other hand, won’t care. It’s about neither safety nor equality. Sometimes you gotta break eggs to make an omelet. Some of those eggs are black.
Told my wife we should get The Clapper so she doesn’t have to get out of bed to shut off the lights when I’m done reading. She scoffed – do they even make those anymore? Yes. Amazon. $17. Order by 6:00 on Friday, guaranteed delivery on Sunday. Seriously? How is that possible? Yes, I understand they have a 850,000 square foot warehouse in Shakopee, a building as big as my entire city block. But surely they must prioritize inventory? Amazon updates its list of “Most Popular Items on Amazon” hourly, so I can keep up with the Jones. Obviously, they’d have a huge inventory of in-demand items. But how much demand can there possibly be for The Clapper? And yet they have them in stock locally for two day delivery? Unbelievable. There’s a reason Amazon is kicking every other retailer’s a**. It’s called “Customer Service.” Joe Doakes
And yet, someday, just like Microsoft, Time/Warner/AOL, IBM, AOL, General Motors and US Steel, something will come along to knock it off the top of the heap.
Speaking of “cyberbullying”: so when a teenager smiles awkwardly at guy tacitly harassing him at a rally in DC, it’s racism – but when a teenager rants at the UN like a junior Mussolini, before taking a “green” trip to the next stop on her agenda and thence home on $10M sailing yacht? Voice of a generation!
The nation’s political class is currently paralyzed with rage over people dying of vaping.
Ignoring the fact that vaping has likely saved thousands of lives by helping people stop smoking, and more people never start – never mind! A death toll in single digits, almost entirely from using home-made vaping fluids or the occasional extremely rare lung condition, and Big Government, Big Left and, presumably, Big Tobacco are on the warpath against legal vaping.
Over less than ten deaths out of 320 million people in a decade.
And our political class is beating the whole world over the head with climate change – a crisis that has killed nobody, but has terrorized hundreds of thousands of school kids into turning into protest droogs on command. .
So I got to looking at the records for the Twin Cities’ three rail lines – the Blue and Green (“Vomit Comet”) light rail lines and the North Star heavy commuter line.
Now, I expected these deeply dim-witted projects to rack up a death toll.
I wasn’t ready for what I found.
Currently, the lines have claimed 26 lives in fifteen years.
Rail Line
Death Toll
Years in Operation
Bodies Per Year
Blue LIne
13
15
.88
Green Line (aka “Vomit Comet:)
8
5
1.6
North Star Line
5
10
.5
I’m adtually a bit surprised that the death toll on the North Star is as high as it is; the intersections tend to be pretty well-controlled, and the trains run on existing right of way.
On the other hand? The death toll on the Green Line astounds me – and the number for the Blue Lline kinda snuck into double digits when I wasn’t looking too.
June 23, 2020. That’s the 16th anniversary of the start of regular Blue Line service. And I’m going to observe it as Transit Memorial Day. A day of solemn rememrance of the 26 people (so far) whose lives have been sacrificed…
…for what?
To support the Met Council and the Political class’s urge to feel like a real big city? To build a monument to the government’s power?
Once upon a time, a then-local “progressive” activist asked via Twitter “To all you conservative Springsteen fans; have you actually listened to the records?”
Not something as trivial as “a conservative who wrote music” – but someone who, at his best, wrote music that resonated deeply with Conservatives, for reasons that were utterly conservative, and for many of us utterly profound.
Ann Althouse once noted (with a hat tip to regular commenter Macarthur Wheeler):
“To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.”
His best music – Nebraska, Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love and The Rising, but especially the “Holy Trinity” (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The RIver) were just that; stories about the struggles, yes, but also the strength and worth of individuals; their failures and their redemptions, sin and consequences, and forgiveness.
And for anyone that misses the point, I’d urge you to watch the Netflix version of Springsteen on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning one-man show that closed last year, in which Bruce admitted – with deference and joy – that the best music in his career was about his father; that he, a guy who’d never punched a clock in his life, had written a 45-year-long litany of tales of sorrow and inspiration and warning and cool rockin’ daddies about Douglass Springsteen, his father, and his mother Adele, who plugged away for decades, sacrificing and slogging away to keep their three kids fed and sheltered.
A few months back, I went to the movie Blinded By The Light – and noted that I felt it in the pit of my stomach more than enjoying it (although I enjoyed it a lot).
Now, the protagonist (it’s closely based on a true story) was the opposite of me, socially and politically; a Pakistani Brit who skewed plenty left, like Brit teenagers do. And yet I felt it in my liver; the discovery, and the epiphany, were the same for both of us.
“See, Mitch – those traits are universal and human, and progressives can gel with them too!”. Artistically? Sure, why not? But let’s debate what “Reason to Believe”, “Johnny 99” or “My Hometown” are really about first. Or, for that matter, the implications of what Sarfraz Manzoor wrote about – being seen as a person rather than a caricature or, dare I say, an “identity”. Then we’ll talk.
Because “progressivism” is about perfecting humanity; conservatism is about living with, dealing with the consequences of, clawing back from, and sometimes, just sometimes, triumphing over mankind’s, and one’s own, imperfections.
Stouts Pub at Snelling and Larpenteur opened as an English pub, serving bangers and mash, fish and chips, and Guinness beer on tap. Lately, with the cool wet weather, I’ve been feeling a need for comfort food. Mutton stew with thick warm bread. Maybe a shepherd’s pie. But when I looked at their menu online today, it’s all trendy stuff, the kind you could get at Applebee’s or Chili’s. Spinach and artichoke dip. Cheeseburger with sharp cheddar and applewood bacon. Margherita pizza. Chipotle BLT. And all kinds of wraps and salads. Yuppie Paradise. I don’t blame them, that’s where the money is. But what happens to us crusty curmudgeons? Where can I go to get my pre hibernation food?
A roundup of climate panic advocates’ recrods shows…
…well, you know:
“While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited,” they added. Some examples:
1967 — Stanford University expert Paul Erlich predicted “time of famines” in 1975. 1971 — A top NASA expert predicted an “ice age” by 2021. 1988 — It was predicted that the Maldives [Ahem – usually referred to as “The Falklands” – Ed] would be under water by last year. 2008 — Gore said the Arctic would be free of ice by 2013. 2009 — Charles said there was just 96 months left to save the world. Starting Friday, there is a global climate strike set to last for a week. According to the organizers, “Our house is on fire — let’s act like it. We demand climate justice for everyone.”
And my favorite: 1988, Ted Danson predicting that the growing hole in the ozone would kill us all in 15 years.
My go-to response to the whole thing: let’s say for sake of argument that they get one right; let’s say that the climate is irreversibly warming due to human activity.
Why is the solution to turn the keys to the world’s economies over to the kind of people who gave us Srebrenica, or Chicago city politics or MN-LARS?
One of the guarantees in the invisible NPR tote bag of goodies and spiffs that “Urban Progressive Privilege” is, is the knowledge that not only will the institutions that participate in that privilege with you will actively ensure your worldview never gets challenged, but they’ll make sure the “oopses” in your worldview won’t influence anyone, either.
Gwen Walz – the First Lady of Minnesota – apparently had a very bad evening on a panel about racism in the justice system.
The moderator of this discussion was Toussaint Morrison, a black man. Soft-ball questions that Morrison was supposed to ask were circulated ahead of time“within the Department of Corrections and the governor’s office.” But when the audience noticed that most of the men behind bars in the documentary were non-white, the issue of race came up—indeed, racial minorities make up around 20 percentof Minnesota’s overall population, but account for about half of Minnesota’s prison inmates. Morrison ran with those questions about race, and Gwen Walz appeared to be stumped. Some in the crowd felt she was sidestepping the race issue entirely….Once the event was over, the Walz administration scrambled to get the video of the event deleted.
Kristin Beckmann, deputy chief of staff for Democrat Governor Tim Walz is alleged to have put pressure on TPT President and CEO Jim Pagliarini to delete the tape. Sarah Walker, a former Department of Corrections (DOC) employee who was pushed out over a lobbying scandal, was also on the panel. Walker seems to suggest that her not properly defending Gwen Walz during that panel led to her eventual exit from the DOC. Walker told MPR that Beckmann, Walz’s deputy chief of staff, told Walker over the phone: “It’s taken care of … We talked to TPT.” According to Walker, Beckmann continued to say that “The TPT president has now apologized and agreed to destroy all of the videotapes that were made of the event.” That’s further confirmed by Donna Saul Millen, managing director of events and engagement at TPT, who wrote in an email: “The short answer … the first lady’s office made the request and we didn’t have plans to use it (at least not at that time) … The obvious answer [to explain TPT’s action to delete the tape is that] it was an easy way to smooth out ruffled feathers.”
Urban Progressive Privilege is knowing you’ll never be held accountable by “your” people.
Dear Walmart Marketing Department: You know the common element between the Gauntlet of Gum in the checkout aisle, the blinking coupon dispenser in the detergent aisle, pallets of pumpkins in the produce aisle, and Girl Scouts standing outside the door selling cookies? They only work if people actually come to your store. If people shop online, none of that stuff affects their purchase. Based on your new policy, I will no longer be coming to your store. I’m just curious, is your CEO secretly a Bezos plant? Because it looks like your biggest online rival, Amazon, is about to eat your lunch. Joe Doakes
See also: Chick Fil-A, Carl’s Junior, Gibson’s Bakery, and on, and on.
Ilhan Omar’s soon to be ex husband’s days of being part of the lifetime sinecure the DFL gives its “elite” are apparently at an end. His job as a bag man…er, community liaison for Alondra Cano apparently got terminated over the summer.
David Steinberg – who hasn’t quite shamed the Strib or MPR to cover the story yet – writes:
My sources stated that Ahmed Hirsi was terminated following a request by Rep. Omar. They added that Omar’s motivation for the request was to force Hirsi to become reliant upon her assets and income. For the majority of 2019, Ahmed Hirsi has reportedly borne the responsibility of raising the three children he has with Omar. (One source used the term “abandoned” to describe Ilhan’s recent share of the parenting.) Since June 14, Hirsi does not appear to have a reliable source of income. Meanwhile, Rep. Omar currently draws a $174,000 Congressional salary, and reportedly received a $250,000 book advance in January.
The masked teens — a 15-year-old and two 16-year-olds — approached three residents around 4 a.m. Monday at the front yard of a home just outside Conyers and tried to rob them, the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office said. One of the would-be robbers took out a gun and fired shots at them before one of the residents returned fire, authorities said. “The victims of the attempted robbery were all uninjured, but the three attempted robbery suspects were all shot during the exchange of gunfire and succumbed to their injuries, one on scene and two at a local hospital after being transported,” the sheriff’s department said in a news release.
Many media outlets are omitting the fact that the teens went into the robbery blazing away with handguns, trying to spin this story as “Man kills teenagers with a black rifle1”.
Given the increasing number of home invasions and group robberies (see also: downtown Minneapolis) going on, it’s useful to remember that military weapon designs are designed, not to “kill as many people as possible”, but to not ever jam, and not run out of bullets before your attacker runs out of attack.
John Hinderocker posted an article on Powerline on September 3 called “Some Comments on Guns,” in which he praises an earlier column posted by Paul Mirengoff called “A Conservative Plan to Reduce Shootings and Other Homicides.” Good, we agree there are conservative ways to handle the problem. But then Hinderocker loses his mind and endorses red flag laws. Plainly, he’s never been up close and personal with acrimonious divorce cases; with law enforcement’s arbitrary denials of gun permits; with petty bureaucrats lording over groundlings; with entitled leftists entrenched in the deep bureaucracy of every local government office; with judges who think they’re God and you’re dirt because you hold the wrong political opinions, voted for the wrong political party, are a white male caught up in the liberal feminist system. I confidently predict red flag laws will be administered exactly the same as Orders for Protection, handed out like Kleenex, because judges will be terrified that someone will do something stupid and they will get blamed for it. If Hinderocker had experience with that system, he’d be scared spitless of giving those people the power to disarm him, without a hearing, based on rumor and gossip. I was tempted to argue reductio ad absurdum: Most Methodists are white people. Many Methodist congregations condemn certain sex acts. Many Methodists also own guns. Clearly, Methodists are a white supremacist hate group and a danger to historically oppressed victim groups. Society must ban Methodism to protect those potential victims. Just a pilot project, to test it out and see how well it works to reduce crime. We can move on to Lutherans later. Absurd, right? And plainly unconstitutional. Except today’s atheist liberal left wouldn’t think the argument is absurd, they would jump on it with enthusiasm. But they wouldn’t want the Lutherans next, they’d want the Catholics next, because they’re even bigger haters. Banning religion would be right up their alley. How can you argue that your rights are entitled to Constitutional protection, when the people you’re trying to convince don’t believe the Constitution should protect you or your rights? There’s a reason the Second Amendment doesn’t say ” the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall only be infringed a little.” Joe Doakes
There is a temptation among some conservatives who have experience with big negotiations to think that this is something where a rational agreement can be reached.
Minneapolis Police are pledging once again to improve safety in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood, following an attempted abduction this month and a reported sexual assault in August. The sexual assault happened after police say a man broke into a home. The attempted abduction happened in a parking lot of a property on 6th Street Southeast, where a University of Minnesota student told police a man tried to grab her as she was taking the trash out last Thursday morning. “That’s very serious and very scary, and traumatic,” 2nd Precinct Inspector Todd Loining said. Loining told a group of neighbors on Monday that the attempted abduction happened at the same building as a reported shooting in February. That shooting, part of a string of crimes this winter, prompted police to increase patrols in Marcy-Holmes.
So there’s some alarm about the surging crime stats.
And what will every last one of those people do next election time?
