When Saint Paul opted for Tony-Soprano-style trash collection, they used a “formula” more or less like the Five Families used to divvy up racketeering in New York and New Jersey; each of the trash haulers got a slice of the city more or less equal to their market share.

This meant there was no “need” to compete for customers – and also no benefit in competing for customers.

Some small trash haulers just pulled out of Saint Paul without any further ado.

Others?

Call Ken Berquist and Son trash hauling. The call transfers over to Waste Management. Another St. Paul hauler bought out by a national chain?: https://t.co/ZcaRMhwoII

— FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) April 2, 2019

Eventually, Saint Paul is going to have three trash haulers – BFI, Waste Management and maybe Aspen. They will have monopolies in their territories, costs will rise, customer service will eventually worsen…

…oh, wait. Who said “eventually?”

SCENE: Mitch BERG is hacking down shrubbery for the spring. Avery LIBRELLE, walking past, hears the chainsaw and walks around the front of BERG’s house.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Er, hey, Avery. Kinda busy here…

LIBRELLE: The US has more guns than any country in the world, and the highest death rate.

BERG: As you can see here… (produces a chart from his back pocket) …

…while per-capita civilian gun ownership is high – and has gotten higher since the data in that chart – our gun homicide rate is actually down the list a ways.

LIBRELLE: Hah! To laugh! Most of those countries with higher murder rates aren’t industrial?

BERG: So?

LIBRELLE: Do I need to speak slowly? They a r e n ‘ t i n d u s t r i a l.

BERG: No, I got that. So what? Is the life of a brown or black person, or a subsistence farmer, worth less than the life of a white middle class liberal American?

LIBRELLE: Why, no!

BERG: Then why do we not count their deaths the same?

LIBRELLE: Do you have any arugula?

(And SCENE)

Progressives love America.

Well, no. Let me rephrase that.  Progressives love the idea that America is a big, powerful, wealthy place that they might control someday. 

That’s more like it. 

They may protest the point – but they let the truth slip on occasion; Michelle Obama’s “This is the first time I’ve been proud to be an American”, and of course Eric Holder’s “This nation was never great”. 

Christian Adams has an excellent reminder. The whole thing’s a pullquote, so I’m just going to do the conclusion: 

America is an idea, a great idea, that all are created in the image of God as free. That idea, not always perfectly executed, transformed the world. Along the way, it also limited government. The freedoms enshrined in the Constitution restrain the power of government. Government cannot act the way progressives want because the Constitution stands in the way. After decades of trying to redefine the notion of freedom in the courts, Holder and his gang have hit a Trump wall, where judicial nominees no longer subscribe to the utopian view of the Constitution.

Let’s hope that Eric Holder changes his mind and decides to run for president. Do us a favor. Go to Iowa, Texas, West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania and tell Americans there that America was really never great. Please.

I’d love to see it.

Of course, they have a way of changing their tone when they have to. See also Amy Klobuchar.

A good guy with a gun is involved in ending one out of twelve mass shootings in recent years, according to Ted Nugent.

Just kidding. It’s according to the FBI.

And they may be under-reporting even that figure:

The FBI’s two latest reports state that there were 40 active shooter cases from 2014-15 and 50 cases from 2016-17.  During these two periods, the FBI reports that two and five shootings, respectively, were stopped by individuals with concealed handgun permits.  The two reports each describe an additional case where a permit holder was involved but wounded or killed by the attacker.
For four years, the CPRC has been collecting cases of concealed handgun permit holders stopping mass public shootings. As we will show below, permit holders saved lives in between 13 and 16 cases from 2014-17.  This includes the seven cases that the FBI lists, seven cases that should have been included (one of the seven is debatable), and two cases that the FBI had on its list but doesn’t include as instances of permit holders saving lives.  Thus, concealed handgun permit holders saved lives in 13.5% to 16.5% of 97 cases. We only started collecting these cases were permit holders stopped attacks in 2014, so a comparison is limited to the last two active shooting reports put out by the FBI.
It is entirely possible that in the two cases where a permit holder was wounded or killed by the attacker that the permit holder’s actions allowed others to escape the scene. But even assuming that was not the case, permit holders were successful between 87% and 89% of the time that they intervened.

But let’s take the FBI’s 8% figure at face value. 8% of the American people do not carry firearms. Likely no more than a fraction of that, even in gun-friendly states.

And almost all spree killings happen in gun-free zones, where nobody is supported to be carrying.

So – as the DFL tries to jam down the gun control agenda Michael Bloomberg paid them to work for here in Minnesota – where, one wonderss, on earth does “Protect” Minnesota get the idea that attazcking a spree killer, unarmed, is 20 times as effective as using a firearm?

According to a 2013 FBI study of 160 active shootings between 2000 and 2013, in only one incident was an armed civilian
able to stop the attack–and that was a US Marine– but 21 of those shootings (13%) were interrupted by unarmed civilians.
Thus, unarmed civilians are 20 times more likely to stop a rampage shooting than armed civilians.

Source: The Latest Research on Rampage Shootings Show that Gunmen Rarely Target Gun-Free Zones. Jennifer Mascia The Trace. November 30, 2016. Yes, they actually believe this crap.

Unmentioned – the ratio of successful attempts vs. fatalities for armed vs. unarmed people.

Because one might think that if attacking spree killers without weapons were a viable tactic, SWAT teams would be using it today.

Two weeks ago: conservatives got criticized for “pouncing” on “Progressive” hubris, overreach, hypocrisy and factual illiteracy.

This week: we get criticized for not pouncing:

.@CNN personalities @brianstelter and @secupp bashing @FoxNews personalities for being glad that Fox News didn't participate in the big, two-year-long collusion hoax pic.twitter.com/xCgVAL6Q1N

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) March 31, 2019

Why, it’s almost like nothing we can do is going to make them happy.

Denied a chance to run the policy table by the fact that they don’t control the Senate, DFLers in the upper house are going to try to bully and shame Republicans into submission with today’s “Committee On Banned Bills” “hearing” at the Senate.

“These bills have huge public support and are common sense ideas,” Sen. Little continued, “They’ve been banned for completely crass partisan reasons; because they are targeting certain seats, and don’t want to give certain people any achievements to campaign with. But the senate can’t make good decisions if major options aren’t even on the table. Partisan games like this are rigging our democracy, and blocking bills that voters really want.” 
The Senate Committee on Banned Bills (COBB) is slated to review the proposed bills, take testimony from citizens and expert witnesses [of the caliber of Nancy Nord Bence – Ed.], and debate the merits of each policy.  A wide array of bills will be introduced during the hearing, including legislation dealing with paid family medical leave, gun safety, and the health care provider tax [agenda and complete list of members and bills below].

The bills include:

1. SF 434 – Latz – Universal gun registration
2. SF 399 – Hayden – MinnesotaCare provider tax repeal
   
3. SF 1012 – Torres Ray – Increase Teachers of Color Act strengthening and appropriation
   
4. SF 1060 – Kent – Paid family, pregnancy, bonding, and applicant’s serious medical condition benefits establishment; employment leaves authorization and regulation; data classification authorization and appropriation 
   
5. SF 856 – Champion – Right to vote restoration upon incarceration release or sentencing imposition; county attorney voter registration and eligibility investigation obligation repeal
   
6. SF 208 – Pappas – Resolution memorializing Congress to remove the deadline for ratification of the equal rights amendment by the states
7.  SF 200 – Cohen – Constitutional amendment for gender equality under the law

These are the DFL’s priorities – and they clearly believe there are enough uninformed people out there to give them a win.

They may be right.

When Richard Nixon’s re-election team wanted to know what the opposition was up to, and needed some dirt, they broke into a psychiatrist office in the Watergate apartment complex. The subsequent investigation brought down the president and tainted the Republican party for decades
When Hillary Clinton’s election campaign wanted to know what Trump was up to and needed some dirt, they laundered some money through their Law Firm to pay for a phony dossier, which they shopped to friendly agents in the FBI who used it to get a warrant to wiretap the candidate. The wiretap transcripts were given to the White House, where Susan Rice unmasked the participants in campaign discussions. Everyone who believes that she scrupulously kept that information away from Hillary’s campaign, raise your hands.
Everyone involved knew they were using the national security cover story as a fig leaf to hide their attempt tp play dirty pool in the election. When they got caught, they had no choice but to continue running with it, and got some cover from Never Trumpers to get a special investigator appointed. But it was always a lie, from the very beginning, And everybody knew it except the voting public.
They shouldn’t get away with it.

Joe Doakes

Modern “progressive” politics is always about telling the low-information emotion-driven voter whatever it takes to give you power.

Some Minnesota Second Amendment activists – many of them misinformed by a fraudulent “gun rights” group – are upset that Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka has left the door open to holding hearings on the Dems’ two gun grab bills, HF8 (the Universal Registration bill) and HF9 (Red Flag Gun Confiscation Orders).

They’d like to see Gazelka just let the bills die in committee when they reach the Senate, assuming they pass the House (which they likely will. But. There’s gonna be a but. We’ll come back to that).

Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms notes:

First, the Senate is going to make the House vote on the bills, knowing that if it fails, they can’t be blamed. If it does pass, they’ve only agreed to let it be heard in committee, which doesn’t mean it’ll even make it to the floor for a vote.
Further, they’re making it clear that they’re also going to talk about some pro-gun legislation and Democrats who don’t like it can deal.
To be honest, I like it.
Now, I’m not thrilled with committees even hearing gun control legislation, but since that’s inevitable, the least we can do is watch pro-gun lawmakers make anti-gunners squirm.

And it’ll give the good guys a chance to descend on the capitol in biblical numbers, to melt the switchboards, and to show the legislators just how motivated Real Americans are – at least, on defense.

And most importantly, it gets peoples’ votes on the record. Because as much smack as the DFL talked about gun control swinging them the last election, polling shows that even among anti-gunners, outside the lunatic fringe at least, gun control was not an important issue to voters.

But it most certainly is to the good guys.

And the DFL doesn’t want those votes on record any more than US House Democrats wanted votes on the “Green New Deal” counted.

I’ve not always agreed with Gazelka on the gun issue – I think he played it waaaaaaaay too safe when the GOP had majorities in both chambers – but here, I think he’s playing chess while his critics are demanding loud, fast checkers.

…nobody is coming for your guns.

It ain’t the guns.

It’s your rights and autonomy they hate.

One of the constant refrains of gun grabbers in recent years is “Nobody needs a thirty round magazine”, stated as an absolute.

This pretty much inevitably comes from people who’ve spent less time studying self-defense than I’ve spent on interpretive dance.

But if you (or they) are curious as to “why”?

I’ll answer that with a question. Three of them, actually.

First: are you ever going to be attacked by someone who wants to kill you, then and there? If you answer “I have no idea“, that’s a perfectly valid, honest answer. Violent attacks – robberies, kidnappings, rapes, aggravated assaults, spree killings, terror attacks – are exceptionally rare. Rarer still if you have no criminal record, don’t associate with criminals, and don’t work in a business where a lot of criminals are part of the clientele. That accounts for the vast majority of people.

Not a single person who gets robbed, kidnapped, raped, suffers a home invasion, or is at a location where a spree killer decides to stage their blaze of glory, woke up that morning thinking “I bet I’m going to be the target of a violent incident today!“ Did they?

Second: if the person decides to attack you with the lethal force we mentioned above, and you decide to defend yourself, how hard is it going to be the end the threat to your life?: impossible to predict, right? Many robberies, assaults and rapes, and even a few spree killings , have been ended by a good guy pulling out a gun, with no shots fired. Sometimes an attacker falls over unconscious, or dead, after a punch to the face. On the other hand there are records of people who’ve been shot 20 times and still had the strength to shoot, stab or hit before they bled out. I know one story of a woman who barricaded herself and her kids in an attic during a home invasion; when the guy broke into the attic, she shot at him six times at a range of 2 feet, hitting them five times in the face and head – and he lived without a lot of complications ( other than a lengthy prison sentence). Alcohol, drugs and mental illness all affect this as well – drunk people are harder to deter from doing stupid things; people who are extremely high may not experience pain, even pain from a gunshot wound. There are cases of people who were very, very high who never noticed they’d been shot until they bled to death.

So the question is: how many shots (if it’s a gun you choose) will it take to stop one person from following through on trying to murder you? The answer, given the evidence we have seen above, is “0 to 20 shots – maybe”.

Bear in mind that, under stress, almost nobody hits their target with every shot. Even at close range. Even if you practice shooting a lot (although that helps) the police, in self-defense situations, hit with an average of about one shot in every six. Put another way, the police fire an average of 17 shots to end an engagement.

So – you don’t know how many hits you’re going to need to end a lethal or threat to you (or your family, or innocent bystanders), and you don’t know how many shots that you fire are going to hit the person who is trying to kill you.

That’s with one attacker.

Which brings us to the third question

Third: how many people will be trying to kill, Rob, attack, rape or kidnap you?: The scenarios above are predicated on one attacker. Can you predict how many people are going to attack you?

In Saint Paul a few years back, there was a series of home invasions. Four people would break into a house, violently subdue any occupants who were present, and take what they wanted.

Nobody died in that series of incidents – but other home invasions do lead to murder, almost always murder of unarmed people.

Remember – none of the victims woke up that morning thinking “I bet I’m going to have a violent home invasion today”.

Now – if you hear somebody kick in your door in at midnight, ask yourself – how many of them are there? Are they armed? Are they drunk or on some sort of mind altering substance that warps their perception of risk, danger, and/or pain? How will they react to someone resisting (or not resisting)?

You are not going to know. All you know is that there is a potentially lethal threat to your life down there. Maybe the sound of a pistol racking up will send all of them scampering from your house. Or maybe the sight of one of them falling over, gushing blood after you shoot one of them will send them running.

Or maybe you pull out your six shooter, and fire all six shots of the first attacker you see – leaving you holding an empty revolver while robbers two, three, and four come at you with baseball bats, ice picks and a shotgun.

So the answer to your question is “When we are responsible for defending ourselves, our families and our community from a violent threat to our lives and we can’t predict who is going to carry out that attack, how many of them there will be, and what it will take to deter/stop them, we want a magazine that will leave you with at least one round in the chamber when the attacker runs out of attack”.

I hope that answers your question.

I confidently expect your Progressive readers to support Utah’s new law restricting abortions, under the theory of state’s rights the Left is using to propose restrictions on firearms.  Looking forward to it. 
Joe Doakes

Pointing out logical and moral inconsistencies in “progressives” is a little like solving Rubik’s cubes. You can do it a lot, and you can do it fast, and you an do it all day – and in the end, it’s pretty much just kept you occupied.

One of Trump’s Civil Rights Commissioners lays the smack down on the San Antonio’s mayor for excluding Chik-fil-a from the city’s airport food court…

…and does it in terms that Mark Twain and Will Rogers would approve of (emphasis added):

Commission as a whole, to address the bigoted virtue-signaling displayed by the City Council in banning Chick-Fil-A from the San Antonio airport.
If the City Council had banned Chick-Fil-A from the airport because its members hate the tastiest chicken sandwiches in creation, there would be no constitutional violation. The City Council, however, explicitly banned Chick-Fil-A because of the company’s charitable donations
to religious organizations. Fortune reports:
“With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion,” said City Councilman Roberto Treviño. “San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our facilities for a company with a history of anti-LGBTQ behavior.”
The lack of self-awareness in that statement is astonishing. Exclusion in the name of ostensible inclusion; intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Litigation is threatened – and more importantly, prim virtue-signaling is mocked.

I feel just a little more faith in my fellow human today.

Sharyl Atkisson has a list of 78 “mistakes” the media has made in covering Trump so far.

Yes, I put mistakes in scare quotes.

In late November of 2016, on NPR’s “On The Media” show – as reliable a measure of the daily ebb and flow of the “Elite” media’s inner id as any artifact you’ll find – representatives from the Washington Post and New York Times newsrooms spoke at length with host Bob Garfield about the need to change the rules. Instead of just “telling the story” – the who, what, when, where, why and how of the news – and presuming the consumer an figure things out for themselves, the mission was going to turn to “de-normalizing Trump”.

The “mistakes” – not just in re Trump, but Nick Sandman, “Russiagate” and on, and on, and on – may not all be symptoms of an “elite” media whose mission has changed from informing to driving an agenda. Perhaps.

But if they had changed their mission, I’m at a loss for how they’d be doing anything differently.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is sitting at the Dunn Brothers Freight House in Minneapolis, writing away, when Avery LIBRELLE walks up the stairs. Trapped, BERG sighs and waits for the inevitable.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: (Crestfallen) Hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE: Mueller’s grand jury is still meeting in Washington DC!

BERG: Right. So…?

LIBRELLE: Guess that means Trump isn’t exonerated after all!

BERG: Could be!

LIBRELLE: In your face!

BERG: Could also be they’ve decided to investigate Hillary, the Clinton’s and the provenance of the “information” that led to the original FISA warrant that started the investigation, which was just a bunch of Democrat party opposition research.

LIBRELLE: …

BERG: Right?

LIBRELLE: …

BERG: Avery?

LIBRELLE: (Jaw flapping like a beached trout)

BERG: (Gets up to leave). Have a nice day.

And SCENE

Best thing President Trump has done in office is to let Liberals clarify the new rules.
Thanks to Hillary’s email investigation, we now know that mishandling classified information will result in no charges, as long as I didn’t intend to give them to the enemy.
We know from Jussie Smollett that 16 counts of felony hate-crime can be dismissed for a couple of days volunteer work, because it’s a first offense.
I’m sure these rules will apply to me. I’m looking forward to receiving the same Justice as other, better politically-connected people receive.
And it would never happened if President Trump hadn’t been in office.
Joe doakes

After the “most transparent administration in history”, it’s good to have an actual transparent administration.

I’m not sure if I’m joking or not.

I want to make a video, fisking John Oliver’s moronic piece claiming Australia’s gun laws “debunk” the “American gun ownership myth”. Spoiler: the only parts that are wrong are the parts where Oliver is moving his lips.

The problem is, watching John Oliver gives me a very unpleasant physical reaction. Watching him literally makes me ill.

It’s not just how he smugly mangles context and cherry picks factoids, and mugs for the trained seals in his audience; that was Jon Stewart’s schtick, too. But I can watch (and heckle and fisk) Stewart and enjoy doing it.

John Oliver could read a phone book, or “Goodnight Moon”, or even quotes from Margaret Thatcher and William F. Buckley, and I’d still feel my skin crawing, and start wanting to throw up.

I don’t even react like this to the useless Steven Colbert.

I literally get ill watching Oliver.

The only other thing like it? I get a headache watching Tim Burton movies. No kidding – I even got a headache watching one Burton movie even before I learned what it was and who directed it. It can be a Burton movie I love (“Nightmare before Christmas”) or hate (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), but it’s the same headache. Something about his style. I don’t know.

But even that reaction is nothing like the one I get from John Oliver.

No, I’m not exaggerating.

Does this happen to anyone else?

Here is Question One on the Mid-Term Exam for the 1-credit class:  “Making Literature Relevant.”
1.  Explain how China’s Social Credit system is completely different from, and totally superior, to the Puritan attitudes described in The Scarlet Letter.  For extra credit, describe why and how a similar system could be implemented in Minnesota.
Joe Doakes

MILLENNIAL: “Scarlet Letter? What’s a letter? Also – what’s Scarlet?”

If I had a nickel for every stranger that’s pronounced my name “MIchelle” or “Michael”, I would have enough money to not need to interact with strangers at all anymore.

It seems I’ve hit the intersectional lottery.

Or maybe not.

Because mispronouncing peoples’ names isn’t a matter of trying to wrap one’s tongue around a word from a completely different language, with all the inevitable pitfalls

Oh, no.  Like everything one does, and everything one does not do,  h it’s apparently racist. 

 Zuheera Ali and Keya Roy talk to author Ijeoma Oluo and each other about their experiences living in the United States with “difficult” names. They also talk to Rita Kohli, a professor at University of California, Riverside who has done research on the effects of mispronouncing names on students of color.

Aaaaaaaand…:

Spoiler: This practice of mispronouncing names isn’t just embarrassing. It has a long and racist history.

Of course, it’s not complete cultural sensitivity to Jerzy Szczepanski or Solveig Hjelle or even Euan Braithwaite’s names we’re talking about, here.

And if you happen to listen to the podcast at the link – apparently from a program to train young public radio drones – you may reach the same observation I did; that millennials of a certain ideological persuasion collect grievances the same way the seem to love collecting psychological and medical diagnoses; the same way the used to collect Pokemon cards.  The same way their grandparents collected fishing stories.

Tide Pod Evita owes business taxes from a while back.

But if you’re a prominent-enough Democrat, that never really seems to be a handicap.

The advocates of high-speed rail to Chicago have changed their minds; they now want another low-speed train for a total of two per day.
Conspicuously left unasked: where are the photos of the throngs of people left standing on the train platforms because there’s no room on the existing train?   Is there actually a demand for a second train?  Is St. Paul-to-Chicago passenger demand unmet by the MegaBus, or airline?  If so, shouldn’t we know how many people we’re talking about, to gauge whether it’s worth spending a pile of money providing the service?
It seems odd to me that Amtrak would be intentionally leaving customers stranded rather than add another passenger car to the train.  That suggests there are no customers, only lobbyists.
Like the ones who convinced St. Paul and Ramsey County to spend a fortune remodeling the downtown train station, for its once-a-day train visit.  Beautiful, but desolate, a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Joe Doakes

Minnesota Progressives – not solving non-problems for 100 years.

I could try to write something about the denouement of the Mueller investigation.

But why bother, when this thread by left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald does it better than anything I’ve read over the weekend.

This thread is the “pull quote”, if you will – but there’s stuff worth reading before and well after it; I suggest looking over the whole thing via Twitter. And that will be the last time I urge people to read anything in Twitter.

But I digress:

How – if you're an MSNBC viewer (or consumer of similar online content) – can you not be angry & disoriented having been fed utter bullshit like this for 2 straight years with basically no dissent allowed? Just listen to what they were telling you to believe & how false it was 👆

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 23, 2019

…if someone got video of this entire event, or even just a count of how many sandbags the Governor, Rep. Craig and Sen. Bigham actually “filled” at this cheesecake photo-op.

I’m guessing cumulative total in the low single digits…

2019: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar  thinks “gay conversion therapy” is torture.

2017: State representative Ilhan Omar thinks penalizing parents for allowing their daughters to be carved up and mutilated is a cultural imposition.

Representative Omar – taking the convenient moral stands.

You know the worst thing about the idea of replacing Rep. Omar?

The 5th CD DFL would come up with someone worse.  Am I the only one who can imagine Alondra Cano warming up her primary shoes?

If the swing shift guy working the tower of Big Ben married Marie Kondo he would not have his clock cleaned to the extent that the Democrats are getting theirs cleaned today.

— Dennis Miller (@DennisDMZ) March 24, 2019

Volvo will install in-car cameras to monitor your behavior.
I suspect the signal will be beamed directly to Mac-Groveland for review by a cadre of St. Kate’s students who will scrutinize it for every micro-aggression and Tweet their dismay that offenders remain employed.
Joe Doakes

While not as well-known as Berg’s Seventh Law, Berg’s 12th Law – “The humorous, satirical or hyperbolic explanation of “progressive” behavior will, in direct proportion to the recklessness, extralegality, deviance or confrontiveness of the “progressive” actions being analyzed, to be the correct explanation.” – is both applicable here, and utterly on point.

We may be in line for a corollary, though. “Today’s jokes about “progressive” petulance, hypocrisy and bullying are tomorrow’s headlines, next week’s proposals, and next month’s policies”.