Shot in the Dark

Tag: Winkler

  • Freedom Dies In “Efficiency”

    Alternate title: “Ryan Winkler tries to make the trains run on time”. The DFL majority in the House has moved all the House’s committees under the Ways and Means committee – meaning that Ways and Means chair Lyndon Carlson can can move bills around, and forward to votes, without a whole lot of scrutiny: According…

  • Unpacking Peggy McIntosh

    About a year and a half ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces in the history of this blog – Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag, which spelled out the ideal of “Urban Progressive Privilege. I described the phenomenon if “Urban Progressive Privilege” by tracing a line from the document from which the term…

  • The Return Of Eddie Haskell

    When we last talked about Ryan WInkler, he was on his way to Belgium, in as much disgrace as the media ever allows a DFL golden child to face, after having called SCOTUS justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom”.   Winkler – who got a degree at Harvard – claimed he wasn’t aware of the…

  • Heads? Disaster. Tails? Catastrophe

    As we noted earlier in the week, the left is just dying to get the NRA out of its way. And they have been since I started following this issue – in probably 1980. It seems that lately, the left has taken to a three-tiered strategy for fighting the Second Amendment Human Rights movement: Lie About Everything.…

  • Ryan Winkler Should Thank George Takei

    Because Winkler is no longer the most ineptly, tone-deafly racist commentator in recent American history. I’ve had the odd chuckle as George “Mr. Sulu” Takei has oozed back into a wry, giggly mainstream prominence.  He can be a funny guy.  And he’s got an interesting story; growing up in an internment camp, building a career…

  • Smoke On The Water; NARN In The Sky

    Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today! Today on the show, Peter Johnson will talk about church security Twila Brase will talk about the latest in healthcare freedom and her interview in Dailiy Caller with Ginny Thomas (wife of a certain SCOTUS…

  • The Problem With Ryan Winkler…

    …was, paradoxically, only incidentally about Ryan Winkler. Our Big Game of Telephone:  From the mid-nineties on, when Michele Bachmann was still organizing the Maple River Education Coalition, before she even ran for the State Senate, the late Karl Bremer was dinging on the future Presidential candidate and conservative lighting rod. And conservatives, in turn, dinged…

  • “Sharp-Tongued”

    Ryan Winkler is leaving the House of Representatives. Winkler spent nine sessions in the Legislature.  During the last five or six of them, his job, coming from an utterly safe seat in Golden Valley, seemed to be “the DFL’s Costco version of Sidney Blumenthal”; to say and do the things that no DFLer in a…

  • My First Caption Contest

    House DFL Minority Leader Paul Thissen having a word with Rep. Ryan Winkler. What is being said? Leave your entries in the comments. (Photo Glenn Stubbe)

  • They Know What Matters

    Twin Cities’ media all atwitter over over a candidate – GOP, naturally – allegedly hanky-pankying with a realtor. It’s NEWS, dammit! Unlike Governor Dayton’s mental health, Rep. Ryan Winkler’s racism, Senator Sandy Pappas’ support for terrorists, Rep. Phyllis Kahn’s attempts at voter suppression (no, not in DFL terms, the real one), the extremely cozy relationship…

  • Because There Aren’t Enough Unemployed Blacks, Latinos And Immigrants In Minneapolis

    Minneapolis is now talking about following Seattle’s “lead” in raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. Council member Alondra Cano tells us she’s working with the U.S. Department of Labor to get a sense of the legal challenges the city could face if officials try to follow Seattle’s lead and raise the minimum wage within its…

  • Attention, Minimum Wage Activists

    The free market is providing small business with all sorts of alternatives to “being forced to pay more for something” – in this case, minimum marketable skill – “than they would normally pay”.  In this case, a coffee shop that operates entirely on the honor system.  Would it work in, say, Minneapolis?  Of course not.…

  • Ryan Winkler’s War On Women

    In the past, I’ve “joked” that anyone with an Ivy League degree should be disqualified from “public service”.  It’s a “joke” – I keep using the scare quotes, because it’s only barely a joke – because over-educated fools have First Amendment rights, too.  But to paraphrase Dennis Prager, it takes years of the “finest” education…

  • ABM Flies Above That Circling Fin

    SCENE:  In the office of “Governor” Mark Dayton, at the Minnesota State Capital.  Carrie LUCKING, Executive Director of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, is sitting at a large, mahogany desk.  She is leaning back, feet up on the desk, looking idly upward at the paintings and carvings that decorate the ornate office in the classical…

  • The Hypocrisy Record Books

    1988:  Carl Rowan, the WaPo columnist with a long record of vicious attacks on the idea of civilian gun ownership, shoots at a teenager who was in his swimming pool. 2012:  Barack Obama, while claiming the GOP is fighting a “War on Women”, pays his female employees much less than his male staff. 2013:  DFL rep Ryan…

  • Confronting The History Thief

    Question: will the media force Elizabeth Warren – putatively the Democrat second choice after Hillary! – to meet with Cherokee women who’d like to talk with her about her phony claim to being a member of their tribe? And profiting from it? (Answer: Sure they will.  When they get done holding Ryan Winkler accountable for…

  • One Of The “Meta” Tribe

    Jon Stewart has his moments – but I’ve never, not once, thought the “Colbert Report” was funny.  I know – he’s basically satirizing Bill O’Reilly, and that’s something that desperately needs to be done well.  Colbert isn’t it.  Yesterday, Colbert got into trouble for a “racist” shot at Asian-Americans, exhaustively documented at “The Twitchy“.  Here…

  • The Real Problem

    Clarence Thomas notes that it’s the white liberals that, in modern times, are the racists, stupid: The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, [were] by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia,” [said Justice Thomas].  “My sadness is that we are…

  • Doakes Sunday: I Cried Because I Had No Shoes…No, Wait…

    Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Wendy Davis is running for Governor of Texas.  She’s been trying to play the victim card – grew up poor, lived in a trailer house, worked her way through college and law school, husband left her – but it’s not working. Turns out she lived in a trailer for…

  • Worse Than The Problem

    Minnesota – the state of 10,000 “progressive” advocacy groups. And some of those advocacy groups run some very slick, polished, professional PR efforts.  Or – like the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, or “Protect” Minnesota –  at least loud and well-funded ones. And then there’s the Douglas County DFL.  The DugCo DFL runs a twitter feed…

  • The Sexist “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”

    The party that stood four-square behind Representative Ryan Winkler for calling Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom“… …has the vapors over two of the most innocuous jokes… Nov. 16, 2012: “Poor Susan Rice. She’s the first woman in Washington to get in more trouble opening her mouth for a president than Monica Lewinsky.” Nov. 18,…

  • Winkler Karaoke: “Making Bipartisanship Out Of Nothing At All”

    Ryan Winkler (DFL St. Louis Park) is beating the bushes around Minnesota to try to gin up a push for a massive hike in the minimum wage (and cobble together some positive name recognition to try to rescue his rumored ambition to run for Secretary of State after the avalanche of negative publicity he got…

  • The Uncommonly Awful Common Core

    I’ve been doing radio for a while.  I’ve interviewed a lot of people – Senators, Congresspeople, State Legislators, Governors, candidates for all of the above, Miss Minnesotas, authors, public intellectuals, fake intellectuals, Princesses Kay of the Milky Way, plate-throwers, journalists, bloggers, athletes, coaches – you get the picture. And almost every time when I walk…

  • Our Innumerate Overlords

    When Representative Ryan Winkler talks, people listen. And then the smart people snicker. He tweeted this yesterday: My favorite point in this op-ed: low wages do not cause poverty. http://t.co/jBfXzKYSiF. Only an economist could be so enlightened. — Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) September 8, 2013 Of course, he had the point of the op-ed all wrong.…

  • Narrowly Focused Diversity

    The US Senate has one black member – Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina. Naturally, he wasn’t invited to yesterday’s 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech: “Senator Scott was not invited to speak at the event,” Greg Blair, a spokesman for the South Carolina lawmaker, said in a statement to…