Jason Rarick won the special election in Senate District 11 last night, and did it with a pretty impressive margin in a district that was not only pretty much 50-50, but in which the GOP has never won the Senate seat.

With 100 percent of precincts in, state Rep. Jason Rarick wins the SD 11 race with 52 percent of the vote to Democrat Stu Lourey’s 46 percent. A flip for the Senate GOP #mnleg

— Briana Bierschbach (@bbierschbach) February 6, 2019

Perhaps it’s a sign that the DFL wave from last fall has dissipated in a welter of the overreach I predicated. The GOP now has a two-vote majority in the Senate.

An interesting sign: organized labor, at least private-sector labor, was working the district hard.

For Rarick.

Didn’t see that coming, I gotta admit.

And perhaps it’s a sign that MInnesota’s real 2nd Amendment groups, which backed Rarick, are actually starting to get their clout back, and see the truth about the (in my opinion) fraudulent, Iowa-based “Minnesota” Gun Rights, which denounced Rarick for no rational reason other than the simple fact that winning would gut their gravy train. Side note: If you donate to Minnesota Gun Rights, you are a sucker and I’ll tell you to your face; you would do less damage giving your money directly to Michael Bloomberg.

Congrats, Jason Rarick!

Last weekend on the show, I predicted that Ralph Northam, with the aid of savvy PR

and a compliant media, would be rehabilitated within a year.

I may have been too conservative – but in my defense, even I did g predict this tactic.

According to CNN, liberal racists are actually a good thing

Ivoprop is a respected brand of ultralight propellers.  They have a great reputation.  The founder has an even better story.

Nobody ever flew one the other direction to escape from capitalist Austria into socialist Czechoslovakia.  Lesson for Ilhan and AOC in there, somewhere.

Somewhere, somehow, I’m pretty sure either Ilhan and AOC got it in their head that someone did, or they know that nobody in their voting pool would check them on it if they said “as many people fled east as west”.

Minnesota “progressives” aren’t that curious or critical.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is shopping for a new casserole trivet for his Instant Pot (C) when MyLysa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, rounds the corner.

BERG: Er…Ms. Silberman.

SILBERMAN: [visibly searching for name] . Er – hello, Merg.

BERG: So – any comment about the allegations against Ralph “Satchmo” Northam?

SILBERMAN: In these inflammatory situations and divided times, it’s a journalist’s responsibility to make sure they get the facts straight.

BERG: OK. So – Brent Kavanaugh…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly screams, face red with rage] WE ALWAYS #BELIEVEWOMEN, YOU SON OF A BITCH!!!

BERG: Huh. So – Democrat governor Northam…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly calm again] Get the facts…

BERG: Northam, Ellison, Clinton…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly calm again] We can’t report a story where we’re not absolutely sure…

BERG: The Covington kids..

SILBERMAN: [Enraged again] . WHITE! MAGA! THE…SMIRK! I JUST WANT TO BURN THAT KID’S FACE OFF!

BERG: Right. So I’ve predicted that the media will declare Northam “rehabilitated” within the year.

SILBERMAN: Rehabilitated from what?

BERG: Er…yeah. Exactly.

And SCENE

Attorneys representing Nick Sandman, the Covington Kid who was the subject of Big Left’s two minutes’ hate a couple weeks ago, have started the wheels rolling on lawsuits.

Over fifty of them:

“The legal counsel representing Nick and his family, Todd McMurtry and experienced libel and defamation lawyer L. Lin Wood of Atlanta, have said they will seek justice for the harm allegedly done to the teen,” The Enquirer reported. “McMurtry is with the law firm of Hemmer Defrank Wessels and has practiced law in Greater Cincinnati since 1991. He said a team of seven lawyers has been working full-time to review the media accounts of what happened.”
The letters come in response to the media’s smearing of Sandmann after a selectively edited clip of an incident on January 19, 2019, went viral that showed Sandmann standing face-to-face with Native American Nathan Phillips, who was beating a drum in Sandmann’s face.

The list of people and entities served includes:

1. The Washington Post
2. The New York Times
3. Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN)
4. The Guardian
5. National Public Radio
6. TMZ
7. Atlantic Media Inc.
8. Capitol Hill Publishing Corp.
9. Diocese of Covington
10. Diocese of Lexington
11. Archdiocese of Louisville
12. Diocese of Baltimore
13. Ana Cabrera (CNN)
14. Sara Sidner (CNN)
15. Erin Burnett (CNN)
16. S.E. Cupp (CNN)
17. Elliot C. McLaughlin (CNN)
18. Amanda Watts (CNN)
19. Emanuella Grinberg (CNN)
20. Michelle Boorstein (Washington Post)
21. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (Washington Post)
22. Antonio Olivo (Washington Post)
23. Joe Heim (Washington Post)
24. Michael E. Miller (Washington Post)
25. Eli Rosenberg (Washington Post)
26. Isaac Stanley-Becker (Washington Post)
27. Kristine Phillips (Washington Post)
28. Sarah Mervosh (New York Times)
29. Emily S. Rueb (New York Times)
30. Maggie Haberman (New York Times)
31. David Brooks (New York Times)
32. Shannon Doyne
33. Kurt Eichenwald
34. Andrea Mitchell (NBC/MSNBC)
35. Savannah Guthrie (NBC)
36. Joy Reid (MSNBC)
37. Chuck Todd (NBC)
38. Noah Berlatsky
39. Elisha Fieldstadt (NBC)
40. Eun Kyung Kim
41. HBO
42. Bill Maher
43. Warner Media
44. Conde Nast
45. GQ
46. Heavy.com
47. The Hill
48. The Atlantic
49. Bustle.com
50. Ilhan Omar
51. Elizabeth Warren
52. Kathy Griffin
53. Alyssa Milano
54. Jim Carrey

Defamation cases are very hard to win. Justifiably so.

But I hope Sandmann cleans clock on this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Amazon Prime members can read Kindle books for free. The one I’m reading now was advertised as a realistic action thriller, so I thought I’d take a chance. Why not?  It’s free, if I hate it, I just push delete.

As a native of North Dakota, I’ve always found southern Minnesota winters to be a bit of a letdown (although last week certainly got my attention).

But there are those who find the whole thing rather brisk, and prefer hiking to shoveling snow.  And so they retire to other states.

Turns out Arizona is the #1 destination for Minnesota snowbirds.

And the story Martin Moylan of Minnesota Public Radio did about the subject last week was actually really good and informative.

But I wondered about this bit here:

Politically, Arizona has been bright red historically. But it may be turning purple, and, if politics matter, newcomers can find communities that align with their social and other perspectives.

Translated:  “Don’t worry, all of you Urban Progressive Privilege entitlees;  even here in a whole new place, there nothing that says you need to rattle your echo chamber by learning to treat other peoples’ perspectives as anything other than caricatures”.

Wonder why they felt the need to do that?

A friend of the blog writes:

Have you noticed the Star Tribune is really running a lot of Amy articles lately?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

Why, it’s almost as if they are “shaping the battlefield” on behalf of their former columnist’s daughter.

The thing about “progressivism” is that while it flaps its jaws about “helping” the vulnerable, it inevitably ends up harming them.

Give them a $15 minimum wage and mandatory sick time? Get them laid off!

Attack landlords for the “quality” of housing they provide? Make housing unaffordable!

Kamala Harris, in her celebrated (by the media) record as a prosecutor, did more than her fair share of being unfair.

. Her crusade against the scourge of parents whose kids skip school, for example:

The good news is that post-CNN town hall, although much of the media lauded Harris and posted adoring articles about her acumen and likability, several took it upon themselves to resurface videos of Harris’s recent support for cracking down on truancy violations.
In 2010, for example, video shows Harris saying, “I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.”
“Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco,” Harris noted, with a folksy giggle.
Another video showed Harris bragging about her power: “As a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have huge stick. The school district as a carrot. Let’s work together in tandem…to get those kids in school.”

Have I ever mentioned how much I love prosecutors who are drunk with their own power?

Her policies involved $2,000 fines, and even jail time, for parents whose kids missed “too much” school.

Which, people who actually pay attention to this issue will tell you, is a stupid, stupid plan, unless your goal is to paint yourself as “tough”:

…the people hurt by this carceral approach are the very people who are most likely to be financially crippled by a few fines. We’re not talking about wealthy people here, and generally speaking, criminal justice reform advocates fear using punitive means to “help” poor people because it can be so easy for them to get trapped in a cycle of unpaid fines that leads to jail time, which leads to time forcibly taken off of work, which leads to even less money and even less ability to pay outstanding debts.
None of this, you can imagine, helps children get a more stable home life with more attention from parents. 

With junior high and high school kids, truancy often isn’t something parents can control (while still holding down jobs, anyway).

With younger kids? If they’re missing school regularly, it’s usually not a matter of “truancy”; it’s problems at home, more often than not problems stemming from one personal or social pathology or another.

In what other area of society do we try to address this sort of thing with fines and jail time?

Kamala Harris is a public cancer.

When private health insurance was unable to provide uniform affordable coverage, Congress had no choice but to take it over through Obama-care.  The success of that program proves the principle is sound: government must do what private industry can’t do.
Thousands of people are without electricity during dangerously cold weather.  Private power companies have demonstrated they are incapable of providing uniform affordable coverage.  Congress has no choice but to take over the electrical industry. This is right in line with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ socialist philosophy, she’s the logical choice to introduce the legislation.  Government, not private business, is the only way to ensure prompt and efficient delivery of essential services to women and minorities, whatever the weather might be
In other news, the Post Office isn’t delivering mail today.  Mn/DOT pulled its snowplows off the road.  St. Paul schools are closed and it’s mandatory recycling program is suspended.  Government workers cannot promptly and efficiently deliver essential services because of the weather. 
Hmm, maybe we should revisit the concept of government taking over private businesses?  Do we really expect union government employees to be climbing power poles in the howling freezing wind in the dead of night?  Would that idea work any better than Obama-care or its inevitable successor, Kamela-care?
Whatever those guys on the power poles make (and they’re almost all guys), it’s not enough.  Whatever those gals in Congress make (and the goofy ones are almost all gals), it’s too much.

I for one am so happy I’ve got private-sector power. Although it’s a private monopoly in the area, so it’s not quite free market…

It’s not just an aphorism!

DC/Baltimore area liberal political comic lives it out:

Tim Young was heading to one of D.C.’s newest hotspots—The Wharf—when his life changed.
He was walking down a well-lit section of M Street at about 7:45 p.m. Wednesday when two men approached him—one of them had a gun.
“Terrified. You know, when I talk to people about this… you’re scared. There’s no man card involved. I was defenseless,” explained Young, who’s a political comedian and host of ‘No Things Considered’ at the D.C. Examiner. The men ran off with his cell phone.

Details: Last night I was robbed at gunpoint by 2 men in DC by the new @TheWharfDC on the way to get coffee at @dolcezzagelato at 7:45pm.
They got my phone and tossed me around while people watched from a half block away. Then they ran off.
Thanks to @DCPoliceDept for your help.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) January 18, 2018

Now, he said he absolutely plans to apply for a concealed carry permit in D.C., but it won’t be easy. The District is one of the toughest places in the country to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
“When you’re in an instance where there’s a gun is pointed at you and your life is being threatened for your property and no one’s going to help—and now I know that no one’s going to help—I want to feel more secure. I want to feel safe, and I have something to defend myself with,” he said.
When asked how the situation would have went differently if he had a gun, Young told Bruce Johnson on ‘Off Script’ that he probably would have pulled it out to defend himself.
He addressed people who are against conceal carry permits by saying they’ve probably never been in his position.
“I think a lot of those people who are opposed to having a conceal carry permit and being able to own a weapon have never had one pointed directly at them when they have nothing on them,” Young said.

Welcome to the party, Tim.

Bring some friends.

…I could only get one right myself.

Remember that quip you get from every bobbleheaded liberal when you remind them that the Second Amendment is supposed to be about defending freedom against tyranny?

“What?”, they inevitably respond, “you’re going to fight at tank with your AR15?” (No, I won’t have to, because if the government comes for the guns, it’ll be the AR15s and the tanks against the progressives with their protest signs. But I digress).

The question about whether tyranny in Venezuela will, to paraphrase Mick Jones, will stay or go, is partly about socialist power politics, partly about manipulation of mobs…

…and mostly about who’s got the guns.

Military defectors say it’s also all about guns.  The military apparently doesn’t have any, or at least access to them, despite the massive arms sales from Russia that Venezuela’s socialist regime has spent its oil bounty on. [Former soldier] Hidalgo Azuaje added: “We’re not saying that we need only US support, but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru, all brother countries, that are against this dictatorship.”
The military men are pleading for arms.  They’ll take care of the job, they say, if they have the tools to do it.
Recall that when Venezuelan soldiers mutinied in the area of Petare earlier this month, their priority also was seizing weapons.
It does suggest that a penurious armed force with no access to weapons is the problem.  Apparently, not even the soldiers are trusted with guns by the dictatorship.  The Maduro regime is starting to arm gangs as a means of checking the military.  They trust gangs and thugs, but not responsible military men with guns, and seem to have disarmed them

It’s worth noting that Hugo Chavez – whose death let to Maduro and his clacque ineriting and extending their absolute power – got his start as a paratrooper in the Venezuelan army. So the regime knows what it needs to defend against.

When Brazil’s new government instituted a right to keep and bear arms for Brazilians, it wasn’t entirely about street crime.

Totalitarian dictatorship has been described as “a boot on your face, forever”. A monopoly on firepower is what makes it possible to keep that boot there, unmolested.

Buzzfeed circles the drain. 

Kyle Smith watches it spinning:

Founded in 2006, BuzzFeed is, as of this year, a teenager, and as is true of many teens it has an unrealistic view of its own likely future. BuzzFeed dreams of landing the Disney prince of profitability by dolling itself up in two ways. One is to cut costs. Unload most of the journalists producing the kinds of pieces that could in theory appear in an actual newspaper because this stuff loses money. Dozens of people have been laid off already, with more to come. Yet BuzzFeed is at the same time advertising for “editorial fellows” (journalistic lingo for “low-paid employees”) to apply for jobs. Clear out all those 28-year-olds whose salaries have soared worryingly into the mid-five figures and replace them with 23-year-olds willing to work for Starbucks wages. Hey, being a journalista beats being a barista, right? And as hinted above, it’s not like BuzzFeed has any hangups about the quality of its content. If you can make a latte, you can probably make a listicle.

I knew Buzzfeed, at least as far as “journalism” goes, was going to be a joke when I first heard about it. Know how I knew? Because of the company it kept here in the Twin Cities.

The second part of the BuzzFeed makeover, coming soon, is to grow. BuzzFeed has hinted that it intends to hoover up many other similar sites, all those fourth-rate imitators of a third-rate product that also seek to provide micro-dopamine infusions to cupcake-scarfing arrested-development cubicle prisoners as they daydream of shopping at Forever 21 and wonder if Jafar is kind of hot. If 17 bajillion dollops of extreme-low-quality content delivering 150 gajillion eyeballs doesn’t work, double down! If gigantic scale doesn’t work, activate ludicrous scale!

If Buzzfeed spirals in, one hopes the American people would get smarter.

These days, it’s more likeliy it’d get replaced by something worse…

What better way to commemorate “the worst movie ever made” than with one of the worst written movie reviews ever excreted?

Four Houston cops were shot (and another sustained a non-gunshot injury) serving a warrant against a couple of drug dealers.

That’s bad enough.

Worse?

Houston Police Officers’ Union President Joe Gamaldi was upset:

“We are sick and tired of dirt bags trying to take our lives when all we’re trying to do is protect this community and our families,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

I get that. It’s downright understandable.

This next part – where he apparently declares war on anti-police thoughtcrime? A little more troublesome:

“If you’re the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, just know we’ve all got your number now, we’re going to be keeping track of all of y’all, and we’re going to make sure that we hold you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.We’ve had enough, folks. We’re out there doing our jobs every day, putting our lives on the line for our families.”

I’m curious what level of criticism

If this law passes, you will be able to march down to the County Recorder and pay $46 to have them record your Affidavit of Virtue.
Well, that’s not the exact title.  It’s called “Discharge of Restrictive Covenant Affecting Protected Classes.”  It has no legal effect.  Restrictive covenants which discriminate against protected classes already are unenforceable, but by recording this form you can proclaim to the world that unenforceable restrictive covenants on your land are now double-plus-ungood.  You and your virtuous neighbors might want to put up lawn signs, get t-shirts printed, have block parties.  You could invite city council members and legislators to attend and congratulate you on your virtue.
In addition, I suspect the newspapers will publish names of people who have signaled their virtue by recording these forms, and also the names of racist, hateful curmudgeons like me who won’t spring $46 to record a document that does absolutely nothing.  So you’ll have that going for you.
I can hardly wait.
Joe Doakes

Sort of a like a PC loyalty oath.

I’ve never been a yuge Pink Floyd fan.

But if you had to pick a guitar player whose style is probably most like mine, it’s probably David Gilmour.

And Gilmour is selling off most of his guitar collection for charity, including some seriously iconic pieces:

The instruments that will be on the auction block at Christie’s New York headquarters this June include many of his signature instruments. He’ll be selling the Black Strat — a guitar he played on “Money,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb” and enough other songs that it has amassed a legacy worthy of its own book — as well as his Stratocaster with the serial number 0001, the 12-string he wrote “Wish You Were Here” on and the Ovation six-string he’s played “Comfortably Numb” on at almost every live performance he’s done.

“These guitars have been very good to me,” he tells Rolling Stone on a phone call from his home in England. “They’re my friends. They have given me lots of music. I just think it’s time that they went off and served someone else. I have had my time with them. And of course the money that they will raise will do an enormous amount of good in the world, and that is my intention.”

I liked this particular pullquote:

It’s very hard to talk about the writing process and how I record and use little snippets. Sometimes I’m hearing a piece of music as it’s playing on the radio or on television, and I record 10 seconds of it, just for a little particular thing and rhythm or something attracts me. I will go back to that little moment to say, “What was it about this that attracted me and what can I … not steal, but pay homage to or extract a feeling from it.” Most of [the ideas] are things strummed on acoustic guitar or plunked on a piano. Ninety percent of them, I will not understand why on earth I jotted them down and recorded them, but I have several hundred of them. I’ll find something good in there.

So – time to find that winning lottery ticket…

Rep. Dan Crenshaw gives a better speech in Spanish than most Congresscritters give in English

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 to the DFLers who now make up the majority in the House, the newish method of managing the flow of budget-related bills is more efficient: a way for legislation to spend less time on the House floor and more time in committees, where the heavy lifting of legislating is really done.

But for House Republicans — both the 55-member Republican Caucus and the four-member “New Republican” caucus — those same rules constitute an anti-transparency move that puts democracy at risk. The newbie GOP even borrowed the motto of the Washington Post — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — when discussing the rules, and one person testifying against them even drew a comparison to the casus belli of the Revolutionary War.
So is the move anti-democratic or a way of making things more efficient? Both? And does anyone outside the halls of the state Capitol much care?

Given that we now have situations with pages of bills moving through “divisions” – not even “committees”, anymore – with a single terse memo of commentary, I’d say “anti-democratic”.

Indeed, given that Ryan Winkler is behind it, I’d say “prima facie anti-democratic“.  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools are closed today.  I’m getting old, my memory isn’t what it was.  I remember looking forward to snow days, but did we get cold days off school?  My sister claims there were a couple of occasions when the country kids didn’t have to come in, only the town kids, but I wonder if that was due to bad roads for the school busses more than low temperatures?
I’m having trouble squaring school closures for cold, record setting cold in Chicago, freezing temperatures for  75% of the nation, with The New Hotness’ claim global warming will destroy the world in 12 years.  
Although if it does, I suppose women and minorities will be hardest hit, so I’ve got that going for me.

It’s science, because shut up.

To: Andrew Zimmern, Celebrity Chef
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Appreciation!

Chef,

I caught this on Twitter over the past weekend:

Although the government shutdown is ending, at @lucky_cricket_west_end we are planning to continue to serve all those with a Fed Gov ID throughout next week, Monday-Friday, 2-5pm. We realize that furloughed workers will continue to need food since they h… https://t.co/h6qga7mPUP pic.twitter.com/67fbA92RaC

— Andrew Zimmern (@andrewzimmern) January 27, 2019

Glad to see you’ll be giving “Free” food to people who missed two checks…

…well, no. Wait. They had two checks delayed before getting it all paid back, amid a national welter of corporate virtue signaling of financial support – extremely low-interest loans, offers to skip payments, and, well, free food.

I and a few million private sector workers would have loved some of that ‘compassion” when we were struggling.

Know what I heard from one bill collector when I was out of work back in 2003? “Get a job”.

Hold that thought, Chef.

That is all.

…calls for a repeal of the First Amendent:

We cannot allow the financing of misinformation campaigns to shape our democracy.

We can disagree on policy, but climate change is real. Period.

Proud to have joined @chelliepingree on this letter asking for greater responsibility to our democracy and planet. https://t.co/5hLsg1FmgT

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 28, 2019

There’s really no other way to put it.

Ilhan Omar – perhaps the most powerful person in Minnesota today in terms of foreign policy – twote:

A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump’s efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican’s efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 25, 2019

She was basically parroting the Maduro regime line – that the Trump administration was imposing a “far right” government on the “democratically elected” government of Venezuela.

A congressman who isn’t actually an active disgrace to his state, Carlos Curbelo, responded:

.@jguaido is actually from a center left party. He supports human rights & the fair treatment of all people. He was also legitimately & democratically elected. You’d think a progressive would be a little more supportive. But no, the sick obsession w @realDonaldTrump is blinding https://t.co/Eh96qanAE4

— Carlos Curbelo (@carloslcurbelo) January 25, 2019

In her own way, Omar may be a dumber, more toxic sign of the times than Tide Pod Evita.

…another hypocrite.

Back in the nineties, there was a hilarious list circulating around this “internet” thing I’d just encountered – a list of rabidly anti-gun New York pols and celebrities who had New York City carry permits.  They included a slew of actors, politicians, and – most ironically at the time – the frothingly anti-gun publisher of the New York Times, Punch Sulzberger, who was known to have his Beretta 92 badly concealed under his suit coat as he’s rail against plebeians’ right to own firearms. 

Former mayor and soon to be perennial Presidential candidate Mike “Where Have You Gone Rudy Giuliani” Bloomberg, who has spent  most of his past 20 years surrounded by armed security and cops, donates millions to groups that want to disarm law-abiding citizens and crime victims.  It could be fairly said that he may not have bought the DFL the 2nd Congressional District in Minnesota, per se, but he certainly chipped in more than most of the Lefty Plutocrat Panel.  

His message:  Guns for plebeians, bad.  Muggles don’t need any more protection from crime than the cops, whenever they can fit you in.  

But if you go to his alma mater?  

Then, your life deserves armed protection.   

Bloomberg pimps for an armed police force for Johns Hopkins – because it’s in Baltimore. 

Despite his acknowledgement that firearms would be useful to protect the elites at Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg hasn’t let up on curbing everyone else’s access to the means of self-defense. In fact, the Sun reported that as he was in Annapolis advocating for the armed private police force, the anti-gun financier was also pressing lawmakers to advance his gun control agenda.
The average residents of Baltimore can’t afford to hire their own private police force, and thanks to gun control advocates like Bloomberg, they can’t provide for their own self-defense outside their homes either. Maryland is one of the eight remaining states that has a severely restrictive may-issue concealed carry permitting regime. 
Moreover, it’s not as if the law-abiding residents of Baltimore don’t have “good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun… as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.” In 2018, Baltimore saw 300 homicides for the fourth year in a row. In 2017, FBI data showed that Baltimore had the highest murder rateof an U.S. city with more than 500,000 residents and the second highest violent crime rate.

But certainly he never went full-blown hypocrite, rolling around in the special security he, personally, got, rubbing it all over himself like Scrooge McDuck in his cash vault?

Did he?

In 2011, the billionaire referred to the NYPD as “my own army.” Following his terms, Bloomberg hired some of the same officers from his security detail to work for him privately.

Oh.

Never mind.