In the last session, legislation that would have added penalties to parents for subjecting their daughters to “female circumcision” – more accurately called “genital mutilation” – passed by a near-unanimous margin in the House, but stalled in the Senate.  The DFLers who opposed the bill carried out the wishes of the far-left “there are no bad cultural traditions in a multicultural society!” crowd, who believe that further regulating the practice of forever crushing a young female’s chance of enjoying sex would keep families from going to the doctor, lead to troubles with immigration authorities, and push the barbaric practice even farther underground.

Not sure I remember having the same deference to Christian parents who were also snake-handlers.  I’ll have to look into that.

The practice is illegal in Minnesota – but taking children to one of the 23 states where it’s not is currently a loophole under Minnesota law.

Mary Franson, the author of the last bill, is back – and pushing it into the face of the multi-culti majority in the House:

Rep. Mary Franson, an Alexandria Republican, said Friedman’s ruling underscores the need for her bill, which passed the House 124-4 in 2017, but never got a vote or hearing in the Senate in the 2017 or 2018 sessions. The Michigan case was the impetus for her bill.

“I will never stop fighting for the safety of little girls, and will keep working to put an end to this barbaric practice and punish parents who subject their daughters to these horrors,” she said in a statement.

Franson is asking for hearings on the bill with the House Health and Human Services Committee.

The committee is chaired by Rena Moran – one of the four DFLers who voted against the bill in the house during the last session.

So the question becomes:  will Rena Moran be standing up for the rights of parents to mutilate their children?

Study indicates a correlation between media coverage of mass shootings, and more mass shootings:

Our findings consistently suggest a positive and statistically significant effect of coverage on the number of subsequent shootings, lasting for 4-10 days. At its mean, news coverage is suggested to cause approximately three mass shootings in the following week, which would explain 55 percent of all mass shootings in our sample. Results are qualitatively consistent when using (i) additional keywords to capture shooting-related news coverage, (ii) alternative definitions of mass shootings, (iii) the number of injured or killed people as the dependent variable, and (iv) an alternative, longer data source for mass shootings from 2006-2016.

Watch – pointing this out will be labeled as “Putting a Chilling Effect on Free Speech (for the media)”.

I’ve been reading “The Girls Are Gone”, by my old friend and former NARN co-host Michael Brodkorb and Allison Mann.

Do I recommend it?

Why, yes I do!

This case goes over so much material near and dear to my heart – family court reform, the bizarre “Judicial Election” cult in Minnesota, Michelle MacDonald in general – that I really can’t stop reading.

Michael may be a polarizing figure – but he’s done yeoman’s work covering this case.   The story is very very worth a read.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Before “A Christmas Carol,” the holiday of Christmas in the English-speaking world was nothing to get excited about.  The important event in Christianity was rising from the dead, at Easter.

We know, of course, that Catholics hyped Christmas in pagan lands to compete with the winter solstice, adopted the Tanenbaum as the Christmas Tree, and somehow conflated the stories of King Wenceslas, Bishop Nicholas, Father Christmas and Kris Kringle into Santa Claus, made famous in America by the Coca Cola advertising campaign.

It’s our last surviving holiday.  Easter is too Christian, Fourth of July is too jingoistic, Halloween is offensive to Wiccans, Thanksgiving – don’t even get me started on cultural genocide.  Christmas – with Frosty and Rudolph and the Grinch – brings back childhood memories of a time when there was magic in the world and if you could stay awake late enough, you’d see Santa with your own eyes.

That’s why Christmas decorations appear in the stores before Halloween, why Christmas sales make or break retailers, and why Christmas credit card debt is the leading cause of family stress leading to February bankruptcies and divorces . . . we’re desperately trying to hang onto one thin sliver of happiness, one day of relief from the endless grinding politically correct bullshit all the rest of the year, trying to escape the lives people lived before “A Christmas Carol.”

The capacity of the American Left to impose misery on their fellow humans – and to get their little dollop of joy from it – may be the thing that bothers me the most about progressives; see also Public Radio’s six week long annual litany of holiday miseries that commenced on Friday.

Last month, we covered the story of an attempted mass shooting at a Kroger in Louisville, KY.

The article I wrote was based on media reporting that said that the killer told one of his victims “whites don’t kill whites”.   The killing was later ended by a good guy with a carry permit.

As John Lott points out (in an article I’ll be revisiting later this week), the media left out a key fact of the story:

National media outlets such as ABC and NBC covered the attack, noting that the alleged gunman told another white man that: “Whites don’t kill whites.” It sounded as if the gunman was merely reassuring a bystander that he had nothing to worry about. But reporters left out the crucial first part of the quote. The killer said: “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.” The other white person was pointing a permitted concealed handgun at the killer.

The killer ran, murdered another (black) woman, before being engaged by Dominic Rozier, a good guy with a gun and a family to defend.

There’s a lot of other good stuff in the article; more later this week.

2018:  “Nobody wants to take your guns.  We just want commonsense gun safety laws”
— the ruling party

1994:  “Nobody wants to murder Tutsis.  We just need commonsense Tutsi control”.
— the ruling party

1931:  “Nobody wants to kill all the Jews.  We just want commensense Jew control”
— the ruling party

1915:  “Nobody really wants to kill Armenians.  We just need commonsense Armenian control”
— the ruling party

1867:   “Nobody wants to decimate the Indians and expropriate their land.   We just need commonsense Indian control and land management”
— the ruling party

Tyranny never comes to your door in a T-shirt saying “Hi! Ask Me About The Benefits Of Having Your Freedom And Humanity Crushed!”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A lousy $12 bucks an hour for unskilled labor during the Christmas rush?

I thought Target was a progressive company. Why do they hate poor people and want them to die? Fight for 15!

Why, it’s almost as if nobody who knows the faintest thing about business actually believes that $15/hour crap.

Want to find out more about the MN Gun Owners’ Caucus upcoming events, plus the “Second Saturday” breakfast socials?

Check out the Caucus website or Facebook pages.  And we’ll see you on December 8 at 10AM at the Tin Cup in Saint Paul for the next event!

But not just any Friday.

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving – which may be the single slowest traffic day in the year of a halfway-serious blogger.

So I’m just going to remind you  my band is playing tonight and tomorrow out at the Eagles in Stillwater (all kinds of details right here), and leave you with this:

My band, “Elephant in the Room”, is playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Eagles in Stillwater.

We’ll be playing from 8 ’til midnight.   We’re a classic rock band that does stuff from the ’50s through the ’90s.   And it features our “new” lead singer, former NARN producer Tommy, who can do Led Zeppelin ,Guns and Roses and the Offspring with style.   Seriously – this isn’t your grandpa’s Elephant in the Room.

It’s a fun room, excellent food, drinks aren’t too expensive, and we have a lot of fun playing the joint!

Will the social justice police finish eating each other…

“The Vagina Monologues,” once a cutting-edge cry of feminist liberation, is headed to the campus forbidden zone . . . because it excludes women who don’t have vaginas.

Seriously: The Women’s Resource Center at Eastern Michigan University just stopped productions of Eve Ensler’s 1994 play for its lack of trans-sensitivity, as well as its supposed overall lack of diversity and inclusion.

…before they take the rest of society down with them?

Senator-elect Kyrsten “my constituents are meth addicts” Synema, arguably the most arrogant prof in politics today, refers to herself as the first bisexual Senator”.

Oooooh, the PC police are gonna swaaaarm.

Two genders?

She must be one of those Nazis the kids are punching these days

The primary assumption of radical identity feminism is that womankind just doesn’t need men.

The revolution in, for lack of a better term, “sex robots”, might promise to flip that assumption on its head; men might just as well do without women:

The average single man paying attention to contemporary social fashions will struggle to understand the new rules of meeting, courting, or having sex with women. Something as banal as trying to converse with a woman wearing headphones is now often considered harassment. A man’s chances of mating success increase when he approaches many women, but so too do his chances of a gaining reputation as sexist, exploitative, or immoral. To take a fraught example, how does a man know that a woman is genuinely consenting to sex? A lack of ability to pick up on cues can incur catastrophic costs.

Men high in conscientiousness, who are sensitive to social disapproval but who nonetheless have difficulty reading subtle social cues, could make good husbands for women. These men are unlikely to want to take the risk of approaching women. As substitutes like sex robots and virtual companions become better and cheaper, they will monopolize the attention of such men.

Think of an introverted engineer with Asperger’s syndrome who wasn’t sure how to broach a conversation with a woman back in 2015 and definitely isn’t sure how to do that in today’s climate. In 10 years he could have a beautiful robot companion (indeed, he could have one that could emulate the experience of having sex with dozens of different women) that has a lower barrier to entry than the mating market and that keeps him satisfied enough to remain a happy bachelor. Some woman misses out on a conscientious guy with a good income who might not know exactly how to respond when she says “nothing’s wrong,” but will definitely keep the cars tuned up to get the kids to their mathematics championships. The world might miss out on his sons and daughters and their analytical approaches to some of the world’s problems.

I’m always going to prefer the real thing, speaking for myself – but the fact that this spectre makes all the right people feel panicky…:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Once someone has been given a White House press pass, they have a First Amendment liberty interest in keeping that pass. Under the Fifth Amendment, that liberty interest cannot be taken by the government without due process of law including notice and an opportunity to be heard. Taking it without the hearing causes irreparable harm to the person whose rights were violated; hence, Acosta gets his badge back.

1977 case provides precedent. Here’s the case.

The judge followed the law correctly but the law is stupid. The First Amendment right to speak your mind doesn’t require a White House pass, else everybody from every newspaper down to the Roseville Review would be entitled to one and how could you decide who gets into the building? Entering the White House must be a privilege, it cannot be a right, regardless of your job, and that’s outside the control of the courts. Any why should freedom of speech be limited to credentialed journalists? Why don’t the guys at Powerline have White House Press Passes – they did more investigative reporting on Ilhan and Ellison than any other media in the Twin Cities this election cycle.

Trump’s administration is working on standards of conduct to decide who gets ejected from press conferences. That’s a mug’s game, it plays into reporters’ hands and leaves the final decision in the courts where Trump has no control.

Two possible solutions:

Announce we’ll move the press conferences to a different, larger, modern building with seating for every journalist who wants to attend, as soon as it’s built, probably on the site of a former football stadium to accommodate all comers. For fairness to the journalists presently excluded for lack of space, no press conferences will be held until the new facility is built. Meanwhile, every newsman will be given notice we intend to revoke their White House press passes on the grounds it’s no longer necessary for them to enter the White House to have access to the press conference. Give selected leaks to selected favored journalists until the stadium is built. Sorry, CNN, no leaks for you.

Option B: hold a press conference tomorrow, announce at the beginning that we welcome back Mr. Acosta, and in deference to the judge’s decision, he gets the first question. Okay, second question, I see the reporter for Fox News here, but your organization joined in the lawsuit to insist Mr. Acosta be able to ask questions, so i’m giving your time to him. Jim, what’s your second question? Okay, third question, I see the reporter for the New York Times here, your organization also joined the lawsuit insisting Mr. Acosta ask the questions, so Jim what’s your third question? Okay, that’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for coming.

Joe Doakes

Ever notice how “Journos” only care about their freedom of speech?

It’s gone through every musician’s mind.

You’re at a show – from a club gig to an area show – and you watch the musicians doing their thing, and the thought crosses your mind; “What if (fill in a member of the band) were to keel over in a faint right now, and the band called for someone in the audience who knew the material, and I jumped on stage and totrally rocked it“?

Yeah, I’ve had that.  At a Springsteen or Asbury Jukes or Richard Thompson or Warren Zevon or Gear Daddies or Los Lobos gig, thinking “If Nils or Gary Thompson or Pete Zorn or David Landau or Cesar or whoever the guitar player is gets the flu and faints away, I could jump up there and totally take over!”

It remains a fantasy for almost everyone.  ¹

Almost.

It was 45 years ago tonight, every musician’s fantasy came true, for one Scot Halpin, of Muscatine Iowa, who’d been living in the Bay Area for about a year.

He was at a Who show at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

After playing an hour and a half, Keith Moon – the Who’s manic drummer – passed out behind the drum kit.  Roadies revived him after another song or two, before he passed out again.

The rest of the band – singer Roger Daltrey, bass player John Entwistle and guitar player Pete Townsend, continued for another song (“See Me, Feel Me”) without a drummer.

Then, Townsend asked the crowd if anyone could play the drums.  Halpin’s friend ignored the fact that Halpin hadn’t touched a drum kit in the year since he’s left Iowa, and got the attention of a roadie, who got the attention of promoter Bill Graham.   And one thing led to another.

As Halpin told the story to the San Francisco Examiner  years later:

When Townshend called out, “Can anyone play the drums?” Halpin and Danese were already at theedge of the stage.

“And my friend starts saying to the security guard, `He can play,’ ” Halpin says. In truth, he hadn’tplayed in a year, but that didn’t slow the braggart Danese, who made such a commotion thatpromoter Bill Graham appeared. “He just looked at me and said, `Can you do it?’ ” Halpin doesn’trecall his answer, but Danese assured Graham that he could.

“The story was that I stepped out from in front of the stage, but that’s not what happened,” Halpinsays. “Townshend and Daltrey look around and they’re as surprised as I am,” he says, “becauseGraham put me up there.”

With a shot of brandy for his nerves, Halpin shook hands with Townshend, then sat down at his firstdrum set since he left Iowa, in front of 13,500 critics. “I get onto the stool. Was it still warm? Whoknows. I’m in complete shock,” Halpin says. “Then I got really focused, and Townshend said tome, `I’m going to lead you. I’m going to cue you.’

“I’m laying down the beat. They’re doing all their `Live at Leeds’ kind of stuff, and then I don’tremember what happened. I guess I played a couple more songs. It was such a weird experience.”

The bootleg reveals that Halpin drummed through the traditional “Smokestack Lightning” and”Naked Eye,” from “Odds and Sods,” closing with the anthem “My Generation.” He wasonstage for about 15 minutes. “I played long enough with them that no one booed and no one threwanything at the stage,” he says.

After the show, Halpin got to party with the band backstage; Daltrey gave Halpin kudos in the press later – and bootleg tapes showed that he did a decent job.   And he won a special, one-time-only “Best Pickup Player Of The Year” award in Rolling Stone‘s critics’ poll at the end of the year.

And until his death ten years ago of an inoperable brain tumor, he was probably the luckiest pickup drummer in history.

¹ As it largely has for me.  Although last summer, I went to a show at the Seventh Street Entry making the 40th Anniversary of Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, with a Springsteen tribute band, “Tramps Like Us”.   They do a good show, by the way.   But they were doing “Something In The Night”, one of the more obscure deep cuts on the record, and the lead singer was flloundering for the words.  And I was singing along at the foot of the stage, so rather incredibly, he handed me the mic and I finished out the last verse for him.  Not exactly pinch-hitting for David Hidalgo on “Will The Wolf Survive”, but it was fun, and I thank that lead singer, whoever he was…

Booming foreign-born populations, highly dependent on big government, lead to electoral sweeps.

The biggest problem with the huge numbers of Somali immigrants isn’t that they’re Muslim, or the possibility that less than a percent of Minnesota’s population might “impose Sharia law”.  ‘

It’s that they support “progressivism” today.  And “progressivism” is the one ideology that can destroy America.

A friend of the blog writes:

So, a group of black men video a Chipotle manager refusing service to them. Video goes viral. Good Morning America is all over it. Manager fired.

Except, we find out these guys dine and dash all the time. Brag about it on Twitter… 

Corporate virtue signaling has become more important than, well, corporate virtue.

Arthur Chrenkoff on election reform, Australian style.

Tired of non-citizens enrolling (and voting Democrat (allegedly))? Or counties where more people end up enrolled (and voting) than are actually eligible to vote? Easy – to enrol to vote in Australia you need to present a driver’s licence or a passport or have someone who is already enrolled confirm your identity. This last option potentially opens the door to mischief, since you could make a chain of fraudulent enrolments based on the first, genuine link, but even with that proviso, the Australian system seems to me a lot tighter than the American seemingly free-for-all.

It could hardly be worse.

Before an election, every person on the electoral roll is mailed a little card by the electoral commission with the voter’s details and a unique barcode. To be able to receive a ballot at the polling station you need to either present the card to be scanned or if you have forgotten to bring it with you you need to show a valid ID for your name to be marked on the voters’ list. Failing either, you can query your absence on the electoral roll and lodge a provisional vote, whose validity will be carefully assessed as part of the overall count, but it is a relatively rare occurrence. To an Australian, an argument that requiring an ID to vote is tantamount to “voter suppression” seems pretty ridiculous. Virtually everyone has got some sort of an ID; the tiny remainder can be accommodated separately.

It seems to make sense.

The DFL will fight it to the death.

I’ve wanted for years if the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shouldn’t, in the interest of intellectual honesty, change its name to the “Manhattan, San Francisco and other Blue cities Civil Liberties Union”. It’s been that long since they represented civil liberties that weren’t popular/convenient among that set.

Classic example Dash they think the “Heller” decision was just a big mistake, and that “US vs. Miller” should still be the defining president regarding the Second Amendment.

David Bernstein at Reason agrees:

Since the George W. Bush administration, the ACLU’s dedication to its traditional civil libertarian mission has waned ever further. With the election of Donald Trump, its membership rolls have grown to almost two million, almost all of them liberal politically, few of whom are devoted to civil liberties as such. Meanwhile, the left in general has become less interested in, and in some cases opposed to, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the rights of the accused.

Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.

Next, you’ll be telling me that the Southern Poverty Law Center has become more of a hate group then the groups it used to track…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I receive calls on my cell phone from all across the nation.  The numbers are different but the voice mails are identical offers to sell me insurance, same woman’s voice, exact same words, her recording plays into my voice mail recording over and over and over.

Two thoughts:

Why does the government entity that asserts it has the power to regulate the public airwaves, continue to allow these nuisance calls to happen?

Who makes the decision to buy insurance based on an endless series of voice mails?

Not a bad question…

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is waiting in line at Sorrento Cucina in the Minneapolis skyway.  He sees Avery LIBRELLE coming around a corner.  The thought of trying to slip away into the crowd visibly crosses his mind.    But the lure of Sorrento’s delicious sausige  conflicts him long enough that LIBRELLE notices him.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Hey, Avery.  What’s up?

LIBRELLE:  With the incoming Democrat House of Representatives in Saint Paul, we’re going to stick it to all you gun-lickers!

BERG:  Huh.  Yeah, I see that the incoming Speaker, Melissa Hortman, says that even though Minnesota has one of the lowest murder rates in the United States, and perhaps the lowest murder rate among states with a top-20 metro area, she’s going to make “gun violene” her #1 priority.

Not the educational achievement gap.  Not economic development in the Iron Range.  Not even anything that’ll have a meaningful impact on urban crime.

LIBRELLE:   Merg!  Don’t you read the papers?  Mass shootings are going on all over the place!  Our schools are charnel houses!  Our malls and gay bars are abattoirs!    Everywhere you go, you are in danger from mass shootings!

BERG:  The rate of spree killings isn’t correlated with the presence of civilian firearms – although it is correlated with “gun free zones” – but schools are the safest they’ve been in decades as re overall gun crime…

LIBRELLE:  I don’t care about overall crime!  Mass shootings are a constant factor of life!  They can hit you any time!  They can’t be predicted…

BERG: …other than being in “gun free zones”…

LIBRELLE:  …and any time you leave your house you’re in constant danger of being gunned down by a white guy with an AR47!

BERG:  Huh.  Now, it’s academic to me, since all my guns fell into Mille Lacs over the summer – but it things really are that dire and serious out there…

LIBRELLE:  They are!  They are!

BERG:  …then it’d be prudent and common sense to decide to carry a firearm to defend myself and those around me from this apparently constant and imminent threat.

LIBRELLE:  Good Lord, Merg – you’re so paranoid!

BERG:  Clearly.

And SCENE

If Trump pulls this off, it’s got the potential to change the electoral landscape for generations.

If the GOP is smart enough to run with it, anyway…

A study that claimed that the oceans are warming 60% faster than the IPCC’s prediction turns out to have had a bit of an issue:

“The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake.

“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”

Keeling said they have since redone the calculations, finding the ocean is still likely warmer than the estimate used by the IPCC. However, that increase in heat has a larger range of probability than initially thought — between 10 percent and 70 percent, as other studies have already found.

“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling said. “We really muffed the error margins.”

A correction has been submitted to the journal Nature.

Of course, to the crowd that thinks “I Heart Neil DeGrasse Tyson” is “science”, the narrative is already set.

So Minnesota will have a new Speaker of the House – Melissa Hortman, longtime DFL extreme Metrocrat.

How extreme?

What do you suppose her first priority is going to be?  Minnesota’s fragile rural economy?  Crumbling infrastructure?  Our rural-urban educational divide?

How naive of you:

The new speaker, Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, said gun-violence prevention is priority No. 1

Minnesota already has among the lowest homicide rates, with or without firearms, of any state – and perhaps the lowest of any state with a major metro area in it.

We must be doing something right, right?

No – they’re answering to the master that put them in office: Bloomberg and the rest of the Democrat plutocrats with deep pockets.

If you’re a Minnesota gun owner or someone who cares about the Second Amendment, it’s that time again:

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus needs you to get involved.  Go sign up.  Become a sustaining member.   The MNGOC is the group doing all the work for 2nd Amendment rights in Minnesota.

• Join!
• Donate!
• Find a place you can help, and get involved!

This is one of those “Their Finest Hour” moments.  But they don’t happen on their own.

To:  Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:    Line In The Snow

Senator Gazelka,

This morning on the lesser talk station, the host – Drew Lee – asked you about the approach your caucus, with its one-vote majority, was going to take regarding gun control in the coming session, given incoming Speaker Hortman’s statement that gun control is going to be her first priority.

(In a state with a muirder rate among the lowest in the nation – truly the extremist tail wagging the dog).

Your repliy seemed to indicate the proper response was to work with the opposition to find “a solution”.

I’ll make it simple;  the solution is fight crime.   Take everything that burdens the law-abiding gun owner off the table.

End of sentence.

The DFL – beholden as they are to millions of dollars in Bloomberg money for their wins in the election – will fight you on it.

We – the good guys, the law-abiding gun owners – will fight you a lot harder if you screw us.

Don’t screw us.

That is all.