This past weekend was all about political conventions; for the first time in a long, long time,

The Gales Of November Came…In Spring:   When I left Saint Paul on Friday morning, it was up around 80 degrees.  When I got to Duluth two hours later, it was 47 with a wind howling off the lake.

But the cold on the first day of June was just about the only surprise.   Every one of the front runners – Jeff Johnson for Governor, Karin Housley and Jim Newberger for Senate – got the endorsement.

It wasn’t completely uneventful, of course.  All weekend, there were rumors that the Pawlenty campaign had voting shenanigans afoot – getting his delegates to vote No Endorsement, and then flip to Parrish.  There were signs early – the first ballot showed 7% “No Endorsement”.  That faded to 2% by the second ballot.

More surprising was Mary Giuliani Stevens’ showing.  The Woodbury mayor had a large, enthusiastic showing on the floor.  Scuttlebutt had it that if Johnson didn’t win on the first ballot, there’d be a huge Giuliani Stevens surge.   It didn’t pan out – Johnson won the first ballot 45/26 (with 20 going to Parrish), and extended his lead to 50/25/16 on the second ballot.  Dock a point from the rumor mill.

So given that the whole thing is going to a primary with Pawlenty, it’s probably just as well we didn’t waste a lot of effort on convention dramatics.

Especially since the other convention was providing plenty of that.

Crazy In Clinic Town:   We knew it was going to be a doozie when we read Rep. Jamie Becker Finn’s endorsement statement for Tim Walz:

With a sendoff like that, what could go wrong?

The first signs that the crazy train had pulled into the station came early in the afternoon Saturday, when the first ballot came in in the DFL Attorney General race.  Lori Swanson won the ballot – by four points, 52/48, over left-wing extremist Matt Pelikan.  Then, reportedly, Pelikan spoke to the delegates, telling them that Swanson had an “A” rating from the NRA (for all of Swanson’s liberal interventionism, she has always been solid on 2nd Amendment rights).  She reportedly dropped out of the endorsement race, leaving Pelikan to get endorsed by acclamation.

Rebecca Otto – one of the most disagreeable people in Minnesota politics – went out early, after one ballot, with 18 paltry percent.  The conversation in the press pit turned to What IT All Meant for the DFL Governor endorsement.  The conventional wisdom had been calling for a Tim Walz win, early and fast.

But after six ballots, extremist Saint Paul prog legislator Erin Murphy was pulling ahead.  After six ballots, not wanting to fight against the endorsement, Otto and Walz came out on the floor, urging a “No Endorsement” vote.  But Murphy was not to be denied.   She took the endorsement after, I forget, six or seven ballots.

And so two vital DFL seats were decided, in large part, because of current or former stances on the Second Amendment.   Let’s put a pin in that.

But we’re not done yet.

Upshot;  The DFL convention continued until Sunday – when Murphy made her big announcement; her running mate was…

…Erin Maye Quade.  A left wing extremist, whose wife is a paid organizer for Michael Bloomberg.

So the message from the DFL convention: “Don’t be silly, nobody’s coming for your guns. But we’re coming for your guns”.

DFL endorsed gubernatorial candidate Erin Murphy has never minced words about her antipathy toward civilian gun owners; her platform is a dog’s breakfast of every terrible, ineffective bit of security theater that *can not* affect crime rates *or* mass shootings. And Erin Maye Quade’s wife is a paid “Everytown” employee. Long on snark, short on reasoning, Maye Quade never saw any pointless theatrics she didn’t like.

And long-time DFL Attorney General Lori Swanson lost the DFL’s endorsement, almost like flipping a light switch, when challenger (and extreme gun grabber) Matthew Pelikan mentioned that, as liberal as Swanson is on every other issue, she’s a solid defender of the law-abiding citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. And Tim Walz lost what had been considered a sure-fire endorsement in large part because he *used to be* a strong 2nd Amendment supporter (before throwing Minnesota’s law-abiding gun owners under the bus to unsuccessfully woo the increasingly extremist DFL delegate base; even that wasn’t enough to save the endorsement.

The DFL reflects a base that is more afraid of law-abiding citizens than they are of society’s actual problems. Don’t take my word for it; look at their endorsements.

Every last one of them.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Recently had a conversation with a guy from Great Britain.  He couldn’t figure out why Trump voters wouldn’t pay for free college, free medical care, higher minimum wage, longer paid vacations, better social security.  Why are we such haters? Tried to explain to him that the math doesn’t work but he didn’t get it.  “In my country, if an old woman has no income and can’t work, we consider it an honor to pay for her retirement.”  Yes, but that’s giving a moral answer to a mathematics question.  It’s a category error.
Consider it this way: what’s 2 + 2?  If you answer 4, you give a mathematically correct answer.  But is 4 a virtuous moral answer?  Does it reflect society’s commitment to diversity and the underprivileged?  Maybe 5 would better enhance social justice?  Maybe if we were more caring people, our politicians would pass a law making 2 + 2 = 5.
That’s pretty much the way we operate nowadays.  The poor pay no taxes.  The rich hide their money and pay no taxes.  The middle class claims to want to help everybody but that’s just a way to signal their virtue to others (any politician who ran on a platform of promising to double your taxes to support higher welfare spending would be crushed at the polls).  Politicians take in 4 but spend 5 to signal their virtue to taxpayers.  All those extra 1’s are the reason the national debt is more than $20 trillion.  Maybe it’ll never have to be repaid and there will never be any consequences because Americans are just that clever.  This is my skeptical face.

 Joe Doakes

It was about 100 years ago that Americans learned that they could get others to pay for their virtues.  It’s been downhill ever since.

Join me from 2-3PM today on a rare Sunday episode of the NARN!

Today on the show:

• The GOP convention.
• The DFL convention.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• FM107.5 in the West Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narnshow)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

Remember during the campaign, when Donald “The Donald” Trump’s history of sexist japes, braggadocio and womanizing went from being a Hollywood inside joke to grist for a desperate Clinton campaign to dig out of a hole?

Of course you do.  You couldn’t escape it.

And as I saw that unfolding in Hillary’s attempt to claw her way into office, I kept thinking;  “Yes, it’s about drawing attention away from Bill and her history of committing and abetting unspeakable horrors upon women to the winking and chuckling of their buddies in high lefty places”.

But I  also thought “it’s gotta be more than this”.

And with the juxtaposition of Roseanne Barr (whose show was tanked within a day of her racist jape on Twitter) and Samantha Bee (who will be a cause celébre on the left, just you watch), it became clear; the borg that is Big Left just doesn’t think their own (the “elite” at the top of the prog pile – the Clintons, Emmanuels, Feinsteins, Waterses and the like) can be guilty of anything.  

Case in point:

Ivanka legitimized trump by being pretty & seeming sane, & libs created a (kinda sexist) Rapunzel narrative that she was ‘trapped’. She’s from a crime family, she married into a crime family, she’s a grown up. She will do as much damage as she can get away with. Sam was too kind.

— Joss Whedon (@joss) May 31, 201

When you have a movement whose “elite” (koff koff) takes private jets halfway around the world to conferences where they tell everyone else to move into apartments and take transit? That sends its kids to private academies but hectors you for putting yours in a charter school? That parks its money in tax shelters run by rooms full of tax lawyers and tells you you’re unpatriotic for wanting your taxes lowered?

Who tell you “Misogyny is bad” while excusing…ugly stupid misogyny (in terms so patronizing and sexist that they’d have gotten any Republican politican exiled to rural Alaska)?

I guess I can see why they deflect to “Racism” when talking about why Trump won.

A motorist who shot a man acting erratically and aggressively – with a knife – after a traffic accident in Fridley last fall won’t be charged.  

According to the attorney’s office, Schiffler got out of his vehicle, grabbed a woman and began forcefully groping and kissing her. He also, the attorney’s office said, stabbed at the window of a nearby car with a 4-inch knife.

Another motorist unholstered his gun and told Schiffler to stop. According to the attorney’s office, Schiffler then raised his knife and charged at the man with the gun. The man shot him three times, and Schiffler died from his injuries.

“The evidence demonstrates the shooter had no reasonable ability to further retreat, given the physical surroundings, proximity of other people and the actions of Schiffler,” the attorney’s office said in a press release.

Gun-grabbers might say that’s not the same as “justifiable” homicide.  They’re right.  It’s better.  The cops and the county attorney believe there was no point in taking the case to court; nobody needs to prove it was justified.

I’d say “I love a happy ending” – but of course it’s not a happy ending; even insane and impaired people are human beings, usually with some sort of parents or sibling out there.

But then, so were the people that Mr. Schiffer threatended with a knife.

…should be a pretty terrifying verdict on the state of our republic – or at least of the “elites” that infest half of it.

It’s convention time.

Time for groups trying to influence the political process to wield the power of their numbers, finances and organizing skill to benefit the candidate they choose.

For a group with serious power – human, financial or moral – it’s time to apply that power to the endorsement of candidates for key state offices. And the big office at play in this weekend’s state conventions will be Governor.

Pressure groups, grassroots organizers, PACs and lobbies will be judiciously applying their clout to the candidates that seem most closely to track their interests and goals, with the skill and restraint of an eye surgeon operating around an optic nerve (or, in the case of Education Minnesota, a street worker jackhammering a piece of cement).

Which brings us to “Protect” Minnesota.

Yesterday, the criminal-safety group gave its “Orange Star” to gubernatorial candidate and state auditor Rebecca Otto.

The Otto campaign, being led by Rebecca Otto – which has been flailing in the candidate count lately, and which fired its manager last week – no doubt took some encouragement in the vote of confidence. It’s probably the only “good” news the Ottos got last week.

And the Orange Star right before the DFL convention might tend to indicate that the group was playing it a little safe, endorsing a female candidate who is anti-gun – but hasn’t wrapped herself around the issue, either.    That’d be an interesting signal of pragmatism from the group.

Well, until a little bit later – when this came out:

On the veritable eve of the convention, they gave another orange star to CD1 congressman and putative front runner Tim Walz, who has flipped from an “A”-rating from the NRA and the Gun Owners Caucus to being a rabid anti (for purposes of swaying the metro progressives he needs to win the convention, no doubt before flopping before the inevitable primary challenge to try to woo outstate voters, including his gun-owning base in the south of the state.

Still – two coveted orange stars would indicate that “Protect” MN was taking a broad, pragmatic stand against Erin Murphy, who has all but made campaign videos of herself pantomiming going door to door to seize guns; she’s that anti-gun.   It’d be an interesting take on “P”M’s part.

Until a few minutes later, when this arrived in our inboxes:

So – on the eve of the DFL convention, “Protect” MInnesota has basically gotten behind…all the DFLers?

They’ll exercise a keen focus on…everyone?

With such mad political skills, it’s hard to believe Nancy Nord Bence hasn’t taken the state by storm.

If there’s a subject on which I’ve taken more than my fair share of crap from fellow conservatives, it’s on the Death Penalty.

I support it for every possible reason, with one exception – the inevitability of executing the innocent.

There is no rational doubt that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent of the arson murder for which he was executed in Texas in 2004; the “settled science” that convicted him of the murder of his sons turned out to be baked monkey doodle.

And even though the evidence against him read like an episode of Reno 911…

The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.

…it appears likely to happen again.

The whole piece is worth a listen- especially the part near 16:03 where the host and his guest (the NYTimes’ Nick Kristof) express amazement that this could happen in blue, liberal, Democrat California, on the watch of Jerry Brown and former state Attorney General Kamala Harris.

While I’ve  been a Trump skeptic and non-fan for, literally, 60% of my life, and am lukewarm on many aspects of his presidency (and especially of the personality cult that’s built up around him), I’ll give him points for a bunch of things:  Gorsuch, rattling the Norks, his cabinet, his deregulatory frenzy, his initiatives in the Middle East…

…and the big kahuna of ’em all, his appeal to the sense that America is a good, not bad, thing.

To Big Left, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Robert “Not the Population Bomb Guy” Ehrlich writes:

Recall a lifetime ago (actually it was 2008), when a certified dove won the presidency in a landslide. One of his first official acts was to undertake a trip to a number of Muslim countries, wherein apologies were offered for America’s “imperialist” past. Assurances were also made: The cowboy Bush and his warmongering neocons were gone. Mr. Obama would now inform the world that America had learned its lesson. The U.S. would no longer manifest its arrogance on the world stage. We would henceforth strive to have the world like us — especially our charismatic but unthreatening young president, who was counterintuitive himself, seeming to act on the premise that if the United States was ostentatiously embarrassed about its dominance and power, we would be better liked. And we were better liked, but much more endangered and much less intimidating…And then one day the unlikeliest of political leaders appeared. Many voters (including some who ended up voting for him) saw Mr. Trump as unprepared to tackle the world’s most intractable problems…But there was one aspect to the Trump phenomena that all of his supporters firmly believed: that the “kick me” sign that had hung around America’s neck for eight years would be gone. Good riddance.

I’ve found Progs’ antipathy toward the US – one of few countries in the world that’d indulge their fripperies, legally or economically – curious and, at one point in my life, off-putting enough to give me one of the many little shoves it took to move me from left to right.

In my mind, it’s yet another reason to think about an amicable national divorce, splitting the nation into a country that doesn’t care about itself very miuch, and one that does.

You’re saying that a woman who said bankers should be beheaded, who did an “ironic” version of the National Anthem that would have been tossed out of a karaoke bar, who claimed (apparently falsely) to be an incest survivor, who posed as Adolph Hitler in a Jewish satire magazine, who tweeted out George Zimmerman’s parent’s address and phone number (and called Zimmerman a “vigilante”), said something stupid and outrageous?

I need to be writing this down.

You can’t talk about everything with everyone.  That’s just not how people are.

Charlie Martin notes that there are five signs to look for to know if you can or can’t talk with someone about climate change.

Example:

5. Are they willing to question the “accepted” values for actual warming?

The apparent mismatch between the modeled values and the measured values for temperature lead to the next question. The number of interest is the global average surface temperature, or GAST. One argument that comes up sometimes is that this is not even a meaningful number, but that’s wrong and kind of silly. The Earth has a surface, every point on it has a temperature, and the average of that temperature can be computed. Of course, we don’t have thermometers on every point on the Earth’s surface and we aren’t recording the temperature for every thermometer we do have. But that just turns GAST from a measurable value into a statistical quantity, with an error interval.

The whole thing is worth a read.

And it occurs to me – we need a similar scale to judge whether it’s worth trying – or possible – to discuss guns.

It’s a concise but useful list:

Do perpetrators ever find their way into the story?  If they describe “gun crime” without ever putting someone at the trigger?  If they realize that a gun without an evil person to use it is an inert object, while an evil person without a gun is an evil person who’ll switch to fertilizer, trucks,knives, gasoline or planes, you might actually have a shot at a conversation.

Do they realize what has actually happened with crime rates?   If they still think that crime rates are rising, you’ll be in for a tough slog.

Will they examine their own chanting points?   When you point out the fact that Universal Background Checks can not, logically, affect crime in any way?

Do they use the phrase “Right to be Safe?”: If they believe there’s any such thing, there’s going to be a failure to communicate.

Do they know the difference between security and security theater?  If they natter on about magazine sizes, without mentioning gang violence,

If you can get 2-3 of those to break right, you might have a shot.

You might also have a miracle on your hands.

Over the Memorial Day weekend “Protect” Minnesota just couldn’t help itself; they had to appropriate a solemn national observance to their mission:

Normally, something like this would end up in me wading into the fever swamp to smack them down.

Especially when you get people like this chiming in:

(Would someone please tell me what the “Right to be Safe” is?   Is it the same as the “Right not to have a car accident?”    There is no such right – merely a responsibility to drive carefully.  There is a responsibility to protect one’s self, family, property and community.  That’s it).

Read the rest of this entry »

A longtime friend of the blog writes:

Common-sense knife control – this has to work right?

Well, maybe…:

…provided that “work” means “inure society to being almost comically helpless in the face of evil”.

Driscoll:  “Forget Blazing Saddles – could they even make SCTV today?”

Mitch answers:  Forget today.  They couldn’t have made it fifteen years ago.

Well – nothing but an hour of “Prickly Heat”, anyway.

“Die-in” at a Publix supermarket (an employee-owned supermarket whose thoughtcrime was to donate money to a pro-2nd-Amendment legislator)?

Or outbreak of passive sexual assault?

You know where my money is.

SIDE NOTE:  I’m going to guess more than a few left that supermarket and joined the NRA out of pure spite.

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

• Socratic debate – Minneapolis style!
• Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer,  from the US Nuclear Strategy forum and fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, on the Iran and North Korean nuclear situations.
• Andy Cilek of the MN Voters Alliance on their suit against the MN election authorities.
• You can fool most MInneapolitans all the time.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• FM107.5 in the West Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narnshow)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Evergreen State College – the ultra-“progressive” school in Washington State that’s spent the past couple years in an orgy of virtue-signaling and PC-witchhunting – has seen its enrollment projections drop by 20% this year – and its budget is accordingly in freefall:’

Both announcements come nearly a year after the college endured persistent riots following former professor Bret Weinstein’s decision to question the “day of absence,” an initiative that asked white students to leave campus for a day of off-campus diversity workshops, while people of color participated in on-campus workshops.

After besieging Weinstein in his classroom, student protesters proceeded to hold school President George Bridges and several other administrators hostage in the president’s office, temporarily refusing even to let Bridges use the bathroom unless he agreed to adopt their demands for additional diversity-related initiatives.

Carmichael warned employees that “it is impossible” to make a budget cut of such magnitude without “affecting some programs and services,” noting that the college “can’t afford” things like “theatrical productions in the Experimental Theater.”

Evergreen has been “experimental theater” for some time now.

But back on point – it almost seems like people looking for an education these days would prefer less pompous, often threatening and sometimes violent virtue-signaling and more…

…education?

It hardly seems possible, does it?

A man walked into an Oklahoma restaurant…

… It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It’s not. He opened fire, injuring four.

Then, a good guy with a gun saved the day:

A man “opened fire” Thursday in an Oklahoma restaurant, leaving at least four people injured, before he was fatally shot by a bystander, police said.

I’m going to guess there aren’t going to be a lot of restaurant shootings in Oklahoma anytime soon.

One of the most evergreen topics for any out-of-power party is the gas prices this time of year.

Here’s a hint – the sitting president has almost nothing to do with fluctuations in spot gas prices (and no, I said pretty much the same thing when gas prices rose to $4, twice, during the Obama years; long-term prices are another matter, but the fracking boom blunted Obama’s efforts there).

Anyway – it‘s a new administration, and a new minority party,  and it’s baaaack:

Now it’s evidently Democrats’ turn again. The Daily Beast reports Monday that they plan to make rising gas prices the centerpiece of their summer election-year attacks against President Donald Trump. Already Chuck Schumer has taken to the Senate floor to attack Trump on the issue, blaming the price increases on his decision to pull out of the Iran deal (an Iran deal Schumer supposedly opposes, but good luck figuring that one out).

But as with the attacks against Bush and Obama, the attack on Trump lacks teeth. Economists widely accept that presidents have only minimal control over gas prices. As University of Chicago economist and Obama advisor Richard H. Thaler noted in 2012, while most Americans think presidents can control gas prices, “any respectable economist” will tell you they cannot.

It’s not like there’s no real news out there, I mean…

I caught a few seconds of the Today show for the first time in five years this morning (I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the TV – I literally haven’t watched a network prime-time show since the finale of The Office in July of 2013).  The “Top Story” on “Today” was the President’s statements on NFL players kneeling during the anthem.

Trump’s greatest genius may be his flair for distracting our idiot media, and people who take it seriously. 

A court has ruled that President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his critics on Twitter.

Last July, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on behalf of seven individuals arguing that blocking users on the @realDonaldTrump account who disagreed with the president’s policies violated freedom of speech.

The blocked plaintiffs are Maryland professor Philip Cohen, Tennessee Dr. Eugene Gu, Seattle songwriter Holly Figueroa, New York comedy writer Nicholas Pappas, Pittsburgh author Joseph Papp, D.C. legal analyst Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, and Houston police officer Brandon Neely.

“When I found out the president blocked me, it felt as though my opinion didn’t matter,” Neely said last year. “After devoting five years of my life to serving this country, the president — who is supposed to represent the views of all Americans — did not care what I had to say.”

I say bravo, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald.   Elected officials should have keep their social media open to everyone that pays their salary.

I’m looking at you, all you DFL reps that blocked me – most of them without having ever engaged with me.

More to come.

“Woman” (probably) throws drink at conservative minx Tomi Lahren – local liberal hamsters applaud like trained chimps.

This article by the City Pages’ relentlessly dumb Mike Mullen:

The Fox News contributor apparently stopped and turned back to confront the water-thrower’s table, at which point a man yelled, “Fuck that bitch!,” “Fuck that hoe!,” “Racist-ass bitch!,” before asking: “Why you even out here?”

Within a couple seconds, she wasn’t: Lahren ended the confrontation and left the scene.The woman left standing there talking to patrons after Tomi retreats might just be Lahren’s mom: TMZ reports “some of the water got on Tomi’s mom as well.”

TMZ also passes along information from “sources close to Tomi,” who report that this drink-throwing was “completely unprovoked.” Completely! Except for, like, 500 things she’s said on national television.

That anyone can make me actually root for Lahren should tell you something.

And the fact is (and it is a fact), at best Minnesota “progressives'” notion of debate runs to:

• One round of factoids
• A round or two of logical fallacies (mostly ad hominem and strawmen)
• A round or two of name-calling
• If they haven’t broken off and run away, physical violence.

But let’s just bask in all that Minneapolis “progressive” tolerance.

The argument amongst Minneapolis’s self-appointed “elites” isn’t whether to make Minneapolis into a high-rise, high-density city full of condos for the well-to-do and poverty-warehouses for the poor – but just how dense to make things.

Pun intended.

But as Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all time.  Even people who vote for Alondra Cano¹.  As the Strib found:

A city staffer explained the rising burden of rental prices on poor residents, and gently pushed a central theme of the draft plan — that the city must build more homes in more places — to a group peppered with skeptics.

“If you just let the market promote density, that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to affordable housing,” said Lara Norkus-Crampton, a south Minneapolis resident. “If it was just density that provided affordable housing, then Hong Kong and New York City would be the most affordable places on the planet, and they’re not.”

Norkus-Crampton’s view cuts to the core of the debate as the city takes public comment on a comprehensive plan that will be finalized before the end of the year. It would be a bold experiment, allowing fourplexes the same size as a large home in every residential neighborhood, and dramatically loosening restrictions on the height and type of buildings allowed on dozens of transit routes throughout the city as part of an effort to drive down rental prices.

Not a bad grasp of economics for someone who clearly votes DFL (the hyphen is the tell); if you make something more scarce (by artificially jiggering the availability of crappy apartments by crappy transit, for example), the price will rise.

The plan, we’re told, is to eventually bar all new single-family homes from the city – turning it into a hipster haunt and poverty warehouse (depending on the neighborhood) with a thin film  of the wealthy grandfathered in around Lake of the Isles and Minnehaha Creek and West River Road (someone’s gotta administer all the rest of the housing – and it’s so hard to concentrate on other peoples’ best interest when you’re jammed into a four plex next to a train station…

¹Just kidding.  You can convince Alondra Cano’s voters of pretty much anything.   Someday, I may turn to short con games in her ward for a little side income.

I was thinking the other day – if it turns out that, after almost two years of Democrats claiming that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians it turns out that the Democrats were the ones who actually colluded with Putin?

It’d mean that Berg’s Seventh Law is not only an inviolable law of human political behavior, but in fact one of the core truths about the American political system today.

Former Iron Range legislator Carly Melin (who has since gone on to the great non-profit sinecure reward that awaits all DFL legislators) on the protests at the Blue Line on Fort Snelling yesterday:

The same people who oppose public transit are mad that public transit was disrupted by a demonstration and even though those demonstrators were arrested there should have been more laws to arrest them under.🤦🏼‍♀️

— Carly Melin (@carlymelin) May 22, 2018

Er, Ms. Melin? Why shouldn’t we be mad? We paid for it.

God knows you didn’t.