Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:

Good take from a non-gun-nut view.

 

Very worth a read.  

Four things can be true at the same time.

We will come back to that. 

————-

Some of you may remember Bill Gleason, esteemed professor or chemistry at the Minnesota medical school. Starting in about 2007, for probably the next 7 to 10 years, he tweeted about me between 20 and 150 times a day, seven days a week. For literally years.  He left a few comments here before I blocked him, too.

Many of you remember – he started a blog about me, mostly involving insane rambling about, well, things he thought I was doing. 

He once started passing word around that I had had a DWI. Democrat bloggers back in 2012 were a lumpen unimaginative bunch, so a whole lot of them repeated it. Turns out he’d read one of those spam “public records” websites, where you can pretty much type in any name and it will say “so and so has a DWI – send us $20 and will send you what we’ve got.“. I actually had a pretty solid defamation case against him – but those involve a $20,000 retainer and no guarantee of a payoff even if you win. 

Anyway, eventually, Prof. Gleason died. Turns out his fixation on me wasn’t the only manifestation of mental illness. 

I wrote my condolences to the family, and left it at that. I was a decent human being. He wasn’t – but by that point those who needed to know, knew, and for the rest it didn’t really matter. 

—————

So – four things can be true.

First: Rob Reiner was a pretty brilliant guy. A Few Good Men and This is Spinal Tap are two of my favorite movies ever. And almost nobody deserves to get murdered, certainly never by one’s own child.

Second: President Trump’s statement on Truth Social about Reiner’s passing was fairly tacky and tasteless. But it’s not like it sprang from the middle of nowhere, because…

Third: it is a fact that Reiner spent the last 10 years of his life pretty much railing nonstop about not just the President, but Republicans in general. It was some pretty seriously demented twaddle. Like, Alex Jones calling him and saying “Rob, bubbie, dial back the crazy a slosh”. I ended up muting the guy on Twitter years ago,, because the signal to noise ratio was pretty much nonexistent. 

The fourth? I don’t feel any need to participate in some performative critical ticket punching. The president was tacky, and if Reiner had been a conservative this past decade, he would have been written off as a conspiracy fruitcake.  My condolences to his family, the film world and his fans. Of whom I was one, when he wasn’t running his fool mouth on Twitter.

Hope I’ve settled that for good.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Nobody seems to know exactly how much money the Somalians stole, but Bill Glahn at Powerline blog posted this:

That’s a lot of Simoleons.  Can we get it back?  And send them back, while we’re at it?

Joe Doakes

a) no, and b) in most case no, they’re citizens and/or born here.   

Governor Walz’s strategy seems to be to try to blame the whole thing on Trump.  I’m just curious to see if Minnesota voters are gullible and stupid enough to fall for it.  

Even money.  That’s being optimistic.  

FFS.  Hasn’t this state suffered enough?

Look, I love the pillows.  I have several.  Make pillows.  

But Mike – who came in third at the State Central Committee straw poll with something like 15% of the vote, for now – is backed by Action 4 Liberty, which is to conservative politics what Minnesota Gun Rights are to, well, gun rights: a group that weaponizes ignorance to make more money from defeat than from victory.   

Somone make it stop. 

Tim Walz and Keith Ellison are running for unprecedented third terms as Governor and Attorney General – even though both had expressed interest in other, higher offices (and Walz actually ran for one off them, sort of). 

Steve Simon is running for a first-of-a-kind fourth term as Secretary of State, notwithstanding the fact that many were seeing him as a governor candidate not long ago, and a fourth term as SOS has just got to be a career-ender.  

I gotta wonder if it’s because none of them have a choice; they all know where too many figurative bodies are buried to leave now?f

Country Highway has the single historical synopsis of Minnesota’s journey from “good government” Mecca to a state that New Jersey and Illinois call to tell to dial back the corruption.  And they took it outside the paywall.

It’s big, but you should read the whole thing.  

So – who do we blame?  A naïve social welfare system designed by the homogenous, high trust Minnesota that garrison Keillor has been yakking about for the last 50 years?

An influx of people from a society that is quite the opposite – extremely low trust outside of ones family and clan, with no history of political, social cohesion, and a “get it while you can“ attitude that comes from coping with a couple of decades of civil war?

A political ruling class that exploits both of the above , doesn’t waste crises, and has a bottomless spigot of state and federal money available?

If some of the story seems familiar – it is.  Local conservative media have been covering this stuff for years:

How did so much get so terrible so rapidly? One simultaneous cause and consequence of the Minnesota swoon is outright fraud, the rotten fruit of a partnership between some of the state’s leading politicians and sectarian interests that understand government not as a society’s shared instrument to address its problems, but as a storehouse to pillage. 

Attorney general Keith Ellison, a Democrat, is Minnesota’s highest law enforcement officer. In December of 2021, business leaders in the Twin Cities Somali community met with Ellison in his office in Saint Paul. Bill Glahn, a fellow at the conservative Twin Cities-based Center of the American Experiment and the former deputy commissioner of commerce for Republican governor Tim Pawlenty, obtained and published a recording of the meeting earlier this year. Its contents reveal how different the actual workings of Minnesota’s government are from what the citizens of any fair and generous and functioning society would probably like to believe.

 

In this case, sunlight may not be any kind of disinfectant.  

By the way – while Minnesota’s health and human services, education, childcare and healthcare systems are packed to bursting with fraud, don’t you dare say the election system might be the same.  That’s gonna be different.  Because shut up. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

When I played beer league softball, the coach would announce the batting line-up for every inning. “Smith at bat. Johnson on deck. Doakes in the hole.”

Right now Trump is at bat, but he’s not eligible to run for re-election. Who’s on deck? Who’s in the hole? MAGA Conservatives need to get their candidate lineup in order lest we get stuck running another milquetoast Romney or mad McCain against media darling Gavin Newsom. 

Joe Doakes

 

That’s gonna be the problem. Whatever his faults and virtues, Trump is more a personality than a political movement.  The likes of 

Not all the fraudsters are Somali.  

But all of them, Somali or Anglo, do have one thing in common:  they are part of the DFL and its non-profit/institutional complex. 

So if you want to get out of ethnic name-calling, I’m fine referring to the current flap as “the Wave of DFL Fraud”. 

Hope that helps.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

There are 3.8 million immigration cases pending.  There are 685 immigration judges nationwide meaning each judge has 5547 pending cases to hear. Not counting new cases.  The case backlog is years. 

President Trump wanted to hire more immigration judges to deal with the backlog.  I was thinking of applying.  I have no immigration law experience but I have lots of courtroom expertise including presiding over hearings. 

If complex subjects like admiralty and bankruptcy can be taught, immigration can.  Not every case demands a learned treatise. 

Okay so I’m not the best qualified but if you are hiring a boatload of people I might still qualify. Hour many are they hiring?

115. Nationwide. Brings the total up to 800. 

So we have reduced each judges caseload to 4,750?  Shaving 800 cases off each judges backlog is supposed to fix the problem?

That won’t reduce the backlog. That will only perpetuate it.  The system IS the problem. What a farce.

Joe Doakes

 

It’s only a farce if it was intended to work in the first place.

Rep. Walter Hudson lays the state’s fraud problem out end-to-end.  

Maybe the best 20 minutes you can watch today:

And remember – the DFL’s greatest achievement has been convincing MN voters that they are inevitable.  

Among Reagan’s greatest strengths was a pretty maniacal sense of focus on what mattered.  Peabrains like Matt Walsh mutter “what did Reagan ever do for the pro-life movement”, ignorant that Reagan was dealing with a Democrat House for his first six years in office; he only had so much political capital, and he spent what he had (beyond the bully pulpit) on his two big priorities; rebuilding the economy and destroying Communism.   

With that in mind Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Trump has too many irons in the fire, he needs to focus.

 Ukraine is a lost cause, stop trying to be peacemaker, let Russia win.

Hamas is a lost cause, stop trying to be peacemaker, let Israel win.

 Everything Trump did by executive order, his successor can undo by executive order.  He needs to start kicking Congress to pass legislation to codify his changes.  He’s got maybe one year before they start running for re-election and then nothing will get done. 

Focus. 

Joe Doakes

I don’t disagree (on most of it, anyway).   

But let’s be honest – Trump does most of. his own unfocusing.  

I’ve been generally more impressed with him this term – fewer pointless squabbles with staff, more focus on getting things done – but he provides plenty of his own distractions. 

Unpopular but correct opinion: Somalis are no different than any other 1st/2nd gen immigrants; some are criminals; most aren’t.

What does ALL the fraud have in common?

The DFL. The non-profit system. And Walz’s “inability” (heh heh) to control it.

You can say the circumstances under which Somalis were brought here – a Clinton-era State Dept. program that gave money to non-profits to settle them here, to benefit the DFL – were a little suspicious. You might have a point.

So – what does that lead us to?

The non-profit/government complex – the system that transfers taxpayer money to non-profits to do pseudo-government-y things, only without any accountability.

“Without any accountability? What do you mean?”

We’re at a billion dollars in fraud * so far*, and sources tell me there’s an even bigger wave on the way; we’re STILL just scratching the surface.

Seeing a pattern?

By the way, while there are a lot of immigrants – the illegal ones – that we need to deal with, people with TPS[1] aren’t them; they are already closely monitored. Somali with TPS – there are 200 of them in Minnesota – aren’t the problem.

I interviewed a counterterrorism expert once; he said 15% of Somali have *some* sympathy with terrorists, almost all of it passive. And that we learn about them from the *other* 85% who want nothing to do with that.

So if you want to knock out this state’s fraud problem, let’s go after the real villain; the non-profit/government complex, and the people who have *at best* mismanaged it, and at worst created it.

[1] Not to me confused with Somali creating TPS reports…

How open is the state’s ruinous new “family leave” law to Minnesota businesses?

The Legislature has barely begun to count the ways.  

Representative Marion Rarick is counting:

There is literally nothing preventing an entire extended family from chucking daily life on the company dime for six months – on the honor system.   

I know businesses that have already left Minnesota due to this provision.  

Why, it’s almost as if putting a bunch of Sandy Feists and Andy Smiths into a room with unlimited authority was a terrible idea.  

I saw this graph over the weekend – and it’s gotten me thinking.

It shows how children in Finland during the Finnish Civil War who became communists and socialists tended to see themselves as, or be, less successful than their fathers, both in occupational and educational terms. In this data set, the pattern became clearer the higher up the educational and occupational scales one went.

Having observed a lot of socialists and other dyspeptic leftists in my time, I don’t think the pattern has changed much in the past 100 years (see:  Woody Kane). 

Here’s the problem. 

“Gen Z” sees itself, statistically, as uniquely burdened by economics, frequently seeing that as the “legacy” of previous generations leaving them nothing.   

And this particular failure has many fathers; yes, the educational system that taught them to embrace victimhood; their Millennial siblings and aunts and uncles who set the example of building identities around one’s maladies.  And, to be honest, yes – an economy that is currently top-loaded with workers from a couple of very large generations, and a list of other confounding factors – tax rates, zoning laws, the advances in technology that are disrupting traditional job markets – that give the Zoomers some difficulties of their own.  

So – does the “socialist loser son” metaphor apply to an entire generation?

That’s going to take some un-doing.  

Something most Democrat have a hard time comprehending:  healthcare tracked the regular consumer price index until about fifty years ago…

…when government stepped in to “make healthcare more affordable”.  Which worked about as well as it did with education, retirement, housing and every other thing government subsidizes.  

The invincible ignorance is a little vexing:

Of course, smart people know that high risk plans aren’t “uninsured” – they’re plans for people at high risk, which may optionally be subsidized. They made a lot of sense, especially when young, healthy people could balance out the system by buying the “catastrophic” care (aka “low risk”) plans, which were super cheap and covered accidents and devastating illnesses and not much else, and most of us of a certain age had when we were in our 20s, if we had insurance.

Say this to a DFLer, and all they hear is a buzzing noise in the background. 

How to explain economics to a DFLer? 

I asked myself – what is the only kind of business a DFLer understands?

Coffee shops.  

The vast majority of DFLers who list themselves as “small business owners”, own coffee shops. When DFL politicians go into the community to meet “small business”, those businesses are coffee shops 99% of the time.  

So – how to explain risk pools to someone whose only economic frame of reference is the coffee shop?

Maybe something like this:

DFLer:   Healthcare its broken.  

Normie:  So let’s say you know someone whose caffeine addiction is so intense that Starbucks or Caribou don’t cut it anymore?

DFLer:  Send them to Dunn Brothers!

Normie:  Why?

DFLer:  Because they might need a higher-caffeine content blend to get the jolt they need.  

Normie:  Even if it costs more?

DFLer:  Sure, but there’s ways to make up the difference.  And if they need coffee, it’s worth it.  

Normie:  So…why would you not just require everyone to pay Dunn Brothers prices so everyone gets the same caffeine?

DFLer:  That’s just crazy.  You’re caffeine-ily illiterate.  

Hmm. 

It’s just crazy enough to try.  

Joe Doakes, ex-Como Parker, emails:

Had the in-laws over for dinner. Things were going fine until my brother-in-law had to tell me all about Trump remodeling the Lincoln bathroom, how excessive it is. Not the East Wing ballroom, a different project that I had never heard of. 

Trump really does live rent-free in Liberals’ heads. Wonder if it’s lonesome in there, wandering around in all that empty space?

Joe Doakes 

 

Oh, empty is one thing it’s not.   Lots and lots of ’em wandering around in that space.  

My question:  what will they replace it with in 2029?

I suspect we all know the answer to that.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

New York City Mayor Mamdani: Free Day Care for All!

Minneapolis Somalis: One-Way Ticket to New York, Please.

Joe Doakes

 

I suspect a few unindicted fraudsters are dusting off their resumes.  

So I’ll admit it – I gave Mayor Frey about a 51% chance of beating Omar Fateh last week.   

But I figured that if Frey did win, the results would look a lot like the 2021 “Defund the Police” initiative vote; 

• Progressives, especially feckless young white ones, voting for the radical change
• People who had something to lose from that radical change – people in North Minneapolis who already live with crime, and people in Linden Hills and west of the Lakes with something to lose – would vote against. 

And lo and behold:

The blue precincts went Fateh; the tan (?) ones, Frey.

And who’d thunk it – Fateh took the urban-life theme parks like Marcy Holmes and Northeast below Broadway, and the toffs in Kenwood, and the wannabe starving artists in Whittier.  

The North?  Linden Hills and Nokomis?  West of the Lakes?  All Frey.  Even Longfellow thought Fateh was a radical too far.  

Color me amazed.   

Perhaps mores – the defeat of Katie Cashman leaves the DSA unable to override the mayor’s veto for the first time in years.    That’s gotta smart.  

After their debacle in 2021, the DSA said they’d be back in force for 2025.  They weren’t gonna let that happen again.  

And yet here we are.  

I’m sure they’ll be back again.  The next election is always the crucial one.  

But if this was indeed the perigee for leftism in Minneapolis (and I remain to be convinced), and the city is going to have to deal with slow decay rather than flaming implosion – well, that’s a slightly better grade of crisis, isn’t it? 

Democrats: “Hahaha!   Mamdani is mayor and New York hasn’t collapsed yet!”

Normies:  “Well, he doesn’t actually get inaugurated for another 7-8 weeks…”

I’m going to start a pool for when Mamdan and his underbosses…er, staffers start complaining that Trump is behind the Mayor’s increasingly obvious failures.   Give him a three month honeymoon and some time for reality to sink in.

I say June 15.  

Other bets?

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The media will try to spin the elections as a devastating loss for Republicans and repudiation of Trump.

Virginia has reliably voted for Democrats for years. New York City, the same.  That’s not a change, it’s business as usual. The real surprise would be if traditionally Republican districts flipped Democrat. 

Which could happen next time if Republicans keep kicking people out of the big tent because they are not ideologically pure enough.   That tactic might be morally satisfying but it doesn’t win elections … just ask the Libertarians.

Joe Doakes

 

 

 

Yep.  Virginia was “dog bites man”.  NYC was more like “dog licks dog” – the inevitable collapse of a far left society moving into overdrive.  

The fact that Jack Ciatarelli made it a fight in New Jersey, again, is a sign that there’s hope.  

And I never thought I’d say it, but did not expect Jacob Frey to beat out Fateh.  I suspect it means that the same crowd that turned out to reject the “Defund” initiative four years ago is still not amused by the DSA’s antics.   I’m going to need to look at the city’s results, but I’m going to go out on a short sturdy limb and guess that the same areas that bludgeoned the “defund”ers – the North Side, Phillips and the like – came out for Frey, while the white prog areas like Powderhorn and Whitter were all Fateh.  

How about Linden Hills and Kenwood?

I’ll follow up on this.  

Democrats, 2023: “Wow, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a stupid bimbo!”. 

2025: MTG joins the crowd trying to seize control of “MAGA”. 

Democrats, today: “It’s time to take a second look at the wise, stateswomanly MTG”. 

(Aside: Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes are all also vying for control fhte right). 

Democrats, 2026, probably: “It’s time for us to take a second look at Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. They are “the good right wingers””.

This is, by the way, the Boehner Inversion to the Reagan Corollary to Bert’s 11th Law in action. 

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is riding a recumbent bike through the Minneapolis skyway when Mitch BERG happens across the path. 

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG:  Er, hey, Avery.  What are doing riding a bike through the skyway…

LIBRELLE: Shut up.   Do you remember these?

BERG:  They were a little before my time, but I know what they are…

LIBRELLE:  You have never seen one because VACCINES!  But your party wants to abolish vaccines!

BERG:  First, no we don’t.  Second, I’m not an anti-vaxxer.  But the vaccines we take for granted today – Measles, Rubella, Mumps and all of those – had years of testing before the public got anywhere near them. 

I didn’t trust the first round of Covid vaccines, because there’s no way the pharmaceutical industry can produce something that complicated, that fast, without some teething problems.  

LIBRELLE:  Hah.  You might as well be a faith-healer! Trust the experts!

BERG:  I mean, I mentioned testing, right?

In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.

Paul Offit, paediatrician and prominent advocate of vaccination, sets the `Cutter incident’ in the context of the struggle of medical science against polio and other infectious diseases over the course of the 20th century. He reminds us that, within a decade of Karl Landsteiner’s identification of the polio virus in 1908, an epidemic in New York killed 2400 people (mostly children) and left thousands more with a life-long disability. In the 1950s, summer outbreaks in the USA caused tens of thousands of cases, leaving hundreds paralysed or dead. `Second only to the atomic bomb’, polio was `the thing that Americans feared the most’.

 

(But LIBRELLE has already cycled away, looking for underutilized recycling bins).

And SCENE. 

Life has its seasons.   Ups and downs, goods and bads, times when you can’t stop creating and time when you’re creatively blocked up so bad you’re borrowing energy from six months out.  

And in 23 years of writing this blog, I’ve been through a lot of them.   

But none quite like this year.   

Job layoff in February, and five months on the beach.   Then a turn around, and being pretty overcommitted, job-wise (a day job, a part-time thing, the show, Hot Air, and a couple of bands on the side).  And of course the acceleration of my father’s decline and passing, which followed my mom’s three years ago.   

Gotta admit, my brain feels a little numb.  I’m covering ten pounds of demands with five pounds of energy.   And for the first time since 2002, the blog finds itself getting squeezed out. Doesn’t help that the blog’s technical issues (it stopped letting me schedule posts in advance) have really harshed my mellow.  

Which is actually unsettling.  Getting up at 5AM and writing something every morning has been sort of an emotional home base for me for a very, very long time. 

And like most seasons, there’ll be a change at some point.  Into what, I don’t know.   

I know that every time I look at moving the show show over to Substack, I…just…can’t.   It feels like “moving to Facebook” was for blogging 15 years ago – giving the keys to the house to some stranger who promises he’s gonna take good care of things, yessirreebob.   I didn’t buy it then and I don’t now.  

Anyway, stay tuned.   

Joe Doakes formerly of Como Park emails:

 Scott Johnson has another post on Powerline demanding Republicans purge themselves of everyone insufficiently enthusiastic about Jews in general and Israel in specific.

 This is one more instance of playing the guilt card. America didn’t do enough to save the Jews from Nazis and therefore we are forever obligated to give them special consideration. 

 That was 80 years ago. I wasn’t even born yet, and neither were my kids or my grandkids.   None of us bear personal responsibility for the evils of Hitler any more than we owe reparations for those of Simon Legree.  Guilt card won’t work with people who don’t feel guilty about wrongs they didn’t commit.

 Why am I complaining about it to Mitch instead of posting on Powerline? Because I’m under a lifetime ban for pointing out the hypocrisy of demanding commenters post under their real names when Hindrocket, Deacon and The Big Trunk used pseudonyms until they retired and no longer had to fear being canceled.

Joe Doakes

 

First – “insufficiently enthusiastic”?  Or actively antisemitic, and ambivalent about the existence of the Jewish State?   You gotta admit there’s a wide range, even on this blog.  

As to the “real names” bit – that always confused me.  Literally everyone knew John, Scott and Paul’s real names by mid-2003.  They used their real names on the air in 2004 (not to mention on countless media appearances back into the ’90s.  

And of course, people certainly tried to cancel them.  I know if I could go back and pick a pen name, I would have.   

David French was once a conservative, in the same sense that David Brooks was – someone with a solid sense of the principles, but a serious problem with application. 

But somewhere along the line, French’s capacity for critical thought eroded away to nil. 

For example:

Perhaps.  

Now – let’s talk about the destructive and nonsensical application of public health procedures during Covid, which destroyed and rendered nonsensical the respect for what had been until 2020 the most indestructible and sensible of the nation’s instititutions, the CDC?  

That might’ve had something to do with it.