…or does this…

“I’ve issued a warning order to prepare the Minnesota National Guard,” Walz added. “These National Guard troops are our National Guard troops. Minnesota will not allow our community to be used as a prop in a national political fight.”

Asked how he planned to deploy the National Guard, Walz said he didn’t know yet before acknowledging the extraordinary nature of the situation, telling reporters, “We’ve never been at war with our federal government.”

 

…sound kind of like an insurgency?

The governor sounds like he’s losing his mind.  

Governor Walz appears to be losing his mind:

Because it’s all Trump’s/Joe Thompson’s fault, of course. 

By the way – watch for a concerted campaign by Big Left – or even just Walz’s crowd – to paint him as the victim in all this:

I try to stay on an even keel, to give people the benefit of the doubt. 

But I’ve never wanted to see someone hauled out of the Capitol in handcuffs – or, given this video, maybe a straitjacket – this badly in my life. 

I started hearing blips last week that Governor Walz was going to get defenestrated from the Governor’s race.  The big donors that run the DFL were worried he’s going to be a drag on the ticket.  

It got a little more official last night:

Reports say Amy Klobuchar may get in the governor’s race. 

This is, of course pretty brilliant for the DFL.   Rumor has it they want to run on an “Anti-Fraud” platform next year.  Klobuchar hasn’t been implicated – so she’ll make that a little less incongruous.  And if she loses, she keeps her Senate seat, and if she wins, Walz appoints her successor.   

The only two risks?  

• The GOP getting its act together and running a well-funded, universally supported candidate that can deliver the right message with enough force to get past mid-Minnesotans Fudds and their attachment to two generations of the Klobuchar name, and
• The Feds bringing in a lot more indictments that make, er, other parts of the ticket squirm a little.  

I’m thinking “B” is more likely, but I’ve love to be suprised. 

Watch this video.  

How far away do you think Minnesota , and America, are from this?

SCENE:  The headquarters of the Democrat Farmer Labor Party, in Saint Paul. Chair Richard CARLBON is convening a meeting of key Democrat activists, including Tim WALZ, Keith ELLISON, Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, Avery LIBRELLE, Inge “Lucky” CARROLL, And Evan Micah BRYAN.  

WALZ:  Damn.  This damn fraud damn scandal is damn causing a damn lot of damn trouble. 

CARLBOM:  We’re not on camera, Tim. 

WALZ:  Doh.  I’m a knucklehead.  This fraud scandal is causing a lot of trouble.  

BIRKENSTOCK:   So what do we do?

CARROLL:   Rebrand “finding fraud” as racist?

BRYAN:  We have been doing that.  It’s not working quite like it used to.  

ELLISON:  We can tell the media who’s boss. 

CARROLL:   On it.  

CARLBOM:  No bad ideas, folks.  But I think I’ve got it.  

(The room hushes)

CARLBOM:  We run as the anti-fraud party!

WALZ:  Damn yeah damn we damn tell people damn damn damn damn

(BIRKENSTOCK rises, takes Walz’s hand, leads him from the room)

BRYAN:  You mean, go at all these allegations of seven years of fraud while we controlled the executive branch and most of the Legislature by saying we were always the party that fought fraud. 

CARLBOM:  Yep. 

ELLISON:  But what about the Somalis?

CARLBOM:  Pfffft.   We throw them under the bus.  

LIBRELLE:  Isn’t that a little bit cynical?

CARLBOM:  It’s a lot cynical.  That’s what I do.   We burn one group of immigrants, we bring in another group of migrants.   Palestinians are hot right now.  

(Nods and murmurs of assent around the room)

CARROLL:  Hm.   Kind of Orwellian.   

CARLBOM:  Of course it is.  And it works.  It’s always worked before.  Minnesotans just aren’t that smart.  

(Muted assent around the table)

BRYAN:  People are pretty stupid.  

CARLBOM:  That’s our unofficial motto.  OK.  Make it happen!

and SCENE

He’s talking about the Nick Shirley video that’s brought the Minnesota fraud scandal to a few million new sets of eyeballs:

Nick Shirley’s video (I’ll link it in the comments) has gotten a ton of traffic and is bringing the story of Minnesota’s fraud pandemic to a lot of people for the first time – but Bill Glahn, Liz Collin, Scott Johnson and even some MSM reporters (Lou Raguse, Jay Kolls) have been reporting on the fraud problem, including this very daycare, for literally four years. Shirley’s video is a great contribution, especially in terms of eyeballs on topic (pushing 100 million as I write this) – but the fact that it’s the first coverage you’ve *noticed* about the fraud doesn’t make it the first coverage. Do a little listening. Some of us have been beating the drum on this story literally for years [1].

Now, let’s move on to Mr. Mannarino and his invincibly ignorant post.

“While you clowns collect fat paychecks to audit and oversee the government”

Strap in for some ninth-grade civics.

Who does Mr. Mannarino (or anyone who read what he wrote and went “that makes sense!”) think does the “Auditing” of state government?

The executive branch.

Who runs the executive branch?

Since 2011, the DFL. Completely. 100%. Minnesota Republicans have had zero influence into any part of the work of *the executive branch* – the Attorney General, the Secretary of State and especially the entire bureaucracy that reports to the Governor – since Tim Pawlenty left office about this time 15 years ago. [2]

The GOP has had intermittent power *in the legislature* since then – both chambers for two years, no chambers for four, and divided government the rest of the time.

And this is basic civics; the legislature doesn’t tell the governor how to run the executive branch, other than via the budget and, indirectly, via hearings. The legislature doesn’t have arrest or prosecutorial power. [3].

The DFL controls the Governor’s office, has a one-vote majority in the Senate, and a tied House of Representatives. Which meant nothing got through the legislature without *some* biparatisan support – in the 2025 session. Which is how the GOP shut down the DFL’s budget plans in 2025, and how the GOP managed to set up the Fraud Committee that is doing *everything a legislative body can* to fight fraud – hold hearings and make information public. In 2023 and 2024, the DFL controlled *everything* – governor, the whole legislature and the Supreme Court.

So when uninformed social media pundits like “Joey Mannarino” start yapping about “primarying every Republican in the legislature”, I keep asking: “what, SPECIFICALLY, did the GOP not do, that it was legally allowed to do, and was procedurally *able* to do being out of power in 23-24 and with only the power to say “No” today, that it SHOULD do?”

And the responses I get are usually things like…

“Get TOUGH”. OK. How?

“AUDIT them!” The Legislature doesn’t have that power, and even if it did, the DFL has the votes to block it.

“Walk out!” The DFL tried that. It cost them their budget. Given the tied House and minority in the Senate, it’d likely cost the GOP more.

“Arrest the governor!” The Legislature doesn’t have arrest power, even if the GOP had the majority.

Still waiting on an answer.

“Primarying the MNGOP in the Legislature” will affect fraud about as much as, I dunno, going after Menards’ rebate program. Anyone who tells you otherwise is engagement farming and/or fundraising off the ignorant.

Don’t be “the ignorant”.

[1] I’ve interviewed many of the principals on the fraud story since literally 2022 at the latest: Glahn, Johnson, Collin and others from Alpha, and some local Somalis as well.

[2] By the way – the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, the two largest parts of the executive branch, are both clogged with fraud, and the Attorney General is at the very least circumstantially tied to the fraud (having been recorded telling a room full of people who donated to his and his son’s re-elections that he’d fight AGAINST the Education Departments attempts to investigate them, a month before the FBI raided them and, eventually put them in prison) – but don’t you DARE suggest Secretary of State Simon and our election system aren’t above it all!

[3] And the governor can’t control how the legislature legislates – which is why Gov. Walz failed at armtwisting the legislature into agreeing to his agenda for a special session on “gun violence”

Trump adding his name to the “Kennedy Center” is causing the usual screaming and incontinence. 

And it doesn’t need to be this way.  

So in the interest of comity, I propose another name change:

The Mary Jo Kopechne Center.  

I think we can all go forward now.  

This fall and winter – when the Minnesota fraud story finally broke nationwide – has been a long time coming. 

As has been a broad realization, at least among modestly independent media, that the Twin Cities media is exactly what we’ve been saying it is for the past 20-odd years:

“The Minnesota Star Tribune masquerades as a newspaper,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine posted on X. “It’s actually a Democrat front, hiding news, twisting facts, lying outright. One of the worst in the country.”

Additionally, the paper’s CEO is Steve Grove, who served as Gov. Tim Walz’s former commissioner of employment and economic development, which has sparked criticism from some who say that the paper is hesitant to pin Walz to the fraud crisis. 

Fox News Digital spoke to several locals who argued that media outlets either didn’t cover the scandal thoroughly enough or, in cases where it was covered, Walz’s oversight role was downplayed.

“The Minnesota Star Tribune has proven itself to be nothing more than communist fish wrap,” Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents Minnesota 6th Congressional District, told Fox News Digital. 

 

A free, independent press – the one they envisioned when they wrote the First Amendment – is one of the things that makes self-government above the “tribe” level possible.  

Maybe we’ll get one of those in Minnesota someday.  

$18 billion in potential fraud since 2018 – and he’s fairly confident at least half of it isn’t hypothetical at all.   

So it’s likely the minimum is nine billion billion dollars – among 14 Medicare/Medicaid programs alone.  

Put another way – the entire ruinous projected six billion dollar deficit projected by the end of the decade, and half of another, all defrauded from the state and nation’s taxpayers in the past seven years.  

I don’t want Walz to step down. 

I want him to get hauled out of the Capitol kicking and screaming by FBI agents.  

And I want to be there videotaping the whole thing.  

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.