It seems the St. Paul Police Department and/or the Ramsey County Sheriff office (the article is a little unclear on which) has gotten itself involved in a First Amendment case.

Now, to me, the case itself, involving a police dustup with of those “First Amendment activists” who seems to have all the time in the world to prowl the streets with a video camera trolling for the faintest whiff of police misconduct – is less interesting than this quote from an officer of the St. Paul police union (Emphasis added):

“I don’t know of a time in our profession where we as cops have needed to be any more vigilant about our personal safety and the security of our facilities, than the present,” said Mark Ross, treasurer of the St. Paul police union.

Blame it on cable TV; cops aren’t the only ones who think it’s the most dangerous time in history.

It’s not:

Even with the uptick in the past year or two, it’s less dangerous than it was five years ago.  Or ten years ago.  There are are 1/4 fewer cop killings than there were 20 years ago.  And less than half as many as a little over forty years ago; 1973-74 were more dangerous than 9/11.

I added emphasis to this part:

“There are safety considerations too numerous to list as to why a person making videos of police officers and police facilities creates enough reasonable suspicion to stop, detain and identify somebody engaged in that type of activity.”

Too numerous to list?  No, I think it’s worth a little time and discussion.

Go ahead and list the “safety considerations” of people videotaping cops, officer.

Every last one of them.

I get it; the “video activist” involved was one of those pains in the ass who’s constantly sniffing around looking for something to wave around; he’s sort of like an assistant county attorney, if you think about it.

But let’s hear the “safety considerations” that a guy with a camera offers you that every other person out there, no matter what they’re doing, doesn’t also present every police officer, everywhere.

I’m serious.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals see themselves as fighting The Man to achieve Justice for the Oppressed. No tactic is unconscionable when the ends justify the means. Call these people Social Justice Warriors.

SJWs complained there weren’t enough women executives in the video game industry; as soon as they got hired, they insisted on changing the product to reduce the violence and sexism that male video game customers wanted to buy. Sales plummeted.

SJWs got control of the Hugo Award for Science Fiction books and insisted the award be given to stories featuring Progressive gay themes instead of spaceships and laser beams. Sales plummeted.

Gamer-gate and Sad Puppies are organized campaigns of traditionalists pushing back against encroachment by the Left. They are relentlessly savaged in the media for it.

SJWs want the Boy Scouts to let gay men sleep in tents with boys and since they won’t, the Left punishes the Boy Scouts at every turn. The Catholic Church is full of gay men having sex with boys so that part is okay with SJWs, but the Catholic Church still isn’t fully on board with women killing their own children so the Church is still the most passionately hated organization in Minnesota. Yes, even more than the National Rifle Association.

“Live and let live” is dead. “March in lockstep” is the new model. Because . . . freedom.

Joe Doakes

The society you thought we were trying to emulate when we were growing up (if you’re over 40) has been flipped on its head.

…I was going to buy a GM car any time soon (over overall vehicle quality, not to mention the bailout)…

…but this adds wood screws to all the nails in the coffin.

I’ve been saying it for 25 years; The free market will develop a hydrogen powered car, at a network of fuel stations to support them, decades and generations before government can build rail networks capable of adequately serving the needs of people in large, dynamic cities. Assuming they could afford to do it, which they can’t.

The self driving car isn’t exactly the advance I was hoping for the market to provide – working in IT as I do, I know I’m a better driver than most programmers are coders – but my basic point still stands; people will vote with their feet, and their earnings, for the solution that allows them choice, hands down, over the one that takes it away from them.

Ergo – look for government to begin the major campaign against self driving cars, sooner than later.

Bob Woodward: Bush didn’t lie.

An error in hindsight?

Perhaps.  And the only reason we know this is why?

After a few years in the cold, Crystal K is restarting her blog, “Friendly Neighborhood Republican”.

Her inaugural reboot postz is in honor of memorial day.

Here’s hoping there’s much more to come!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A former colleague was laid off last year, he’s been struggling. He writes:

***

Applied for a job with [unit of government name redacted]. Sorry, they needed a person of color to achieve diversity in the workforce.

Applied for a job with [downtown law firm name redacted]. Sorry, they needed a gay person.

Applied for a job with [corporate headquarters name redacted]. Sorry, they needed a woman.

Just once, I’d like to be judged on the content of my character.

I have a dream . . . .

***

Silly middle-aged White Male; dreams are for kids.

Joe Doakes

That’s so 1963…

…was, paradoxically, only incidentally about Ryan Winkler.

Our Big Game of Telephone:  From the mid-nineties on, when Michele Bachmann was still organizing the Maple River Education Coalition, before she even ran for the State Senate, the late Karl Bremer was dinging on the future Presidential candidate and conservative lighting rod.

And conservatives, in turn, dinged on the irascible Bremer.  I’m not one to speak ill of the dead – but it’s a simple fact that the guy was prone to using imagination when the facts didn’t give him the story he wanted.   For years, finding and pointing out all the logical and factual holes in his peevish tirades was for conservative bloggers what “mending nets” is for Spanish fishermen.  In short – he was like a blogger, only more so.

But if you ask a left-leaning member of the Minnesota Media “elite”, you got a different story; Bremer was lauded as a hero, treated as one of the club, given the secret handshake.  He won an award from the “Society of Professional Journalists” – something like “best digger of documents”.

It was all, every bit of it, related to Bremer’s nearly two-decade-long mania for “covering” / writing about / stalking Michele Bachmann.  The enemy of the Twin Cities’ media’s enemy is the Twin Cities media’s friend.

And had Bremer turned all of that manic energy on Paul Wellstone or Keith Ellison?  Not a single member of the Twin Cities media would have acknowledged his existence, much less pissed on his grave.

Warm, Fuzzy:  With that in mind, take a good read through Doug Grow’s profile of the retiring Representative Ryan Winkler.

Entitled “Why the Legislature will miss Ryan Winkler”, it’s full of assurances, via Pat Garofalo, that Winkler’s big and rapidly-moving mouth was “all business, nothing personal” – which is a fine thing, and mildly reassuring (although mere nonelected proles who encountered Winkler on Twitter had mixed experiences with the lad)…

…and maybe even true, as far as it goes.

But read the article.

You’ll scan it in vain for any mention of Winkler’s “Uncle Tom” jape.  And that’s fine; people make mistakes; to err is human and to forgive divine, yadda yadda.  If every political “opposition researcher” in the world suddenly broke their femurs and spent six months in traction, and the world could forgive politicians their past oopses, the world would be a happier place, and maybe a  little bit better one too.

That might actually be a wonderful thing.

But as I – and quite a few other people – noted when Winkler announced his retirement, Winkler was only the symptom.  The disease?  The Minnesota Media’s double-standard.

Because if Winkler’d been a Republican, you can bet “Uncle Tom” would have popped up in Grow’s epitaph; it’d be carved large on the media’s collective memory of the guy for all eternity.

Winkler has painstakingly avoided ruling out a return to Minnesota politics.  Five will get you twenty that when he does, “Uncle Thomas” will not rate a single inch of copy.

Anywhere.

You’ve heard the stories of the betrothed gay couples who’ve scoured the market for test cases waiting to happen – Christian photogs, bakers, florists and other vendors who politely tried to opt out of participating in ceremonies they don’t believe in.  They were sued into compliance or bankruptcy, or both.

And now, in Canada – a Christian jeweler who actually made the rings for a lesbian couple, who were favorably impressed with his work…

…until they discovered he didn’t personally believe in same sex marriage.  The idea of having their finely-crafted rings made by someone with impure thoughts – thoughtcrime! – sent them running to Big Gay Inquisition to smite the infidels.

Rod Dreher narrates:

Were this a Monty Python sketch and not a horrifying power play, the tendering conversation would presumably have proceeded like this: Customer: We are a lesbian couple who would like you to make us a wedding ring. Business owner: Okay. I do not support gay marriage, but I will serve you as anybody else. This, I understand, is how it works. Customer: You can’t deny me service simply because you hold different views from mine. Business owner: Indeed. I have no intention of doing so. Society is better off when our differences remain private. Customer: Okay, let’s do business. Business owner: Great. Customer: Your private views are disgusting. You can’t make me do business with you. Give me my money back or I’ll unleash the kraken. If this is to be our new standard — and time will tell — it would be useful to know what legal protection our recalcitrant firms will reasonably be able to recruit to their side. In both Canada and in the United States there already exists a pernicious imbalance in the supposedly free marketplace. If a browsing consumer doesn’t happen to like the politics or the race or the religion of a given business owner, he is quite free to decline to associate with it. Thus do some progressives like to skip Chick-Fil-A, an openly Christian business; thus do some conservatives prefer to avoid Apple, whose owner Tim Cook irritated them during the Indiana fight. By that very same law, however, it is strictly verboten for a business to discriminate against customers they themselves dislike — even if they feel that by fulfilling their legal obligations they will be violating their consciences. Are we really going to add to this already lopsided arrangement a general right to break contracts after the fact? Are we going to hand the integrity of our signed arrangements over to the whim of the mob? And if we are not, what are we to expect the government to do about those whose consciences now demand that they renege on their word?

Granted, it’s Canada.

On the other hand, it’s Canada – the prototype shop for all the stupid bits of social engineering leaking into the Western Hemisphere.

…that my faith in humanity gets a boost.

But this story did it.

…my commentary about Pope Francis is largely irrelevant.  While we’re all on the Jesus Team, he’s not in my chain of command.

And I know, I know – is “infallability” is, doctrinally, entirely a matter of theology.

All I know, goy that I am, is that many more remarks like this and people are going to start mistaking him for Joe Biden.

With a world at war, and new nations joining the fight, the events of May 25th, 1915 would have seemed blessedly contradictory – two nations signing a peace treaty.

There was little drama or media fanfare as representatives from Japan arrived in Peking to meet with the Republic of China’s first (semi-democratically) elected President, Yuan Shika. The course of nearly five-months of bitter negotiations, and the threat of expanded war in Asia, had led to this meeting. At issue were Japan’s “Twenty-One Demands” – a list of diplomatic concessions Japan wanted from China, including territories, industry, and most concerning for Japan’s fellow Western allies, de facto control of Chinese government ministers.

If accepted, China would become little more than a Japanese protectorate. If refused, the Great War would expand even further.

—

Japanese artillery at Tsingtao. A German-held Chinese port, Tsingtao was captured in 1914 by a joint British-Japanese invasion, setting the stage for further Japanese expansion in China

When we started this retrospective on World War I, we mentioned that it made sense after covering World War II since the conflicts “really were two different phases of the same war.”  And most assuredly, the seeds of Japan’s imperialist designs on China – and war against the United States and Britain – were firmly planted on May 25th, 1915.   Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a double-dip of NARN this weekend!

Today and tomorrow, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM both days!

• Saturday on the show, I’ll be talking with Senator Dave Thompson about the session that was
• Sunday, I’ll be talking with Bryan Strawser of the Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee about the five bills that got passed – and where the Human Rights movement goes next year.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN most other Sundays from 1-3PM.

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

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• 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!

The enthusiasm was contagious in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.  As the 482 Deputies out of the Chamber’s 500 poured into their seats, the Deputies applauded were those who wore military uniforms.  Men hooted, waiving flags amid cries of “Viva Italia!”  For the dozens of diplomatic attendees, ranging from representatives of the Entente to neutral American observers, the atmosphere was more carnival than political.

A few minutes before the session began the Italian nationalist poet, Gabrielle D’Annunzio, appeared in the rear of the public tribune which was so crowded that it seemed impossible to squeeze in anybody else.  But the moment the people saw him they lifted him shoulder high and passed him over their heads to the first row.

The entire chamber, and all those occupying the other tribunes, rose and applauded for five minutes, crying “Viva D’Annunzio!”  Later thousands sent him their cards and in return received his autograph bearing the date of this eventful day.  Premier Antonio Salandra entered, followed by all the members of the Cabinet.  “Viva Salandra!” roared the Deputies, with the cheering lasting longer than anyone cared to count.  After the formalities of the opening of the Chamber, Premier Salandra, deeply moved by the demonstration, arose and said:

“Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to you a bill to meet the eventual expenditures of a national war.”

On May 23rd, 1915, Italy willingly chose to enter the horrors of the Great War.

—

The Triple Alliance – Italy was allied with the Central Powers before 1914, but felt very much the junior partner. The animosity was mutual – Austria was contemplating a surprise attack against Italy as late as 1911

For most of the combatants in the Great War, their entry into the conflict was, in some way or another, strategic.  Austria had to punish a nation which had assassinated a royal heir.  Germany couldn’t afford to be trapped in a two-front war against Russia and France, and thus felt it had to strike first.  Even Britain, ostensibly fighting for Belgian independence, joined the battle to keep Germany from dominating continental geopolitics.  But for Italy, the Great War was far more ideological. Read the rest of this entry »

Governor Dayton has reportedly signed HF878, the Public Safety omnibus bill that included five second-amendment-related provisions:

• Barring thengovernornfeom confiscating guns during states of emergency
• enacting carry permit reciprocity with several other states
• allow Minnesotans to buy long guns in non-contiguous states
• eliminated the capitol felony trap
• allows Minnesotans to own and use their federally-licensed suppressors.

This is a big win for human rights.

Thanks to Governor Dayton for heeding the overwhelming will of The People, and signing the bill.

Thanks also to a newly-active NRA, to MN-GOPAC and to GOCRA, as well as to the legislators who made it happen.

And thanks to you, the Real Minnesotans, for speaking out so loudly and clearly.

What does this mean for next session? More on the show this weekend, and on the blog next week.

Ryan Winkler is leaving the House of Representatives.

Winkler spent nine sessions in the Legislature.  During the last five or six of them, his job, coming from an utterly safe seat in Golden Valley, seemed to be “the DFL’s Costco version of Sidney Blumenthal”; to say and do the things that no DFLer in a contested district – or human with an education and a conscience – would dare to say.

Winkler racked up a long, storied history:

• Saying that women who run childcares are just too dumb to get a fair shake without the big strong union watching out for them
• Lying to the rubes outstate about the “bipartisan” support for his minimum wage shakedown
• Of course, his consistent, serial rape of fact in pushing for demigogueing the minimum wage bill
• Participating in the politically-motivated slander of a company that employs (for the moment) tens of thousands of Minnesotans
• And of course, the moment that may have ended his aspirations for higher office – calling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “Uncle Thomas“.   In defense of his corrosively racist jape, Winkler – a graduate of Harvard and the U of M Law School – pleaded…ignorance of history.

…enough that he seemed to be well on the way to becoming Minnesota’s Joe Biden.

Of course, Paul Thissen said what caucus leaders are supposed to say about their hatchet men:

House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, said he’ll miss Winkler’s “impatience with injustice. He is always willing to take on the tough fights and not back down. He drove the discussion forward about how to make our economy work better for people. His work to raise the minimum wage and improve opportunity for average Minnesotans is a tremendous legacy.”

Um yeah.  When a Minnesotan loses a job to pay for his precious minimum wage hike, we need to say they’ve been “Winklered”.

But this isn’t about my observations.  Look at the adjectives the media uses in describing Winkler’s career; “outspoken” (as in “outspoken advocate on behalf of…” yadda yadda), “sharp-tongued”, “Harvard-Educated”, and the like.

If he’d been a Republican, I’d have looked for adjectives more like “Controversial”, “stridently partisan”, and maybe “gaffe-prone”.   More to the point?  A “sharp-tongued” Republican would be “contibuting to the nasty partisanship” around the Capitol.

But he’s a DFLer in Minnesota.   He was just a character, one that the reporters could always get a cutesy quote from.

Ryan Winkler is the poster child for the Minnesota media’s double standard.

Guide to all the world’a hot dogs.

My votes: Kansas City, Argentina and Vietnam.

On the one hand, this article in the HuffPo – which bemoans the notion that new college graduates can’t afford an apartment in the 25 “most desirable” cities – is apparently written by people who were on allowances from wealthy families (emphasis added):

Entry level salaries coupled with sky-high rents in the country’s most desirable cities often makes finding a place more of a headache than a happy ending.

As experts at Trulia found, new grads can’t really afford to live anywhere among the country’s 25 largest rental markets. While the median annual income for new grads ranges from about $16,000 to about $41,000 in these cities, the income needed to afford median rent is two to three times that — assuming grads don’t want to spend more than 31 percent of their income on rent.

On the one hand:  Median income?  The price in the middle of the range?

Who are the posh little fops who move straight into the middle of the housing market right out of school?

And since when do new college grades move into apartments alone, much less in the middle of the market?  Get a damn roommate.  Or move to a less “desirable” city!

On the other hand, looking at the list of cities that college grads (or the poor, or the middle class) can’t afford to live in, I think I detect a pattern:

Yes.  I believe I do.

During the legislative session: The Senate DFL caucus joined with Senate Republicans to defeat Governor Flint-Smith’s Dayton’s teachers union payoff (A.k.a. “early childhood education” bill) – a proposal that school districts don’t want, and research shows is at best useless for kids development.

Now that the session is over, and the Senate election is in sight: The Senate DFL caucus is puckering up, and homing in on Governor Dayton’s hindquarters:

One day after Governor Dayton announced he would be vetoing the legislature’s $400 million E-12 bill, seven DFL State Senators have made it clear they won’t be a road block to negotiations, saying they are in favor of the Governor’s desire to fund a sustained commitment to early childhood education that works for all schools and includes flexibility.

Reading the article – from the Senate DFL caucus communication office – it’s easy to see who the campaign is aimed at; people who want free stuff, and don’t really care how they get it.

…that a dozen of these little numbers have been sold to medical schools…

…and 2,200 to Minnesota state and county tax authorities.

I’m not going to say that this is the most depressing thing I’ve read in ages…

…oh, the hell I’m not.  It absolutely is:

YouGov’s latest research shows that many Americans support making it a criminal offense to make public statements which would stir up hatred against particular groups of people. Americans narrowly support (41%) rather than oppose (37%) criminalizing hate speech…

And yes, as PJ O’Rourke reminded us, the ones who’d burn the Rights of Man to save the snail darter are mostly left of the aisle: 

…but this conceals a partisan divide. Most Democrats (51%) support criminalizing hate speech, with only 26% opposed. Independents (41% to 35%) and Republicans (47% to 37%) tend to oppose making it illegal to stir up hatred against particular groups. Support for banning hate speech is also particularly strong among racial minorities. 62% of black Americans, and 50% of Hispanics support criminalizing comments which would stir up hatred. White Americans oppose a ban on hate speech 43% to 36%.

 

And just so we’re clear – “stir up hatred” doesn’t mean “actively advocate violence”, which is already illegal.  This refers to, for lack of a better term, offensive speech.

I’m becoming genuinely depressed about the future of this country, as a country.

House DFL Minority Leader Paul Thissen having a word with Rep. Ryan Winkler.

What is being said?

Leave your entries in the comments.

(Photo Glenn Stubbe)

Senator Thompson – who will be a guest on the NARN on Saturday – pretty well nailed the Governor’s tantrum:

And Andy Aplikowski, on Facebook, made the sterling point that Governor Dayton is touring the state trying to convince Minnesotans he “cares about children”…

…with his Lieutenant Governor, Tina Flint-Smith, former executive butcherette of Planned Parenthood (aka “The Vandalia Abattoir”).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

William Mitchell College of Law is looking for legal writing instructors.  I wonder: if the existing professors include a White liberal, a Black liberal, a Woman liberal, an Hispanic liberal, a Pacific-Islander liberal, a Veteran liberal, a Differently Abled liberal and a Pre-Operative Transgender Cis-liberal, has the school achieved sufficient diversity that they can now hire the applicant with the best education, experience and character?  Or do they need to hire a Muslim liberal first?

Joe Doakes

Can’t believe Joe forgot the various flavors of “gay” teachers.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is waiting in line at the box office to buy advance tickets to see PJ O’Rourke.

Suddenly, Bill GUNKEL, chairman of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of Former Republicans for Ron Paul, walking by to find a place that sells pancakes, notices BERG.  

GUNKEL:  Hey, Berg!   Ron Paul was right all along about Iraq!

BERG:   Huh?

GUNKEL:  He opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning.

BERG:  Well, no cigar for that; he opposes the Civil War.

GUNKEL:  Well, yeah for good reason…

BERG:  Before you launch into that, Bill, why doncha tell me what it was that Ron Paul knew about Iraq that the rest of us didn’t?

GUNKEL:  He had no WMDs!

BERG:  OK.  Right. Now – forget for a moment that the authorization to go to war had 23 different separate reasons, grouped into four different categories; Aggressive actions against its neighbors including sponsoring terrorism and paying for suicide bombers in Israel; gross human rights violations, including two separate mass genocides against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs;  violations of the terms of the 1992 peace accord, and WMDs.  WMDs amounted to three of the 23 reasons for the authorization.

And pretty much everyone in the world that wasn’t regarded as a crank…

GUNKEL:  …hey!

BERG:  Sorry, everyone in the world that wasn’t regarded as a crank and Ron Paul looked at the same evidence that the President did, that showed there were WMDs, and believed it.  Including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden.

GUNKEL:  But Ron Paul was right about the WMD!

BERG:  Right.  And almost nobody – none of the world’s major intelligence agencies, diplomatic services or anyone else – agreed.  And as long as Hussein was in power, nobody was going to know any better.

GUNKEL:  So Ron Paul is smarter than all of them!

BERG:  Er, sure.  And how do we know it?

GUNKEL:  Because there were no WMDs.  Or not many.

BERG:  And we know this why?

GUNKEL:  Because we never found any!

BERG:  Who never found any how, or when?

GUNKEL:  Our troops, in Iraq, after…the…  [GUNKEL pauses]

BERG:  In other words, the invasion, and only the invasion, confirmed Ron Paul’s thesis, and without the invasion, there’d have been no foreseeable way to confirm or deny it.

GUNKEL:  Statist RINO!

And SCENE.