After four years of abject failure, the St. Paul public school district renewed superintendent Valeria Silva’s contract earlier this week.
And it’s a nice one, indeed:
Photo courtesy Bob Murphy
8% over four years – which, with compounding, is over 10%.
People who are actually accomplishing anything aren’t getting raises like that.
Lousy graduation rates. Unchanged achievement gap.
Money well spent.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’ve been threatening to quit the Minnesota State Bar Association for years but chickened out because I get my life insurance through them and I must remain a member to keep the insurance. But I recently got insurance through AAA – I don’t need MSBA anymore. And from the way they act, they don’t need me, either.
When I joined, the Bar Association was a trade organization devoted to helping members be better lawyers. In the past 30 years, it has drifted leftward into Social Justice activism. That’s not why I joined.
I was especially pissed the leadership of the MSBA agitated for gay marriage, taking it upon themselves to speak in my name without ever asking the membership for a vote.
In the March issue of Bench and Bar, the President reports MSBA has decided it should elevate its commitment to diversity and inclusion. MSBA hired a Diversity Director and starting this Spring, will be asking renewing members to self-identify on their online member profiles in four additional areas: Gender (male, female, transgender/gender non-conforming); Race; Sexual Orientation (straight, gay, or bi); and Disability. MSBA hopes collecting this information will quantify areas of disparity and provide concrete evidence for leaders to address inequities based on fact, not anecdote or conjecture.
None of this is any of their business, but if that’s where the organization wants to go, so be it. I don’t need to wait for the survey, I can tell you right now the MSBA has too many straight White cismales. Some of them need to quit.
Glad to be of service.
Joe Doakes
Because privilege!
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Main floor bathrooms at work flooded a few weeks back. Restoration has been on hold for weeks . . . waiting for tile.
What the hell, Menard’s has tile. Is this some special hand-made Italian marble tile? What are we waiting for? These are the main public restrooms for a public building – slap up some white subway tile and get them back in service.
They’re cutting tile now. Ceramic dust billowing, sucked up in the exhaust vents, distributed all over the building, everybody is sneezing.
You couldn’t cut it at night after the blowers are off, or on the weekend when nobody is around?
You couldn’t seal the bathroom exhaust vent and suck the dust out through a filter?
True, the dust is making all four floors of the building uninhabitable, but they’re a union shop and low bidder . . . so what’s the problem?
Un. Be. Lievable.
Joe Doakes
Someone’s got to pay those dues to the Teamsters…
In all of of this nation’s frenetic back-and-forth – usually just forth – over race, i’ve really just had one question, all all this time ”
What do you want me to do?
Only an idiot doesn’t recognize racism exists, in some form. And that’s above and beyond to the “We -ism” that is endemic to every human being in the world; the race of people around them is one of the first perceptions babies develop, with uneasiness about the difference following closely.
And white privilege exists, too. Of course, the roots of white privilege date back hundreds, maybe thousands of years, when wage Northern European societies developed into patriarchal, militaristic societies dominated by aggressive warrior cultures that were able to avoid being enslaved, for the most part, as societies, at a time when most sub-Saharan African societies were small, matriarchal, and ripe for the picking buy more aggressive societies.
That’s one of the greatest “privileges” a society can hand down to its offspring; a history of freedom.
So racism and privilege exists. Stipulated.
Now what?
Writing at The Daily Beast,” John McWhorter, in a long, excellent article, has the same questions:
However, one can thoroughly understand how racism works and still ask just what this laser focus on “White Privilege” is meant to achieve.
“This is messy work, but these conversations are necessary,” says Sandra Chapman, director of diversity and community at Little Red School House in New York City. OK—but why? Note that the answer cannot be, “So that whites will understand that they are the privileged … etc.” That makes as much sense as saying “Because!” So I’m going to dare to ask a simple question: What exactly are we trying to achieve with this particular lesson?
And the questions keep coming. I will urge you to read the whole thing.
Because they have time for this:
A bipartisan Minnesota House proposal suggests the engraving on a statute of Christopher Columbus should be edited. It now reads “Discoverer of America.” The proposal says it should be re-written to read, “Landed in America.”
The bill is sponsored by DFLer John Persell, of Bemidji. Who, to be fair, may be (fairly and accurately) representing for his Norwegian constituents, who may prefer to honor North America’s actual European discoveror, Leif Ericson.
Still. They have the time for this?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Hilary’s email problem, put in context by Mark Steyn.
Love this line: “ . . . she ran a freelance State Department.”
Liberals finally adopt a proposal that conservatives have been advancing for years: outsourcing!
Joe Doakes
Maybe farm the whole thing out to Manpower.
Winning the battle for the English Language is always a challenge when you’re a conservative. The left understands, and wages without mercy, the war for the language.
And for the most part, the media reflects the left’s view of how language portrays things.
So it’s been interesting watching the media coverage of the raft of Gun Rights bills. In a Twin Cities media that will refers to using ones’ carry permit as “packing heat” so frequently it’s beyond satirizable, there’ve been some improvements.
This past few weeks, a bill that would allow Minnesotans to join 39 other states in owning mufflers for their guns has been advancing though committee.
And it’s been interesting reading the headlines that local news organizations having been using for the story (in this case taken from online coverage); do they refer to gun mufflers with techical accuracy as “suppressors”, or with conspiratorial, theatrical scaremongering as “silencers”.
Here are some examples, with emphasis added by me:
So minor kudos to the Twin Cities media; at least as re the very basics of language, you’re coming around ever so slightly.
Now, if we could do something about using the term “packing heat”, like, ever…
Tonight, and Thursday morning, the legislature is going to be debating a bill – HF722, sponsored by representative Jim Newburger – which would prevent government from confiscating civilian firearms during states of emergency.
This is no idle worry; after Hurricane Katrina, the police went door to door through the storm ravaged neighborhoods, confiscating peoples firearms, leaving them helpless in the face of looters and thugs.
There are going to be two rounds of hearings:
Second Amendment humans rights advocates are on the offensive, this session – but that doesn’t mean anything is a shoe in. Showing up at hearings, or calling your legislators, is still essential. Maybe moreso than ever.
Any DFLer who votes against this bill is essentially tipping their hand; they won’t “waste a crisis”, and if offered the chance will use that crisis as an excuse to extort firearms from the law abiding citizen. They need to be held accountable for this 2016
After four years under firmer Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Chicago has run up an absolute mountain of debt, and is among the ranks of cities that could easily go bankrupt in the near future.
So naturally, inveterate democrat Chicago voters appear likely to go the Greek route, and kick the physical can down the road even further, appearing to favor someone even further to the left:
Three weeks remain before the April 7 runoff between Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner and fellow Democrat whose candidacy is the vehicle for grievances against the mayor and his efforts to steer the city away from insolvency. Chicago has $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, a school system deep in deficit and a credit rating dropping toward junk. It’s in danger of being overwhelmed by debt unless it embraces onerous solutions that probably would include retirement benefit cuts and tax increases.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such financial uncertainty and so many moving parts all going on at once, and no one wanting to blink first by saying what he’s going to do about it,” said Donald Haider, a former Chicago finance director who ran for mayor in 1987.
Of course, they have to walk a very fine line; essentially, both have to campaign on who’s willing to be the most brazen about waiting for a federal bailout, without actually saying it.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Found in an on-line bulletin board:
“Room available for the summer for a college aged girl to live with us for free in exchange for weekday child care. Text or call if this sounds like a good fit for you. Contact Info: 651-xxx-xxxx”
Is this merely tax fraud, a Wage and Hour violation and a Sex Discrimination in Housing complaint; or it is an invitation to be sold into sexual slavery? Or maybe just some well-intentioned Mac-Groveland DFLers, aghast at the already-obscene cost of non-union daycare?
Whatever, it absolutely cannot be legal to hire an Au Pair in Minnesota. That would be, just, wrong, on so many levels.
Joe Doakes
Depends on the prosecutor and the (administrative law) “judge”, now, doesn’t it?
Heather Martens has never once made a substantial, true statement about firearms or the Second Amendment.
Her testimony at the Minnesota House was more of the same: Martens claimed that silencers were “designed” to allow people to commit murder and get away with it.
Sure – in the same way that car mufflers were designed to allow hit-and-run drivers to sneak up on victims.
If you want real facts about suppressors, GOCRA as usual has the answers.
Two weeks away from the city minimum wage to $15 an hour, Seattle restaurants are dropping like, well, flies in soup.
Of course, minimum wage hike advocates are claiming it’s all just part of the normal attrition – ignoring the fact that the closings are running ahead of the normal rate of closures.
It’s reminiscent of 2005, when Minneapolis passed it’s smoking ban in bars and restaurants. There was a surge in bar closings – as patrons drove to bars in the suburbs, where until the state wide ban a few years later, you could still smoke.
Apologists for the ban said “bars close all the time!” Which is true. But conversations with bar owner after bar owner after bar owner who had just Tridar their establishments almost inevitably included the phrase:
The smoking ban was the final straw.
Hospitality is a tough business. In Seattle, it just got a lot tougher.
To: The entire Minnesota state legislature
From: Many hypothetical, westbound Minnesotans who may have had to stop at gas stations on the east bank of the Red River every time they go back to visit their parents to transfer something that is perfectly legal on the east bank but is a felony on the west, and vice versa into the trunk.
Re: Reciprocity
You have a bill in the hopper that would do a job that the Public Safety commissioner was supposed to do over 10 years ago; make carry permits reciprocal between Minnesota and states whose permits are “substantially similar” to ours.
The Public Safety Commissioner 10 years ago took the most anal retentive possible view of “substantial similarity”, and made Minnesota permits reciprocal with an almost useless assortment of other states; Minnesota permits are no good in any of our neighbor states, and vice versa. And the state of North Dakota created a special class of carry permit, expressly designed to conform to Minnesota law, to get Public Safety to honor NoDak permits (and vice versa). Governor Flint-Smith’s Public Safety commissioner has ignored the legal imperative to change the rules accordingly.
You have a chance to fix that this session.
Please do.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Worst place in the world for a Black person to live: Madison, Wisconsin.
So says Meaca Moore, a sociology student from Columbus, Ohio.
Oddly, Madison is only ranked 3rd on the Whitest Colleges In Americalist.
It’s too bad she was required to go there, and is prohibited from transferring.
Joe Doakes
Racism seems to be a little like “sexual harassment”; not only does it mean whatever the complainant wants it to mean, but the respondent’s intent is irrelevant.
More info on Better Ed right here.
Info on the Shooter Show at Bill’s Gun Shop and Range in Robbinsdale.
Here’s the Facebook page for “Concerned Citizens for Emergency Services“, working toward a little fiscal sanity in Lino Lakes, Centerville and Circle Pines.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!
Today on the show,
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
The shootings in Ferguson earlier this week were an ugly, new-ish wrinkle in the situation.
Among all the sturm und drang from the left about America’s gun laws and the sheer number of guns available in the US, the use of guns in demonstrations, even riots, is relatively rare. It happens, of course; my old colleague John MacDougall reported carrying a gun with him when he covered the riots in North Minneapolis in 1968; some rioters shot at police during the LA riots.
But for the number of guns available in the US, very few of them over come out during periods of unrest.
Now, I’m sure the shooters in the audience took note of this part of the story:
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said one officer was shot in the face, just below his right eye, with the bullet lodging behind his ear. The other officer was hit in the shoulder, and the bullet came out his back…Authorities believe the shots came from a handgun fired about 120 yards away. There were no suspects in custody.
120 yards? With a handgun?
Either there’s a rogue SAS trooper or Olympic marksman in Ferguson, or the “luckiest”, fluke-iest crook in the US, or two of the unluckiest cops – or someone was firing a pistol-caliber scoped carbine.
Where “endless one-sided talk about principles” is checkers, “taking those principles to a legislature that’s at least partly full of people that disagree with you, and trying to turn those principles into policy” is chess.
And one of the big reasons I left the Libertarian Party, and criticize the “Liberty movement” so often these days, is not so much that so many of them play checkers (that’s true of most people in any party), but that so m any of their loudest voices have convinced themselves that playing chess instead of endless rounds of checkers is a moral offense and a distraction that diverts one from the purity of checkers.
The FCC’s new internet rules cite a Soros-funded front group dozens and dozens of times:
New internet regulations finally released by the Federal Communications Commission make 46 references to a group funded by billionaire George Soros and co-founded by a neo-Marxist…The term “Free Press” is mentioned 62 times in the regulations. Some are redundant mentions referring to the same Free Press activists’ comments in favor of more oversight. In total, the FCC cited Free Press’ pro-net neutrality arguments 46 times.
The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.
The Obama Administraiton is the most transparently corrupt administration in history.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Roughed out my taxes. Going to have to write a check to the IRS – not enough deductions.
I suppose I could
start a private charity to solicit giant donations – the blue arrowhead is helpful, find your friends! Or maybe just not pay the taxes.But I’m not a Democrat. I need a side business where I can lose some money on paper and write off expenses such as bar association dues.
Any suggestions?
Joe Doakes
I got nothing for you, man.
Anyone?
It’s corollary time:
The Boehner Inversion the Reagan Corollary to Berg’s Eleventh Law: Similarly, the Republican that Democrats support, is supported purely to wedge the conservative wing of the party
Berg’s Laws: there’s a reason they’re not called “Berg’s Casual Observations”.
Opponents of urban charter schools – inevitably white, upper-middle-class, MPR-listening, Subaru-driving people with degrees from Macalester – have developed a habit of sniffing that urban charters are “a return to segregation”, because many charters, especially in the city, are aimed at ethnic groups.
What these lilywhite guardians of “diversity”-for-its-own-sake miss is that these charters – the Twin Cities have schools aimed at black, H’mong, latino and Native American kids, and used to have one serving Muslim students – may be “segregated”, but it’s entirely voluntary; the decision of the parents and families involved.
And why would they do that?
Because they’re racists?
Perhaps. More likely, I suspect, it’s cultural (the Native American and H’mong schools), and linguistic (the Latino schools).
And I suspect that for more than a few parents, it’s more like this: while they like the idea of “diversity” – exposing their children to different people, cultures, races and the like – they also know they’ve got one shot with their kids. America’s racial problems aren’t going to be fixed in 12 years. If they’re fixed in thirteen years, that’s great – but too late for your first-grader.
And in the meantime, lurking in the background at the worst “diverse” schools, are scenes like this (and save your breath, Volvo-driving ninnies; this sort of tension is endemic at urban schools; my kids went there for years, and while it rarely got that bad, it hovered over the school experience in ways ugly and comical for their entire time in school). And while I suspect that, like me, a lot of parents would love for their kids to participate in America’s ethnic “conversation”, they also figure that there’s plenty of time for that when they’re adults, and they’d like to spend that first 12 years focusing on them getting an education without all the pointless, mindless tension.
This form email has been making the rounds at the capitol in Saint Paul. The person who sent it to me is under the impression that it shows the gun-grabbers are running out of good ideas and smart people.
Au contraire, said I. This letter is a miracle, bordering on the first radio signal and the first nuclear fissile pile.
Because so much stupid is jammed into this email, it violates what were once thought to be inviolate laws of physics.
The woman – she’s a suburban matron from Mound – comes out swinging:
I oppose legalizing silencers in Minnesota (HF 1434). Silencers are designed to let people commit murder and get away with it.
Only in the movies.
They do the same thing for guns that mufflers do for cars; forestall hearing loss. They take 30 decibels off the “bang” of a gun firing. What does this mean?
This: “…for most commercially available fire arms and cartridges, this ends up only reducing the noise level to somewhere in the range of 130-150-ish dB for a supersonic cartridge and 117-130-ish dB for a subsonic cartridge. For reference on just how loud that is, an ambulance or police siren is typically between 100-140 dB. So this isn’t exactly the “whoosh” sound Hollywood depicts.”
Someone’s been watching too many movies:
In addition, silencers would compromise Minneapolis’ crime-fighting “shot-spotter” technology.
About as much as things like buildings and cars and anything else that gets between a shot and a shot-spotter microphone. In other words, not really.
I also oppose HF 305, a bill to let North Dakota legislators decide who can carry guns in Minnesota. Under current law, state law enforcement reviews other states’ laws to determine if the other states’ permits should be recognized in MInnesota. That is as it should be. We should not let North Dakota legislators decide what is best for public safety in Minnesota.
This is mad ignorance.
The law allows the Commissioner of Public Safety decides whether other states’ carry permitting laws are “subsantially similar” to Minnesota’s. North Dakota implemented a two-tier system – one permit for residents, and another for non-residents, specifically to cater to that absurd restriction in Minnesota law, to help avoid creating a felony trap for law-abiding citizens from both states. Knowing, as I do, er, “friends” who have to stop in Moorhead or East Grand Forks when travelling west to move, er, payloads to the trunk, this change is long overdue. Not that author of this post knows the difference.
Two other bills, HF 830 and HF 372, are unnecessary. In particular, weakening our laws around carrying guns at the Capitol is a step in the wrong direction.
But she doesn’t favor us with a reason why.
That’s simple; she’s parroting something someone else told her. There is no downside to the proposal; Capitol Security has real-time access to the database of carry permittees; the current notification statute is a throwback to the days when permits weren’t computerized.
Please join me in opposing these bills.
[“Writer’s” name redacted]
Mound, MN 5536
She must be on the “Minnesota Progressive Project” farm club.
50 years ago, United States declared a “War on Poverty”.
For much of the last 30 years, the State of Minnesota has been actively pursuing a top-down housing policy, aggressively trying to jiggle the “mix” of housing found in communities that grew up organically over the course of a century and a half.
And for almost 20 years, the cities have been extremely aggressively squeezing out private market “low income housing”, while “investing” heavily in public low income housing.
In schools in the Twin Cities crummier neighborhoods have been terrible for nobody knows how long.
What do all of these things have in common, besides being functions of the cultural left?
The attempt to use politics to solve social problems.
So it’s perhaps ironic that Myron Orfield, the patron Saint of the dismal, discredited political “art” of “urban planning”, comes perilously close to blaming the right thing – politics – for once in one of his studies.
He’s it cited in the MinnPost::
Specifically, Orfield and his co-authors from the institute — Will Stancil, Thomas Luce and Eric Myott — blame policies and practices that redirected affordable housing programs from mostly white suburbs back to segregated neighborhoods in Minneapolis, St. Paul and first-tier suburbs such as Brooklyn Center and Richfield.
“You can build affordable housing in poor neighborhoods,” he said during an interview this week, “you just shouldn’t build all of it [there].”
Absolutely not. Why, you “should” build low income housing in West Bloomington, and Southwest Edina, and North Oaks, and Kenwood!
Except since the policy is entirely driven by politics, the people with political clout decide how the policy will be implemented. And the people in those DFL-addled areas have decided that poverty is just too hard on their property values.
In the meantime – driven by the same sorts of policies that the likes of Orfield have been peddling to cities for close to a generation – Minneapolis and St. Paul have been making it virtually impossible to be a successful private market landlord in either city. Meaning “affordable housing” is almost exclusively provided by the government – at two or three times its market value.
The DFL takes the likes of Myron Orfield very seriously (except, of course, for putting “affordable housing” next door to their leadership’s homes). The next paragraph explains why I don’t:
The study also repeats an argument Orfield has put forward before: that charter schools re-create school segregation by creating institutions that are too often mostly black or, increasingly, mostly white. “I don’t think the public schools in segregated neighborhoods have been doing very well for a long time,” he said in an interview this week. “I think they’re bad schools. I don’t defend them at all. But the sad thing is, the charters are worse.”
The difference – and it takes someone as highly educated as Myron Orfield to miss it – is this: charter schools are voluntary. They are a free market (well, free-market-ish) response to the rot and decay in our school systems. Unlike the wretched inner-city public schools, nobody forces anybody to go to them. They succeed or fail on their own merits – unlike, again, public schools.
Perhaps poor parents know something that highly educated experts like Orfield don’t; that forcing kids to be proxies for their adults “discussion on race” may make academics like Orfield feel good, but it does nothing for their children’s futures.
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