To:  Lieutenant Governor Flanagan
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re:  I Have Questions.  Let’s Be Honest, You Just Don’t Do Answers.

Lieutenant Governor Flanagan, 

I caught this tweet over the weekend:

I’ve got two questions:

1.  Does This Mean You’re Cutting Taxes?  One of the main reasons families (who can’t afford to leave Minnesota) are “just scraping by” is Minnesota’s confiscatory taxes.  Sales taxes in the metro (when you add local to state taxes) are up over 10%. The overall tax burden, driving by state taxes, is among the heaviest in the nation, and affects people at every level.  

Given that the administration of which you were an aggressively co-equal part squandered an $18B surplus, I need to ask: does this mean you’re repenting of your wastrel ways?

2. Do You Share A Platitude Tech With Gov. Walz?. Your twitter feed is not just an endless series of banal platitudes, but “style”-istically they appear to be written by the same unimaginative pollyanna-for-hire. 

Example:

Perhaps endless streams of platitudes are going to sound the same no matter who the writer is, but it just seems too close to be a mere coincidence. 

3. You Know My First Question Was Sarcastic, Right?  There’s no way “cutting taxes” is ever going to be on the agenda, is there?  Ever?

So, with the revelation last week that hiring managers and the MN Department of Human Services need to explicitly justify hiring white (presumably especially male) candidates for jobs, it’s not unreasonable to wonder – there must be some kind of deeply racist person driving these policies.  

Your reasonable question has been rewarded with an answer:

The tipster raised concerns about Phillips and claimed his social media page is “littered with racist comments about ‘white folk.’”

After reviewing a Facebook page under the name Vonnie Phillips — filled with the type of content described by the tipster and a video tagging a woman whose name matches Phillips’ wife in public records — Alpha News sent an inquiry to Phillips’ state email address.

In his response, Phillips confirmed the Facebook page was his and lashed out at Alpha News reporter Jenna Gloeb in a profanity-laced tirade defending his posts.

“Good luck,” he wrote. “My Facebook page is within the ‘protected concerted’ activity guidelines, therefore, do what you want; nowhere on my Facebook page lists my employer; and the person, the gutless, worthless coward that reported me, the hell with them, please tell them I said that fool.”

Ooof. Someone played that one wrong.

And played it, and played it…

The worst part, to me at least, isn’t Phillips’s statements or actions.  

It’s the culture of bureaucratic entitlement that allows bureaucrats to think that they’re OK acting like this on taxpayer time. 

Their supporters – real and automated – are rutting:

We can test whether that’s true or not.

Experiment:  Put a group of cute girls in tank tops with order pads in the middle of an open field.  

If a “Hooters” magically springs up, you got yourself a theory.  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s nice that Amazon is so concerned about me, they send me email telling me how to avoid be scammed.

 

It’s annoying they send the email to my cell phone at 3:09 am.

 

I leave my cell phone on overnight in case I get an emergency call: the kids have been in a car accident or a tornado was sighted in our area.  I don’t mind be woken up for that.

 

 I suppose I could opt out of receiving emails but then I wouldn’t know when packages were on their way. Is there a setting that says “send me stupid advertising spam at 6 PM my time”? 

 

Not generating much goodwill here,  Amazon.

 

Joe Doakes

As someone who tends to work more on the design and engineering side, the jokes about marketeers write themselves.   

Or hopefully they do, because I don’t feel like writing them right now 

Rarely do we mere mortals share a time and space with a person like Peggy Flanagan.  

A person who has led by example her entire public life – including her early turn on the Minneapolis School Board…:

…starting the Minneapolis Public Schools’ meteoric rise in achievement over the past 20 years, turning it into the beacon of exceptional learning that it is today.

Well, she’s not resting on her laurels:

Brilliant. 

Know what else are taxes, Madame Lieutenant Goverrnor? 

Taxes.  

Like the ones your administration and legislative “trifecta” jacked up, statewide, after squandering a $18 Billion surplus, accelerating Minnesota’s slide to “below average” in gross product per capita.  

She could be our next Senator.  Or Governor.  Or whatever the machine decides they want her to be.  

The Strib notes that the new Minnesota state flag is not getting traction outside DFL neighborhoods:

Don’t get me wrong – I like Brehm’s idea.

But I also think we should leave things as they are. Having two state flags – one foisted on the state by a pack of arrogant wannabe tyrants set on destroying institutions, the other flown in defiance – is a perfect metaphor for Minnesota today.

Divisiveness was the intent of the new flag.  

In a state with a functioning GOP, that divisiveness could be driven home to roost – a powerful metaphor for a campaign built around rolling back the tyrannical excesses of the gaggle of middle school mean girls of all genders who ran this state into the ground.  

If the MNGOP won’t do it, someone needs to. 

Just in case you’d forgotten that Rep. Morrison is a doctor, even after her starting 1,000,000 tweets, website postings, Facebook posts, soundbites, TikToks, Reels, Instagrams, Snapchats and MySpace posts:

A lab coat. 

In the well of the House. 

Does she keep a lab coat in her office, in case there’s some emegency where someone in a lab coat needs to respond? 

Or just because saying “I’m a doctor” for the 1,000,001st time still hasn’t convinced anyone?

As the nation creeps up on a 250th birthday, at a time when it’s better to be a human being than at any time in recorded history, in large part due to the nation that is celebrating that birthday, and yet somehow in the worst social shape since its 192nd, and maybe its 85th, I hope you all have a great holiday. 

Hey, at least it’s not as grim at that 248th birthday…

It’s getting difficult to find numbers small enough to measure how low “Rolilng Stone” has gone. 

• Their ad for The Container Store, thinly disguised as a tongue bath for Amy Klobuchar?
• Their slander of Nick Sandman (oh, yeah – I’m still watching that one). 
• The University of Virginia rape hoax. 

It’s easier to quantify the number of readable non-musical pieces they’ve run since PJ O’Rourke left whatever’s left of the once-legendary magazine: zero.

But however far they fall, Rolling Stone manages to violate the laws of physics to find a little more room to drop. 

Rolling Stone is to fact-checking…what “Dog Gone” was to fact-checking.  

• If someone praises Naziism, does one need to be a Nazi to get condemned?   Mamdani praises Jihadis.  He wrote a rap praising the Holy Land Five.  
• Anti-Zioinism is antisemitism. 
• He refused to condemn or abjure the phrase “globalize the Intifada”. 
• “He’s not a communist” – he just proposes putting communist ideas into policy.  Tomayto tomahto. 

There are no numbers small enough to measure how low Rolling Stone has fallen. 

I got a quick laugh at this one from Matt Little, who’s running to try to replace Angie Craig in CD2:

I”d love to know what’s this “full range of vision” he’s talking about?

All seven of them voted in absolute lockstep on every single issue.  Not one of them broke ranks with the DFL majority on any vote.  Every last one of them voted to squander the “surplus”, to run up the state budget 40%, for a $6B deficit, for the thoughtcrime database and for healthcare and free tuition for illegals, for ignoring out of state custody orders when parents with Munchausens by Proxy brought their kids to Minnesota to get transed, for red flag gun confiscation and universal registration laws…

…for everything. 

There is not one degree of difference between the voting records of DSA radical Zaynab Mohammed and “moderate” Grand Hauschild.  

Or Matt Little, for that matter. 

How to make it in America:  Come to America via the immigration system.  Adopt the values that made America great.  Work hard, raise good kids, give a good value for the money. 

How to make it in Minnesota:  Come to America and, in apparently no particular order:  Commit a crime, ingratiate yourself with the bureaucracy, make get lots of taxpayer money.  

Wilson Tindi holds a director position at the Minnesota Department of Education, where he audits taxpayer spending and oversees internal accountability.

…

Tindi was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to register as a predatory offender. His sentence was stayed for five years, but he was also sentenced to 210 days in the workhouse, records show.

However, despite the felony conviction and offender status, Tindi serves as Director of Internal Audit and Advisory Services at MDE, according to public records and his LinkedIn profile.

 

Wonder if there’ll be a riot if he’s fired?

A leftist murders two Jews in DC. Big Left staged riots in LA and (almost, again) Minneapolis.  

The mainstream media attacks…

…well, who do you think?

“White Supremacist” group membership dropped by an order of magnitude every generation over 100 years from millions in the 1920s to the single-digit thousands in 2016. 

But we’re to believe that, now, all of a sudden, it’s because they think they won?

Hope Walz – a 25 year old reportedly working as some kind of social worker – on the Mamdani election:

“The top 1% that exploit all of us down below?”  

She’s been the child of a Congressional representative or governor since she was five years old, and has had every form of access, power and privilege imaginable.  

Like Mamdani himself – not to mention most “revolutionaries” – she’s is a “One Percenter”.  

Now, if there’s a field that’s worse than teaching when it comes to requiring lots of paper credentials to advance, or hold a job, it’s social work -and Ms. Walz has decided that graduate school is a form of privilege and won’t be attending.

Which means she’s going to be going for a “job” in “public service”, doesn’t it?

The Piglet can’t be happy about this latest Star-Tribune poll:

Gov. Tim Walz’s approval rating has dipped below 50% since his failed run for vice president last year, and about half of Minnesotans say he shouldn’t run for a third consecutive term in 2026, according to a new poll. The results suggest the DFL governor could face headwinds if he runs for re-election again, particularly from voters in greater Minnesota and the suburbs outside Hennepin and Ramsey counties. He also faces opposition from a majority of independents who disapprove of his performance.

The new Star Tribune/Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication Minnesota Poll found 49% approve of Walz’s performance and 50% disapprove. A previous Minnesota Poll conducted last September found 53% of Minnesotans approved of Walz’s performance while 44% disapproved.

It’s only the second time Walz’s approval rating has fallen below 50% in the Minnesota Poll.\

It’s hard to read much history into this “Minnesota” Poll; the poll has changed hands so many times since its heyday from 1989-2012.  

But this is not great news for Walz.  

I don’t expect him to go out without a fight, of course; he – or Gwen – palpably craves national office.  The question is, given:

• the extraordinary nature of a third term as governor
• Walz’s unpopularity (which I’m going to guess is worse than even this latest re-dressing of the MN Poll shows, becasue that’s never a bad bet)
• The emergence of other contenders in the DFL – radicals like Peggy Flanagan (who’s terribly overmatched in her Senate race against Angie Craig), and relative moderates like Dean Philips…

…will the Tim Walz brand support another run?

I suspect we’re going to see a huge reconstruction effort.  Which I frankly hope succeeds, at least through DFL convention season. 

Postscript:  wouldn’t now be a great time for the MNGOP to suspend its circular firing squad and actually focus on fundraising and fighting a campaign?

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office recently hosted an all-day continuing legal education program titled, “Price, Access, and Power: Exploring Grocery Costs, Food Access, and Competition.” Several speakers advocated for breaking up grocery retailers and establishing government grocery stores in areas that don’t have them, such as high crime zones and Indian reservations.

A leading candidate for mayor of New York City favors government-operated grocery stores (and you know whatever they get, Minneapolis must have).

The next Democrat crusade is food. They want to take over your grocery store and run it “fairly,” you know, like the Post Office or the DMV.

Thomas Sowell quipped, “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” This sounds like more of that.

I just have one question. After Democrats have made private grocery stores unprofitable and replaced them with government grocery stores, what happens to consumers when AFSCME goes on strike??

Joe Doakes, Wal-Mart Grocery shopper

If government groceries work as well as government schools, we’ll have a raft of remedial programs and consultants and…

…aaaah.  I get it now. 

December 6, 1941: “A modern war would inevitably turn into a trench quagmire like the First World War”

June 24, 1950: “The next war will be, at best, a mobile industrial clash of titans, and likeliy end with mutual nuclear annihilation”

March 7, 1965: “This war is going to be a conventional war to contain Communist aggression”

August 1, 1990: “This war is going to devolve into a quagmire that will destroy a generation and enervate a nation”

October 3, 1993: “American technological power and training will enable us to walk all over these primitive tribesmen, and restore order just the way we did in Kuwait”

October 18, 2001: “As we discovered in Mogadishu, the Islamist terrorist’s willingness to die will make any war between us an endless quagmore

March 19, 2003: “American technological prowess and our experience liberating Afghanistan in record time will enable us to prevail against the Iraqi Army, Republican Guard and Fedayeen in short order.

June 22, 2025: “Iran will inevitably be another Iraq”.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Transgender people claim they just want to be accepted.  I can do that. But my idea of “accepted” is the way Colonel Potter treated Corporal Klinger on the television show M.A.S.H., more “tolerated” than “celebrated.”

 

You want to wear a dress? Fine, go right ahead.  But it doesn’t get you out of standing watch. It doesn’t get you into the nurse’s shower with Major Hoolahan. It doesn’t get you any special privileges at all.

 

Certain males Want to act like girls, but everyone knows they’re Not girls, so we aren’t willing to Treat them as girls.  Your transgender fantasy is your own.  I am not required to participate in your fantasy, not even with your choice of pronoun.

 

 Wear a dress if it makes you feel pretty. But you don’t get to shower with the girls or pitch on their softball team.  Being weird doesn’t make you special. It just makes you weird in a dress. 

 

If you have a problem with that attitude, well then, you have a problem. Don’t whine about it, deal with it.  As a real woman would. 

I’m old enough to remember Tim Walz saying we needed to change our political rhetoric.  

And if you’re older than a week, so are you. 

How’s that going?

So, back to normal. 

Hey – check this out:

Suddenly the media does know what a woman is!

Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,  I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”.

Not much I can say or do about the former. 

But as to the latter?

Just War Doctrine outlines reasons that war might be morally justified. It requires a legitimate cause (like self-defense), proportionality in response (there’s your bugaboo right there), and due discretion to minimize harm to non-combatants. It also says you need a legitimate authority to declare war, a reasonable chance of success, and war as a last resort after running out of peaceful alternatives. The doctrine is an academic attempt to balance the moral complexities of armed conflict with the pursuit of peace.

I’ve seen a few of my liberal Christian friends dunk on the Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuke program and military, even though by any *rational* measure, the Israeli strikes satisfy all of these criteria.

Self defense? Iran has been bankrolling terror against the US (not to mention Israel)  for over forty years. The Marine Embassy bombing? Funding and arming Hamas, Hizb’allah, the Palestinian Authority, the Houthis and other terror movements throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia? Funding all the Intifadas, paying big money to the families of suicide bombers, funding decades of rockets attacks on Israel (and others), having their fingers directly on the October 7 pogrom, and having “eradicating Israel” as a foundational goal (inclding for their nuke program)?

Too many of my liberal Christian friends seem to have gone past “Just War” doctrine and straight on to “Groundhog Day Doctrine” – forgetting all of history when they wake up every morning and starting the entire Middle East conflict over from a clean slate every morning. Israel “attacked Iran” – 40-odd years of terrorism, direct attacks, and apocalyptic ,eliminationist rhetoric be darned.

Proportionality? Forget for a moment that it’s not only an academic concept when actual self-defense is involved – “proportionality” taking to the ridiculous extreme too many history-challenged liberal Christians do, it actually makes wars worse and less “just”. Think about it: a “proportional” response to Pearl Harbor would have involved sinking Japanese ships and calling it even; in 1939, the Allies should have retaken Poland and left everything else in place; Israel should presumably send goons into rural Iran on an anti-Farsi pogrom, taking hostages and killing 1200-ish people – in all cases, leaving the *root cause* of the wars (Japanese and German expansionism, elimination antisemitism) in place.

But you’d have a hard time showing a more “proportional” response in all of military history than Israel’s attack on Iran – thus far, at least. No carpet-bombing, no “Search and Destroy” missions through villages – no conventional ground troops at all. And hardly any contact with civilians outside the nuke program at all (it’s likely 90% of the Iranian population has had no contact with the war outside whatever media reports they’re getting.

They’re not a lot different than Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, in their own way.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning, or re-beginning, of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in most cases unwittingly – to further Minnesota’s political class’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.

It was a relatively quiet year on the rail lines – if you leave out crime at the train stations and on board the trains, of course. But the trains didn’t run over anyone new.

Still:

• The Blue Line has mowed down 20 so far – including a pedestrian and a cyclist on back to back days just a few weeks ago. That’s an average of almost one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested 13 victims in 11 years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. Over the past year, the line clamed a pedestrian this past March. There was also a murder on a Green Line trade last November, right after Thanksgiving.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far. The last was in 2019 – which, to be fair, was about the last time anyone rode the Northstar.

That’s 31 dead, so far. 31 lives snuffed out so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government narcissism and megalomania.

We’ve had a week of gyrations and caterwauling about “right wing violence” after the ghastly shooting spree carried out by Vance Boulter, who is tenuously associated with the Republican Party.  

We now return to regular programming:

Now, you might think the fact that no party was mentioned is a sure sign that he was a Democrat. 

And you’d be right:

The “expletive” in question was alleged to have been Rep. Jim Nash of Waconia.

So, to borrow a phrase from David Byrne, “same as it ever was”.

Mere months after DOGE took a chainsaw to fuzzy discretionary spending…

A party whose approval is in the 20s, clearly living on graft, and that seems to be having trouble keeping its own house in order?  

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. 

Don’t get cocky.  The Democrats still have all the money in the world, and plenty of “talent” in the wings.  

But I’m loving the flailing. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

 

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Devil’s advocate says: John Thompson wants to make sure Boelter gets competently prosecuted?