The Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco is hosting the “Third Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,” – discussing the “needs of transgender patients in healthcare,” 

Just kidding. It’s the “Sanford Research Center”, in Sioux Falls.

Sanford Health – the titan of rural healthcare, and one of the biggest employers in the upper midwest – is pushing the very “blue” trans agenda in the very red northern Great Plains:

Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States — a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign’s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. “No one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,” Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota, boasted in February. “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”

Sanford, which purports to be “the largest rural health system in the United States” — it currently employs nearly seven times more South Dakotans than any other business in the state — has played a pivotal role in orchestrating those conservative failures. In 2021, a National Review investigation detailed the medical giant’s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year — a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she hastened to reintroduce an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.

The Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) agenda is being pushed into very red places by very blue big business – as a project to try to “convert” red parts of the country.

And in the case of Transgender ideology in South Dakota, it’s working:

Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU drew conservative criticism for hosting a “kid-friendly” drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state’s prohibition on “show[s] or other presentation[s]” deemed “harmful to minors.” Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state’s Department of Corrections signed a new “Management of Gender Dysphoria” policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their “gender identity” rather than sex — and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.

But no set of institutions in South Dakota has embraced gender ideology more than the state’s Sanford-dominated business community, which sits well to the left of the state’s political center of gravity. (In November 2020, Sanford replaced its CEO of 24 years after he informed employees that he wouldn’t be wearing a mask around the office, arguing that he had recently recovered from the Covid virus and therefore posed no threat of spreading it.) The state’s Chamber of Commerce chapters, which are closely tied to Sanford, regularly lobby against social-conservative bills, including medical conscience rights, the prohibitions on sex changes for minors, birth-certificate gender changes, transgender locker room use, and bans on men in women’s sports.

This is happening as other civilized countries are having intense second thoughts about the excesses of Big Transgender.

This shows how Big Left gets incrementalism in a way conservatives are having a lot of trouble with.

Among the welter of new laws going into effect at every level of government this past week are two one must suspect the MN DFL “trifecta” will trot out sooner than later; gun insurance.

San Jose passed a municipal ordinance requiring gun owners carry liability insurance.

Notably, the kinds of coverage mandated by the ordinance would not cover the overwhelming majority of firearms incidents that tend to be the subject of public concern. To start, homeowners and renters policies only extend coverage for injuries to third parties. Generally, this would mean guests, contract workers, or other visitors to the insured’s property, or in some cases, to third parties who were injured by the insured off-premises. Injuries to other members of the household would not be insured. Thus, the paradigmatic example of a tragic firearms accident—a child gets hold of an unsecured firearm and injures his or her sibling—would not be covered.

Naturally, this depends on the integrity of the state’s insurance regulators. After New York’s attack on the NRA’s carry insurance program, it’d seem that trust is misplaced, at least in all “Blue” states.

Depending on one’s point of view, the new law in New Jersey would appear to be even more insidious, or comically incompetent; it doesn’t specifically rule out insuring illegal activities with guns:

As to whether it would violate New Jersey insurance law to extend coverage to criminal acts, the question is—as it is in many states—somewhat complicated. But ultimately, the state Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld exclusions for “expected or intended” injury as barring coverage, including in Voorhees v. Preferred Mutual Insurance Co. (1992), SL Industries v. American Motorists Insurance Co. (1992), and Harleysville Insurance Cos. v. Garitta (2001). Moreover, in 1990’s Figueroa v. Hartford Insurance Co., the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey held that an injured party could be collaterally estopped from suing a third-party’s insurer to relitigate questions of intent where that intent had been settled in a previous criminal action, such as by a guilty judgment or plea.

At a minimum, it can therefore be said that New Jersey insurance law broadly permits exclusions for intentional acts in personal liability policies and that state courts have shown deference to criminal proceedings as dispositive in settling questions of intent (which isn’t necessarily true in all states.) Given that backdrop, a broad reading of A. 4769’s text would appear to require the state’s firearms owners to obtain coverage that does not actually exist, particularly in the wake of regulatory actions to shut down the NRA’s Carry Guard program. That would amount to a de facto ban on firearms ownership, directly contravening the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, even before applying the Court’s more recent Bruen test.

I can see the MNDFL majority copying and pasting either law.

It may perhaps be a sign of a shift in the perceptions of the GOP’s likely behavior in 2024 – but Big Media is already calling Ron DeSantis not only “Hitler”, but even worse than Trump:

I noted on the show a few weeks ago that Democrats referring to Republicans as “literally Hitler” goes back to Harry Truman; he was literally the first candidate who could refer to a Republlican (John Dewey, in this case). I remember it picking up with Reagan – but it was already old hat by then.

Now, the best response to this sort of thing is mockery and laughter.

How best to do this? That’s my project for this month.

A friend of the blog emails:

Saint Paul mayor is pitching a 1% sales tax to increase revenue to repair roads. People say the awful shape of the roads is the reason there are no businesses in Saint Paul “negatively impacts the mobility, safety, and access to the businesses that do so much to grow our community.”

I have some thoughts on this-

A) Does repair roads mean automatic bike lane on any street that this money touches for repair? Because that has been the norm lately, despite what businesses were asking for.

Saint Pauli has one huge advantage in this area: it has Minneapolis next door. If it’s just a little less crazy than Minneapolis, it flies under the radar.

So. yes – I’m sure there will be bike lanes on any street this money touches. But fire hydrants won’t be replaced by EV charging stations [1].

See how that works?

B) Before we go with the 1% sales tax, can we tax and charge all of those multi-unit apartment buildings more if they aren’t adding adequate parking for their tenets? The street parking definitely has an affect on the condition of the streets all year, but especially during snow plowing season.

The city’s mission to make driving an untenable lifestyle choice is proceeding according to pan. . But I can totally see the city taxing multi-unit buildingis 1% more if they have inadequate parking. And 5% if they have adequate parking. Because that sends the right message…

C) As for the actual 1% sales tax, sadly, I’m trying to figure out how this will actually affect me since most of the business that I used to support in Saint Paul have already been chased away.

I’m trying to remember the last time I went to a Saint Paul business that isn’t a restaurant. It’s probably been a few years since I even bought non-Asian groceries here.

[1] Minneapolis hasn’t actually done this yet. Just wait.

As a broad rule, I oppose cancelation of speech and art. It’s a lousy precedent, and a great way to build a stupid society.

But there are exceptions that I can get behind:

Tomas Mazetti, 55, and wife Hannah, 33, have already raised more than £50,000 to banish the song to the history books – but with the rights estimated to be worth anywhere in the region of £20million they still have a long way to go…”‘It started last Christmas – pun not intended – when we asked friends how much they would be willing to pay never to hear the song again.”

Not since Omaha Beach has fate presented a generation with such a surpassing mission.

A friend of the blog emails:

Explain to me how adding more bureaucrats terrified of offending a DFL constituency will prevent fraud committed by a DFL constituency protected by the bureaucracy

I don’t think the governor or his staff read this space, so I will try to explain it.

It will work, because we are moving forward together as One Minnesota. with equity and reproductive rights for Minnesotans of all genders.

I may have the details wrong, but that’s what I remember from the campaign.

Today’s song list – all artists that left us in the past year:

SCENE: It’s MSNBC. A commentator is bellowing at the camera.

COMMENTATOR: Long Island Republican Congressman-elect George Santos is lying! Which means he’s no different than all Republicans!

SCENE: In a South African jail cell, three inmates are watching MSNBC

JOE BIDEN: The commentator is right. Republicans all lie.

CORN POP: Word up.

NELSON MANDELA: I”m so glad you left the leadership of the Delaware Civil RIghts movmement to come to jail, here in South Africa.

SCENE: In a classroom in Boulder, CO, watching MSNBC

RACHEL DOLEZAL: That’s right! Can I get an amen!

CLASROOM: (A few half-hearted or sarcastic “amens” ensue)

SCENE: A Hill somewhere in the Mekong Delta. Two men in jungle fatigues, M-16s smoking, stand amid a pile of slain Viet Cong and piles of cartridge cases, watching MSNBC on a black and white console TV set.

JOHN KERRY: Let me be clear. I agree with this perspective. All Republicans lie through their teeth.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: (Spitting a plug of tobacco into the foxhole, wiping blood off his K-Bar knife on his pants leg). Yup. All of ’em.

SCENE: At a steak house in Newark, New Jersey. MSNBC is playing on a TV over the bar.

T-BONE: Wotchuthinkabout dat?

COREY BOOKER: He’s right. All Republicans lie, all the time.

SCENE: A runway in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina. A group of American officials, Secret Service, and a blondish woman huddle behind a brick wall as sniper five spatters the ground around them. A racket of gunfire as Bosnian troops return fire, trying to clear the airfield for the woman to get on her plane. On a TV behind the wall, MSNBC blares.

HILLARY CLINTON: Damn straight they’re all liars!

SCENE: At a Native American observance, with drums and dancers, on the quad at Harvard University, as a TV blares MSNBC in the distance.

ELIZABETH WARREN: The great spirit that is the true law professor of the universe agrees. Republicans are liars. As the first woman of color at this law school, I agree.

The drums continue to beat, as crowds of pasty white liberals shuffle past.

SCENE: At a spa in Hollywood, a man and woman lie on their backs, cucumber slices over their eyes, listening to MSNBC on a TV in the background.

HILARIA BALDWIN: Repobelicans are de woorst liahrs.

ALEC BALDWIN: I oughtta kill them all.

SCENE: At the Saint Paul Grill. Editors and Executive Producers from the Star-Tribune, KARE, WCCO-TV and the Pioneer Press are having cocktails with Ken Martin as MSNBC plays above the bar.

EDITORS AND PRODUCER AND MARTIN: Heh.

SCENE: in the back of a limousine, driving through the District of Columbia. Ilhan OMAR is sitting in the back with husband Tim MYNETT, watching MSNBC on a mobile device.

OMAR: I was never married to my brother.

MYNETT: Literally nobody in the world believes you were, darling.

AND SCENE/S.

Black owned detailing shops, immigrant owned restaurants and Vietnamese run nail salons come and go constantly throughout Minnesota. They come and go without much comments from the gatekeepers of popular culture.

but high concept, restaurants, especially the ones that clean closely to the progressive narrative? They get saturation media coverage, coming and going.

“Common Roots”, a high concept restaurant in south Minneapolis, got breathless media coverage when it opened a few years back. And with a mission statement like this, it’s no wonder:

‘According to their website, the eatery was operated around the values of supporting local farmers, being environmentally sustainable and providing living wages and benefits for employees.’

With a set up like that, you know how the story ends, don’t you?

“While we dramatically reduced our monthly losses during the course of the year, the business still will end 2022 with a large financial loss. We are still only operating at roughly half the sales we did prior to the pandemic. Our margins were thin in good times, but there’s absolutely no possibility of the budget working at anywhere near the volume we are at now,” Schwartzman wrote.

And I’m sure there’s no link, no way, no, how, between the fact that principal collided with reality:

He added that last week he was informed that staff wanted to unionize, which forced him to “take a fresh look at the overall state of the business.”

“I fully support the labor movement and would have loved being able to run a union business,” Schwartzman wrote, but said he “couldn’t commit to moving forward if I didn’t have confidence I would be able to keep the business open under all the very many different strains the business is under.”

Huh.

So, your principles have unsustainable prices?

Weird.

“It’s Been a Minute” (henceforth IBaM) s one of the current plague of podcasts repackaged as radio shows that plagues both public and commercial broadcasting. As we discussed yesterday, some are better than others – some are OK radio, some are utterly dreadful as radio.

IBaM is pretty clearly trying to sell infotainment coverage smothered in public broadcasting convention, but to a black audience. It is, by public radio standards, breezy, sometimes to the point of sounding just a little contrived. But radio standards, it’s not the worst podcast on the air.

But this past weekend’s episode – about the wave of social media misogyny aimed at rapper “Megan Thee Stallion”, after she was shot in the foot by her…uh, paramour, rapper Tory Lanez. It features a “senior producer” from, guess what, another NPR podcast – Gabby Bulgarelli from a podcast called “Louder than a Riot”, and you’re on your own with that one.

Dog Bites Man. There’s an old newsroom bromide, passed down through Journalism 101 classes throughout the past 100-odd years. “Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news”. If something is the norm, the expected, the utterly mundane? If you’re not the man being bit, it’s not realy news.

Anyway – I listened to this epi of IBaM, so you don’t have to. But if you’re curious – smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Here’s the part I wanted to focus on. It’s around 6:00 into the segment:

BRITNEY LEWIS (HOST): The coverage of this trial feels somewhat muted compared to the coverage of another trail that gained a lot of public attention this year, Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Why do you think that this case feels so different?

BULGARELLI: One, nobody cares about black people. Two, it’s close to the holidays. Three, because it’s a closed court…in some ways they feel similar. A lot of the arguing (sic) against Megan feels similar to how people rallied against Amber in support of Johnny Depp…

LEWIS: Mmm Hmmm

BULGARELLI: …the way Megan has been made out to be a liar – I don’t think anyone believes Megan to be a victim, so they don’t care…

I can’t comment on the merits of Bulgarelli’s argument, presuming there are any.

But she’s ignoring two elephants in the room:

• Rappers shooting rappers is, regrettably and tragically, dog bites man. No, seriously – the list is long, and spans genres, coasts, even nations. It’s been a generation, and we still haven’t a conclusive idea who killed Tupac and Biggie. Ms. Thee Stallion was shot in the foot during a domestic squabble. It’s senseless, and stupid – but Ms. Thee Stallion survived, and will no doubt see her profile increase as a result. Oh, yeah – violent misogyny in the world of hip-hop doesn’t even rise to the level of dog-bites-man; it’s more like “Dog Licks Dog” . It’s ugly, and awful, and it’s the norm, to the point that pushing back against it is, in fact, the news in the show-biz press.
• On the other hand, what – besides skin color – distinguishes the Depp/Heard trial from the Lanez/Thee Stallion dust-up? A woman’s claims of victimhood have been torpedoed by overwhelming, sworn evidence that she was in fact an emotional and violent abuser – something mainstream narrative denies exists. Millions of men who’ve suffered, either in silence or in the face of open derision from cops, social service professionals and society at large saw at least some vindication, even if only vicarious. The dominant narrative – “the power differential means only men can commit abuse” – was stomped flat, opening the door for millions of men to perhaps, one day, be taken seriously.

The inconvenient truth for identity-thrashers like Bulgarelli is the Lanez/Thee Stallion is “Dog Bites Man”; Heard/Depp is “Man puts mayo and a slice of tomato on a dog and takes a big chomp”, trashing a different bit of identitarian dogma outside Bulgarelli’s career specialty.

Think anyone at NPR will cover that angle?

Governor Walz released his plan to address, rampant fraud in his executive branch.

Long story short: transfer more money to the political class.

Bill Glahn, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment who has closely tracked the case, said the proposals mainly consist of “hiring more bureaucrats.”

“That so many different state agencies are involved points to part of the problem: too many cooks, too many fiefdoms, and no central location where the buck stops,” Glahn wrote in an article this week. 

That should solve things.

Berg’s 20th Law is clear and unambiguous . To wit:

All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

Is the Law right about the recent case at the U of Cincinnati, about which so many prog brows were furrowed in recent days?

What do you think?

Call me a curmudgeon if you will. I don’t care. If caring about the classic art and craft of doing radio makes me a curmudgeon, then I’ll get a “Curmudgeon” face tattoo and wear it with pride.

Figuratively speaking. Face tattoos are a horror.

Anyway.

There are two plagues afoot in the world of radio.

Decline And Fall: Broadcasters – especially big broadcast networks – have been strapped for cash for a decade and a half. Big chains, like IHeart, went on leveraged buying sprees in the mid 2000s, just in time for the advertising market to collapse in 2008. The revenue never really bounced all the way back – the recovery from 2008 coincided with the rise of streaming, “renting” music, and a near complete collapse of the music radio market that had kept radio handsomely afloat from the late fifties to the early 2000s.

So big radio networks are in the same bind as companies that manufacture white-out, paper checks and rotary phones; they cater to a market that’s shrinking by the month. Outside of conservative talk, Spanish and sports radio, most of the radio industry involves trying to coax a shrinking cohort of baby boomers and Gen-Xers to tune in to morning shows. Music radio, once the marketing cornerstone of the music industry, is scarcely relevant.

The traditional talent pool in broadcast, up until probably the 1990s, worked a little like this: people started as disk jockeys, usually in small markets, and via combination of talent, perseverance, opportunism and luck, worked their slow, laborious way up the ladder of market size; from Cody Wyoming to Casper, thence to Palm Springs, then on to San Diego and finally Los Angeles was a typical trajectory, with each echelon in the market weeding out tranches of non-hackers, who went into sales or real estate or managing Shopkos, leaving only the most talented, determined and lucky to make it on the air in the big-money markets.

Rush Limbaugh altered that dynamic in talk radio – pre-empting the bottom of the talk food chain with his syndicated shows; joined by Hannity and Pagliorulo and Prager and Hewitt and the rest, the middle of the ladder pretty much evaporated as well.

And then in the rest of radio – with little money left in the industry, and most of what was there soaked up by the Dave Ryans and Tom Barnards who were left in the business, most of the “disk jockey” jobs at the bottom, and then the middle and upper-middle, of the ladder transformed into “voice tracking” – recording bits onto computer files which would be stitched into place between songs by computer. A jock might earn decent money – but be tracking for several stations during a given shift, not really building up an identity as a “star” anywhere. Which was fine, given that stardom was more or less irrelevant.

And so with the talent pool in both music and talk radio disrupted, the big broadcasters needed to find another source of talent to fill in slots when the holdovers from the golden ages of music and talk started leaving the scene.

The Plaguecast. And so major broadcasters – commercial and public – turned to the pool of “podcasters” that sprang up around the time streaming began supplanting broadcast.

And it’s been mostly dreadful.

Here’s why.

Good radio is the original social medium. Since the dawn of music and talk radio, the hallmark of good radio is being able to reach through the signal chain – the microphone, the transmitter, the electromagnetic spectrum, your receiver, and finally to you – and give you the impression the announcer, the host, is talking to, playing a record for, telling a joke or story, to and for you. To be able to push that “live” energy through all those layers of misdirection, not to talk at you, but to talk to you. Personally. Or at least give you that feeling deep down in your gut. Its a live medium (or used to be), a conversation with stimulus and response traveling back and forth at the speed of sound and, in between us, the speed of light.

Podcasts, on the other hand, is one or more people talking into a microphone and getting recorded. There is no fact, much less illusion, of pushing energy out to real, live people. Podcasts are, at best, storytelling (which can be wonderful, but is not interactive; it’s tellers, and it’s listeners, and never the twain shall meet. At worst? It’s a group of people having a conversation that you listen to.

And you can tell when someone who’s started in that medium tries to transpose that style to live (or live-ish) radio. Buck Sexton and Clay Travis (or is it Buck Travis and Clay Sexton? I have no idea, to be honest), who sit in Rush Limbaugh’s time slot ‘cross much of the land, but can’t seriously be said to have “replaced” him, are classic examples. They chatter through the issues of the day – but unlike Limbaugh, who pushed an energy down the signal chain that felt like he was in your car with you, talking to you. Clay and Buck came up through the world of podcasting, and they were very successful at it. And they sound like a couple of guys kibitzing – because they are a couple of guys kibitzing, via a digital connection, watching each other via Skype.

The format makes a little more sense on NPR – because public radio has always given the impression that it’s a room full of “elites” talking to each other (barring a few old-timers, like “Weekend Edition”‘s Bob Simon, who is one of the most gloriously talented and utterly underrated broadcasters on NPR…

…which is rapidly becoming a podcast network, in the worst sense of the term.

We’ll come back to that later today.

Chatter. Speaking of Public Radio…

One of the iron clad bits of craft in traditional radio is “Don’t half-ass it with an open mic. Say something, or be silent. Don’t create background chatter”, whether that chatter be walking over other voices, or just making inchoate noises in the background. They are a distraction. They divert the energy you’re trying to push out in the world.

But over this past 2-3 years, something has crept into the NPR style guide that annoys the crap out of me.

It goes a little something like this:

The Strib hails the…uh, “diversity” of the incoming class at the MN Legislature.

As Alan Dershowitz said, the Strib’s and DFL’s (pardon the redundancy) idea of “diversity” is…

…someone in with different color skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you.

I’m not sure if the Strib noted the fact that the House MInority leader and several other incoming GOP freshmen in both chambers are “Republicans of Color” – but I suspect most echo the words of former Representative and now Senator Eric Lucero:

As a Hispanic minority myself married to an Indian minority, I categorically reject the Democrat definition diversity equals skin color. I firmly hold to the truth content of character over color of skin and true diversity equals diversity of thought and ideas.

Which is a message today’s Left actively disparages.

Adam Kinzinger proves he knows nothing about the constitution by saying it in as many words.

No. Really.

The only thing that bothers me as much is the Trump personality cult is the anti-Trump personality cult

“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
– Elwood Blues

I don’t know that I laughed any harder than anyone else at that classic line from “The Blues Brothers“ when I first saw it, back in high school.

But if I had known how important the idea of “Taking absurd, improbable chances that, in retrospect, seem completely crazy“ would be in my life, I might’ve laughed even harder.

I had no plan for my life when I got out of college – so I moved to the Twin Cities on a drunken whim.

Once I got here? Nobody gets a job in major market radio by just walking up and asking for one. I ‘d been in radio for six years by the time I was 22 – even I knew it was delusional. I hadn’t even moved to the Twin Cities with getting back into radio in the back of my mind. But I did it anyway.

And it worked.

No 23 year old gets a talk show on a 50,000 watt station by nagging his boss into putting them on the air. But I did it – and he did.

Nobody builds a career by teaching themself something that (at least at the time) most people had a masters degree in psychology to get into. But I didn’t know any better – so I did, and it worked out.

Nobody gets a major market talk show by gathering a bunch of bloggers together, walking into a radio station and saying “ mind if we do a show on your station?“. But here we are.

It doesn’t always work – that’s kind of what my marriage was, too; “what the heck, who says it couldn’t work out ok?“. But that’s where my kids came from, so I can’t say it didn’t work, either.

No question about it – I’ve been blessed, and lucky, to turn a pattern of scatterbrained opportunism into a career and a life I enjoy.

And every once in a while, I hit one of those restless moments when I think “what’s my next opportunity to grab half a pack of cigarettes, put on my sunglasses, and drive off into the darkness looking for my next questionable decision?”

I’m kind of having one of those moments now.

Remember when Ron DeSantis sent fifty migrants to posh, leafy Martha’s Vineyard?

And the American left wrenched their shoulders out of socket patting themselves on the back by feeding them before having the hired help bus them to a nearby military base?

Maybe it’s time for some of them to start ponying up. Yuma, Arizona’s hospital is stretched beyond its capacity treating migrants:

An Arizona border hospital has been left with $20 million in unpaid medial services from the massive influx of illegal immigrants over the past six months.

Yuma Regional Medical President Dr. Robert Transchel joined “Fox & Friends” Friday to discuss how the migrant crisis has burdened hospitals as experts warn the end of Title 42 will escalate border crossings.

Transchel said anyone coming to the hospital receives the “same level of medical care” regardless of immigration status, including surgeries and intensive care.

“People always think they’re coming in with coughs and colds, but that’s not really the case,” Transchel said. “You have individuals come in that need dialysis, that need heart surgery, that need cardiac catheterization. We’ve had women come into our labor and delivery unit that have delivered infants that need to be in the neonatal ICU for sometimes months at a time.”

Maybe James Taylor and John Kerry can write some checks?

Driving home from a Christmas party, I flipped over to national public radio and listened to the networks most explicit Christmas tradition – the inevitable airing of the insipid David Sedaris story about being a Santas elf at Macy’s back in the 1970s.

I listened to it, so you don’t have to. but here it is anyway.

It’s a Christmas story for people who hate Christmas. Feel free not to listen. I certainly couldn’t -. I flipped it off after about five minutes. God only knows how many times I’ve sat through the whole thing. 20? No – twice.

Anyway, it filled me with an urge to hear a Christmas story that didn’t fill me with rage.

So I thought I would switch to a different, much better Christmas story.

I’ve written about it in the space before; the dark, scary winter of 1981, when the communists shut down the Solidarity, labor movement in Poland. Poland’s ambassador, a lifelong communist atheist converted to Catholicism by his devout wife, had an attack of conscience and patriotism, just before Christmas of 1981, and defected to the United States.

One hesitates to think how the Biden administration would react.

But the president was Ronald Reagan. And his reaction was one for the ages.

I was still a couple years away from being a conservative. But I remember Reagan’s speech that night.

Since NPR will never replay it – mustn’t divert airtime from David F****ng Sedaris – I will:

Anyway, – Christmas greetings, from a time when the president was on America’s side.

For when the kids – or grandkids – ask:

I’m going to be off today, and probably Monday. But I’ll be back raring to go on Tuesday!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

…when dissenting from forced civil rituals was considered the height of Patriotism.

Why, it was only Kaepernick years ago.

How things have changed:

Look – as someone who supported Ukrainian independence back when Democrats universally said the USSR was here to stay, I have one request: Show the share of the money that actually goes to weapons, logistics and training.

Because I’ve seen estimates that 2/3 of the money we “send to Ukraine” ends up in the pockets of consultants and special interests in the US that don’t include building weapons (or replacing them in US units and inventories), shipping them, or training Ukrainians to use them.

And what better way to avoid that accounting than to hold yet another ongoing witchhunt against “badthink?”

What’s officially a Christmas movie?

Ask no more. It’s settled:

This meme has been making the rounds:

This is false. Both are problems.

There is literally *zero* excuse for following closer than two seconds behind someone, no matter how slow they are going.

Seriously – when did MN stop teaching drivers “leave two seconds between you and the car in front of you (and double that in rain and on ice)”? I don’t know – but clearly, once the state passed its “left lane” law, a whole new caste of drivers started thinking they were entitled to drive in the left lane, no matter what.

And here’s a little note for some of you Minnesota drivers: if someone’s in the “passing” lane and going too slow – pass on the right, morons.

Last week, I kid you not, while driving I drove past a line of 6-8 drivers in the left lane, all less than half a second behind each other. I’d bet a shiny new quarter every last one of them was drooling “Muh Left Lane!” and cursing the “slowpoke” at the front of the parade.

Someday, if I’m ever king, shooting tailgaters will not only be legal, but I’ll pay a bounty.

Why, yes. I hate tailgaters.

While people focus on Minneapolis’s ongoing decay, Saint Paul just broke its homicide record:

And there’s plenty of time to run up the score before New Years.

Remember – in 2016, there were 81 homicides in the entire state – 30 in Minneapolis, and (IIRC) 18 in Saint Paul.

Hard to believe Saint Paul is the sane city…

Over the past few weeks, Stanford issued its “List of Allowable Words”.

They don’t call it that, of course. The official title is the output of the “Elimination of Harmful Language” initiative.

And if you expect something that the Babylon Bee might have passed on as too implausible, you’re half right. The Bee makes better satire. But if you work in modern corporate culture, it’s all too plausible.

The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020.

The list has gotten a raft of derisive coverage – all of it justified.

Pick a favorite.

Mine (so far):

• Seminal: Replace with “Leading, Groundbreaking”. Term reinforces male-dominated langauge.

Well, no – Seminal (and “Semen”) are derived from the Latin term for “Seed”. A “seminal” thing is something from which something bigger grows. It’s not “male-dominated”, it’s Latin-dominated.

But :

• Transgendered: replace with “Transgender”. This term avoids connections that being transgender is something that is done to a person and/or that some kind of transition is required.

Grammatically? That’s just bizarre. Adding “ed” is a common way to turn a noun into an adjective.

Biologically? That’s even more bizarre. The word “Trans” itself means some sort of, uh, transition is required.

Oh, go ahead. Pick out your favorite and leave it in the comment section. I can’t fight the language war by myself.