The biggest losers last night:

3. Trafalgar Polling. Their “secret sauce” seems to have hit its shelf date with velocity. Utterly useless.

2. Minnesota taxpayers – as in, the ones that actually pay taxes.

And the #1 loser last night: Donald Trump’s endorsement and coattails. From Keri Lake to Don Bolduc to Scott Jensen, they fared terribly. There were exceptions – but JD Vance likely needed the “R” rather than the “T” behind his name in Ohio.

So congrats, Democrats.

You have a senile president, a thin lead in the Senate, a looming recession, inflation that your policies stand every chance of turning into hyperinflation, and an election built largely on dissatisfied young people who your policies aren’t going to help beyond a few transient payoffs.

Good luck with that.

Crime. Inflation. Shortages. Unprecedented division and balkanization.

Enh.

President Brandon’s tackling the stuff that really matters:

I suppose if you hang out at concert venues all night, you don’t need to heat your house…

Because there’s an election denial problem – among Democrats…

…that they’re trying to project onto the right.

Because I’ve got your “Amnesty for using Covid as a cover for the most immense peacetime power grab in history” right here:

Because Keith Ellison french-kissed “Anti”-Fa…

…and they returned the favor with a night of “mostly peaceful protest” that did this…

…three blocks from my house.

Because when you scratch the surface with the most prominent, outspoken thought leaders of the Democrat party, from Kamala Harris to Jamar Nelson, you find an undercurrent of hatred for the American experiment…

…and the rule of law…

…and, for that matter, their fellow Americans…

Because while work themselves into McCarthyist glee referring to people as “fascists”…

…it is in fact they who seek to enforce acquiescence – whether via blandishments or violence, the Left doesn’t care.

Because America has built back battered…

…and it’s not sustainable.

Because America has a problem with racism – on the left, in places like New York City…:

…and Apple Valley:

…and the response of our “enlightened” ruling classes ranges from the trite:

to the very trite…

…to the, uh, opportunistic, exploitive and cynical.

Because for all of Governor Klink’s yapping about “fully funding education”, the system in Minnesota (outside the parts where the upper-middle-class white DFLer live) is broken…

…and no wonder, since the adults running the system are themselves, while highly schooled, very poorly educated:

To complete the job of contesting control of the party with those who should have nothing to do with conservative politics and make sure those among us who are inclined to giving the party self-inflicted wounds…

…are ushered out without ceremony.

Because whoever you are, where-ever you are, you are not better off than you were four years ago, unless you work for a Democrat non-profit.

Today will be the straightest ticket ever.

It’s finally Election Day and we can all breathe easier now that we won’t have to see Angie Craig’s alternating rictus grin/contorted face of rage multiple times a day on television, social media and other media. But will we see Craig going forward? While I sincerely hope not, it’s difficult to know. So let’s hazard a few guesses on how it will play out today and in the coming days.

Governor: Tim Walz deserves to be tossed out on his well-padded posterior, but I suspect he and Peggy Flanagan will survive. Scott Jensen ran a decent campaign but it’s difficult to overcome all paid advertising from Alida Messinger and the free advertising from the Esme Murphys of the local media.

Secretary of State: Steve Simon is a smooth operator and Kim Crockett is not. Should those traits matter? No, but they do. Simon wins.

Attorney General: We have had the DFL Lucys pull this football away before. Recent polling suggests Keith Ellison is in trouble and that Jim Schultz is leading. Do you believe it? I don’t, but I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

Auditor: If the Republicans are allowed to win a statewide office, it will likely be this one. Republican Ryan Wilson has run a fine campaign and you can’t spell blah without DFLer Julie Blaha. The auditor has limited power but a committed auditor can at least turn over a few rocks the DFL would prefer to keep stationary. Wilson wins.

CD-2: While there are 8 congressional districts in Minnesota, apparently only the 2nd is being contested this year. We’ve seen dozens, maybe hundreds of ads featuring the odious incumbent, Angie Craig, and her rival Tyler Kistner. It’s been a nasty race and Craig has serious money behind her. She’s vulnerable because of redistricting, but it’s not clear to me that Kistner has made the sale. A left wing veteran’s group has also run some stolen valor ads in the final weekend that may affect the outcome; I have not been able to determine if their claims are accurate, but if Kistner loses, that last-minute attack might make the difference. As an aside, I really wish we’d seen Republicans make more of an effort in CD-3, where it’s been entirely too easy for Dean Phillips.

Elsewhere: Control of the House and Senate are at stake and the deep unpopularity of the Democrats will almost certainly mean Congress will be in Republican hands in 2023. A few guesses on races in other states:

Wisconsin: while the population and demographics of Wisconsin are similar to Minnesota, Wisconsin is not a blue state. Milwaukee and Madison are lefty enclaves, but their overall population is less than 40% of the total population, while the Twin Cities are about 60% of the total population here. As a result, it is easier for Republicans to win. Ron Johnson, the incumbent Republican senator, is a bit on the crusty side, but he’s a smart, effective campaigner and looks to be a good bet to win against his opponent, Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, a gladhander in the Hakeem Jeffries/Barack Obama style, but less effective. In the governor’s race, Republican challenger Tim Michels is also a bit crusty, but the fluke incumbent governor, Democrat Tony Evers, is an ineffective milquetoast. Look for the Republicans to win both. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my personal traditions is, whenever I see someone in an unopposed race on the ballot, and I’d rather not vote for them or leave the spot blank, I will write in one of my pets.

I think today’s Ramsey county commission race leaves is just such a choice; Ren Moran, or my cat.And so…:

If not now, when? If not him, what other animal?

I saved this tweet by “Historian” Michael Beschloss over the summer, just so see how it’d age.

I feel a bit like I’m opening a time capsule. I may do more of these in the future.

Beschloss – who’s built a bit of a career bastardizing history on behalf of Joe Biden, and is one of the people who cheapened the value of a “blue check” to $8 – thought, last summer, at the height of the “blue counter-wave” hysteria, that last night’s election might be a parallel with the 1936 election, which FDR and his servants in the media painted as a referendum on the Supreme Court.

So – how’d that work out?

DFL communications guy on Twitter Dash which I’m told most Democrats will be leaving, apparently on their way to Canada:

Neo Marxist iconography? Specious reference to “democracy“ from a party that has been actively fighting the things that make American democracy good and useful?

Yes. Yes, it really does “say at all”.

To: Minnesota Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Fake Beliefs

DFLers,

A few points of information:

• There is no “Swat Plan”. It was an off-the-cuff, tongue-in-cheek remark by Kim Crockett’s husband, at a Tea Party meeting, and of no more policy impact (or taste) than DFL staffers calling for “guillotines” for Republicans.
• The Governor can not directly change MN abortion policy
• Attorney General Ellison openly supported defunding cops.
• A. Quarter. Billion. In. Fraud. So. Far. It’s going to be half a billion by the time they’re done.
• MN, locked down, did no better in pandemic than our neighbors.
• Nothing about Republicans or their ideology is remotely “fascist”, and we are less a threat to “democracy” than your beliefs are.

That is all.

I think I voted for some Democrats in the 1982 midterms, when I was 20 and still fighting with my Democrat upbringing. The last Democrat I know I voted for was 26 years ago – because she was unopposed, and her constituent services person worked wonders (she actually went on to be one of the few sane members of the Saint Paul City Council). Not sure I’d do it again, but there you have it.

That, and a few elections during my Libertarian years, 1994 through 1998, were about as far as it went for me not voting Republican.

But notwithstanding that, it’s still not a “gimme” of a vote. The GOP has to earn my vote, or at least (some years) be the lesser of two evils – because if the lesser evil loses, you get a greater evil.

But I’ll be voting GOP this year, straight ticket, every race. No exceptions.

And I’ll be doing it for a lot of reasons.

I’ll be doing it for the guy who ran the little shop over on Snelling that tried to stay open during Walz’s arbitrary, scientifically-vacuous lockdowns – and failed, while the big-box store he competed successfully with for two decades trundled along with government’s blessing. And for every other business that got shut down.

I’ll be voting especially to repudiate Keith Ellison, who spent most of two years siccing his legal goons on businesses that were trying to stay alive, owned by people who’d done something Keith Ellison has never done; invested their life’s savings into trying to run a business in this state. I’m voting Republican to help bring the day when that might not be a stupid idea, maybe, someday, again.

I’m voting GOP for every cop who shows up and tries to do a good job, and is tired of having the political class spitting on her. For every officer that’s brought in a perp, and seen them sprung before the paperwork was done.

I’m voting GOP for every father that had to watch their kids being born via video. For everyone who had to watch their loved ones die via video, or hear about it after the fact from some overworked nurse on the phone.

I’m especially voting GOP for everyone that went through that, and then watched Governor Klink, mask stretched over his maw, jammed into a seat at George Floyd’s very public, very crowded funeral, for which “science” somehow made an exception. I’m voting to throw a huge, red finger at anyone who excused that.

I’m voting a straight Republican ticket for all the nurses, techs and doctors who got laid off about twenty minutes after being hailed as “front line heroes”, because their clinics were shuttered, or their hospitals and networks were realigning due to the market distortions caused by the lockdowns.

I’m voting GOP for everyone wondering how the hell they’re going to heat their house AND buy food this winter.

I’m doing it because of all your “SAVE DEMOCRACY – VOTE BLUE!” buncombe. The left is, year in, year out, the actual threat to our constitutional order, to “democracy”, to freedom.

I’m voting Republican to stick it to the Electoral College denialists and the Supreme Court Conspiracy Theorists. And because Democrats are inflation deniers, crime deniers, American History deniers and, here in Minnesota, fraud deniers.

I’m voting Republican for everyone that lost their job due to the Vaccine mandate.

I’m voting Republican for every National Guardsman – every “19 year cook” – who had to face off against their fellow citizen in the street because their political leaders in Mpls and Saint Paul were too PC and cowardly to enforce the law, reform the police and deliver the “privilege” of public safety for we pay all those f**k**g taxes before Minneapolis became a powder keg.

I’m voting GOP for every beleaguered homeowner in North Minneapolis and the lower East Side of Saint Paul who wonders if this is the night all that gunfire in the distance stitches the walls and windows of their house.

I’m voting GOP to tell every Latino and Black voter who is pondering voting GOP for the first time, and feels as I did when left the Left in 1984 – like they’re stepping off a cliff into the great unknown – “Welcome. Let’s kick some ass”.

I’m voting GOP with the “Rocks and Cows” – all the people in Greater Minnesota who are sick to death of being condescended to by chirpy little 20-somethings from Macalester with poli sci degrees and “mushroom head” haircuts and resumes of short careers spent chasing DFL non-profit bucks.

For every Iron Ranger who’s tired of being told “stocking shelves at Shopko is just as good a career as mining, and all that money’s probably pretty bad for you, really” by Metro-area “environmentalists” in 2 million dollar houses in Kenwood.

I’m voting Republican because they are coming for your guns. Over the past couple years, they’ve felt emboldened enough to admit it. They’ll get ’em, not over my cold dead body, but over theirs.

I’m voting GOP because the DFL turned a blind eye to their contributors taking anvil cases of money out of the US, with (I believe the record will show) a nudge and a wink. The $250 million for “Feeding our Future” is just the beginning.

I’m voting Republican to tell Lisa Bender and every DFLer who believes as she does, “You’re right. Law and order is a privilege. And delivering on that “privilege” is one of government’s few unambiguously legitimate jobs, for which we pay the taxes and lend out the liberties we do.

I’m voting for every cancer patient who wishes they could have had a biopsy six months sooner, or isn’t alive to wish it. For the people whose health – physical and mental – was directly impacted by a state that treated bureaucratic prerogatives better than they treated science.

I’m voting for everyone with chronic pain – the cancer patients and accident victims and repeat-surgery patients with horrible chronic pain who can’t get the pain meds they need, since the same ham-fisted system that locked down the state also investigates and destroys the careers of doctors who give “too many” opioid prescriptions (in the view of some soulless bureaucrat) – while the DFL basks in the sickly glow of having “stuck it to Big Pharma” (while in many cases raking in big contributions from “Big Pharma”).

I’m voting Republican for everyone who’s sick of the DFL-dominated “Laptop class” getting rich on your backs.

I’m voting Republican for everyone who’s more than a little irked at the crude irony of people who vote for Keith Ellison calling Scott Jensen “too extreme for Minnesota”.

I’m voting Republican because I don’t want my granddaughter to have to pay for Joe Biden’s re-election spending spree, although I fear it’s too late.

I’m voting GOP for every kid that slowly lost interest in school, in learning – and in all too many cases, eventually in life itself.

I’m voting GOP for the owners of the my drugstore, my luthier, and every other store that got burned, looted or vandalized; every shopkeeper that had to spent their nights patrolling their stores – or figuring out how to clean up the wreckage.

I’m voting GOP for every parent that is sick of politicized school administrators and school-board politicians undercutting them, and for every parent who’s wondering why their schools just keep getting worse even as the price just keeps rising.

I’ll be doing it for everyone whose car got jacked, for every victim of everyone sprung onto the street by the Minnesota Freedom Fund or whiffleball DFL judges and prosecutors.

I’ll be doing it for every poor family scraping by wondering how they’re going to replace a catalytic converter on top of all the other bills and crap piling up these days.

I’m voting Republican because the shrapnel from Governor Walz’s hamfisted “state of emergency” was utterly. bitterly personal. I had to delay moving my mother – whose husband had just died, and was in a long-term care in North Dakota, pretty much alone – for months while the state worked out all its many mistakes in nursing homes. She was in a competently run state, so she didn’t catch Covid – but the months alone didn’t help one bit. And for that, I have a grudge. Oh, yes I do.

I’m voting GOP for everyone who’s sick to death of being gaslit by Hollywood, by Academia, the media and our own government, and isn’t going to take it anymore.

I’m voting Republican for the 13 soldiers and Marines who died in Afghanistan. Joe Biden wants them forgotten – but I will not.

I’m voting Republican because I read and have critical thinking skills.

I’m voting Republican because I can, and I’m going to keep it that way. Don’t tread on me.

The big Democrat problem with Latino voters?

They keep trying to treat them as a spot on the intersectional checkbox…

…which is not, more and more, how they see themselves.

I think the first time I noticed America’s political class divide when I was doing my first talk show, at KSTP, way back when. I made the, um, profound observation that while the American Left had always sought a “class war” in which they – or at least the garden variety of “they” – saw themselves as the little guy revolting against the Leviathan, in at least one contest, the gun control “debate”, they were in fact the patricians, trying to keep the plebs in line.

I was young and naive. Literally every cultural argument breaks down on those lines, down to the rhetoric Big Left uses.

And that class war’s biggest flashpoints in recent years were Brexit in Europe, and Donald Trump in the US. The Big Government response to Covid was an extension of that skirmish.

Which brings us to this weeks’ most interesting story, the argument over the case for or against Amnesty for the culture-war criminals.

Speaking to the case against “Covid Amnesty”, I present this piece from Unherd. Or rather, one part of a huge case for, not “amnesty”, but truth and reconciliation.

It was a salvo in the class war – America’s patrician class’s way of getting the plebs back for Brexit and Trump.

One of many “money” pullquotes:

Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.

In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign [the “In This House…” mob – Ed.] priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.

The whole thing is worth a read.

…of Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering (“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”), it’s hard not to look at this story – “Klan literature” being handed out in a swing-y part of northeastern Minnesota long controlled by a DFL that’s not happy about losing ground in the are, four days before an election where the DFL is poised to lose, maybe big – and not presume it’s a hoax.

Gotta tell you something that bugs the bejeebers out of me.

Governor Walz’s campaign motto in both elections has been “One Minnesota”.

Now, if you’ve studied History *and* German, that slogan sounds all too close to “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” – “One People, One Empire, One Leader”. It was the motto of…uh, a regime 80 years ago that left behind some apocalyptic historical, social and political baggage.

In 2018, the slogan was merely annoying – one of those things the kids today refer to as “Microagressions”, which is another way of saying “something that people normally suck it up and chalk up to the cognitive dissonance of human communication”.

But after four years featuring the most incredible peacetime seizure of government power in history, and a long spate of politicized violence, not to mention a campaign of “othering” dissenters from the current ruling party as “Fascists” – the same, morally and personally, as the Godwins Law convicts in the second paragraph up above – it’s not hard to wonder if “One Minnesota” is a warm, fuzzy inclusive thing, or a warning that you’re either *with* “One Minnesota” or you’re against it; an invitation, as Elvis Costello put it, “shut up or get cut up”.

The President’s speech in September, referring to half the country as “Facists”, is exactly what regimes do when they want to draw a wide, exclusive “with us or against us” line through society.

I thought about that while reading this blood-curdling story about the Russian war crimes in Bucha – where they “cleansed” the city of Ukrainians accused by their regime of being “Nazis” and “Fascists”.

Today it’s Ukraine – but it’s the same dynamic that happened in Iraq in the 2000s, and Rwanda in the ’90s, Northern Ireland in the ’70s, China in the ’60s, Greece in the ’40s and ’50s, Finland (ffs?) in the 1920’s, even Kansas before the CIvil War; if you were on the wrong side of the “Us vs. Them” line when “Them” came through town, you and your family…died. Horribly. Then and there, bodies dumped in the street as a warning that we’re now living in One Iraq/Rwanda/Ulster/Greece/Finland/Kansas.

Given the rhetoric we are seeing today – I’ll charitable and say “on both sides”, but my heart’s not really in it – a slogan like “One Minnesota” is just too…redolent. That’s a good word.

You indiscriminately refer to your opposition – political, social, whatever – as “Fascists”, “Nazis” or whatever mortal enemy, against whom your society fought a life or death battle in living memory, that your culture recognizes.

Something causes the gloves to come off. Angry tweets – aimed at people who’ve had that label from that mortal enemy piled onto them – turn to angry words, to angry actions…

…and eventually, to mass murder.

But after the rhetoric of the past few years, escalated over the past few months, it’s not hard to see it happening in a place like

Democrats, learning Twitter banned discussion on politically fraught topics at FBI request: “Hey, it’s a private company. They can do what they want!”

Democrats, being asked to pay $8 a month for their precious blue checks: “Musk is STIFLING FREE SPEECH ZOMG!!! REEEEEEEEE!!!”

Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds“) was written long before I first read Saul Alinski’s “Rules for Radicals”, so I didn’t know that Alinski’s Rule 4, “”Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”, is more or less the same idea.

The most tiresome, and omnipresent, meme of this election is “a vote for Republicans is a vote against Democracy”, combined with labeling any call for scrutiny of election laws and processes on any level as “election denialism”.

It’s a way of “othering” people – for, in most cases (shaddap about Marjory Taylor Greene – for defending a system of self-government …

…that is under constant attack by the left themselves.

It’s time to start calling out:

• Electoral College Denialists
• Minoritarian Senate Denialists
• Enumerated Powers Denialists
• Checks and Balances Denialists…

…as the threats to self-government that they actually are.

A friend of the blog emails:

This woman has had 2 scary incidents. 

She tries to say in the op-ed that there are solutions. She doesn’t name any.

It doesn’t appear as though she called the police at all over either incident, so she is complicit, in my opinion, to allowing these criminals to terrorize others, maybe even kill someone next time. She doesn’t seem to care.

If she found herself visiting a small rural town, where several white rural stereotypes were shooting at each other and pointing their guns at her and her children, would she have the same beliefs? I don’t know.

But, in either case, she should be calling the police. Fine, believe in, advocate for early interventions. But, when someone is actively engaged in criminal activity, early intervention is too late. They are criminals. We have laws. Why is that so hard for people to understand? Does half the country have Stockholm Syndrome? 

I saw this morning that Peggy Noonan wrote that crime might elect a Republican in New York. And it is possible here in Minnesota, as well. I’m not going to win any friends by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway- I hope Republicans are truly prepared for that possibility.

Yeah, that’s kind of (pun incoming) elephant in the room: the GOP is going to need to deliver on a lot if they win significant enough majorities…well, anywhere.

Yesterday was a big day in polling for MN Republicans.

Top of the order – Real Clear Politics’s polling summary shows Scott Jensen behind, still – but the second most-improved of the GOP hopefuls:

That’s over the previous two weeks – and it was the best performance of a number of underdog Republican gubernatorial candidates. As Dan McLaughlin said:

In the gubernatorial races, the Wave Surfers are Christine Drazan, Kari Lake, Joe Lombardo, Stitt, Derek Schmidt, and Tim Michels. Maybe you could persuade me with one more poll to slide Scott Jensen into this bracket.

And its been 16 years since that’s been said out loud.

Later in the day? I suspect some interns were soundly thrashed when the news came out:

Wilson up five over Blaha, with plenty undecided, but Biden underwater in Minnesota and momentum apparently moving the other way? Fingernails will be chewed. But it could be worse.

And the big news:

GOP Attorney General candidate Jim Schultz up by nearly double the margin of error, with barely enough undecideds to swing the race to Ellison if they all joined him (ignoring the MOE for a moment).

As to the Governor’s race?

Survey USA, which had Jensen down 18 points two months ago, currently has him…

…down eight.

I’m not going to claim SUSA is biased in the same way I showed the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll was. Clearly the methodology differences between SUSA and the Trafalgar Poll a few weeks back are pretty immense, and it’ll be interesting, to say the least, to see how this shakes out over the next week.

Emily Oster at The Atlantic wonders if we mightn’t just bury the hatchet about all that Covid overreaction; call a social mulligan; just mooooooove on:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

David Strom – now writing for Hot Air – meets Dr. Oster halfway:

[Dr. Oster] has generally been a voice of reason on COVID policy, and even when I disagree I respect her. She supported policies I considered and consider appalling, yet she always shared her reasoning and her doubts. Plus she vigorously opposed the COVID excuse to destroy education, and that deserves great respect…Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers

But…:

Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.

COVID fanatics deserve every single bit of the consequences that are coming for them, and far far more than they will suffer.

I might be inclined to agree with David’s premise – in March and April, maybe May of 2020, when we really didn’t know what was going on, and we didn’t know that Covid wasn’t going to be a demographic scythe mowing down vast swathes of the population? Sure.

Once we got to about June or July – when it was very clear to anyone who could read a graph that Governor Klink’s prediction of 20,000 dead in Minnesota by mid-July, best case, was off by more than an order of magnitude, and he set about concealing the code for the model that led to the prediction because “someone might use it to get different results than we got” (which is the polar opposite of “science”?

For everything that came after – the schools closed, the tsunami of mental health issues, the endless emergency declarations, the boarded-over basketball hoops and bans on selling garden supplies – you want “Amnesty?”

After this?

I’m going to start the negotiation with “military tribunals”.

For the many millions who couldn’t get their cancer, heart disease and other chronic, sometimes life-threatening conditions seen, diagnosed or treated?

Drumhead court-martials are too good.

For the bans on funerals? For the loved ones that died alone in hospitals and LTCs?

I’d be hard-pressed to deny those demanding a “purge night” their due, but this is a civil society.

For the huge advances in the power of the police and surveillance states? For the “emergency powers” seized, and held for well over a year, by tinpot piglets like Gretchen Whitmer and Tim “Klink” Walz?

Give me some heads on pikes – figuratively – and I I might, might, be persuaded to settle for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, as long as it has the power to imprison people for a long time.

My mother suffered from Alzheimers. She and her husband – also very ill – were in a long-term care in Minot. Her husband died in March 2020. The “emergency” rules in Minnesota – and the carnage caused by Governor Klink and the Department of Health’s policies – meant it took seven months to move her to Minnesota. Seven months during which, alone in a nursing home, my mother declined even more alarmingly than she had before.

Amnesty?

I’m more inclined toward demanding unconditional surrender.

But it’s likely my vote next Tuesday is my only recourse.

Rot in (figurative, electoral) hell, Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan, and anyone who votes for you.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is out dropping literature for a candidate for the Minnesota state House of Representatives. As he walks toward a door, he encounters Avery LIBRELLE, carrying a shopping bag full of campaign literature.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, Chriiiiistchurch New Zealand is beautiful this time of year, hey, Avery, how…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. Paul Pelosi was attacked by a MAGAt terrorist who represents the inner id of all Republican scumbags, something that every voter needs to remember as we head towards a midterm election where some polls are showing democracy itself is a threat from slack-jawed, drooling yokels in red caps.

BERG: “Uh, there’s no evidence that DePape was a Republican or conservative in any…”

LIBRELLE: “He was an old man who was attacked, and all you can think is politics?”

BERG: (Glances into LIBRELLE’s shopping bag) Uh, Avery, that’s all Republican literature…

But LIBRELLE is already scampering down the road

And SCENE.

Since some prog will bleat “Why aren’t you condemning the attack on Paul Pelosi?” if I don’t say it – violence is bad. Don’t hit people with hammers, or anything else.

Speaking of people trying to exploit the episode…

The Star Tribune:

Rob Reiner, the intellectual thought leader of the modern Democrat party?

And look – here’s Ilhan Omar, on the attack on Paul Pelosi:

A far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.

Here’s Angie Craig:

Here’s Amy Klobuchar:

On Meet the Press, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar rued how Pelosi “has been villainized for years, and big surprise, it’s gone viral, and it went violent.” She said we have “to make sure we’re not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump down this road,” and “we have to do something about this amplification of this election-denying hate speech that we see on the Internet.”

I don’t expect Dems to be familiar with Berg’s 18th Law – but there may be no better case of it in all of history. Indeed, there might be a corollary to the the law – if the Democrats can use the story for political gain, 48 hours is waaaaay too short.

The facts? Much more prosaic:

All of this requires imposing a coherence on David DePape’s mind that simply doesn’t exist, which would be obvious to anyone who paused for a minute to consider and absorb the evidence.

Listen to the person who perhaps knows him best — the mother of his two children, a woman named Oxane Taub (a.k.a. Gypsy), herself a whack-job serving jail time for trying to abduct a 14-year-old boy she was infatuated with.

(As a press release from the local DA’s office put it: “Over the course of 14 months, she sent him numerous obsessive emails, created blogs directed at him, used his friends to send him messages and eventually tried to abduct him a few blocks from his school in Berkeley. While the case was pending, Taub also tried to dissuade the victim from testifying.” And she was the rational half of the couple.)

In an interview from jail, conducted by a local TV station, Taub said, “He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time.” She said he was missing for a year and then showed up again “in very bad shape.” According to Taub, “he thought he was Jesus.” She added, “He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”

My theory? Democrats – especially Minnesota DFLers – are looking at next week’s election, and figure painting themselves as victims of MAGA, and the “wave of conservative/white supremacist terror” they’ve been promising for the past 15 years, can’t hurt.

The Vice President of the United States actively worked to bail out rioters, convicted rapists and scads of violent goons:

Not a single national Democrat or local DFLer denounced this erosion of our legal system. Some, including much of the metro and state “progressive” power elite, celebrated and participated in it.

This needs to be held against every last one of them in tomorrow’s elections.

UPDATE: Next Tuesday’s elections. Sometime banking posts for the future is a two-edge sword.

The DFL is getting nervous about crime; their line has morphed from “We ARE tough on crime!” to “The other guys are no better”.

Dane Smith’s editorial parrots the execrable Paul Krugman; both of them are utterly, unforgivably wrong.

“Red” states with crime problems have one or more of the following factors in common:

1) They have one or more large cities, usually Democrat-controlled. Tennessee has Memphis. Louisiana has NOLA. Alabama has Birmingham. Even in Minnesota, if you leave out Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the violent crime rates are almost European level.

2) Scots-Irish culture, exacerbated by centuries of poverty driven by the servitude culture that led to “white trash” culture. Dueling, honor killing and violence as an accepted part of life are still fairly routine down south. They were even MORE routine when the South was Democrat. They were, in fact, routine before the US was a nation. It’s why parts of rural South Carolina and Louisiana are as dangerous, *per capita*, as Chicago.

Krugman and Smith ignore a couple of vital facts.

1) Yes, *Conservative* policies *do* curb crime. 30 years ago, New York City was one of the most dangerous cities in America. They elected Rudy Giuliani, who replaced social justice mewling with law enforcement – and made NYC a place you could take your kids to. He wasn’t the only one; Jersey City elected Brett Schundler 30 years ago, and nine years of his very conservative leadership turned Jersey City from a crime-riddle hellhole to the jewel of the Jersey side (for a while, anyway).

2) Why do neither Krugman nor Smith point out that places like the rural, hard-red West have crime down around European levels? “But empty land doesn’t have crime problems”, some innumerates may reply – but we’re talking *per capita rates*. Still, they make a point – cities have pathologies that lead to crime. And they are overwhelmingly blue. Correlation? Causation? I don’t know – and it’s for certain Krugman and Smith don’t.

3) “Red” policies DID work, already, in Minneapolis. In the late ’90s, the city went from being among the nation’s most dangerous to a fairly safe one for close to a decade and a half, ENTIRELY due to diliegent law enforcement, including cracking down on career criminals. (Were there excesses? Absolutely. That’s the hard part – given a choice between public safety and ethical police, CHOOSE BOTH, NO EXCEPTIONS .

4) Whatever you can say about “red” law enforcement, “blue” law enforcement has been a failure…EVERYWHERE. In large part because they believe, in Lisa Bender’s words, that public safety is a “privilege”.

So – if a Democrat says it, and it’s about crime in particular, it’s a lie. There’s no way to pretty that up.

Smith and Krugman are trying to deflect the gullible. Do not let it work.

Surprise, surprise – the Strib endorses Co-Governors Flanagan and Walz.

Rather than posting tiresome pullquotes from the article, go ahead and post your own versions of “Strib” quotes in the comment section. I’m sure it’ll be more entertaining.

…if Keith Ellison is really this dim…

…or if he’s just counting on his voters being that clueless.

My money’s on “B”.

From 2006-2010, I worked at a job in downtown Saint Paul – on Wabasha, as luck would have it.

Wabasha had escaped the worst of the ravages of “Urban Renewal” of the 1950s-’60s, so it wasn’t a completely sterile, dessicated cement canyon, like Minnesota or Cedar.

But the 80s through the 2000s certainly had not treated it well, as whatever little non-government foot traffic there was on non-hockey/Ordway nights dried up. So while it’s not the depression-inducing brutalist hellscape that reigns from Minnesota over to Jackson, it was still pretty sad when I worked there, and the pandemic and Ecolab relocating to the Travelers building hasn’t helped.

A friend of the blog emails:

I travel quite a bit. Sometimes I travel by plane and when I get to my destination, I just walk or take taxis and transit everywhere. I have been to places far more dense than Saint Paul. Those places where I have traveled always have street level shops, restaurants, actual businesses that bring people out. Those places, in addition to having a larger number of people on sidewalks also have a large amount of automobile traffic. They have quite a few parking ramps as well. But, Saint Paul and Minneapolis is the only place that I have been that seems to have a plethora of vacant buildings and parking ramps, yet thinks the reason the downtown is “not people scale” is because it was lacking some sort of bike lane or “traffic calming.”

This section of Wabasha that our Resiliency Officer Stark thinks is so wonderfully suited for people is just one example of many. What is a bike lane going to prove on a deserted street? Stark will, of course, likely blame cars as the reason no one is riding their bikes past parking ramps. Then, the city will buy the ramps and close them. And still, people won’t ride their bikes past vacant buildings. Meanwhile, suburbs that I drive to, because there’s limited shopping in Saint Paul, seem to be thriving with businesses, housing developments, and yes, even sidewalks and bike lanes with people on them. Why are Democrats and far left urbanists determined to destroy our city?

I’m completely at a loss.