2018: afraid that the hyper-progressive Erin Murphy/Erin Maye Quade ticket will lose the governor‘s office, the coterie of progressive plutocrats that bankroll the DFL prop up retrofitted “moderate“ Tim Walz as a sort of Danish-monarchy-style figurehead for the hyper-progressive troika of Peggy Flanagan, Ryan Winkler and Melissa Hortman (all of whom are essentially mouthpieces for Aleta Messinger And Michael Bloomberg). With the help of the invariably subservient Minnesota media, they retain the governors office.
2020: Fearing the electoral consequences of nominating socialist Bernie Sanders, progressive cabal appropriates elderly, addled Joe Biden as their “Moderate“mouthpiece and, in effect, Trojan horse. They win a bitter election, and go on to drop all “moderate“ pretenses even before the inauguration.
Rob Dubnecay, restaurant owner in south Minneapolis, watched his vehicle get stolen in a matter of seconds as he rang up a customer. Ten days later, the case has yet to be assigned an investigator. Read the story here: https://t.co/rbPuHzh6cdpic.twitter.com/5evhYI2OFn
Pay no attention to the mass of criminals behind the curtain:
Luger stressed several times during the press conference that offenders themselves have expressed to authorities that they've come to believe they will not be held accountable for their actions in Minnesota. https://t.co/eXfphdYr5p
Just between you and me, I suspect that the only people for whom it “conjures” that image is Charlie Crist’s message team.
DeSantis was actually in the military; putting Dukakis in a tank was a little like putting Paul Lynde in a UFC ring. (UPDATE: Duke served in the Army, as a radio operator serving the UN Armistice Commission, back in the fifties. My bad. Albeit not as big a bad as the ).
SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for Gatorade Zero at Cub Foods when Cat SCAT, he designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“ and office manager at a small phrenology practice, steps around the corner.
SCAT: Merg!
BERG: Uh, hey, Cat…
SCAT: Shut up. You and other so-called conservatives are spreading disinformation.
BERG: Do tell.
SCAT: You say that the so-called “woke mob” is “grooming” people, especially young children, into transitioning their gender.
SCAT: Ack-shyu-ally, before someone can transition, they have to go through rigorous counseling by physician, culminating with a “Letter of Readiness for Surgery” signed by a physician.
Riots, encouraged by your administratiion’s passive-aggressive bureaucratic gamesmanship with the National Guard
Collapse of respect for the rule of law, as a result of DFL policy
Educational outcomes for minorities, already terrible, collapsed
State divided between “essential” and “non-essential” workers – meaning dividing people
“Science” bastardized by your administration hiding the code for the “model” “predicting” tens of thousands of dead from Covid by July 2020, as a best case. That’s how how science is done,
To the extent Minnesota is doing well, it’s in spite of you.
I listen to NPR, on occasion. I do it so you don’t have to. Freedom isn’t free.
And in and among the hours and hours of bald-faced Democrat public relations and PR, you find the occasional nugget of brilliance.
On occasion, that brilliance is utterly in spite of any original intentions.
Such is this hour-long documentary by one DJ Cashmere – which I thought was a hip-hop stage name for a moment, but is in fact the name of a nebbishy-sounding former high school teacher at “Nobles Street School”, a “chain” of Chicago-area “no-nonsense” charter schools. Cashmere went on to become a journnalist…
In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.
While I eschew the term “dog whistle” as a way of slighting other points of view, the story is full of terms that both sides have staked out, for and against. The blurb notes “At the time, Noble followed a popular model called “no excuses.” Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college.”
That discipline included uniforms, plus some pretty rigid behavioral expectations; being late, disruptive, or tardy with homework was not tolerated; detentions flew like spitballs for infractions, not only of disciplinary rules, but for being in class late or having uniforms out of spec.
No education model is a panacaea, but Noble Street had good results – good enough that close to 10% of Chicago families, overwhelmingly “of color” and low income (just like Twin Cities charter schools) put their kids in Noble Street schools. There were exceptions. When dealing with human beings, nothing is ever foolproof. But pretty much every objective measure – graduation rates, test scores, college acceptance rates, crime rates – showed the concept worked well for most kids.
And then…
…well, the blurb mentions the dramatic peak; management at Noble Street changed. Noble Street’s “no excuses” values were patriarchal, colonial and, despite the overwhelming approval of the overwhelmingly of-color clientele who’d voted with their and their kids’s feet to get into Noble, “white supremacist”.
And so they changed.
As to the results?
You can listen to the story here (I can’t embed it, unfortunately).
Like all human behavior, there are as many sides to the story as there are people. But it’s a lede that one might suspect public radio would bury, and you’d be at least partly right. The results that parents were looking for – the sort of accomplishment based measures that modern Big Left has called “patriarchal” and “white supremacist” – didn’t fare well.
Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we’ve got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.”
Writing for the Atlantic (via MSN), Helen Lewis also noticed something else:
I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. “I think probably being religious,” Clare-Young responded. “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.”
Of course it is. In our world, the wrath of the mob is more fearsome than the wrath of God. And you’re more likely to get instant karma if you don’t bow to conventional wisdom. If you see a sign in someone’s yard, proclaiming “In This House We Believe [select platitudes here]”, it’s almost certainly a leftist. I suppose it’s good when they self-identify. But as the old saw goes, the devil is in the details.
The beginning of the thread is pretty funny. He complains that the Hilton Gardens isn’t really downtown because it is between a highway and a vacant building. (Surprise-that is what our downtown is like these days). In the next tweet, he complains that the hotel seems to be full of people “waiting until things with the police cooled down or their wives took them back.” (Another surprise, I guess, because this seems to also be something many people are saying about downtown Minneapolis these days. It’s just not that #vibrant).
Minneapolis has always had an inferiority complex re New York. It even adopted “The Mini-Apple” as its marketing slogan in the ’80s (during the later years of NYC’s nadir in the Dinkins years, for crying out loud).
If New York media figures start dunking on Minneapolis? That might get the administration’s attention.
For every singer who manages to keep a career going for decades, there are hundreds of flashes in the pan – people who get a one-hit-wonder in their teens or twenties, have a brief spurt of stardom, and then…
In 1987, seemingly overnight, Terence Trent D’Arby became the most arresting new pop star of his generation. To hear him sing songs such as If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name was to bear witness to the art of aural seduction; the knees buckled. He became terribly famous, terribly quickly. He was 25.
Of course you remember Terence Trent D’Arby.
Er, Sananda Maitreya.
“I wanted adulation and got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, by now working under the name Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive it.”
If his ascendancy had the stuff of legend about it, then so did his demise. Like Prince before him, he began to feel himself capable of anything, each new song he composed a masterpiece. His record company felt differently – it wanted hits, not ornate rock operas – but D’Arby was not someone easily restrained. And so, in pursuit of his muse, he spent the early 90s reportedly living the life of a tormented recluse in a Los Angeles mansion. When I speak to him – which takes six months to arrange – he suggests he was grateful to move on “from such excess and artifice. I didn’t give a fuck about it then, and even less about it now that memory has been kind enough to allow me to forget most of it.”
Prince had died, Michael Jackson, too. D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – prompted by a dream he had in 1995 – to help him better bury the past. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children, and writes, records and produces his own music, which he releases on his own label, behaving as he damn well pleases.
And Trent D’Arby…er, Maitreya – hints at something that dogged me and my mental state through my early thirties:
The question of whether anyone is listening any more doesn’t seem to trouble him unduly. When I ask what, if anything, he misses from the old days, he replies: “I miss the unbridled, bold, naked stupidity of youth’s vibrant electric hubris.”
As someone who oozed vibrant electric hubris himself? Even though I never had a hit (or came much closer than this single glorious evening), I do miss feeling that way pretty badly, sometimes.
Not all the side-effects, of course. I’m one of those guys who wants four metaphorical Old Fashioneds, but no hangover.
As the article shows, it doesn’t work that way, literally or figuratively.
According to MPD data, 83% of the city’s shooting victims this year have been black. And in 2021, one black shooting victim was identified for every 150 black residents, while one white shooting victim was identified for every 3,768 white residents.
A significant majority of homicides in Minneapolis, moreover, are committed by black suspects. In 2022, 89% of shooting suspects have been described as black (in cases where police obtain a suspect description from a witness).
As for age, two-thirds of Minneapolis’ shooting victims are 30 years old or younger.
So – young black men are extremelly disproportionally the perps and the victims in Minneapolis.
After facing extensive public blowback last year, the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission on Thursday, July 21, again considered a proposal to reduce criminal sentences for those who commit a crime while in custody, on probation or supervised release.
And you can guess which ones going to get the media coverage, right?
Governor Walz: Don’t like the noise, heat and humidity?
After doing like 14 years at the State Fair, I totally get it.
So I’d like to formally invite you and Dr. Jensen – either or both of you, honestly – to join me either Sunday afternoon, or any Saturday between August 27 and election day.
Of course, we’ll be talking about your response to Covid and the riots, as well as you propensity for naming giveaways for self-glorification (“Walz Checks”) and claiming credit for tax cuts you opposed, and the like.
If it seemed to you that the Administration and Dems jammed down the “Inflation Reduction Act” – an agglomeration of “Build Back Battered“ and “Green New Deal“ policies – really really hard?
mericans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening…Overall, 35% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally, down from 44% in August 2019. Another third say they are somewhat concerned. Only about half say their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with two-thirds in 2019.
The story is, in fact, more climatemongery, and goes on to try to re-bury the lede – but between the lines, the message is there; other priorities are taking over for people in the real world, outside the upper-middle-class progressive bubble.
And if people ever make the connection between the output of the “green/sustainable/equitable“ mafia policies, and the depression in their standard of living, that’s going to be a big problem for the greens.
California residents continue to vote with their feet. From this NYT article in May,
For the second time in two years, the California Department of Finance has reported a drop in the state’s population.
California lost 117,552 residents last year, driven largely by the Covid death toll and a sharp drop in foreign immigration. This followed a slightly bigger decline in 2020, when the state lost 182,083 residents — the first time in more than a century that California got smaller.
The latest data is further evidence that California, whose identity has been tied to expansive growth going back to the Gold Rush days, is now a state of stagnant growth. That has already resulted in the state losing a congressional seat for the first time in its 170-year history.
This City Journal article found that since 2000, California saw a net loss of over 2.6 million people. Many of those are taxpayers.
The comforting tale that only the old, bitter, and uneducated are moving out simply does not withstand scrutiny. An analysis of IRS data through 2019 confirms that increasing domestic migration is not dominated by the youngest or oldest households. Between 2012 and 2019, tax filers under 26 years old constituted only 4 percent of net domestic outmigrants. About 77 percent of the increase came among those in their prime earning years of 35 to 64. In 2019, 27 percent of net domestic migrants were aged 35 to 44, while 21 percent were aged 55 to 64.
As an unscientific experiment, I looked up U-Haul rates for a 10′ truck, picking up on September 6, both leaving and going to California, with Texas and Florida as the other ends of the trip.
from Los Angeles, California…
Los Angeles to Dallas – $2,701 Los Angeles to Miami – $4,416
to Los Angeles, California…
Dallas to Los Angeles – $1,296 Miami to Los Angeles – $2,760
from San Francisco, California…
San Francisco to Dallas – $3,350 San Francisco to Miami – $4,902
to San Francisco, California…
Dallas to San Francisco – $1,462 Miami to San Francisco – $3,065
It’s 60-100% more expensive leaving California than going to California. What might that say about demand in California and which direction trucks are going, and where they’re staying?
The tech and entertainment industries can survive longer because so many of their dollars come from outside the state, but as crime and lawlessness and leftist policies drive out more and more people, eventually the California tax base won’t support the status quo. Then we can sit back with some popcorn and watch the fireworks.
…one might be well-placed to shuffle past the Minneapolis Public Schools’ latest collective bargaining agreement:
A Minneapolis teachers union contract stipulates that white teachers will be laid off or reassigned before “educators of color” in the event Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) needs to reduce staff. https://t.co/K62vfM2NaV
To be, uh, fair, it doesn’t mean all white teachers get laid off before all minority ones. The union would never go for that.
No, just that honkeys are first people at any given level of seniority to get whacked.
One of the proposals dealt with “educators of color protections.” The agreement states that if a non-white teacher is subject to excess, MPS must excess a white teacher with the “next least” seniority.
“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” the agreement reads.
NEW – Joan of Arc, a national heroine of France, will be portrayed as non-binary with the pronouns "they" and "them" in a new play at the home of Shakespeare in London.https://t.co/xspEuYPMrO
Forget about cultural conservatives. I’m waiting for the world’s feminists to rise up in anger at the trans mafia that is appropriating and canceling womanhood itself (without which the Joan of Arc story is just another insurgency).
What is it with DFL politicians who don’t live where they say they live?
Hennepin County requires its sheriffs to live in Hennepin County.
Dawanna Witt, the DFL-endorsed, primary-victorious “progressive” DFL candidate for Hennepin County sheriff, apparently doesn’t, according to Rebecca Brannon, apparently the only journalist in Minnesota who’ll cover Democrats:
I’ve wondered for years; what would it be that forced Walmart, finally, to end its quaint, small to midsize southern city tradition of allowing RVs and campers to stay in Walmart parking lots overnight?
I always figured it would be a lawsuit brought in someplace like the Twin Cities.
Essie McKenzie alleges that Walmart’s policy to allow RVs and other vehicles camp in their store parking lots led a California couple to stay overnight in August of 2019, and eventually use a hotplate that started McKenzie’s van on fire with her two children sleeping inside. The lawsuit alleges wrongful death, and says by allowing people to camp with no supervision, permit requirements or sanitation, Walmart has maintained dangerous conditions on store grounds.
I suppose it’s inevitable – everything that is good and innocent must be crushed, or turned into an opportunity to transfer more wealth to the regulatory class.
Yeah, I’m getting a little peevish about it. I don’t even own an RV.
We are living in a meritocracy that is utterly lacking in merit. And our betters know it. If the current leadership in Washington were confident in their abilities and in their support, you would not see FBI raids on political opponents and political show trials on national television.
You are under no obligation to like the Bad Orange Man. Likely a plurality of the regular writers of this feature are, if not actively anti-Trump, certainly Trump-skeptical. We all know him and, in a better world, he’d be back on television pretending to fire C-list celebrities.
We don’t live in that world. We have a hopelessly corrupt federal government and, at least in Minnesota, a kleptocratic political machine built for the amusement of the parlor pinks who support them. These are the same people who especially enjoy voting for Ilhan Omar, because doing so is brave and transgressive. Ask the local gentry and they will say it’s elementary.
If you’ve read The Great Gatsby, you’ll recognize the type — there are plenty of Tom and Daisy Buchanans in the world. They like what they like and they don’t like arrivistes from the outer boroughs. And they don’t care about the damage they leave in their wake, because they are, in the main, immune from the consequences. We send people like Betty McCollum and Vin Weber to Washington to dance for the Buchanans and, if their performances pass muster, they get to stick around long enough to make bank. And when the spirit moves, the politicos send us back a percentage the money they extract from all of us. And for the most part, those of us who follow politics pretend the labels our dancers wear really matter.
This construct has lasted a long time, at least 90 years and arguably all the way back to Grover Cleveland. All of it is getting shaky now, though. And in Joe Biden, we have the decrepit embodiment of the rot that has been building since the one-time Garanimals customers started learning their Gramsci alongside the trust-fund swells.
It can’t continue. And our betters know it. They are showing force, but they are not confident. They may be able to gaslight their way past November, but the reckoning draws near.
It’s been going for almost a week and ends this weekend, but I haven’t seen any hand-wringing articles from the mainstream media about the Sturgis motorcycle rally.
In previous years, when the DFL won elections in Minneapolis and Saint Paul by Iranian-election-level margins, their activists would gather at “victory” parties and chant “We own this town! We own this town!
I wonder if they’ll be doing that this year?
Well, some people were out to celebrate: last night, as criminal sympathizers moved to the ballot for Henco Attorney and Sheriff in November, it’s hard to miss the constituents celebrating:
I wouldn’t say there was much in the way of “surprises“ in the primaries last night. Mostly confirmation of existing hunches, and a brief stab of hope followed by waves and waves of confirmation that Minneapolis is not only screwed, but seems hell-bent on participating in its own screwing.
That is painfully close. A few hundred people who kvetch about crime turning out? A few hundred Republicans crossing over? An errand thunderstorm? All could’ve affected the results enough to retire Omar.
I have to expect the results surprised congresswoman Omar as well; she ran almost no television, and a fairly languid campaign up until the frenzied (and occasionally tone deaf) tour with The Squad this past week. Primaries usually draw the party’s loyalists to the polls – the hard-core who also go to caucuses and the next layer outward. In Minneapolis. that generally means white, upper-middle-class progressives, and public union employees. I haven’t looked at the precinct results yet, but I have to suspect Samuels started getting people to the polls who normally wait ’til November, if at all, to vote.
Omar pulled it off by two points. If she doesn’t focus on crime, and Minneapolis continues to deteriorate, someone else – Samuels, or some new law and order DFLer – might have a shot.
Which is probably the closest thing we can find to a silver lining on the next two races.
In Hennepin County races, the top two finishers in the primary go onto the general election. and if the choices of the county voters gave themselves last night are any indication, there is going to be a big opportunity for a “law and order“ candidate in two years.
It’s hard to come up with an adjective phrase even softer than “soft on crime” to describe the choices that will move to the November ballot. Mary Moriarty and Martha Holton Dimick will be the “options“ this fall for Hennepin county attorney. Mori
And for sheriff, committed progressive Dawanna Witt will square off against Joseph “Who?” Banks. When Witt wins, she will make Dave Hutchinson look like Ted Nugent.
Last night – at least as re the CD5 DFL primary – was a little spasm of common sense and protest voting in the highest profile race in the city, the results are fairly clear; the people who come out of the primaries are fine with Minneapolis’s status quo.
And in house district 52 a – the area around my radio station – the reliably moderate, center left Sandy Mason got pummeled…
by…
Liz Reyer.
Liz who?
I don’t know who she is, but she pulled off the exceptionally difficult combination of “ELCA hair“ and pink. Not just literally, but figuratively and morally:
So Eagan has moved from center left to “Alandra Cano“ territory.
Every time I see these, I have to ask – who are the 12 freaking percent of people who vote for Sharon Anderson?
I’ve got nothing against Wardlow; I’ve emceed or spoken at five of his fundraisers over the years. but I’m having a bigger and bigger problem with people defying the party endorsement. Especially after saying they would honor it.
Speaking of honoring endorsements: in the new 33B, endorsed candidate Mark Bischofsky prevailed over Tina Riehle, a candidate supported by most of the GOP brass (including Kurt Daudt and Karin Housley, who took a break from opining for the sanctity of the endorsement to float Riehle against the endorsed candidate, for reasons I am just not advanced enough an intelligence to figure out)
Here’s hoping the GOP can pull it together enough to get behind the primary winner, and flip that very winnable seat.
