David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter, is among my favorite writers. (My other favorite to pull off that particular daily double is Tom Stoppard.)

In 2008, Mamet wrote a piece at the Village Voice entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’.” In it, he described the beginning of his journey away from conventional liberal beliefs.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

Today, of course, to view America as a pretty darn good place to live, and boy howdy aren’t we lucky that we do, is to the Left heresy.

In 2011, Mamet wrote a book entitled The Secret Knowledge in which he shared in his inimitable way where his intellectual journey had taken him in the intervening three years. The book was a collection of essays and in them Mamet summed up his effort to reconcile what, as Leftists do, had been assumed to be default and correct political views with what he observed.

This is the essence of Leftist thought. It is a devolution from reason to “belief”, in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness. And if government is Good, it is a logical elaboration that more government power is Better. But the opposite is apparent both to anyone who has ever had to deal with Government, and, I think, to any dispassionate observer.

It is in sympathy with the first and in the hope of enlarging the second group that I have written this book.

This year Mamet published Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. Like The Secret Knowledge. It too is a collection of essays, many of which had appeared in the National Review. Many were written during the times when Covid policies ravaged what the disease had left untouched. Mamet recalls observing “a family of four, on mountain bikes, at five thousand feet, climbing an empty road in northern Nevada, all wearing masks.”

Here are a couple examples of his insights.

But the question occurs to me again: Why are Jews liberals? And I have come to a new answer. I used to think we voted for Democrats out of a millennial biblical occupation with justice, compassion and generosity. I no longer think so.

J.S. Mill wrote that give a man a choice of two tasks, one that will bring him renumeration if he works at it and the other that will pay him regardless of his effort, he will choose the second, take the free money, and employ his energy seeking additional benefits. We see Mill’s observation at work in welfare, unemployment, and other government subsidies. No amount of oversight will keep a recipient from taking the stipend and then finding a way to improve his lot off the books

Similarly, we Jews have two political choices: conservatism, counseling individual initiative; and liberalism, promoting statism, which is to say passivity and government support. But we Jews do not need help or direction in embracing self-reliance; it’s been all we’ve had for two thousand years. It’s our party trick. We’ve always been on our own.

Liberalism was attractive because it offered Jews something we did not have and for which we’ve always longed: the promise of inclusion, which is to say anonymity.

And this sister thought,

Observe that every conservative who employs the preface “This may not be politically correct but” is not only acknowledging but aiding the forces of thought control. These forces do not need to be acknowledged, and whether or not they are opposed, they must not be strengthened.

Napoleon said that if we want to know our opponent’s fears, we need merely observe that with which he seeks to terrify us. Leftists are terrified of exclusion from the mob and see, everywhere, the exclusion’s cost. Imprisonment, vituperation, bankruptcy of conservative opponents, the severity of their punishments fit not to the degree of their deviation (to the Left there are no degrees) but to their persistence, having been threatened and warned, in any deviation.

He recognizes the ugly face of Leftism because he lived it. There could be no better prophet. (For a typical reaction to Mamet’s apostasy, see here. Someone needs to change their sheets.)

And so, like King Lear, the liberal Left “decided” to grant “some” of the power they supposedly had to more “worthy” recipients – that is, those from whom it had been supposedly stolen.

But, again as with Lear, we see that the generous assignment of some of one’s power inevitably inspires its recipients to usurp the rest. Hitler ran a bluff on France in 1940, and the Bolsheviks could’ve been stopped in the suburbs of Moscow by a squad of police (see Minneapolis). King Lear thought himself generous and was beggared by those to whom he bequeathed his power.

Now our country is being eviscerated by the Marxist Left. Each battle they win emboldens them to escalate their activities: shaming becomes blacklisting; picketing becomes destruction; demonstrations become riots. Just as with taxes, all they want is all we got, and who could stop them? Enter Donald Trump.

He looked at the Left and informed us that he knew them of old: they were the same thugs, thieves, cheats and whores with whom he’d been doing business all his life. He was formed by the construction industry.

The Left wet the bed.

Medieval Europe saw the world as divided into three orders. Those who pray, those who fight, and those who work.

The first, those who pray, consisted of the clergy. The second, those who fight, consisted of the nobility. The third, those who work, consisted of the serfs, peasants and others who worked the land.

The orders were complementary, and each contributed to society as a whole. The workers were the economic engine and put food on the table. The Church certainly played a role in civic life, but faith was also an integral part of life and seeking God’s favor was both a Christian’s duty and desire. The nobility and the knights that came from it fought to preserve it all.

In France, these orders became known as Estates, and these Estates made up the Ancien Régime which lasted until the French Revolution.

In the 18th century, following from these institions, the Press became known as the Fourth Estate.

The appellation may have started as a witticism, but journalists, convinced of their own priesthood, eventually took it seriously.

While our national media at one time may have functioned as a watchdog, speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, our Fourth Estate has become PR flacks and gatekeepers for the side they have chosen.

Rather than complementing other sectors of society, and contributing to the whole, our Fourth Estate works against those it disagrees with, and that is not a recipe for a healthy society.

“If I don’t get to go to the all ages show with my friends tonight, I’m going to die. Dieeeeee, I tell you!”

Versus:

One is a remark by a spoiled, entitled little person who knows no rhetorical trick other than going full on dramatic.

The other is a teenager.

When Suleiman the Magnificent died in Hungary in 1566, the Grand Vizier at the time, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, had the witnesses to the death killed in order to keep the Sultan’s passing a secret so that the successor, Selim II, would have time to take over. Many times I’ve wondered if Nixon ever secretly wished he had such extreme powers, for the Nixon Administration’s undoing ultimately came from internal witnesses.

Within a week of the break-in, the Nixon Administration had decided to hinder the FBI’s investigation into the break-in, not just to cover up the Administration’s involvement in the wiretapping of the DNC, but also to conceal the questionable uses to which campaign funds had been put.

The summer of 1972 was relatively uneventful, on the surface. Behind the headlines, John Dean was meeting with Acting FBI Directory Gray ostensibly to “cooperate”, but actually to keep abreast and ahead of the investigation. And, hush money was paid to Howard Hunt.

The Watergate burglars were indicated in September. The next day, Bob Woodward got in touch with his source, Deep Throat. This source was in fact Mark Felt at the FBI, and Felt was seeing everything the FBI had in the investigation. Felt told Woodward that campaign money had financed the Watergate operation and “other intelligence-gathering activities.” The resulting Washington Post story increased the pressure on the White House, but the firewall still held. In November, Nixon defeated George McGovern with 60% of the popular vote and a landslide in the Electoral College, 520 to 17.

The trial of the Watergate burglars began in early January. Guilty verdicts were returned January 30 1973. Sentencing was scheduled for March 23. The judge in the trial, John Sirica, wrote in his book To Set the Record Straight about his belief that the trial had not revealed everything about the break-ins.

I was far from alone in my skepticism about the facts brought out at the trial. The Senate of the United States had voted to investigate the Republican campaign tactics. The press was full of caustic comments about the trial itself and the government’s handling of it. I had been practicing law for thirty years. I had handled cased involving political scandals. I knew the Watergate case was not what the trial in January had made it seem. But by late March, with the trial over, there didn’t seem to be a lot more I could do about it.

On March 20, John Dean received word that Howard Hunt was demanding more money. Dean wrote in Blind Ambition:

O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question and he [Hunt] just said ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.'”

The next day, March 21, Dean met with Nixon about this new threat. Dean described the growing threat with the memorable phrase, “We have a cancer within – close to the Presidency – that’s growing.” In that meeting Nixon asked how much money the indicated burglars would need. Dean tossed out a figure of a million dollars over the next two years. And according to Dean, Nixon said “We could get that.” And with that, Watergate moved into the cover-up of the cover-up phase, and ultimately to its ugly conclusion.

On March 23, Judge Sirica made public a letter he had received from James McCord a few days earlier. In the letter, McCord, the leader of the burglary team, said that political pressure had been applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, that perjury had occurred, that others had been involved with the operation who had not been identified in the trial, and that the operation was not a CIA operation. Sirica wrote about revealing the letter in open court to make it part of the trial record,

As I worked through them, an excruciating pain began to build directly in the center of my chest. It was nearly more than I could bear, but I couldn’t quit before the end of the letter. I finally finished the letter and quickly called for a recess. As I hurried off the bench, the reporters flooded toward the double swinging doors at the back of the courtroom. The dam had broken.

Indeed it had, and everything that followed was the just the system grinding towards its inevitable conclusion.

Don’t you dare say Democrats are unpatriotic:

Mind you, that’s not a BLM or “Anti”-Fa Group. This is a Democratic party unit.

UPDATE: But wait! Some of them do have some standards!

A “Democratic Socialists of America” group apologized for a planned flag burning.

They apologized to the environmentalists, anyway:

Here’s the National Review piece on the very good SCOTUS session that just ended.

And here’s today’s music list:

On the one hand, last week‘s Bruen ruling at the Supreme Court wasn’t the “Jericho bringing down the walls of Canaan” moment that a lot of us gun owners have been hoping for all these years.

On the other hand, if you’re not a lawyer, some of the effects seem a little inscrutable; slapping New York California, Massachusetts and a few other “may issue” states on the wrist seems like aiming just a little low.

But there is a lot more to it than that:

Moreover, gun carry is only the beginning. The Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen is going to influence many more gun laws throughout the nation and could even bring about the downfall of the most contentious ones, because it sets up a new standard for deciding gun cases at all levels of the federal court system.

“When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.’”

In other words: “hell, yeah, The founding fathers were referring to putting muskets in the hands of individual people. And those muskets were the “assault rifles“ and “military weapons“ of their day.“

A series of cases already pending before the Court will give insight into the effect of Bruen in other areas of gun law. Bianchi v. Frosh, for example, is a case involving Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban. It has been upheld by the Fourth Circuit using the now-defunct two-step standard. In Duncan v. Bonta, a California magazine limit was upheld by the Ninth Circuit under the same two-step standard. ANJRPC v. Bruck deals with the same magazine question and was similarly upheld in New Jersey. Young v. Hawaii deals with what amounts to a total ban on gun carry in Hawaii, which is likely the most vulnerable state law in the wake of Bruen.

Watching DC, California and New York State after the upcoming successive series of legal beat downs is going to be a little like Sylvester Stallone looked in the last five minutes of the first Rocky.

It’s a good thing we’ve got our major media superiors…

…to keep us safe from “misinformation“.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Modern Monetary Theory says the government can borrow and spend as much as it likes without consequences. If we can afford a gas tax holiday, why not an income tax holiday, a social security tax holiday, a liquor tax holiday?

Or is MMT a lie and the gas tax holiday simply at attempt at buying votes with taxpayer money?

Joe Doakes

It is, of course, a purely academic exercise, like so much of the policy big left has been foisting on this country for the past hundred years and change.

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” – has been getting a workout lately.

But this next bit – an LATimes response to last week’s Bruen decision at the Supreme Court – may be heading to the Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame. [1]

I’ll let the Times own words do the talking:

Is “California” “ready”? Well, the state’s government clearly isn’t:

California Democrats are scrambling to craft and enact new legislation this week that would somehow salvage the requirement — assuming local law enforcement continues to enforce it — that residents get a permit before carrying a concealed weapon. Current law forces gun owners to show “good cause” for needing such a permit, and that is now unconstitutional.

And they can’t talk about the issue without a certain amount of gaslighting:

Nathan W. Jones leads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Gun Owners Assn. But until a few years ago, he wasn’t even into guns…on Thursday, while many were apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the rights of gun owners to carry a loaded weapon in public — throwing gun control laws in California and New York into limbo at a time when shootings are increasing — Jones was thoughtful.

On the one hand, he wants it to be easy for law-abiding citizens to be able to defend themselves “if and when the time arises.” But on the other hand, he’s a 50-year-old realist who knows that fear and hatred of Black people run deep in the United States, especially when we’re armed.

And this is based on…?

“There’s no overt racism when we go to the gun range, but we know how people are looking at us,” Jones said of the dozens of Black members who meet up to go shooting. “We know the things that people think.”

So, gaslighting it is. “We know what you’re really thinking?” Every signficant pro-2nd-Amendment group, at the national and federal levels, have welcomed the surge in black gun owners – whatever their reasons for joining the tribe.

The writer, Erika D. Smith, is certainly impressively ignorant on the substance of the issue:

And the other, truly weird thing is that race is now actually being used as an argument in support of loosening gun laws

Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen case, waxed philosophical about how the right to bear arms was crucial for the self-protection of Black people in the South during Reconstruction.

And how in 1868, Congress “reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the ‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security … including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.’”

Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the Supreme Court to rule exactly as it did.

Their argument? That gun control laws in New York, like California, disproportionately harm Black and Latino people who carry guns for self-defense. They complained of clients who have been “stopped, questioned, and frisked,” and deprived of their livelihoods because they “exercised a constitutional right.”

“We represent hundreds of indigent people whom New York criminally charges for exercising their right to keep and bear arms,” they wrote. “For our clients, New York’s licensing requirement renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction.”

Smith – and the white LA progressives who edit and publish the LATimes who greenlit Smith’s piece – seem almost amazed to notice the one real thing that the gaslighting just can not deflect from:

But the governor and lawmakers could fail in their efforts, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could stand. And then, California could be forced to confront a reality that has long made many self-proclaimed liberals uncomfortable: Black people — potentially a lot of us — legally carrying guns in public.

Dig beneath the ongoing, lazy slander of all white America, and the McCarthyistic “white supremacists under every rock” rhetoric that’s become background noise in most “progressive’ writing; that’s the real fear. The only thing a white progressive fears, and needs to control, more than a black person is an armed black person.

And when they become armed, and realize that the honky at the range isn’t the problem…

[1] Note to Self: Create a Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame.

I’ve been in some form of broadcast and/or news media for 33 of the past 43 years.

I’ve had years of experience and training in every aspect of how the media works; from how to turn on a transmitter (and the FCC license to prove it) and edit video and how to talk so people can understand you, to the standards and practices a professional journalist has to follow to do news.

I’ve paid dues you can’t imagine.

More importantly, I’ve seen how the big media works. Do you have any idea the machine a TV station brings to covering stories and producing content? The sheer number of people in network, or even a major newspaper, can bring to reporting and covering a story? The talent, the training, the experience, the equipment, the money…

If you think you’re going up against Big Media with your First Amendment rights and your Twitter feed, your Tumblr account, your little podcast?

You’re simply delusional. Watch a crew from Channel 4 or MPR News or C-Span in action; you and your cell-phone cam will slink away in shame.

The First Amendment is for the professionals. Like me.

That sounds really stupid, doesn’t it?

So when a cop or “former federal agent” or veteran does the same thing in re civil rights – the Second or Fourth Amendments – does it sound any less myopic?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Found this stuffed in the screen door on Sunday morning. Couple of late-middle aged White women with ELCA hair going around the neighborhood (no doubt doing Good Works before heading off to hear the Gospel).

Struck me that Tina doesn’t mention which political party she intends to caucus with, if elected. She doesn’t have any endorsements.

I’ve been around long enough to recognize political euphemisms. “Who you love” means homosexual. “Where you’re from” means illegal alien.

This flyer was delivered days after Roe v. Wade was overturned, so “reproductive rights” means abortion. “Equal Pay” means “affirmative action for women.”

I’m going out on a limb and suggesting Tina is a Democrat who is terrified to admit it, because the public is less than enthused about Democrats right now.

Hiding your party affiliation to deceive voters is kind of shady, don’t you think? Wouldn’t honesty help voters make an informed choice? Or is that the problem?

Yep, definitely Democrat.

Joe Doakes

If Democrats are going to have to run stealth campaigns in places like 41B, the internal polling must be devastating.

Close your eyes. It could be Kamala Harris:

“ACK-shu-ally, we’re not fifty states. We’re one country“.

Show of hands if you’ve heard at least one progressive, lodged far on the left side of civic education’s Dunning-Kruger curve, say something like that.

Among the many failures – or acts of sabotage – of modern American education, perhaps among the biggest, most dangerous shortcomings is the complete collapse of civics education.

Modern students seem to learn nothing aboujt:

1. Why the Constitution existed – to provide a framework for self-government
2. What the Constitution does – limit the powers of government, and enumerate the checks and balances on power
3. Why our nation is called the “United States” – and why the constituent parts are called “states” rather than “Provinces”, “Counties”, “Ridings” or “Administrative Districts”. They are, or were intended to be, individual nation-ettes
4. What Federalism is – in the US’s case (like post-war Germany), a balance of powers and rights between the federal and state governments.
5. Gridlock was built into the system, because gridlock is a virtue. The government that governs least, governs best – and gridlock ensures minimal government. (This particularly galls “progressives”).
6. And perhaps most importantly? The Constitution, its enumeration of powers, and Federalism itself, was designed to help a nation that was from it’s founding not a whole lot more divided or less fractious than it is today, coexist.

With that in mind? Perhaps the Dobbs decision, and the court’s new-found originalism, are a big step in the right direction for a nation more divided in many ways than before the Civil War.

Because the alternative to a renewed federalism is a national divorce at best, and civil war at worst.

To: Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, whose common “irascible peasant” self-appelation has never seemed more on-target.
Re: You

Dear all Democrats,

Every once in a while, in front of a friendly audience, you slip and let the truth out.

In front of the NPR simps in 2016, for example, you said in as many words it was time for the media to put its finger – or arm, or butt – on the scale to tip the public against Donald Trump.

And now, from the (if you’ll pardon the expression) Colbert sixty minutes hate:

You can put most of what this woman says into the mouth of a spousal abuser – which really is a great metaphor for the modern Democrat party.

That is all.

Minneapolis delivery driver with a (apparently) permitted handgun gives carjackers a significant emotional growth experience.

The driver was making a delivery to one of the Abbott buildings at 29th and Chicago, when the ne’er-do-wells made their move:

“My dad was making a delivery at Allina hospital earlier today and almost got carjacked, the suspects got scared and ran when my dad pulled his gun on them. One of them had a pistol and was tapping his gun on the passenger side window while his friend was trying to force open the door. [I’m] glad I convinced my dad to carry especially with how crazy crime is.”

The video leaves a bit to the imagination.

The part I’m having the most fun imagining…

SPOILER ALERT

…is the discussion the two punks had with the getaway driver who peeled out and left them running on foot away from an armed man.

But it’s fun to imagine.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Not sure how I got on this mailing list but here’s the latest news: Angie Craig hates my vehicle warranty. She wants me to burn E15 which the service advisor told me not to do, absolutely not, voids my warranty.

She also hates my family grocery budget. She’s proud to have taken bold, decisive action to address skyrocketing food costs by . . . appointing a task force to submit a report to Congress in nine months. I’m sure that’ll be a big help when I’m standing in the checkout line this weekend.

I would click “unsubscribe” except I’m pretty sure it would automatically put me on the No Fly List, the IRS Audit list, and the January 6 co-conspirator list so the FBI can bust down my door while CNN films. I guess I’ll just click “delete” instead.

Joe Doakes

It’s probably the best idea.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is at REI, getting a handlebar cell phone carrier for hjs bike. He rounds the corner from the coffee cups, and runs into Avery LIBRELLE, who is shopping for…something? BERG tries to backpedal quietly away, but it’s too late.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhhhhhure as I stand here today, it’s Avery…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The Supreme Court just violated the separation of church and state, by allowing an educator to pray at school functions.

BERG: Well, you got a few of the facts right.

LIBRELLE: What would you think if a Muslim were to throw down a prayer mat on the fifty yard line and delay the kickoff while he prayed to Mecca?

BERG: Coach Kennedy didn’t interrupt the game with an ostentatious prayer in the middle of the field. It was a personal observance, after the game, involving him and only him. Other than the fact that it took place on the field around people, it couldn’t have been less public.

LIBRELLE: It caused an uproar.

BERG: It caused a small group of progressives to go to the school board and, after years of such observances, change the district policy to ban “demonstrative religious activity, readily observable to (if not intended to be observed by) students and the attending public.” 

LIBRELLE: So what would you think if a Muslim did something like that?

BERG: Have you actually been in the Midway Target? The Roseville Walmart? Seeing Muslims throwing down their mats at prayer time in an out of the way part of the store is nothing new at all. I care about it no more than a Christian praying whereever they want.

LIBRELLE: Yeah, but what if a non-Christian kid sees the demonstration, by one of their school’s authority figures? That’s going to put pressure on them. (Nods smugly)

BERG: So let me get this straight: a Christian school staffer, praying, privately but in public view, is…

LIBRELLE: Oppressive, fascist and probably white supremacist and racist.

BERG: Mkay. In the meantime, a non-binary or LGBTQ teacher telling kids the details of their personal and identity’s sexual orientation, including how their various orientations practice intimacy, to kids of all beliefs, including Christian and even Muslim kids, telling them there are infinite genders and no real notion of masculine and feminine, when they’re still at an age where the parents haven’t had “the talk” with them themselves yet?

LIBRELLE: Essential social education, to make up for the sloth and incompetence of parents.

BERG: Aaaah…

(They are interrupted by an employee)

EMPLOYEE: (to BERG): Can I help yo, sir?

BERG: (waves box with holder). Good to go.

EMPLOYEE: (to LIBRELLE) And you, si…uh, maa… (looks at BERG, startingi to panic a big. BERG shrugs)

LIBRELLE: I need a new seat for my electric recumbent bike.

BERG: So you, the big environmentalist, have switched to a coal-powered bike?

LIBRELLE looks up, alarmed, stammering, giving BERG time to make his break.

And SCENE.

Berg’s 8th Law of Diversity states “American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.

Like when, for example, the first Mexican-born Congresswoman is a conservative Christian? Never bet against the response being just a little psychotic.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi elbows the daughter of Mayra Flores out of the way during a photo op:

The contempt Big Left feels for “their” people who take off the Ketchup Bottle dresses and leave the cult positively throbs.

I think Flores – or whoever is running her Twitter account – is up to the challenge.

I may have to pony up for Flores’s actual election bid this fall.

I don’t wanna interrupt a guy when he’s on a roll, but has anyone told Billy Joe Armstrong – the guy who last had a hit about 20 years ago, calling George W. Bush voters “American Idiots” – that the UK has more restrictive abortion laws than the US?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about yesterday‘s New York Supreme Court ruling:

The New York State Supreme Court struck down a New York City ordinance allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. What a bunch of haters.

The Boston Tea Party was based on “no taxation without representation.” The Declaration of Independence affirms that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. The Constitution lays out the formula to determine consent, through voting. The consistent underlying principle is that the people who will be affected by the rules imposed by the government ought to have a say in who makes up that government. And illegal aliens hiding in the city are affected by the rules adopted by the City Council as much as anybody else, so they ought to have a say in who sits on the City Council as much as anybody else.

And why should it end there? Citizens of foreign nations are affected by laws made in the United States Congress: foreign aid payments to their nations; wars waged in their countries; immigration encouraged or not. Why doesn’t every citizen of every nation get to vote for our Congress?

Why should they have to vote at all? That’s a heavy burden for someone who doesn’t read or speak the language, can’t complete the Request for Absentee ballot, can’t afford postage to send it back on time. Why not let US-based voter advocates cast ballots for them? They could bring ballots by the suitcase full, helpfully completed on behalf of all the citizens of the world.

And why bother with paper ballots for all those people? Think of the expense and wasted time, running them through the machines again and again until the right guy wins. Why not simply program the machine to give the desired result and be done with it?

It’s a slippery slope the court has chosen, this notion that only certain people should be allowed to vote. Probably a bunch of MAGA Trumpers on the court. Or worse, Open Borders Libertarians.

Joe Doakes

Don’t be giving Steve Simon any ideas.

Look – believe what you want to believe. Let a thousand lights shine . The founding fathers intended for this to be a pluralistic society.

But I do get tired of preening.

To wit:

Why, no, Senator Klobuchar. None of them do.

But not for the reason you are thinking.

All of you came up through the bureaucracy in one-party, one-view organizations either in government or the non-profit industrial complex – the Henco Attorney’s office, Planned Infanticide and the Minnesota Council of Churches. Three of the four of you were or are executives, meaning you’ve long since got out of the habit of taking orders from anyone.

Smith and Ms. Granola Frightwig, coming up through Planned Parenthood as they did, have never had to recognize any such thing as dissent or opposition.

Flanagan has a sinecure in a one-party district; Klobuchar and Smith are the beneficiaries of incumbency, neither of whom are up for election this year (for which their staffs must be thanking their lucky stars).

All of you can do pretty much anything you want without fear of media scrutiny of any kind. For Senator Klobuchar, it’s a matter of generational fealty to “one of their own”, but the other three can operate immune from all scrutiny as well.

Two of you have amply manifested this sense of entitlement; Senator Klobuchar for exhibiting the sort of behavior as a boss that only women can get away with (by bleating “if a man would do it, they’d just call him ‘tough'” loudly enough to make people believe this “Mad Men”-era stereotype); Lt. Gov. Flanagan by sending a mob to tear down a statue that she didn’t have to bother removing via due process, even though she runs the committee that manages the capitol’s statuary.

So no, Senator. None of you look like you are going to “back down”. None of you have ever had to develop the facility to do anything “across the aisle”. It’s a foreign concept to all of you.

And that’s a stupid thing.

In the radio industry I grew up in – especially the one I came of age in, in my later twenties, at places like KDWB – competition in radio was a constant, ugly thing. Especially in big-market music radio, getting ratings was mortal combat, a bloodsport where morality and ethics (and, often as not, sobrieity) got chucked before the first break of the morning weather. Pirates looked at major market radio executives and thought “arrrrr, cut off the cutthrrroat stuff, matey”.

Some of that faded after the 2008 recession, when most of the money left music radio. And talk radio has usually been, if not genteel, at least a little more civilized.

Among talk radio people in the Twin Cities, the comity was almost unsettling. While AM1290 and AM1130 competed for the same audience, the wrenching animus just wasn’t there.

For years, now, the personalities at the various stations [1] – Bob Davis, Sue Jeffers, Ben Kruse, Jon Justice and Walter Hudson from the 1130, all us NARN guys from the 1280 (and Jack Tomczak, who’s been at both), and even to a lesser extent the likes of Blois Olson and Jason DeRusha from ‘CCO – have gotten along very amiably, socially. It’s disconcertingly far from the cage match I grew up in.

And so it’s with more than collegial wishes and sympathies that I note that Andrew “Drew” Lee, long-time morning guy at the 1130, has passed away:

I won’t say I knew Drew well – but we met many times. He sat in on bass with my band a few years ago, and at various points made overtures about trying to get all of us local talk show hosts together under the 1130 banner (for which I thanked him, but genuinely like working for Salem, and they’ve treated us all way too well for any of us to walk away lightly – which Lee, as a radio lifer, understood).

He was a big-hearted guy, a devoted family man, and the kind of radio road warrior you just don’t find anymore. .

Prayers and condolences to his real and radio families.

[1] Heck, even the MPR folks let their sense of monastic above-it-all-ness drop for a couple years, there. Management put an end to that nonsense a few years back, unfortunately. It’s been their loss.

…of Minneapolis’s demise…

… apparently aren’t far off.

Four shot last night, right around downtown Minneapolis‘s casual tourist epicenter, the Stone Arch Bridge.

My favorite part about episodes like this; the wave of progressives from “City Life“ theme parks like Seward and Powderhorn who will sniff down their noses at people from Maple Grove expressing alarm at crime in Minneapolis.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Lots of cheering from the Establishment Republican crowd: hooray for gun rights, hooray for overturning Roe! After 50 years, we did it.

No, you didn’t. Those things didn’t happen because your foundation wrote White Papers that nobody read; or because you held round-table discussions on celebrity cruises; or because you made endless fundraising appeals to elect a majority in Congress. Those things happened because a Certain Somebody nominated three rock-solid conservatives to the Supreme Court and stood by them when they were attacked in confirmation hearings, a Certain Somebody whom you opposed every step of the way from the moment he rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy til the moment you confirmed an obviously stolen election just to get him out of the Oval Office.

I haven’t seen anybody from Powerline or National Review giving that Certain Somebody credit for the greatest conservative victories in the last half century. Who knows how 2022 would have turned out if we’d had a Conservative President in office instead of a President under Conservatorship? But hey, no mean tweets. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Joe Doakes

Enh. Going to meet you halfway on this one, Joe.

Anyone out there remember Ron Paul? Libertarian congressman from Texas? Built up a fairly powerful grassroots movement of young libertarian conservatives, many of whom say he was cheated out of the nomination in 2012? Who, had he been elected President, could have eggs enacted almost 0% of his very ambitious and generally absolutely satisfactory libertarian agenda, because he had a congressional libertarian caucus how about three representatives? I used to joke with libertarians that the only way Ron Paul was going to get his agenda enacted was if he had staged a libertarian coup d’état, Established an absolute libertarian dictatorship, and imposed liberty on the nation by force.

Without a fairly solid (if deeply imperfect) conservative base in Congress, Trump would’ve accomplished nothing.

And that majority came from somewhere.

UPDATE: On the other hand, David French needs to start finding a new career: