One of the more controversial stances I’ve taken on this blog is “MInnesota Public Radio News sucks less than most local news organizations”.

It’s not an unblemished statement, of course. With some of their staffers, their eliminationist leftism slips out (or comes gushing out in a tsunami of foul, scabrous rotting bile). And you don’t have to scratch the surface too hard to find MPR doing its best to uphold Big Left’s narrative.

So yes – they suck less. It’s a low bar, and they barely get over it, but there you have it.

But the product has been slipping in recent years. MPR’s newsroom has been shrinking – by a little over half in the past 5-6 years. Their on-air programming has gotten more and more perfunctory; ; less local production, (except for their local talk shows, which don’t take nearly as much overhead and effort as doing news – especially given how over-staffed as MPR historically has tended to be).

All is not well.

Jay Boller at Racket has a long, well-reported and, I need to add, utterly stereotype-affirming report on the recent decline of MPR News.

Long story short: As executive salaries soar, less and less of that taxpayer and donor money is going to news and programming.

But naturally, to those remaining, the problem is, notwithstanding the fact that the organization has unionized and pushed itself to the bleeding edge of the social justice fashion curve, MPR News just isn’t progressive enough:

The employee-led Transform group re-stated its lists of demands around anti-racism and gender equality last fall after Taylor assumed her role, concluding, “We remain tired, perhaps more tired than ever before. But we will not stop trying to force this company to change. It is simply too important.” 

This comes at a time when some – few, but some – in the “progressive” non-profit industrial complex are starting to ask some of the same questions about their business and political models (about which more, likely, next week), after noticing that all that money seems to be buying less results and more internal, woker-than-thou discord. The parallels are worth discussing.

I’d love to ask someone from MPR to come on the show to discuss this – but they’ve long since circled up their wagons and stopped talking with anyone outside the Circle of Trust.

Production: US currently run by an administration imposing a “radical restructuring” that will make society a dystopian droog state (for all but the oligarchs who will sit at the top. See also the USSR, or China).

Staging: Justin Trudeau’s Canada, where the next steps of the dystopian vision are trialed on a “western” population.

Experimental Red China. Where the surveillance state has come to life in ways that’d make Orwell blanche in horror:

Coming to a “free society” near you, if the powers that be have their way.

Democrats: “The President has little to no control over supply chains. He is but packing peanut before the winds of war, greed, the market and Americans selfishness”.

Also Democrats:

Makes perfect sense to me.

Remember when Democrats giddily predicted Texas would inevitably turn blue?

Someone didn’t get the memo.

Republican Mayra Flores won the special election in TX34 – along the Rio Grande, the second most Latino district in the country – last night. Born in Mexico, daughter of migrant workers, wife of a border patrol agent, she ran on a red carne asada platform; secure the border, protect the economy, God Guns and Guts.

Ed Morrissey notes the caveats:

Special elections have very unique and (usually) non-predictive turnout models. TX-34 is a D+5 district, so it’s never been entirely out of reach for Republicans. Flores won in part by running a smart campaign but also by building a financial and media-buy edge over her opponent. Flores will have to run again in less than five months to keep the seat, and she may have trouble getting a lock on the same resources when the GOP is fighting for 435 seats and not just one.

All that aside? For the moment, it doesn’t appear that Trump’s velocity among Latinos has dissipated – nor does it appear to be strictly tied to Trump, whom she references on her website, but doesn’t lindell it.

Watch for MSNBC and The View to call her and her voters the New Brown Faces of White Supremacy. Mark my words.

Dear GOP: Don’t screw this up.

So the economy’s in the crapper and you’re a worried Democrat? CNN has found the silver lining:

All of this could pose problems for Biden and Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
But if there is any consolation for Biden, the market implosion during the early stages of his presidency is not as bad as those experienced by some of his predecessors, according to data from CFRA Research chief investment strategist Sam Stovall.
The market plunged 16.5% in the first 510 days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which was also a period of historically high inflation. Stocks were down 25% in the early part of George W. Bush’s presidency, as the market was in the midst of the dot-com meltdown and struggled to recover in the aftermath of 9/11. But both Reagan and George W. Bush wound up being re-elected.
Meanwhile, stocks soared more than 20% early in both George H.W. Bush’s and Donald Trump’s tenures in the Oval Office. Neither was elected to a second term.

Reagan had principles, a plan, and crucially Paul Volcker working with him. W, for what it’s worth, had a war and craven opposition. Biden has nothing except long knives sharpening in the background. 

The Left, 364 Days a Year: “What, you think you’re going to take on the US Government and Military with your AR15?

The Left, the other day: “ZOMG, THEY HAD GUNS AND WERE GOING TO OVERTHROE TEH GOVERMENT!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Excellent example of second-order effects never considered by the Lesco Brandon Administration.

Joe Doakes

Wait – did I call them “unintended consequences? “

This has become one of my pet peeves:

That one, there.

Would you say “I’ve got a right for my kitchen not to catch on fire?”

Only if you’re an idiot. You have a right to a kitchen. You have a responsibility to keep it from catching on fire.

Would you say “I’ve got a right not to have my house hit by a tornado?”

You could. It’d be absurd. You do have a responsibility to watch the sky, turn on the radio, and look out for your and your family’s safety, though.

So – is there a “right to safety?”

No. Adults have a responsibility to protect children.

And literally none of the things Rep. Edelson is demanding will ive up to any part of that responsibility.

Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan:

Of course, the average price of an electric car is well over $50,000 – which happens to be right about the average income in Michigan.

I beg of you, Democrats: run on this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Lesko Brandon took bold decisive action to help me with rising gas prices. There’s just one catch: he wants to void my vehicle warranty.

I drive a 2017 Hyundai Sonata. The owner’s manual says I can use gasoline with a maximum of 10% ethanol. In Minnesota, that’s ordinary 87 octane gas but under the new plan I’m supposed to burn 88 octane (aka E15 because it contains 15% ethanol and therefore is slightly cheaper). Except I called the dealership and they said flat out, no, that’s not approved and using it will void my warranty. Save a nickel? Void my warranty? Hmmm.

I guess he really does want me to buy an electric car. Not certain how I’m going to charge it, though. Maybe I’ll end up getting those 10,000 steps a day after all.

Joe Doakes

It’s almost as if there is a plan of foot to destroy literally everything about America, starting with the constitutional system at the top, working its way down to every single thing you and I own.

NAH, that’s just crazy talk. Right?

The Pioneer Press, apparently knowing (what little is left of) its audience, says:

Now, I don’t pry into other peoples personal healthcare decisions, and I’m pretty merciless to any idiot who tries to yap about mine.

But it’s worth noting that Dr. Jensen, though not vaccinated, appears to have missed zero days of work or campaigning due to Covid.

In the meantime, the people who run this state – Lt. Governor Flanagan and her figurehead, the…uh, somewhat comorbid Tim Walz – have both had Covid and been off the job in the past couple years.

Correlation – especially with three data points – isn’t causation.

But it’s a better correlation than the one data point the PiPress ran with.

Claiming inflation and recession weren’t real didn’t work.

Blaming them on a pandemic only the media, the very comorbid and the most drama-addicted Karens really care about anymore is just absurd.

Blaming it on Putin? That reeks of desperation.

So we’re down to Plan D: gaslighting consumers and society.

To: Governor Walz

You – or one of your social media smurfs – tweeted this over the weekend:

I caught the subtle gaslighting; in Democrat communications lately, upporting your current flavor is “courage“. I’m sure that will log roll at least a couple of gullible people who don’t think that hard.

But since The laws we already have, against straw purchases and trafficking guns to known felons, and using guns to commit crimes, and for that matter shooting up a car with your family in it, aren’t being enforced in cities run by your party, how about you have the “bravery“ to do the executive branches enumerated job, and enforce the laws we already have?

It’s a little harder than gaslighting the Republican majority in the Senate and a state full of gun owners, but it is your job.

Or lieutenant governor Flanagan‘s job, anyway.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Went to a graduation ceremony Friday evening. All the talk was about grad parties lacking balloons. There’s a helium shortage. Why?

Helium is made at a plant in Texas. It’s regulated by the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management. They shut it down in January. Still not open.

No word on whether they will be air – lifting helium from Germany. Maybe they could use a zeppelin?

Joe Doakes

Apparently, helium is white supremacist.

Or something.

Tad Jude is running for Hennepin County Attorney. He’ll need your vote in the primary on August 8.

And here’s today’s playlist:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Doctors say gun violence is a public health issue, an epidemic. Here we go again, another round of the same tired lies.

Can we please acknowledge some obvious and simple truths? Guns don’t shoot people. People with guns shoot people. But not all people with guns shoot people, some of us have owned guns for decades without shooting anybody. And sometimes people shooting other people is perfectly justified and should have happened sooner, as in that Texas school.

The problem is bad people with guns shooting people. That means the real problem is not the guns; the real problem is the bad people. Take away the guns and they’re still bad people, still willing to do bad things.

Bad people are not an epidemic. There is no treatment. There is no cure. Best we can do is remove Bad People from society, keeping the rest of us safe.

Long term imprisonment. Death penalty. Vigilante justice. The old remedies are the only effective remedies for bad behavior committed by bad people. And everybody knows it, whether they’re willing to admit it, or not.

Joe Doakes

This, in fact, may be the most exhausting thing about being a gun rights activist; the population of gun grab activists (below the national level) recycles every 2 to 3 years.

And so every few years, you get to Saint deal with the same lies, clichés and emotion driven fallacies all over again.

Including this one.

I’ve probably noted this elsewhere, but I don’t’ think it can be overstated: the reason that the first Obama Administration spent so much time and effort barbering about “white supremacist terror” was to start projecting fault on the phantom menace to draw attention away from the mass of leftist thugs that Big Left was in the process of unleashing on society.

Events this week show I’m onto something.

Pro-infanticide terrorists in Buffalo firebomb a crisis pregnancy center – one of several such incidents nationwide lately:

The arsonists left graffiti on a wall that read, “Jane Was Here.” The organization has committed multiple such incidents in the last few months, including one in which it firebombed the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), a pro-life group in Madison, Wis. last month. There, the terrorists left the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

…

Jane’s Revenge also admitted that it threw red paint on the the front door of a crisis pregnancy center in Washington, D.C. last week, spray painting “Jane Says Revenge” on the side of the building.

Here, locally? “Anti”-Fa torches the truck of a contractor who helped the city evict a homeless camp, takes credit:

It’s culminated – for now (?) – with the Democrat hit man who, incited by Chuck Schumer’s rhetoric (specifically calling out Justice Kavanaugh for the attention of extremists) and the partisan leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision and the likely outcome of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case, rangered up and went cross-country with the stated intent to kill the justice and intimidate the court.

The punk will get virtually no sentence; his crime, little media attention outside the conservative media. Big Left will blather on about “imminent waves of right wing / “white supremacist” terror”, while waves of leftists burn more cities, and eventually just through weight of numbers kill more conservatives.

And Big Left and its media toadies will befrenzy themselves over episodes like Charlottestown and January 6, while ignoring events like this – which are themselves every bit as great a threat to democrach.

If people don’t get law and order – and, more importantly, equality before the law – in exchange for all of the taxes and civil liberties we give up – or, perhaps worse, realistically believe that there are two separate, unequal justice systems – they are going to get it for themselves.

And it will be incredibly ugly.

For the better part of six months, the fighting in the Donbas and Don regions of southern Russia and southeastern Ukraine had been a slowly turning meatgrinder of White Russians, Red Bolsheviks, Cossacks and Ukrainians of all political stripes.  Despite being the main front of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) with the Volunteer Army that had risen from the first days of Bolshevik rule, the Whites had been consistently outgunned and outmanned.  The Volunteer Army had at best 26,000-35,000 men, but were led by experienced Tsarist-era officers, including their commanding officer, General Anton Denikin.  The Bolshevik forces in the area numbered perhaps two-to-one to their White counterparts, but were generally less knowledgeable in military tactics and distracted by their role in invading and occupying the crumbling Ukrainian People’s Republic.  Both sides were increasingly mistrusted by an weary populace that had gone through five years of epic bloodshed and deprivation.

In mid-May of 1919, the tide however looked to turn.  Soldiers of the Volunteer Army and the “Don Army”, essentially Cossack shock troops, had won a number of victories but the Bolsheviks had always seemingly managed to regroup and counterattack.  Yet the Ukrainian front for the Reds had stalled, with the Ukrainians even able to regain some key territory, meaning fresh Bolshevik troops were being deployed elsewhere.  When the White Cossack cavalry attacked this time, the four Russian armies in the region collapsed, with the 9th Army in particular being cut in two and destroyed.  The path to central Ukraine and Russia now lay open.

On July 3rd, 1919, The White Russian movement was at it’s zenith and the Bolsheviks appeared to be at their military nadir.  Victorious across most of his front, General Denikin issued Directive No. 08878 to his armies – an attack on Moscow itself.  The goal was nothing less than the end of the Russian Civil War.

Bolshevik leadership – Lenin is pictured in the center

The political consolidation of the White Russian movement in the winter of 1918/1919 had done nothing to immediately impact the war on the ground.  The Siberian All-Russian Provisional Government of Admiral Alexander Kolchak remained massively removed from the southern Russian/Caucasus forces of the AFSR, but was nevertheless a small light of hope for any anti-Bolshevik forces at an otherwise dark stage in the Russian Civil War.  The Soviets had invaded almost all of their neighboring countries and were victorious on all fronts, including expanding out from their holdings in central Russia and clawing back gains from the small, disorganized White forces.  By the start of 1919, the Soviets looked as though they might reunify the Tsarist-era lands of the Russian Empire relatively quickly and expand their influence throughout Europe as Germany and then Hungary both experienced communist revolutions.  Read the rest of this entry »

SAN FRANCISCO: Whew. Stop prosecuting criminals, and bad things happen – who knew, right?That was crazy, wasn’t it?

I tell ya, maybe those Republicans are right; San Francisco is it’s own worst enemy. Is there a city anywhere in the country as crazy as us?

MINNEAPOLIS: Hold my latte.

Today, Democrat conventional wisdom is that the USSR was going to inevitably collapse, and that everyone – well, every Democrat – always knew it.

It’s not true, of course:

Forty years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave one of his greatest speeches – but unlike “A Time for Choosing“, or the Brandenburg Gate, or Point du Hoc or Christmas 1981, not one of his most widely heralded or remembered ones.

It was his speech to the British Parliament 40 years ago today, in which he predicted, and called for, the collapse of Communism.

Here it is:

And if Democrats were right, this would have followed by a wave of “Well, no, duh” by the political and cultural left of the day.

But, well, no:

After Reagan’s speech at Westminster, historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — elite thinkers in American higher education — in a book titled “After Brezhnev.”Their conclusion: Any thought of winning the Cold War was a fantasy. “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said in an interview. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”

Of course, Reagan was right:

Within a decade — on Christmas Day, 1991 — Mikhail Gorbachev announced the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. The 40-year-old Cold War came to a peaceful end because American democratic capitalism had laid bare the economic, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy of Soviet communism. As Reagan told an adviser when asked about his policy toward the Soviet Union: “We win, they lose.”

But now is not a time for nostalgia.

Forty years ago, the cancer destroying freedom was an external enemy.

Today the enemy – the same enemy, if you think about it – is here, within our borders, at our Capitol.

Forty years ago, the same egghead class that is canceling conservatives on campus was poo-poohing the thought that Communism would ever go away.

We need another leader – or group off leaders – who can envision eradicating the cancer that is eating life, prosperity…freedom, from within, just as certainly as the Soviets did (if with less bloodshed – so far), and lead toward that goal with the same exuberance and confidence.

Chesa Boudin – the Soros-backed district attorney in San Francisco – didn’t just lose his recall yesterday.

He got brutalized.

Scott Johnson at Powerline, inimitable as usual:

Recall is a particularly good word in this case. He was a defective prosecutor. Among his innovations was the elimination of cash bail, the nonprosecution of a large swath of property crimes, the toleration of open-air drug dealing, and the facilitation of San Francisco’s continued descent into third-world hellhole status.

I was going to ask “will this cause other Soros/Bloomberg spawn like Keith Ellison to change anything?” Adjust messages, yes; even Ellison has to be seeing that devastating internal polling. Actual substantial long-term policy changes? Of course not; “progressivism” is eternal.

Still – it shows there’s a point beyond which even the most addled progressives, sometimes, might not let things get pushed.

I try to take the high road.

I feel better when I can look back on all I’ve done, after a few weeks or years, and think “I may not have many standards, but I upheld them, doggone it“.

It’s not something I especially seek to change about myself.

But I’m only human.

So when I see statements like this from the likes of Keith Oberman – a person who “achieved “way more influence than anyone who came up talking about grown men chasing balls around fields deserves…:

I can’t help but ask “why such an oddly, intensely specific response? “

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I need to go back to school so I can take out$10,000 in student loans and never pay them back.

I’m thinking Gunsmith School sounds good. Saw it on a matchbook cover. Probably be lots of demand for my services and get paid in cash, after Democrats ban legally-owned guns.

Joe Doakes

I’m going to guess that the base value of a academic program Will increase by $10,000 in the next few years.

Above and beyond inflation, I mean.

Senator Ron Latz went to Harvard. Did you know that?

Anyway – here he is, talking about the new “public safety” / gun grab bill.

Well, sort of:

Dear Democrats: it’s your duty to run on this, this fall. Every candidate, every race.

Seriously: Republicans, statewide: somebody needs to put this on signs, buttons and t-shirts. The good guys and gals need to hammer every Democrat with this, every appearance, every race, between now and November.

Saint Paul notched its 19th homicide over the weekend:

The city of St. Paul recorded its 19th homicide Friday night after officers conducting a welfare check in the city’s Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood found a man dead from a gunshot wound.

A statement released by SPPD said officers were dispatched to a senior living apartment building on the 700 block of East Seventh Street just before 7 p.m.

They arrived, made entry into the apartment and found the man, who is believed to be in his late 50s. Initially, it was unclear to the officers if the injury was self-inflicted or caused by someone else, but after members of the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office and our forensic services unit responded and gathered more information and evidence, it became clear that someone had shot the man.

Just for reference, Saint Paul had 38 homicides – the worst butcher’s bill in 25 years, and an alarming death toll in its own terms.

If we continue at our current pace, the city will have 43 in 2022.

Great job, Melvin.