I used Booking.com when I walked the Camino de Santiago last year.  It’s entirely on-line so they have my email and (in case I get locked out) my phone number.  What do they do with my private information?  Glad you asked, they sent an email with the updated privacy policy – the company will give my phone number and email to advertisers.  But what if I don’t want them to?
“The hard truth: If you disagree with this Privacy Statement, you should discontinue using our services. If you agree with our Privacy Statement, then you’re all set to book your next stay. Let the good times roll!”
Well, that’s refreshingly honest.
Joe Doakes

It’s almost refreshing that someone out there has the integrity not to blow smoke up your pant cuff…

Governor Walz provides the service for which Big Environmental paid good money.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Enbridge pipeline would replace hundreds / thousands of derailment-prone tanker cars and crash-able «trucks that currently transit populated areas and sensitive environments with a pipeline that will be gallon-for-gallon vastly safer for both people and the ecology; Walz knows who he’s working for.

Arguably the bigger crime? The twaddle he plopped out there to justify “his” decision.

I’ll add some emphasis:

Gov. Tim Walz will continue pursuing a court appeal started by his predecessor that could block Enbridge from building a controversial $2.6 billion oil pipeline across northern Minnesota.
Under former Gov. Mark Dayton, the Commerce Department appealed the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC’s) decision to allow Enbridge to build the pipeline, a replacement for its aging and corroding Line 3. Last month, the Walz administration said it would review the appeal.
“By continuing that process, our administration will raise the Department of Commerce’s concerns to the court in hopes of gaining further clarity for all involved,” Walz said in a statement. “As I often say, projects like these don’t only need a building permit to go forward, they also need a social permit. Our administration has met with groups on all sides of this issue, and Minnesotans deserve clarity.”

“Social permit”.

That is two steps from fluent Duckspeak.

Following it up with a platitude like “Minnesotans deserve clarity” adds rhetorical insult to Orwellian injury.

Governor Walz; your leash is showing.

Florida man kills who robbers who were holding his mother at gunpoint:

The 911 call from the victim revealed that he was asleep at the time of the break-in and was woken up by the intruders, who he said were holding his mother at gunpoint. 
“They were trying to wake me up,” he said in the call. “They had my mom at gunpoint I couldn’t stop it.”
The victim told the 911 operator that the men had arrived to his home in their own vehicle. He said he shot both of them, killing the driver, Smalls, and injuring Lynn who tried to leave on foot.

Both robbers were reportedly just about to turn their lives around.

A friend of the blog writes:

I don’t necessarily think it should be easier to vote. I think people should respect their right and make informed decisions. But, I do think it would be beneficial if more people did take their right seriously and voted.
With that, I laugh every time someone declares that voting day as a holiday will make it easier for people to vote. Easier for whom? Most poor people working for minimum wage in service industries will still be working. Healthcare workers will still be working. The list could go on.
Let’s look at the announcement by the city of Sandusky, Ohio, who will be making voting day a holiday. They’re swapping out Columbus Day.   (I don’t think that I have ever had Columbus Day off let alone holiday pay for working it, so is this going to be helpful for people?) Some decision makers were concerned that they were losing a 3 day holiday, but we’re swayed because this would be for the greater good. Of note, per this article, this would only affect 250 residents out of 26,000. The city manager admits it is “a small gesture, but an important one.”
Not sure if it is even a gesture of any import. How many of these 250 were already voting?

It might be a cheap shot to say “Progressives benefit by driving lots of ill-informed people to the polls”.

It really might.

I’m not sure “cheap shot” and “accurate” are mutually exclusive.

Always believe staffers.

#AKlo
#MeToo
#NoAbuse
#AngryAmy
#MNNotNice
#MNNarcissist
#BelieveStaffers
#ToxicEntitlement
#StafferFacesMatter
#BindersAndBindersFullOfNarcissisticEntitlement

For when exploiting cheap labor, physical abuse of partners and subordinates, emotional sadism, sexual harassment from entitled juvenilia to entitled imposition, racism (old and not so old), rape, moving government into back rooms out of sight of the hoi polloi, and control of government by the highest bidder is always wrong, except when it’s Democrats, because shut up.

It’s time for Shot In The Dark’s new game, “NPR Bingo”.

The challenge is this: listen to NPR.

The game is this: Every time you hear one of the phrases below, mark off the square.

When you get a five in a row or four corners, you “win”.

Keep us posted.

Amy “The Slugger” Klobuchar announced her candidacy for President during a snowstorm yesterday.

A friend of the blog writes:

Saw no African Americans. Other then on the podium. __ One,only one Rainbow flag. Very ELCA crowd. Throw in a sprinkling of UCC.

Tne DFL’s props department was apparently stuck in a snowdrift.

American public media reports – or, in a sense, “Reports” – on the ironic rising cost of water in several Great Lakes-area cities and, naturally, its disproportionate effect on the poor.

The cities – they focus most especially on Cleveland, Detroit, Duluth, Buffalo and Chicago – have water rates that are rising extremely fast, as the ageing infrastructure starts to give out.

What it doesn’t mention?

Every one of the cities has been run by Democrats, according to Democrat priorities, as long as anyone can remember.

Not only are electric cars mere displacement vehicles (they run on electricity generated by burning coal instead of running on gasoline so they still pollute, they simply displace the pollution to Monticello instead of Como Park), now we learn they aren’t capable of driving to Monticello and back if the weather is cold.
But not to fear.  Rep. Ilhan is working on raising your taxes to force more of us to drive less.  It’s her “stay at home and watch TV all day” doctrine.  Looking at the snow falling again this morning, actually, I’m kind of on board with that.

That’s what they’re counting on.

First things first:  Kenneth Lilly, the security guard alleged to have shot the bus driver on 35W the other day, has been charged with attempted murder, among other things.  

And it’s seem, from watching the video, to be a fair cop.  To use a gun in self-defense – we’ve been through this before – you need to satisfy four criteria in the state of Minnesota:

1. You can’t be the aggressor.
2. You must reasonably fear immediate death or great bodily harm. 
3. You must only use the force necessary to end the threat. 
4. You must make a reasonable effort to retreat.  

You need to satisfy all four of those criteria (unless you’re in your house, in which case only “only” need to check off the first three.  

This will be for a jury (or, more likely than not, the defendant, his lawyer and the judge) to decide – but it looks like Lilly blew 1, 2 and 4 completely.   

Of course, those who get their “information” from local gun-grab scolds “Protect” Minnesota will get a version of events that would make Baghdad Bob wince with Schadenfreud. 

Where to start with this – words fail me – horsecrap?

“I’m afraid I might get killed, now” is a part of every legitimate self-defense claim. No exceptions! It has nothing to do with “Stand your Ground”, which – thanks for nothing, Governor Goofy – is not the law in Minnesota anyway.

But the law doesn’t require that you “feel afraid”. The law requires that you “reasonably” fear death or great bodily harm – and by “reasonable”, we mean “an investigator, prosecutor, judge or jury believes it”.

Invoking “stand your ground” means either the writer – almost certainly the invincibly ignorant Reverend Nord Bence – doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or she doesn’t really think it matters if her audience doesn’t get the truth or, and this is my bet, both.  

It’s almost a Berg’s Law.

I have concerns about the climate, and about man’s involvement in them.

I have bigger concerns about being logrolled.

I have nothing to say about Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’ “Green New Deal” (which got disappeared after it was revealed to be something a spoiled sixth-grader could have, and may have, written) y abou that David French at National Review doesn’t say better.

Read the whole thing. I add emphasis:

Nobody has to be a progressive to be concerned about the environment. Nobody has to be a progressive to respond to climate change. Any proposal that conditions response to climate change on the adoption of the full progressive platform is not only doomed to fail, but it raises the question of whether the declared climate emergency is more pretext than crisis. There’s a need for a serious discussion about our climate. The Green New Deal is not serious.

Did you miss it before it got disappeared yesterday? Have no fear, people glommed onto it. And David Harsanyi found the 11 bits you really needed in the first place.

The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence had a red-letter day yesterday. 

And by “Red Letter Day”, we mean “a day where she passed on more lies and ignorance than normal”. 

In fact, today is going to be a rare Bence Bifecta.

Remember – “Protect” Minnesota and its leadership have never, not once, made a statement about guns, gun owners, gun history, gun laws or the Second Amendment that is simultaneously:

• Original
• Substantial
• True

You may get one out of three. Sometimes two. Never three.

But this? The Reverend Nord Bence gets zero:

Except that if you win a gun at a raffle, you do take a background check.

I’m still amazed that anyone in the media uses her as a source.

Some glitch in the Star Tribune system accidentally allowed a sensible op-ed onto the website.  Best read it before they catch on.
Joe Doakes

I’m sure it’ll be rectified. Facebook is showing the industry how it’s done.

How do you fight a piece of popular culture that completely mangles history?

You put out some popular culture of your own

Historians fighting back against the pop revisionism of Hamilton with a musical of their own.

Reed’s “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” is an uncompromising take-down of “Hamilton,” reminding viewers of the Founding Father’s complicity in slavery and his war on Native Americans.
“My goal is that this to be a counter-narrative to the text that has been distributed to thousands of students throughout the country,” said Reed, who teaches at the California College of the Arts and the University of California at Berkeley and whose latest novel is “Conjugating Hindi.”
Reed, whose play had a recent reading in New York and who is raising money for a four-week production in May, is part of a wave of “Hamilton” skeptics — often solitary voices of dissent amid a wall of fawning attention — who have written journal articles, newspaper op-eds and a 2018 collection of essays, “Historians on Hamilton.”
Miranda’s glowing portrayal of a Hamilton who celebrates open borders — “Immigrants, we get the job done!” — and who denounces slavery has incensed everyone from professors at Harvard to the University of Houston to Rutgers.
They argue that Miranda got Hamilton all wrong — the Founding Father wasn’t progressive at all, his actual role as a slave owner has been whitewashed and the pro-immigrant figure onstage hides the fact that he was, in fact, an anti-immigration elitist.
“It’s a fictional rewrite of Hamilton. You can’t pick the history facts that you want,” said Nancy Isenberg , a professor of American history at Louisiana State University who has written a biography of Aaron Burr and is the author of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”

It all fits into my plan to do a musical on the life and legacy of Calvin Coolidge.

To: Sen. Scott Jensen
From: Mitch Berg, Impudent Peasant
Re: Know Your Friends

Sen. Jensen,

Last year, as he got set up to run for re-election as a Republican in decaying purple district, Representative Dario Anselmo made a very visible point of cuddling up to Minnesota’s various gun control groups.

He spoke at their rallies.

He offered his own testimony (his stepmother was murdered).

He sought the grabbers’ endorsement, he could practically taste it.

And after all that, the DFL and the gun grab groups up to which he’d been sucking, endorsed the DFL opponent, who won the race surfing atop of curl of Progressive Plutocrat money. And it’s not just Anselmo. Republicans who cuddle up to Big Gun Control tend to get treated like the kid in junior high who, when the bullies and mean girls ask them to eat a bug to be accepted by the “cool kids”, eat the bug – and have the photos of them eating the bug pasted up around the school.

Don’t eat the bug, Senator Jensen.

That is all.

…remind them that he’s the kind of “Nazi” who sings “Happy Birthday” to a Jewish camp survivor:

House and Senate members broke into a rendition of “Happy Birthday” during Tuesday’s State of the Union address to celebrate a survivor of the Holocaust and last year’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

Judah Samet attended the address as a guest of the White House. President Trump acknowledged him in the crowd, prompting a standing ovation, and noted it was Samet’s 81st birthday.ADVERTISEMENT

Attendees then broke into song, with Trump mock-conducting from the dais.

“Thank you!” Samet shouted.

Wonder if Ilhan Omar joined in?

Not a rhetorical question. I’m seriously curious.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The governor of Virginia explained that a proposed law would allow a woman to give birth to her baby, then decide whether to kill it.  A “post-birth” abortion.  Aside from the fact that killing babies is what Kenneth Gosnell went to prison for, why only the mother? Why isn’t the father involved in the decision to kill the child?
In the past, the “women-only” argument was that a woman’s body should be free from government intrusion.  Government shouldn’t have the power to force her to carry a child, and neither should anybody else.  That’s involuntary servitude, a fancy of saying sexual slavery, which is evil.  Plainly, the woman is the only person with a right to decide what happens to her body, including whether to terminate the pregnancy by abortion.
But under the proposed law, the carrying is done.  The baby is out of her body.  No slavery involved.  So why should only the woman get to decide whether the baby lives or dies? Why isn’t the father involved?  For that matter, why isn’t the baby involved?   Who speaks on behalf of the living, breathing, child lying on the table?  Shouldn’t there be someone appointed to defend the child’s rights including the most fundamental right of all – the right to be alive?  
Serious flaws in the logic of the proposed law. Send it back for more work.

To be fair, it was never about logic.

It’s been a little crazy lately, and in the rush I neglected two birthdays.

The first, of course, is today.

Reagan

Note:  This is an “encore” of a post I wrote in 2013

Today would be the 108th birthday of the greatest president of my lifetime.

People say “there’s no Ronald Reagan in American politics today”.  And they’re right – but as his son Michael told me in an interview a few years ago, it’s not that there couldn’t be.

Because Reagan had three great talents:   he was a great, natural communicator (who, unlike a lot of “natural communicators”, honed his craft with relentless discipline);  he developed a vision and he stuck to it with determination and focus; and most importantly for today’s  conservatives, he knew how to build coalitions, rather than exclude people from them.

We have plenty of people who can communicate well, although the conservative movement has had its share of duds in that department too.  And we have not a few who can visioneer with the best of them  – in fact, with the rise of the Tea Party, our movement’s best years may be to come, provided they keep the faith.

But as to building coalitions?

Today, we’re better at building silos.

Reagan did something that conservatives are terrible at today; he got social conservatives (at the peak of their notoriety and political cachet), blue-collar Democrats who the economy had turned into instant fiscalcons, Jack Kemp-style economic hawks and paleocons together…

…by focusing remorselessly on what they agreed on;  fixing the economy, and ending Communism.

And once in office, that’s what he focused on.  Oh, he paid lip service to issues that were to him tangents – and lip service from the world’s greatest bully pulpit ain’t chicken feed. But he didn’t fritter his political capital away with excessive natterings about issues that were tangential to his vision, and the vision his coalition all agreed on in electing him.  He spoke eloquently on issues – many of them – and that speaking had its effect.

Some call that an abdication; it was in fact a matter of leaving that work to the members of his coalition (example:  he exerted very little executive effort on abortion and gun control – but the efforts to roll both back at the state and local level started to coalesce during his time in office anyway – in part because of his leadership from the bully pulpit.  But for all that, always, the focus was on “dancing with the one what brung him” to DC at the head of an impossibly-diverse coalition; his rock-solid, bone-simple two point agenda, fixing the economy and toppling the Commies.

As I moderated the “Where Do We Go From Here” event last week at the Blue Fox, and listened to some of the friction and cat-calling across the party’s various factions, I thought there was a lot of focus on what divided us.  And so my final question to the panel was “what do we all – all of us, from socialcons like Andy Parrish to libertarians like Marianne Stebbins, actually agree on?”  Because that is the only real way forward for any of the factions – since if any faction takes Parrish’s (tongue in cheek?) advice and forms a separate party, it’s the road to mutual palookaville, with multiple parties that are less than the sum of the parts they once were.

So for my annual Gipper Day celebration, it’ll be the usual; jelly beans at my desk, taking the kids out to dinner to talk about what Reagan’s legacy has meant in their lives (other than the uninformed, out-of-context crap the DFLers in their lives’ll say)…

…and asking my fellow conservatives “what do we agree on?”

The second? Well, that’ was yesterday.

Shot In The Dark

Yesterday was the 17th anniversary of my starting this blog.

Hardly seems possible, sometimes.

Jason Rarick won the special election in Senate District 11 last night, and did it with a pretty impressive margin in a district that was not only pretty much 50-50, but in which the GOP has never won the Senate seat.

With 100 percent of precincts in, state Rep. Jason Rarick wins the SD 11 race with 52 percent of the vote to Democrat Stu Lourey’s 46 percent. A flip for the Senate GOP #mnleg

— Briana Bierschbach (@bbierschbach) February 6, 2019

Perhaps it’s a sign that the DFL wave from last fall has dissipated in a welter of the overreach I predicated. The GOP now has a two-vote majority in the Senate.

An interesting sign: organized labor, at least private-sector labor, was working the district hard.

For Rarick.

Didn’t see that coming, I gotta admit.

And perhaps it’s a sign that MInnesota’s real 2nd Amendment groups, which backed Rarick, are actually starting to get their clout back, and see the truth about the (in my opinion) fraudulent, Iowa-based “Minnesota” Gun Rights, which denounced Rarick for no rational reason other than the simple fact that winning would gut their gravy train. Side note: If you donate to Minnesota Gun Rights, you are a sucker and I’ll tell you to your face; you would do less damage giving your money directly to Michael Bloomberg.

Congrats, Jason Rarick!

Last weekend on the show, I predicted that Ralph Northam, with the aid of savvy PR

and a compliant media, would be rehabilitated within a year.

I may have been too conservative – but in my defense, even I did g predict this tactic.

According to CNN, liberal racists are actually a good thing

Ivoprop is a respected brand of ultralight propellers.  They have a great reputation.  The founder has an even better story.

Nobody ever flew one the other direction to escape from capitalist Austria into socialist Czechoslovakia.  Lesson for Ilhan and AOC in there, somewhere.

Somewhere, somehow, I’m pretty sure either Ilhan and AOC got it in their head that someone did, or they know that nobody in their voting pool would check them on it if they said “as many people fled east as west”.

Minnesota “progressives” aren’t that curious or critical.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is shopping for a new casserole trivet for his Instant Pot (C) when MyLysa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, rounds the corner.

BERG: Er…Ms. Silberman.

SILBERMAN: [visibly searching for name] . Er – hello, Merg.

BERG: So – any comment about the allegations against Ralph “Satchmo” Northam?

SILBERMAN: In these inflammatory situations and divided times, it’s a journalist’s responsibility to make sure they get the facts straight.

BERG: OK. So – Brent Kavanaugh…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly screams, face red with rage] WE ALWAYS #BELIEVEWOMEN, YOU SON OF A BITCH!!!

BERG: Huh. So – Democrat governor Northam…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly calm again] Get the facts…

BERG: Northam, Ellison, Clinton…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly calm again] We can’t report a story where we’re not absolutely sure…

BERG: The Covington kids..

SILBERMAN: [Enraged again] . WHITE! MAGA! THE…SMIRK! I JUST WANT TO BURN THAT KID’S FACE OFF!

BERG: Right. So I’ve predicted that the media will declare Northam “rehabilitated” within the year.

SILBERMAN: Rehabilitated from what?

BERG: Er…yeah. Exactly.

And SCENE

Attorneys representing Nick Sandman, the Covington Kid who was the subject of Big Left’s two minutes’ hate a couple weeks ago, have started the wheels rolling on lawsuits.

Over fifty of them:

“The legal counsel representing Nick and his family, Todd McMurtry and experienced libel and defamation lawyer L. Lin Wood of Atlanta, have said they will seek justice for the harm allegedly done to the teen,” The Enquirer reported. “McMurtry is with the law firm of Hemmer Defrank Wessels and has practiced law in Greater Cincinnati since 1991. He said a team of seven lawyers has been working full-time to review the media accounts of what happened.”
The letters come in response to the media’s smearing of Sandmann after a selectively edited clip of an incident on January 19, 2019, went viral that showed Sandmann standing face-to-face with Native American Nathan Phillips, who was beating a drum in Sandmann’s face.

The list of people and entities served includes:

1. The Washington Post
2. The New York Times
3. Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN)
4. The Guardian
5. National Public Radio
6. TMZ
7. Atlantic Media Inc.
8. Capitol Hill Publishing Corp.
9. Diocese of Covington
10. Diocese of Lexington
11. Archdiocese of Louisville
12. Diocese of Baltimore
13. Ana Cabrera (CNN)
14. Sara Sidner (CNN)
15. Erin Burnett (CNN)
16. S.E. Cupp (CNN)
17. Elliot C. McLaughlin (CNN)
18. Amanda Watts (CNN)
19. Emanuella Grinberg (CNN)
20. Michelle Boorstein (Washington Post)
21. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (Washington Post)
22. Antonio Olivo (Washington Post)
23. Joe Heim (Washington Post)
24. Michael E. Miller (Washington Post)
25. Eli Rosenberg (Washington Post)
26. Isaac Stanley-Becker (Washington Post)
27. Kristine Phillips (Washington Post)
28. Sarah Mervosh (New York Times)
29. Emily S. Rueb (New York Times)
30. Maggie Haberman (New York Times)
31. David Brooks (New York Times)
32. Shannon Doyne
33. Kurt Eichenwald
34. Andrea Mitchell (NBC/MSNBC)
35. Savannah Guthrie (NBC)
36. Joy Reid (MSNBC)
37. Chuck Todd (NBC)
38. Noah Berlatsky
39. Elisha Fieldstadt (NBC)
40. Eun Kyung Kim
41. HBO
42. Bill Maher
43. Warner Media
44. Conde Nast
45. GQ
46. Heavy.com
47. The Hill
48. The Atlantic
49. Bustle.com
50. Ilhan Omar
51. Elizabeth Warren
52. Kathy Griffin
53. Alyssa Milano
54. Jim Carrey

Defamation cases are very hard to win. Justifiably so.

But I hope Sandmann cleans clock on this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Amazon Prime members can read Kindle books for free. The one I’m reading now was advertised as a realistic action thriller, so I thought I’d take a chance. Why not?  It’s free, if I hate it, I just push delete.