Headline: 2027

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Minnesota Star Tribune, April 17, 2027:

FEDS INDICT 20 IN WATER FRAUD SCANDAL

The US Attorney for Minnesota has announced indictments of 22 executives and board members ‘”Watering Our Future”, a Methodist-affiliated non-profit ostensibly dedicated to providing water at public events.

“WOF spent $230 million in state money”, said Assistant US Attorney Ashley Bouffant, “but we’ve found no evidence they ever provided any water to a single person at a public event”. 

The headline in 2025?   “Minnesota lawmakers push for free water access at public events“. 

The bill, introduced in February by Rep. Leigh Finke, (DFL-66A) has been added to a larger House commerce package. If passed, it would mandate that all qualifying events provide at least one of the following:

  • Free bottled water

  • Permission to bring in sealed water bottles

  • Access to refill stations for those who bring empty bottles

  • Exemptions: art galleries, museums and presentation spaces where beverages aren’t allowed

“This bill just kind of came to me last summer when I was having conversations with people about the heat,” Finke said. “There are numerous ways for this to be successful at very low stakes and with high rewards.”

Any government program opportunity, at best, for creating a new transfer of wealth from the real world to the political class; at worst, another opportunity for fraud and graft.

And under this version of the DFL, let’s just leave out the “at best” part.

I’m just waiting to see what special interest group can carve / has carved out a piece of the public water action.

Because you know there’s gotta be one.

Schooled

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Joe Doakes, looking at Como Park through his rear-view mirror, emails:

Harvard is pushing back against President Trump’s demands for reform. President Obama praised them for resisting. He is joined by several Thoughtful Republicans Of Moderate Bona fides On Neither Extreme Side (TROMBONES, the new and more acceptable word for people formerly known as RINOs) who agree that yes, racial discrimination is bad, and viewpoint discrimination is bad, and antisemitism is bad, but is that any of the federal government’s business, particularly at their elite private Ivy League alma mater?

Harvard’s defenders have a point. But so does Trump.

The purpose of federal student loans is to help poor kids go to college. The purpose of federal research grants is to subsidize schools who can’t afford to hire good people. Why should grandma pay income tax on her Social Security to subsidize leftist hatred at a billion dollar private school?

Trump should announce that henceforth, student loans and research grants will be based on need – individual and institutional. Harvard can subsidize its own students and researchers to hate whomever they like on their own nickel.

Joe Doakes

I’d love to see schools fill out a FAFSA form and spend a few weeks waiting to see if they get qualified.

So The Question Of The Day Is…

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…what is Boss Hogg trying to get ahead of, here?

What does the little guy know about Hillary?

Ex-Cel

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XCel Energy’s sponsorship deal with Saint Paul’s major arena is over:

All I know is that after twenty years of calling it “The X”, the new sponsor is going to have to be Excedrin, Microsoft Excel, X, Space X, or Ex-Lax, or I’m never going to remember it.

Oversold

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Look – I’m all for women.  My mom was one.  So are my sister, daughter and daughter in law.   Go, women!

But the trifle that is modern feminism has gone a little overboard with claiming “firsts for women”.  One of my more glaring recent examples was the Saint Paul City Council, who are indeed seven women (or were until one left, and was tentatively replaced by a man), but aren’t really running the city because they aren’t much of a council. 

But this week’s “Blue Horizon” flight seven prominent female space tourists had moved into a solid first place. 

Among the tourists was pop start Katy Perry, who imbued the event with, er, immense gravitas:

Community notes for the win.

I imagine going into space is something of a “high”, so I won’t make the inevitable “someone snuck some THC gummies onto the flight” joke, pinky swear…:

So, like David Strom, I don’t really care if people with cash and connections wants to pay for a trip across the Karman Line.  The revenue will help advance private sector space flight.  Yay free enterprise. 

But…Astronaut?

Perry’s only real training for the event was getting measured for her designer jumpsuit, before being shot to the edge of space as a passenger. 

Unlike Valentina Tereshkova, who went into space 62 years ago, after at least qualifying as a cosmonaut and pilot. 

Or Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Or even Christa MacAuliffe, the teacher killed aboard Challenger, who at least went through some version of astronaut training, among the many other American women who’d qualified and been into space by that point.

Sorry to say, Perry was about as much an “astronaut” as Laika the Space Dog – although Perry at least survived her trip.

Glad we could settle that. 

It Ain’t Over

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Even as the “Feeding Our Future” scandal appears to shift into a new gear with the release of the recording of Keith Ellison appearing to:

  • put the lie to several of his statements about when he did or didn’t know about the fraud scandal
  • tell some future defendants that the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) could “chill” the ardor of other agencies to investigate them
  • accept campaign donations for his son and himself,

…it appears we’re nowhere near done with scandals in DFL-run Minnesota:

And while Feeding Our Future is just pedestrian stuff like fraud, jury tampering and maybe racketeering, this one gets into TMZ-fodder:

Gabriel Adam Alexander Luthor (a.k.a. Langford), 39, and Elizabeth Christine Brown, 42, were arrested in Las Vegas, where they made their initial court appearances in U.S. District Court in the District of Nevada earlier this week.

The indictment alleges:

Luthor and Brown intentionally devised and carried out an overbilling scheme for medical services provided through their neurofeedback therapy business, Golden Victory Medical, LLC (GVM). Luthor and Brown were in a relationship and together founded GVM in 2018…In total, GVM submitted hundreds of thousands of false claims to insurers, many of which the insurers paid, resulting in an estimated loss of over $15 million. Millions of dollars in fraudulent proceeds were transferred from bank account to bank account and ultimately retained by Luthor and Brown. Luthor and Brown used the funds to purchase a 9000-square-foot mansion in Eden Prairie and to pay their living expenses and the living expenses of other girlfriends of Luthor’s, who lived with Luthor and Brown and assisted in the fraud scheme.

 

It’d sure be a great time to have a functional state GOP with an election coming up, wouldn’t it?

The Mean Girls Club Strikes Again

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Saint Paul’s much-ballyhooed all-boss-lady City Council not only can’t do its job.

It breaks the law while doing it. 

Jane McClure is a long-time writer for the Highland Villager. 

And as she points out, it seems the Council is walking all over the state’s Open Meetings Law:

The Open Meeting Law prohibits serial meetings, or meeting one-on-one or in smaller groups to make decisions before a public meeting. Serial meetings can be seen as ways to avoid public discourse or to reach some kind of agreement in advance of an open meeting. This depends on the facts of each matter, of course.

Serial meetings can also occur through electronic or written communication, including phone conversations, emails, texts and social media.

City Council members contend that they have long discussed issues one-on-one before taking major votes. This practice predates the current council. That still doesn’t make it right.

Discussing is one thing. Making decisions in private is another. Making promises that lead to decisions is another.

 

The rule of law is the first casualty of all-“Blue” government – in city hall as well as on the street. 

Just In Time To Start Another Audit

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An audit of the Southwest Light Rail project – which is years late, and running at well over double the original projected cost, and (this is my longtime prediction) will end up over $3 Billion when it finally lurches to completion, got a hearing at the Legislature earlier this week. 

A years-long audit of the construction of the embattled Southwest Light Rail line has concluded the Metropolitan Council had issues with “non-compliance” and a lack of “internal controls” managing the mega project, which is now expected to cost taxpayers $2.86 billion.

The presentation by the Office of the Legislative Auditor also gave frustrated lawmakers another opportunity to tee off on Met Council Chair Charlie Zelle. 

“You can’t blame it on anyone else, blame it on the consultant, you are the decision maker,” said Sen. Mark Koran (R-North Branch) at the hearing on Monday morning.

The audit highlighted huge discrepancies in estimating the costs of hundreds of change orders on the project, including one for the construction of a barrier along the Kenilworth Corridor, which drove up the price of the project by more than $40 million.

How about we just start the next audit now, to save time?

Ellison On Tape

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In the six years Tim Walz has governed Minnesota, and especially in the two years the DFL, the state’s bespoke version of the Democratic Party, has had unfettered control of the state’s government, Minnesota has become something of a hotbed of corruption. 

The marquee case, so far, is “Feeding Our Future”, named after a non-profit that allegedly took hundreds of millions of dollars of state and federal Covid relief aid, and “spent” it on feeding centers that served no meals and fed no hungry people.  

Federal money is involved, so the Feds have been doing the heavy lifting on prosecutions this past couple of years.  Cases are going to trial, and sentences are being handed down.  

But in a bombshell Wednesday evening, Bill Glahn of the Center of the American Experiment (a conservative think tank run by Ed and my former radio colleague John Hinderaker) released an audio exhibit from the federal cases, appearing to show Minnesota’s controversial Attorney General, Keith Ellison, discussing a wide range of subjects of interest in the case with several people involve in the case at various levels:

American Experiment has exclusively obtained the complete 54-minute, 44-second audio file of a private December 2021 meeting between state Attorney General (AG) Keith Ellison and key figures in the Feeding Our Future scandal. 

As I wrote last week, the audio file was named as Exhibit 710 on the evidence list presented to the court by Aimee Bock’s defense attorney, Kenneth Udoibok. The recording was not offered into evidence during the six-week trial that concluded last month, with Bock’s conviction on all seven counts she faced.

As a document, it exceeds expectations. Voices can be heard clearly and are clearly identifiable. The highlights, which are many, tend to be front-loaded. I’ve included below some clips from the meeting to highlight a few points.

Glahn presents the receipts, as the kids say. In this clip, Ellison discusses how his flex can get other state agencies to back off:

The “Jodi Harpstead” referred to is state’s former Human Services commissioner – no stranger to other problems, and who, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, resigned last January as controversy swelled around the department.  

Here, Ellison pledges to fight on behalf the non-profits:

Perhaps most revealing, according to Glahn, the tape changes the timeline presented by Ellison in the past.  

At 30:38, Ellison interrupts, saying, “This is the first I’m really hearing about it.” At 37:08, Ellison says, “This has not come to my attention until now.” These private statements in December 2021 completely contradict his September 2022 public statement:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and his office have been deeply involved for two years in holding Feeding Our Future accountable. 

Two years. Do the math. 

The entire tape is included in the Center’s story. 

Pop your popcorn.

 

Calculated Risk

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Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Scott Johnson from Powerline has a column explaining why Trump’s tariffs are calculated incorrectly and are therefore too high.  He gives a formula from some academics showing that the inelasticity of trade was improperly factored into setting our new rates.
Missing the point, Scott.  The point is foreign governments have been taking advantage of our generosity for years and it’s time to fix that. Yes, we’re a party to GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) but renegotiations have been stalled for decades – too many rice bowls at stake – so Trump’s unilateral new tariffs are a way to break the stalemate.
 
The specifics of Trump’s tariffs don’t matter, 10% on penguins or 90% on Vietnam, these numbers are just the opening round of negotiation.  It’s like the guy selling sombreros on the beach in Mazatlan, or the guy selling rugs in the souk in Marrakech.  His opening offer is ridiculous because you are expected to bargain with him. That’s the accepted practice in that culture.  So, too, in every real estate deal, which is where Trump learned his lessons.  You always set the listing price high to give yourself room to negotiate down.  And now we’re seeing it’s also true in setting foreign trade policy, as more than four dozen countries have already lined up to renegotiate their trade policy with us.
 
Scott’s column is so typical for RINOs. The other side can state any lie and it’s accepted at face value while our facts are scrutinized and debated endlessly, with the result that the opposition’s policies get enacted but ours get nibbled to death by ducks quacking around our ankles.  With friends like that . . . . . . .
 
Joe Doakes
 
Gonna reject the premise that Scott’s a “RINO”.  
 
Might he be guilty of, as Selena Zito once said, “taking Trump literally but not seriously?”  Perhaps.  It’s easy to do.

Secret Location!!!!! Shhhh!

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State Rep. Maria Isa Perez-Vega wants to mow herself some of that fresh astroturf:

The DFLer, who enthusiastically participated in the orgy of spending that led to both tax hikes and a colossal deficit that has raised the cost of living, led to thousands of Minnesotans losing their jobs or moving their businesses out of state, piling unfunded mandates onto schools that are causing budget-tightening in the classroom, and cutting the very services the Representative is talking about, is going to try to deflect the whole mess over to Trump.

And she is going to do the brave, boss-lady thing and hold a town hall.

Where? 

When?

So, you can find out where the “town hall” is after we vet you to make sure you’re not one of the “bad” ones?

Since this takes place during show-time on Saturday, Avery Librelle will have to sit it out.

But if any of you go, feel free to call in with a report. 

Just Like Shakespeare Said; All Them Marketers Oughtta Be Dead

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Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

I get lots of spam emails but never see them.  My spam filter works fine for real spam.  It’s spam-ish emails that get through.  “Legitimate” spam, so to speak.
 
Marketing people will tell you that the best source of business is your existing customer list.  They already know the way to your door. They paid you money in the past. The trick is to get them back in the door again to spend more money in the future.  How to do that?
 
Keep your name in front of them.  Email a quarterly newsletter.  Email monthly specials.  Email “Happy Birthday!” greetings.  That way, when the customer thinks “I should buy . . . ” they already know who to buy it from.
 
Except I HATE SPAM.  Pelting me with spam emails is far more likely to annoy me than to make me grateful.  Do businesses gain more repeat business from spam than they drive away?  I wonder.
 
And it’s everywhere.  The grocery store wants my email before I can get the BOGO on green grapes but that means receiving weekly coupon emails.  The oil change place wants to send me a three-month reminder in addition to holiday greetings. The dentist, health care provider, insurance agent, Congresscritter, drugstore, discount warehouse . . . STOP SENDING ME THIS CRAP!
 
But I can’t tell them that, or they will take my name off the list, and the next time I shop there, they will say my account has been closed at my request.  
 
Marketing majors take note: it’s people like you what cause civil unrest.  My next “mostly peaceful” protest may be at your office.  And not a soul would blame me.
 
Joe Doakes
 

Point taken – although I’m going after the people (or “people”) that design phone trees first. 

(Title reference):

Ripping Off The Bandaid

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OK, so work with me here [1].

I’m not especially a fan of tariffs. Some of the arguments against them aren’t much better, though. If they go through, they are taxes, yes indeed. And if they don’t – if they are leverage, used to successfully change trade policy, or in some cases safeguard an industry we *don’t* need getting offshored [2], then not so much.

But this goes way beyond tariffs, so again, bear with me [1].

Our economy has extremely healthy fundamentals – and some incredibly nasty endemic problems:

  • – National debt that will crush the economy if we don’t do something useful
  • – inflation that was down from four years ago, but still way higher than it should be, especially for working-class Americans (because the inflation rate for food, fuel and housing was and remains *way* higher than the economy at large)
  • – A stock market that was very overvalued at the beginning of the year (with profit to earnings ratios almost double the rate of a healthy market), with a major bubble caused by federal spending and the AI bubble.
  • – A Federal Reserve whose only answer is cutting rates (which will increase inflation, given all the loose money that’s already out there) or hiking them (strangling economic growth).
  • – Four years of uncontrolled immigration, which depressed working-class wages (and artificially kept some prices down while raising other costs, economic and social).
  • – A Congress that *can* and *should* fix all these problems, and *could*, at least to start by means-testing Social Security and Medicare, except that they have to win popularity contests every two years, and the noise machines of both sides have made being *honest* about the impending entitlement time bomb political suicide)
  • Oh, yeah – Europe is closer to general war than it’s been in 85 years, and experts are predicting China will, not may, either invade or strangle Taiwan before the end of the decade. ]

So – what to do?

Let me take you back.

It’s 1982. I was still a Democrat. Probably kind of an obnoxious one, come to think of it.
And the economy had been a basket case for much of my childhood, and all my teenage years and adulthood to that point. The Oil Embargo led to the mid-seventies recession, which led to Stagflation, which led to the Malaise, and of course the Federal Government was spending money like crazy on the “war on poverty”, so inflation crushed economic activity; inflation peaked at over 12% when I was in high school.

President Reagan’s Fed chief, Paul Volcker, cranked the federal funds rate to *20%*. Mobbed up loan sharks said “dial it back, bub”. It SLAMMED inflation to the mat – but unemployement *soared* to 10.8% [3]. It triggered a VERY sharp recession in 1982 – one that’s still “the big one” to a lot of us.

The Democrat majority in Congress grew by 26 seats to a majority of *over 100 seats*. IF there’s been a Presidential election in 1982, Reagan would have lost by a landslide.

But here’s the thing about recessions – if the fundamentals of the economy are healthy, then the sharper the downturn, the sharper the recovery, if you let it [4]. In a year, the economy was gaining almost 500,000 jobs *a month* (and the population was 34 the size it is today), and the longest peacetime boom in history, almost 25 years, kicked off.

And Reagan rode that economy to the biggest landslide in history. And I made my first Republican vote, for Reagan (and my last Democrat one – for my Mom).

So – what about last week’s orgy of tariffs?

Maybe it just means Trump is stupid. Could be [5].

Or maybe the whole thing is:

  1.  A sharp kick in the market’s teeth, to get those valuations down to size, AND…
  2. … burn off some of that excess capital that Biden (and yes, Trump in 2020) pumped into the economy with no growth to eat it up, AND…
  3.  Throw a stun granade into the international trade market to exert leverage on other countries to cut the tariffs that *are* there [6] AND…  Start creating demand for American blue-collar labor, to replace all the cheap foreign labor that the cartels aren’t walking across the border, AND…
  4.  To force China into a recession that they can just not afford (if their exports are strangled, they are screwed blue), which might have the salutary effect of helping prevent WORLD WAR F**KING THREE in the Taiwan Straits, AND…
  5. Unleash the Growth Fairy, which – let me put this as gently as I can – IS THE ONLY WAY THIS COUNTRY’S ECONOMY ISN’T GOING TO COLLAPSE in the next decade or so. Literally, those are the two choices – out of control growth, or collapse. There is no option C. Taxing billionaires don’t do it. Confiscating every dollar of wealth over a Billion, or a million, won’t do it. ONLY the greatest explosion of growth the world has ever seen will do it.

It’s not just me thinking this: my (Facebook) friend Glenn Reynolds wrote this [7]…

And HIS friend and my one-time rhetorical fencing partner Steven Green had this to say:

Decide for yourself. [1].

[1] Or don’t. I don’t care. But if you disagree, shoot for intelligent disagreement, OK? I’m kind of tired of the other kind.
[2] Germany is kind of starting to regret outsourcing the production of its army’s tanks to Greece, for one example.
[3] Yep, Millennials, almost a point worse than 2008. You didn’t survive the worst of all possible times.
[4] Which is why the 2008 recession, and the Great Depression for that matter, dragged on so long – government “recovery” efforts prolonged the economic trouble that caused the whole thing in the first place.
[5] We’ll see, one way or the other. I’ve been wrong about Trump before, and so have you. Anyway, hear me out [1].
[6] Both sides are wrong about trade, by the way; Trump’s largely wrong about the trade deficit (it’s mostly from us buying cheap stuff from poor countries, and the middle class has grown in the past 40 years) and his opponents are wrong about foreign countries’ policies (they DO hamper lots of American exports in the “free market”). We can discuss it [1].
[7] I eschew “appeal to authority” and other logical fallacies, and I hope you do too [1], but let’s be honest; he’s smarter than me, and probably smarter than you, too.

 

Girl Brawl

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If it seems like just yesterday the national media was swooning over Saint Paul’s city council – the first all-female city council in the US, we were told – it’s because it practically was just yesterday that the entire establishment was swooning over them.  

They’re women, donchaknow.  

And I’m not gonna say I predicted this, but you know I kinda predicted this:

The president was, as luck would have it, my “representative”, Mitra Jalali – a woman whose “flexibility” on issues and identity makes Tim Walz look all boring and consistent; she left the council in January to focus on her health or something. 

Since then, the council has deadlocked on everything from a temporary replacement for Jalali, to space for the city’s new Sudanese-style trash collection service to stage its trucks (forcing Mayor Carter to declare an emergency and, speaking of emergemcies, forcing Mayor Carter to appear like a relative moderate and grownup.

Or perhaps the one person in the transaction who shows up for work: the councilwomens’ attendance is a little dismal:

That’s may actually be worse than the DFL in the House of Representatives. 

UPDATE: Mayor Carter has appointed Jalali’s legislative aide to serve out the term.  I don’t think this is over. 

Outbreak Of Reason

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is pondering the tragedy that is his backyard garden when Avery LIBRELLE, riding a recumbent bike, rides up the alley, unbeknownst to BERG.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak.

BERG:  Huh.  And that’s RFK’s fault?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely.  He’s anti-Vaxx.

BERG: Whereas an enlightened country like, say, Canada won’t have any trouble with that kind of thing.

LIBRELLE:  Of course not. They’re enlightened and progressive!

BERG:  Huh.

LIBRELLE: Wait – is this another one of those things where you…

(BERG opens a link on his iPad):

Surely they must do better than the United States at controlling communicable diseases, right?

Yeah, well, not so much. Quite the opposite, actually.

While the numbers are inherently unreliable to some extent, we can get a rough estimate of the relative risk of somebody getting Measles here vs in Canada. Both have advanced healthcare systems that collect a lot of data, and both have active media environments that love to focus on scary stuff like spreading diseases.

Want to know the relative risk? Americans contract Measles at a rate of 1.1 per million more or less, while Canadians have a rate of 12.2 per million.

Canadians are more than 11 times more likely to get the disease than people in the United States. And they don’t have any mean, nasty conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. to spread conspiracy theories. The English, a similar society to both Canada and the United States, has a rate 5 1/2 times the US. France and Germany have rates similar to ours, if a tiny bit higher at the moment.

LIBRELLE:  Dammit! Why do you always do that?

BERG:  (Not very interested) Do what?

LIBRELLE:  Shoot down everything I say, and make me look like some kind of idiot?

BERG:  It’s a blessing and a curse.

And SCENE

Missing The Forest For The Dust

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Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I notice a common theme running through Berg’s Third Law (disasters) and Mother Jones Corollary to the Tenth Law (vicious lies) and 18th Law of Media Latency (48 hour rule): the media rushes to lie about Conservatives, so thoughtful readers will wait for the dust to settle an the truth to be revealed.

I wonder if a similar principle should apply to President Trump?

He proposes a course of action, the media loses its mind, Democrats and RINOs panic, the feared apocalypse does not occur. It happens over and over. He wants fair trade with Canada; Canada threatens to punish every American; tariffs are proposed; media, Democrats and RINOs panic; Canada backs down. If everybody had waited a week or two before setting their hair on fire, it all would have blown over.

Generally takes longer than 48 hours so how about a two week rule?

Joe Doakes

The committee is taking it under advisement. 

Sic Transit Gloria Radio

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One of the truisms of playing in a bar band (as I do) is that bar bands aren’t musicians.  They are beer salesmen. 

And if you’re playing an American Legion in Anoka, and you bust out some Parliament or Sonic Youth, or Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, you’ll make a few hipsters and fanboys happy – and send the rest of the crowd to the exits, sooner or later,.  Mostly sooner.   The American Legion in Anoka (or wherever( wants its Creedence Clearwater and Tom Petty and Bad Company and a little classic country probably woudn’t hurt.  

We’ll come back to that. 

The big splash in local media this past week is KQRS – the classic rock station that used to have literally the highest ratings in the country, the station that was so powerful it could beat back Howard Stern at (or near) his peak – is adjusting its format. 

Along with a playlist more heavily steeped in ’90s alternative rock — including a promised bump in Minnesota acts such as Soul Asylum and the Replacements — KQ’s corporate operators Cumulus Media announced the addition of new on-air personalities who will be familiar to listeners of other Twin Cities stations.

Longtime 89.3 the Current midday jockey Jade Tittle and former Cities 97 host and music director Paul Fletcher have joined the remade KQRS staff, a clear attempt by Cumulus to pick up some of those competitors’ audiences.

The classic rock crowd is angry.  The 90s alt rock crowd is chanting “it’s about time”.

Me?  I’m surprised it took this long.  

Here’s why.  

Like the (not remotely hypothetical) bar band in my example at the top, radio isn’t about music (or sports, or even conservative talk.  Radio is a delivery system for advertising.  Nothing more. 

Advertising focuses on people who have money – specifically, money to spend on an advertiser’s products.  A station’s “format”, whether talk or sports or some genre of music, is pretty tightly associated with a demographic group that is in some way desirable to advertisers, and the products they sell.  Whether pitching nightclubs to 20-somethings (KDWB in the ’90s) or lifestyle products to women from 25-40 (KS95) to stuff for harried moms (ChickTalk 107) to mental red meat for men 35+ (conservative talk), you can tell who the station is trying to reach by the products they’re trying to sell.  

And it gets to them via the emotions. 

One of the little secrets radio programmers know is that people form deep, lifelong, intense emotional bonds with the music that they were exposed to between, roughly, puberty and the time the brain stops growing – usually the mid-to-late 20s.   Doesn’t matter what the genre – the music of that part that you associate with that part of life when so much else about peoples personalities get formed, and they start noticing and getting noticed by the opposite sex, has an intense emotional connection for them.  More or less intense, maybe, but still, it’s a a powerful hook into a person’s psyche. 

“Classic rock“ is music of the baby boom.   For the past fifty years, they’ve been the biggest, wealthiest demographic surge in history.  And “classic rock” is the music of the people who were born between 1945 and sometime in the early ’60s.  Who were entering puberty between the late ’60s and the mid-seventies.  And whose brains became more or less fully formed between 1970 and 1980 or so.  

And for most of the past 45 years or so, KQRS has prospered by cracking the emotional response of one of the biggest, wealthiest demographic groups in the area – white men (remember – mens and womens brains are different!) whose brains started forming in the mid-sixties, and pretty much switched to emotional, and thus musical, cruise control sometime during the George HW Bush administration.  

The baby boom starts turning 80 this year. The younger ones start retiring. They don’t have the money or the clout anymore. Advertisers are moving on.  Which is the same reason the last of the Big Band and Beautiful Music stations (KLBB, WLTE, KMFY) left the air 30+ years ago, and why KOOL108 switched from Elvis and Carl Perkins to, well, the stuff KQRS was playing until two weeks ago; because their audiences aged out of the prime advertising years. 

It’s not about the music. It’s about business.  You gotta sell the beer. 

Compare And Contrast

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When “Satanists” – actually a sophomoric cheetoh-dusty club of militant atheists – erected a “Satanic” holiday display in the Capitol rotunda, Christians angrily dissented, and occasionally fulminated – but let the “Satanists” enjoy their free speech and one of their few trips outside their parents’ basements. 

When an Easter display got excluded from the Capitol, Christians – including former Senator Dan Hall – took it outdoors:

You didn’t need to be a playwrite to foreshadow this one:

No cigar for guessing this one:

Norby allegedly has an arrest record involving “Antifa-Like” activities in 2020. 

Of course, the real precedent is that Minnesota leftists feel entitled to destroy speech they disagree with.  

And this being John Choi’s Ramsey County, I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and predict Norby gets “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the separation of church and state, using precedent.  

 

Berg’s 18th Law: It’s Not Just For Spree Violence!

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Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week:  “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech!  They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”

Waiting period specified in statute passes:

Not sure it ever fails. 

Which is why we call ’em “laws”. 

In This House Of Cards

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Last fall’s election was a rough one for America’s left.   Their message was rejected by a majority of Latino men, an increasing share of the black vote, an astonishing percent of GenZ (some reports say that Trump drew a third of the vote at the deep-blue University of Minnesota), and even a near supermajority of Native Americans, to say nothing of the usual suspects, white men (especially blue collar men) and married women.

And the Democrats’ woes haven’t abated with the election – with their popularity hovering somewhere below “Serbian War Criminal” and above “Journalist“.  

You might be wondering if the drubbing they took caused the radical wing of Big Left to get a little circumspect?  To see if they might want to change their approach, especially to the parts of their late coalition that forsook them last November?  To even say “maybe we oughtta dial back the culture war schtick”?

Well, not many of them.  

This sign has been popping up in Minneapolis:

The signs are posted by a group, “Mpls for the Many“, which apparently seeks to move Minneapolis’s city government even further to the left, and appears intended to supplant some of those “In This House” signs standing in the front yards of so many white, middle-class “progressives”.  

I put “progressives” in scare quotes because, well, if you read the responses to the tweet above, it just doesn’t seem very “progressive”.  It’s got that whole “scarlet letter” vibe about it.  

And it’s not a rare thing at all – as David (a Minneapolis inmate) points out, many on the left seem to think the social contract is, er, subject to terms and conditions (nearly a direct quote from many of the responses to the tweet above, in fact).  

Tom Knighton (at our sister publication Bearing Arms) points out that the current round of “mostly peaceful” demonstrators are putting the gloves back on – so as not to get gasoline, explosive residue or any stray flames on their hands:

Now, Molotov cocktails are bad, but the nature of them tends to mean that people know good and well that there’s no one around when they use one–or, conversely, that someone is present. Using one is a violent act, but it’s still a thing that gives the user at least some control over who all is going to be hurt by the cocktail when it’s thrown.

After that, all bets are off, which is why we don’t really treat them as a nothingburger.

But bombs are an escalation. These are intended to go off at a later time. It doesn’t say if they were meant for remote detonation or on a timer, but what we know is that these aren’t necessarily controlled and can be much more destructive.

To those who believe in such things as social contracts, it appears that part of our society is conjuring up some escape clauses in the fine print.  

Second Acts

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America loves second acts. 

The child star who disappeared under a mound of blow at age 15, coming back with a stellar performance.

The team that started the season in the cellar, going to the championship.

The 35 year old short reliever who started as an 18 year old prodigy before getting stuck in AAA ball for a decade and a half that pitches a shutout to get the save, and a little bit of immortality, in the big game.

The political party that squandered a $18B surplus to create a $6B deficit, while blowing up the budget 40% and jacking up taxes, rebranding itself as tax hawks for the children…

Wait.  Wut?

And kudos to the social media intern for that clever job of editing all the facts out of the interchange, to make it look like Rep. Gomez was winning the discussion.  It was…creative. 

Questions That Would Get Asked..

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…if the Walz administration would allow real journalists, like me, along on his entourage to junkets like this:

“Uh, yes, Governor Walz – do these farmers know that you signed a law that will ban all liquid fuel by 2040, including on farms? Meaning no gas or diesel to run tractors and combines, among other things?

What? You’re saying nobody asked that? 

Not even the farmer?

Or “farmer”?

So, it’s staged?

Like every godforsaken shot of  kids spontaneously hugging him?

It tracks.

Fact Check For The Feckless And Factless

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Honestly, with some of these lefty s**tpost farms, I’m not sure why I bother fact-checking anything.  They don’t care, and they bank on their audience not caring as well. 

But there’s always the off chance that I’ll catch someone who hasn’t checked all of their brain in at the lefty claim check, who is looking for an honest answer to a stupid question.

To wit:

So let’s get this straight:  in the past 60 years, the United States has spent $22 Trillion dollars – more than the annual gross domestic product of China, or about 3/4 of a year’s GDP of the USA – to “eradicate poverty” and its effects. 

But, on top of all that spending (which is ongoing, and has accelerated well ahead of inflation), taking a small tax onto the small number of billionaires is what it’ll ackshyually take to fix the problem?

Huh.

We’ve been so close, all along!

OK.  Now let it sink in.  

Then press flush.