For years – longer than just about anyone – I’ve been writing about “Minnesota Gun Rights”, a group from Iowa whose “business” model is to raise money on ignorance about gun control legislation.
The usual cycle is a little like this:
They raise a hysterical alarm about some piece of legislation that may or may not be moving in the legislature.
They accuse Republicans of going soft on guns. Given that no Minnesota Republican has voted “yea” on a final bill supporting any sort of gun control in almost thirty years, these are usually lies – in one case, accusing Republicans they’d endorsed (inevitably in safe districts) who’s been 100% pro-2nd Amendment with ‘betrayal’. Because “betrayal” is a nice inflammatory take that promotes hysterical fundraising.
For whatever reason, they are silent about Democrats.
They go back to Iowa and spend the money.
“Action For Liberty” seems to have a pretty similar business model. The group is a byproduct of the Tea Party, and started out as a fairly run of the mill conservative group.
But somewhere along the way, it started walking, talking and quacking like Minnesota Gun Rights.
The problem with the MNGOP, according to A4L, isn’t losing elections – it was “RINOs”. A Republican In Name Only – the definition of which is any Republican, elected, appointed or hired, who’s ever had to try to get anything done with Democrats.
Remember the old Reagan saying – someone who agrees with you 70% isn’t your 30% enemy? To A4L, being a 90% friend makes you a 100% enemy.
Because “betrayal” sells.
This has been the top story in intraparty politics this past few weeks. The last MNGOP State Central meeting elected a slate of leadership that are, if not A4L sympathizers, at least very amenable to rapprochement. (I just used a French word. Maybe that makes me a RINO?)
Case in point: over the past few weeks, A4L has been attacking Republicans for voting for the Health and Human Services Omnibus bill, which includes a contribution to Medicaid, which pays for abortions. Abortion is bad.
Stipulated in advance – Omnibus bills need to be banned. If we ever get a GOP trifecta, in fact, we need to demand it.
But that’s life. Omnibus bills are inevitably s**t sandwiches, full of “poison pills” to be lorded over the other party in the next election.
But in the case of the HHS omnibus bill, the problem would be the same if it were a clean single-subject bill; court decisions hamstring the state; the Medicaid money has to pay for abortions. States have no say in the matters.
But Action For Liberty knows as well as you do that that’s a pretty abstruse fact, and not hard at all to spin as “BETRAYAL!”.
And so we’ve been feted (there’s another French word. Maybe I’m turning into David French?) with the absurdity of A4L calling solid conservatives like Mary Franson, Walter Hudson, Jim Nash and Elliot Engen “RINOs”.
And I’m gonna guess they’re going to call Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) “PLINOs” after this broadside:
I try to be “Switzerland” when it comes to intra-party politics – but if someone can make a case that Action For Liberty doesn’t run off of monetizing cynicism and ignorance, I’m doing to take some convincing.
We know there’s a battle coming. Congress’s funding resolution runs out March 14. If Trump and Congress don’t reach a deal on a new budget, the government shuts down with all the angst and drama we recall from earlier battles, with all the political risks that have made some Republicans unwilling to fight the battle again. So in the upcoming fight over the budget, what’s our view, the Conservative view?
Personally, I’d like to see something akin to Constitutional government. Article I, Section 8 enumerates the powers given to Congress. Go read it. It’s worth remembering that those are the ONLY powers the Founders wanted Congress to have. To get back to that, we’d have to cut about 80% of the federal government. I concede that’s not realistic in today’s political climate.
What is realistic? How about living within our means? How about balancing income and outgo, revenue and expenditures, same as every family and small business must do? What would it take to get there?
We would have to cut about 2 Trillion dollars of annual spending. Is that possible?
First, let’s remember the last budget was 2019 when Trump was in office. Starting in 2020, Congress ramped up spending to cover the extraordinary costs of fighting a world-ending epidemic of Covid. Leaving aside the possibility that Covid was merely an excuse to promote absentee ballots to steal the election, the spending never stopped. Every year since 2020, Congress passed a continuing resolution which keeps spending the same amount of money as before, plus a little extra for inflation, including the emergency money for Covid and lately, money for Ukraine to the tune of a third-of-a-trillion dollars. Surely some of that can go.
Second, let’s remember that Congress gives money to agencies to promote vague policy objectives like “safe food” or “transportation.” What, specifically, the agency does with that money is up to the bureaucrats. That’s why we get drag queen shows on military bases. Surely some of that can go.
Third, let’s remember that every bureaucrat knows the first rule of budgeting is “spend it or lose it.” They will hide behind a “hostage puppy” to protect the rest of their funding (so named for the famous National Lampoon cover). They will insist that if we cut the funding for drag queens, the puppy will die, the child in Ethiopia will starve, the meat will not be inspected, the Washington Monument will be closed, and Grandma will have to eat dog food to survive. We have heard it all before, surely they can’t expect us to fall for it again?
So what do we do? First, we don’t fall for the hostage puppy, we stand firm. If bureaucrats would rather let the Ethiopian kid starve than give up their drag queen shows, on their heads be it. Second, we empower someone to look through agency budgets to cut out silliness to focus on core functions. Musk’s team is doing that now but it ought to be a full time job for somebody. Third, we insist on real cuts now, not gimmicks like “out year” reductions 10 years down the road. And most importantly, we get tough – we harden our hearts – so we can ride out the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the rending of garments, the accusations of every -ism imaginable.
Why this fight? Why now? Because we’re nearly at the end of the road. We’re short about $2 Trillion a year which we borrowed to get by, but that’s been going on for so long we now owe $36 Trillion dollars which is more than the entire Gross Domestic Product of $26 Trillion. Do you realize what that means? It means we owe more on the national debt than the value of all the goods and services produced in the entire nation.
We pay more for interest on the national debt than the entire defense budget.
By every reasonable measure, the United States is bankrupt.
It comes down to surgical cuts now or default on our debts later and then everything collapses into complete anarchy. Choose wisely. And demand that your elected representatives do the same.
Joe Doakes
One of the upshots of Americans (induced) economic illiteracy is that if they’ve gotten any education in economics at all, it’s been in Keynesianism. As such, they think the natural, effective response to an economic downturn is to pour taxpayer money into the situation.
Which merely stretches out the natural recovery, as it did in 1933, and in 2008.
In an economy with healthy fundamentals, a sharp downturn in a free market serves to kill off a whole lot of bad ideas – unsustainable dotcoms in 2001, subprime mortgages in 2008, and probably a whole lot of bubble-like irrational exuberance over AI today.
Now – are we as a society smart enough to know this? The fact that the Obama regime went back to subsidizing subprime mortgages after the ’08 recession (which their policies dragged out for years) indicates “probably not”.
On the one hand, it’s amusing to see that suddenly “cultural appropriation” – in this case, a bunch of rhythmically-challenged Argentine leftist “Karens”
Argentinian leftists express their anger towards Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Javier Milei
Until the mid 1940s, Argentina was a wealthy first-world country, with a per capita GDP competitive with the US.
Then, the “Argentine leftists” sold Argentine voters on “Rizz” and “Brat Vibes” with the Perons and a series of socialists, which gutted the economy and led to a series of coups and counter-coups, which also gutted the economy, which led to a war to restore pride that led to humiliating defeat that further gutted not only the economy but national pride, which led to further see-sawing back and forth, finally leading to a complete economic collapse 20 years ago, which has largely been met by further waves of center-to-far-left governments spending money they don’t have (or borrow from the IMF) to keep programs afloat at the expense of, well, everything.
So now the growups, led by Milei, are in charge, and they are showing the world the actual potential of the Argentine economy and people.
So perhaps after his past 70-80 years, it’s best that Argentine leftists stick with club-footed cultural appropriation and dancing with all the rhythmic authority of Swedish disco dancers. They cause less damage (artistic damage notwithstanding).
While this is good – and expected – news, I feel a little cheated.
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, joining a list of major corporations that have been under pressure by conservative activists. The company confirmed on Monday to The Associated Press th… https://t.co/j3oiq5I7VR
Companies are ditching DEI because it’s bad for the bottom line; they can practice equality without flogging “equity”.
But notice how it’s framed: “under pressure from conservative activists”.
I mean, if you’re going to “blame” companies’ rediscovering economic and social sanity on people like me, and least call it “pouncing”, for fox’s sake.
I’m pondering renewing my subscription to Daily Wire.
On the one hand, they’ve got good news coverage.
On the other, the “membership” user experience needs work.
So as part of my analysis process, I present:
Mitch Ranks the Daily Wire Podcasts.
Podcasts are rated in terms of
Overall quality (subjective, judged by me), and
Standard deviations from the mean likely with any given episode. For those who don’t wrangle much with statistics (and I realize much of my audience does), standard deviations are a measure of consistency of statistics. Example: a sample of several ratings within 70% would have a very small standard deviation; a “90%” leaking in there would have a very large standard deviation.
OK. Let’s get started (subscribe to the Daily Mitch for the…oh, wait. I don’t do that. Yet).
Ben Shapiro:
Rating: 92%.
Standard Deviation: 3%
Shapiro is just about always super solid. He rarely deviates from a very solid mean; his show on October 8 2023 was two standard deviations above (99%), and his review of “Barbie” was an extremely rare 20 standard deviations below.
Andrew Klavan
Rating: NA
Standard Deviation: NA
I can not work up the interest to listen to Klavan. Maybe I should.
Someday. Promise.
Probably.
Matt Walsh:
Rating: 65%.
Standard Deviation: 20%
The problem with Matt Walsh is, when he’s hot, he’s amazing (hence the high standard deviation). The problem with Matt Walsh is that when he really wants to make a point, and has a point to make, he makes the point in such a way as to make the point he has to make. As in, makes the point – the one he set out to make. And then makes that point – and makes the point again. Seriously – I once counted him re-making the same assertion ten times in 90 seconds.
Michael Knowles:
Rating: 73%.
Standard Deviation: 2%
Knowles is always Knowles. And by that, I mean he’s a 34 year old guy who lectures people about “growing old gracefully”. He’s a very strident Roman Catholic who relates have been an atheist at Yale (all good), but goes on to live out the ecclesiastical version of the old saying “the most annoying New Yorkers are the ones that were born in Albany”; he couldn’t exude “recent RomCat Convert” any harder if he did the show in Latin and squirted incense through the speakers. But his insights about politics, especially the intersection of culture an politics, are almost always spot-on.
He’s docked five points for constantly use of the term “weird sex stuff”, like he’s the world’s oldest awkward eight-grade boy. Seriously, taking a drink when Knowles says “Weird Sex Stuff” could be a more toxic drinking game than “Hundred Beer Club”. He gets three points back for getting “Barbie” very right for the same reasons I did.
Daily Wire Backstage
Rating: 40%
Standard Deviation: 15
Like The View, if it were done by frat bros with whom I largely agree.
Visited a different church this weekend, and heard a new song. The musicians on stage played and sang. The congregation was instructed to shout, “That’s My King” when appropriate. Like all modern churches, they have giant tv screens hanging above the stage showing the words. I’ll skip to the part of the song that I found interesting:
That’s my God That’s my shepherd My protector That’s my king
That’s my rock That’s my anchor My defender That’s my king
Most Americans think of “king” as a picture on a playing card, not a part of the government. We mistakenly believe Our Precious Democracy is the ultimate form of government. I think that’s simplistic and dangerous. The Seventeenth Amendment, the effort to pack the Supreme Court, the demand to abolish the electoral college, these all move us away from checks-and-balances and toward absolute rule by whomever counts the ballots.
One need only look to the French Revolution to see why pure mob rule is a terrible idea. Elections aren’t everything – Hitler, Castro and Putin won their elections, too. Ben Franklin quipped: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.” Robert Heinlein wrote: “A king is the people’s only protection against tyranny . . . especially against the worst of all tyrants, themselves.”
Throughout history before the Constitution, the most common form of government was kingship, partly because Might Makes Right, but also partly because Stability Brings Order. The subjects owe allegiance to their king, sure, but as the song from church points out, kings have a responsibility to their subjects, to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic. When there’s a vacancy on the throne, there’s chaos in foreign relations and confusion in domestic politics. That’s one reason some Founders wanted George Washington to agree to be king. He was a natural leader and a gracious gentleman whom ordinary people could admire and respect.
Looking around at the chaos caused by the vacant Rose Garden Throne in America today, and considering the two contestants for the office, only one strikes me as the sort of leader who can inspire people to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get busy restoring this nation to greatness. Only one of them is fit to be king.
Joe Doakes
Some historian – I forget who – described the British monarchy of myth, from its origins until probably the 1600s, as the old-world equivalent of Mafia factions duking it out for the position of Capo di Tutti Capi, only with no FBI to prevent slop-over to the wider society. It took over 400 years, from the Magna Carta to the bitter end of the English Civil War, to turn the British monarchy into the most relatively small-l liberal significant monarchy (shaddap about Denmark) in the modern world.
And the greatest glory of the American experiment was that we were able to not only short-circuit that 400 years of dynastic tree-pruning and blood-batheing, but do it via elections and an orderly process, and implement it in 15 short years and keep it running smoothly for almost 250.
Who’s the best choice to try to keep that record going?
McBeth is a former anti-tank grunt who now does open-source intelligence and systems work. His Youtube and Substack channels are interesting; he doesn’t get everything right (he is still claiming Mossad figured out how to remotely blow up lithium batteries, although his reasoning for getting to that conclusion isn’t wrong), and he certainly runs in official-ish circles, but he shows his math.
I pointed this out, not to “run cover” for officialdom (wtf?) but out of awareness that all “sides” of every issue on social media are farming engagements to draw clicks, eyeballs, and of course the mother of all motivations, “monetization”.
The real lesson? Waiting for government to help you out after an emergency is a sucker bet. Government may mean well but be incompetent; it may do its best but be overstretched; it might be actively undercutting you; it might be all three and then some. But one way or another, example after example in the real world shows us you, the regular schnook, are likely to have to see to your own well-being after a disaster.
Seeing to that well-being is either a waste of time, or absolutely vital – and you won’t know which until it’s too late.
This note comes from a friend of a friend:
“I’m in Asheville, NC right now and we were devastated by the hurricane. Day 5 of no power, water, internet, or even cell service. We are cut off from the world. Here’s what has mattered so far and what hasn’t in my particular situation:
Life saver #1 = Starlink internet. All our phones say SOS. Can’t text for help. Don’t know what’s going on. I plugged in my satellite internet and have been helping the whole neighborhood call loved ones. Everyone is offering me anything from their supplies because it’s so valuable.
Life saver #2 = Solar panels and 3000w battery pack. I can run satellite internet, electric kettle to purify water, charge headlamps, electronics, instant pot for cooking, ice maker for the cooler, everything I need. I’ll won’t run out of the sun like I would propane or gas if this extends a lot longer.
Life saver #3 = Gas cans and extra gas. These are sold out everywhere and are harder to get than gas itself. When power goes out so do gas station pumps. When you have portable gas you can run a generator, evacuate, drive to where the supplies are, check on family members, etc. People are stranded and sleeping at gas stations for days in their car waiting for power to come back on so they can get home.
Life saver #4 = Knowledge on how to survive without a huge stash. Some preppers spend too much on stocking up and not enough on education. None of us knew the hurricane was going to be this bad. Some people lost their entire house including supplies. Those who know multiple ways to collect water, purify it, start a fire, find food, are the ones still alive that haven’t been rescued yet. I could go for another month if I had to with nothing but my backpack and tools.
Life saver #5 = Hand sanitizer. Sanitation is rough here and the hospitals are out of power, food, and water. People are starting to smell and after you touch something you do not want to get sick and go to the hospital because it’s bad there too. The water you do find may not be safe for hand washing without purification. I wash my hands with soap and water and then do hand sanitizer after to stay healthy.
Other things I’ve relied on:
Cash. No power means no debit cards can be used
Disposable cutlery and plates
A 4×4 truck that can drive where others can’t or help tow people to safety
Solar/battery radio
Dogs for company and to alert if someone is outside
Hasn’t mattered as much as I thought:
#1 = Guns! I haven’t even thought about needing my gun and realized I put too much on this. Strangers have come together in our area and are taking care of each other like you wouldn’t believe. Each person has a surplus of something and is missing something else. We all share while still respecting boundaries and only sharing what we choose. Again, this can depend on the area but here if you are acting paranoid/standoffish of others and open carrying a gun, the nice innocent people are going to avoid you and you will be isolated without community or resources. I’m still glad to have a gun but I wish I spent more time on other skills too instead of putting so much emphasis on shooting. (And to anyone who says, “it only takes one time and you will be glad for your aim”, you’re missing the point I’m trying to make here.)
#2 = Food. This is easy to find for me but it may be due to the part of the country I’m in. I can also fish, forage, and don’t cook much because I don’t want to waste water on dishes. I had shelf stable food prepped and lll probably end up only using 25% of it in a month. As people’s freezers start to thaw we’ve had big cookouts so it doesn’t go to waste and I’ve been full most nights.
Again, this list could be based on location, type of natural disaster, weather, etc But it’s interesting to me because I’m actually living it instead of preparing and wanted to share.”
As the correspondent notes in the last graf, it “could” be based on location. And it most certainly is based on the relative health of the social fabric in the area.
It’s a cliché of modern Western life – “youth” rebel against their elders.
Since the dawn of western “youth culture” right around 70 years ago, that’s pretty much always meant a leftward tilt – and in much of the world, it still does.
If an election were held today, Canada’s Conservative Party would win in a landslide and bury the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau. This may not seem impressive after ten years of Liberal rule; most governments wear out their welcome long before then. What’s unusual here is that Conservative support is strong in all demographics—and is strongest among youth. An astonishing 47 percent of those aged 18 to 34 would vote Conservative, and only 24 percent and 17 percent would vote Liberal and socialist, respectively. This represents a complete reversal of the upwelling of youth support that brought the Liberals to power in 2015.
Why has the electorate soured on the Liberals? First, nothing has been a greater turn-off to voters than contemporary progressive activism. Think of the constant bloviating about structural racism and colonialism, the “crisis of whiteness,” and self-accusations of genocide. Twenty years ago, you might have heard such things in a sociology department or undergraduate student lounge; now it emanates from Canada’s top political leaders and cultural institutions. One of the Trudeau government’s first moves was to announce a plan to “decolonize” Canada. In their own telling, the Trudeau Liberals manage a civil service and a military riven by systemic racism and white supremacy, respectively. Everyone knows that such claims are ridiculous, but few have dared say so in public. The predictable result is that only about one-third of Canadians have confidence in the federal government, and 70 percent now agree with the statement “Canada is broken.”
I can remember the general feeling of fatigue with what seemed like the ongoing collapse of the world that prompted so many people my age to vote for Ronald Reagan when we were in our 20s.
I can’t imagine the world doesn’t look a whole lot worse right now.
Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:
Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.
The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.
As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly. Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python. Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.
So the movie was…good. It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it.
But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation. Probably two generations.
Is Reagan the movie to do it? Maybe not.
If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?
Now there, we’re onto something.
Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment. At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within.
And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president.
The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale); the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR.
But this’ll do for now.
For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home.
But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.
Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.
— Frederick Melo, Reporter/Axolotl (@FrederickMelo) August 23, 2024
And Minneapolis:
Building permits have also dropped quite a bit in Minneapolis according to the data. There were 3,000+ total units from 2020-2022, 1,528 in 2023, and 321 so far this year. pic.twitter.com/1PZmKSxlEq
Somehow, though, they’ll be ready to take the entire load (and all those mandated EVs) by 2040?
Reminds me of this classic discourse on solving difficult problems:
I’m going to guess the “miracle”, in this case, will be that everyone involved in setting the policy will be out of government and cashing fat non-profit or lobbying checks by the time energy becomes unaffordable to proles.
Well, at the very least he loved it, back when he was teaching kids “social studies”:
Wow: The Free Beacon dug up this old news article in which Tim Walz defines "communism" as a system in which "everyone is the same and everyone shares." He praised the CCP for providing "food and housing" rations. A real-life communism respecter.https://t.co/OKgcHmGDwUpic.twitter.com/oQUuQN6nG9
There appears to be precious little evidence that he changed anything but his surface decorations (during 12 years as a “moderate” while campaigning in the rural 1st CD).
People who complain about the Electoral College are like people saying the team who scores the most runs in the World Series should win the series, not the team who wins the most games.
Perhaps you heard – conservatives won big in EU elections last weekend.
You might have missed it, because the news only referred to “the far right” – as if Francisco Franco were back from the dead.
Indeed, it’s yet another term that today’s left have rendered meaningless:
The term “far right” has become so loosely applied that it’s effectively useless in sniffing out genuine cases of extremism and more often used to slander reasonable people. pic.twitter.com/sfcIkp2Zdr
Let not pretend this is accidental. Big Left has been working for decades to gain control of the language and its perception. The systematic turning of all “right wing’ thought into some neo-fascist aberration shifted into high gear in 2009, when Obama’s Homeland Security czaritsa Janet Napolitano told the nation’s law enforcement “don’t mind all those leftist terrorists, watch out for all that right wing terror which is going to come out of nowhere someday, pinky swear!”.
Just watch – in a month, NPR and the NYTimes will furrow their brows and wonder why society has had a “Big Sort”…
The good news: these sorts of results usually bode well for elections in America, at least for the upcoming cycle.
In other words: A woman with near 100% name recognition, especially among people who come out for special elections, beat someone nobody had heard of three weeks before the election.
By nine points.
In a district Keith Ellison won by 20, and Governor Klink by 30:
She’s an unknown conservative who ran in the runoff three weeks ago, spent about $700, and got 33% of the vote with no name recognition, running against Mary Moriarty’s spouse and at least one candidate who spent $70K to try to build name recognition, in a runoff. That took her to the final round, today:
Her opponent is Heather Edelson – a sitting Legislator whose sole “accomplishment” was writing a bill that would have banned gas powered lawn mowers in the state. “Lawncare Barbie” has name recognition – and literally nothing else.
Simonetti’s a dark horse – but given the tiny turnout in these special elections for county races, anything is possible.
So:
If you live in the area in the map above – basically all of Henco south of 394 and west of 169 – get to the polls. Bring your family. Extort your kids. Whatever it takes.
If you don’t live in this district, make sure any family you do have in the area turn out and vote for Simonetti.
I always liked the idea of Argentina’s libertarian-conservative President, Javier Milei.
But after seeing this interview, I am actively wondering a bunch of things:
Does the US need to bottom out, as Argentina’s been doing for most of my life – before being ready to, as he says, “put on our long pants?” and embrace the freedom that used to be this nation’s reason to exist?
And where can we get one of him to run for governor in 2026?
The world’s major powers are rattling their sabers as they spar in secondary theaters.
The economies are in the hands of people who love to tinker with the levers and buttons of the Big State.
And young intellectually over-stimulated but underendowed bobbleheads are romping and playing:
THIS SATURDAY: Revolutionary Communists to march to the Wells Fargo Center, demanding that big banks be nationalized under workers' control. Calling on all workers not to vote for either the Democrats or Republicans, come November. Starting 1pm at Minneapolis City Hall. pic.twitter.com/bqt6jPJmFZ
[Since] 2019 — the last pre-COVID year — Minnesota’s real GDP growth has ranked 36th out of the fifty states, coming in at 4.0%, less than half the national rate of 8.1%.
The gross GDP growth comparison is bad. The per capita numbers, even worse:
Minnesota’s recent performance is relatively poor. As Figure 2 shows, between 2019 and 2023, Minnesota’s real, per capita GDP growth ranked 39th out of the fifty states. Again, with growth of 3.1%, Minnesota’s real, per capita GDP growth was less than half that of the United States, 6.6%.
The Walz regime will respond, no doubt, as it always does; with a selfie of “Lieutenant” Governor Flanagan feeding Governor Klink a pronto pup.
Capital, productive citizens and the college kids who are the productive citizens of the future are fleeing. Businesses have been moving their non-white-collar operations out of MInnesota for decades.
You may not win along with it, but that’s your fault for denying reality.
Speaking of denying reality: we warned MInneapolis about the inevitable end results of rent control, high taxes and onerous regulations (aka “everything the Met Council does re housing and transit policy”).
And yet every $%#$%$@# time their chickens come home to roost, they act surprised and angry:
Roughly 7000 apartments in Minneapolis sit empty because landlords refuse to lower their rents to prices our communities can afford.
Thank you @noemptyhomes_mn for hosting a vacancy tour! Landlords letting homes intentionally sit empty during a housing crisis is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/tlSmWqCF0Q
A significant chunk of the far-left clacque that runs politics in the metro are Marxists, either overtly or under the hood.
And an amazing number of them subscribe to the “Labor Theory of Value” – the idea that labor, as opposed to the other three factors (Capitol, Management and Land) is the dispositive factor of production.
I have been challenging adherents for years – test the theory by taking a group of fast food workers, plopping them on a vacant lot, and seeing if a Hardee’s springs up around them.
It’s an absurd test – exactly the one the theory deserves.
The annual “natural change” in Minnesota’s population (births minus deaths) is not enough to compensate for the number of people moving out of the state. In the little over three years from the last census (April 1, 2020) to July 1, 2023, Minnesota saw a natural increase in residents of about 40,400. These gains were wiped out by the net domestic outmigration (people leaving Minnesota for other states) of 46,000. If not for the net “international migration” of 34,600, Minnesota’s overall population would have fallen over this period.
Young people are leaving the state – which is a huge change from when I first moved here, when the Twin Cities were a destination to a lot of recent grads stepping out into adult live.
But hey, maybe protecting criminals while jamming people into ticky-tack multi unit boxes will fix the problem:
This small apartment building just got built between two single family homes a few blocks from me, it should be legal to do this in every neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/iWwm6XBBpq
The Minneapolis City Council’s vote on minimum wages for independent contractor drivers has driven Lyft out of Minneapolis, and Uber out of both cities.
A friend of the blog emails with an initial reaction very close to my own:
That being said, Uber and Lyft were never affordable here in the Twin Cities like they are elsewhere. That is likely because the market here doesn’t support it like it might in cities with higher density populations.
This article mentions that “Seattle and New York City have passed similar policies in recent years that increase wages for ride-hailing drivers, and Uber and Lyft still operate in those cities.”
Yes, well, the cost to use those services was lower to start with because they actually could make money there. So, they are likely still making money even if passengers are paying more to ride. I would bet those services were barely making it here as it was. It’s not hard to drive most places, it’s not even particularly expensive. The downtowns of MSP are mostly dead anyway, so who is using Lyft and Uber at this stage anymore? As far as I can tell, the council’s stupid ordinance just gave them the excuse to pull out.
That was pretty much what I thought; it was yet another case of a prog city council demanding the world violate the laws of economics to give them what they want.
But wait. There’s more.
It’s the current DFL – so one must always check to see if there’s an ulterior motive involving transferring wealth from taxpayers to the DFL’s non-profit/government complex.
Notice the list of priorities does NOT include: “Build The Wall and Make Mexico Pay For It.”
Nor does it include: “StopPissing Away Money in Ukraine.” “Lock Up Criminals” is mostly a local issue but then, so is abortion (now that Roe v. Wade is gone). And I don’t know one single person who favors canceling student loan debt, not even the people making payments on their student loans, who routinely tell me, “I paid my loans, they can pay their loans.”
Comparing this list of priorities to mine, I have to ask: how far out of touch with reality am I?
