Rebecca Brannon is one of perhaps half a dozen actual reporters in the Twin Cities media.

She captured this yesterday at “Pride“:

Looks like someone came up on the wrong end of the intersectional lottery…

The rule changes in baseball this season got a lot of press.

But a rule change in basketball seems to have gotten less press.

Apparently, two field goals inside the three point line is now worth five points.

In related news, the Wooves/Linx “community” group has decared its “Inspirinig Women” winner for 2023:

The DFL did so much damage this past session, it’s hard to track all of it.

Rep. Hudson did a pretty good job of cataloging it – and why it matters (expand the tweet to see it all).

I’ll be talking about this extensively on the show this Saturday.

Something doesn’t quite smell right about this story.

It’s a gay bar, dumping Bud Light over them, abandoning the Dylan Mulvaney campaign.

The stereotype of gay bar patrons is that they have impeccable taste.

We are talking Bud Light.

Anyone else seeing the problem here?

Of course, the lesson to companies is, or should be, “don’t get involved in the culture war. Because once you dip your toe in, there is no “middle ground“.

…when “Cultural Appropriation” was considered a bad thing.

Realtor markets to gays who are hysterical about Texas laws about…

…checks notes…

…restrictions on chemical neutering of mentally-ill minors, by calling his marketing ploy “the Rainbow Underground Railroad”:

When someone goes to the website FleeRedStates.com, a message reads, “As LGBTQIA+ citizens in Red States, many of us feel at risk. Current laws are highly discriminatory against trans youth and their families. Our marriages, our families, and even our safety are at risk. If you feel the need to leave the jurisdiction of a Red State, let us help you sell your property here and connect with you an LGBTQIA+ or ally agent in a better location of your choice. We are licensed in Texas and we have affiliates in all 50 states and several countries.” People can share their contact information to create an account and start the process of connecting with a real estate expert.

“We’re calling it kind of the ‘rainbow Underground Railroad,’” McCranie said. “We’re trying to get people out quietly and get them to someplace where they feel safer.”

And if you are more than two months old, you’re old enough to remember it, too.

SCENE: One morning at MNDFL Headquarters. An array of progressive Minnesota luminaries are gathered around a table. At the head sits Lieutenant Governor Peggy FLANAGAN. To her right, Ken MARTIN, chair of the DFL. The other seats are occupied by Javier MORILLO of the SEIU, Denise SPECHT of Education MInnesota, Alida MESSINGER of Alliance for a Better MInnesota, and the senior staff of Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes, the non-profit/money-laundering operation that works with the party.

FLANAGAN: Murphy!

(Esme MURPHY enters the room): Yes, Maam?

FLANAGAN: Gimme a g*****mn Manhattan.

MURPHY: Yes, ma’am. (Murphy exits.)

FLANAGAN: OK, Ken, where’s the governor?

MARTIN (Yelling): Governor Walz?

WALZ (Enters from a closet next to the exit door). Hraaaa hraaa hraaaas hreaa One Minnesota hraaaaa hra hra hraaaaaa Best State (holds out an iPhone, takes a selfie) hraaaa hraaaa hra hra donut hraaaaaa hraaaaa…

FLANAGAN: Got it! Enough! (WALZ goes back into the closet).

FLANAGAN: We need an example of a place in the real world that is dominated by Democrats and exemplifies love and equity.

Inge “Lucky” CARROLL, a former guidance counselor at a school for monomaniacs, Inge is Head Meme-Buffer at “Minnesotans United for All Liberal Causes, raises her hand.

FLANAGAN: What?

CARROLL: Let’s have them look at Hamtramck, Michigan. It’s solid Democrat country – their Democrat congresswoman won by a sixty point margin. And the city is majority Muslim and is run by an elected Muslim city council, and they just voted…

(CARROLL squints at a site on her phone) uhhhhhhh…

On Tuesday, Hamtramck, Michigan’s city council, unanimously voted to banPride flags from being displayed on public property. Located just outside Detroit, Hamtramck is the only Muslim-majority town in the United States.

The ruling was celebrated with cheers and applause inside City Hall, where dozens of concerned residents, Muslim and Christian, had shown up to express their thoughts on the matter.

According to the Detroit Free Press, the resolution was introduced by Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Mohammed Hassan, and applies not only to Pride flags, but also those promoting any “religious, ethnic, racial, political, or sexual orientation group.”

“Only, the American flag, and the nations’ flags that represent the international character of our City shall be flown,” Hassan stated, adding that it was imperative to “maintain and confirm the neutrality of the city of Hamtramck towards its residents.”

FLANAGAN: (Sits, dumbfounded)

(The closet door opens. Governor WALZ steps out, and wanders around the room like a Roomba)

WALZ: Hraa hra hraaa hra hraaaaa hraaaaa hra BestState hra hraaaa hra Fully Funded hra hra hraaaaaa hra hra hraaa hra…

And SCENE

Maybe, just maybe, the kids will be all right:

Us Gen-X grandparents will have a role in helping our Zeeper/Alpha grandkids reclaim this nation’s actual legacy.

Also: I bet if this keeps up Big Left will stop trying to register teenagers to vote.

Big Media (Loudly). Target is getting threatened for backing off of some trans-forward merch in some stores in some places…

(More quietly): …by pro-LGBTQIAetc advocates.

Conclusion: give in to the wannabe terrorists so the conservatives don’t win!

When trying to win a rhetorical or political battle, the idea is when the fact reflect the proposition that you are winning, and that your victory is inevitable. Not only does it show you are on track to win, but it sucks the morale out of your opponents as the contest slogs to its miserable, inevitable end. Sort of like a Timberwolves season.

The next best thing?

To paraphrase the old law school trope: when the facts are against you, argue the ideals. When the ideals are against you, argue the facts. And when the facts are the ideals are against you, convince the enemy that they favor you anyway.

And that’s what Big Left is trying to do; convince Real America that the game is already over.

It’s nothing new – it’s why they parroted twaddle about “the emerging Blue majority” and “Texas will turn blue!” over the past 20 years, as if all political trends are linear.

But there’ve been a few hot ones lately.

“Minnesota Is Irreversibly Blue!”

The DFL outspent the GOP 18:1 in the 2022 elections – and flipped the decisive seat by less than 400 votes.

Fewer than 1,000 votes would have put the House in GOP control.

But for a pretty dismal showing by the Jensen campaign, and the overturning of Roe (which can’t happen again), the Attorney General and State Auditor were on the cusp of winning.

Yes, statewide races are a problem – and I despair of the current MNGOP cracking that code, not that I’m not gonna try to push it.

But saying “Minnesota is pure blue!” is premature.

“Millennials Are Eternally Progressive!”: Maybe not so much anymore.

In the 2020 presidential election, voters who were 18 to 29 in 2008 backed Joe Biden by 55 percent to 43 percent, according to our estimates, a margin roughly half that of Mr. Obama’s 12 years earlier.

The exit polls show it even closer, with Mr. Biden winning by just 51-45 among voters who were 18 to 27 in 2008 (exit polls report results among those 30 to 39, not 30 to 41 — the group that was 18 to 29 in 2008).

And last fall, the young voters of ’08 — by then 32 to 43 — preferred Democratic congressional candidates by just 10 points in Times/Siena polling.

Nobody stays young and stupid forever (DFL communications staff notwithstanding).

“The General Public Is Embracing The Transgender Ideology”: Sincie 2021, the public perception that there are more than two genders has shifted six points.

Away from the transgender narrative.

Sack up, campers. This fight is just beginning.

I’m not the world’s biggest Matt Walsh fan.

Not because of what he says. Mostly because he’s a podcaster whose podcast gets plopped onto radio with a little editing. It’s not necessarily great radio.

But radio purism aside, I watched “What is a Woman?” last week.

And the part that stuck with me, the part I didn’t already know?

Between hormones, surgery and other clinical charges, every single transition yields a total of $1.3 Million.

The return on investment has to be far better than Covid was.

With that in mind, I caught this the other day. It’s a thread – if you cllck into it, it should yield 5-6 related tweets:

“It’s a racket” would certainly explain a lot of the hamfisted way the DFL jammed the issue down this past session.

To: Calvin McDonald, CEO, Lululemon
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Business Stuff

Mr. McDonald,

Last week, a couple of employees at a Lululemon store were axed after they tried to react like a normal law-abiding human when someone robbed their store.

You defended this response:

Lululemon’s CEO stands by his decision to axe two employees who called the police while three masked men robbed a Georgia outpost, citing the company’s “zero-tolerance policy” for intervening with a robbery as reason for firing the workers.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy that we train our educators on around engaging during a theft,” Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald told CNBC during Friday’s “Squawk on the Street.”

“Educators” are what Lululemon calls its workers…

Ferguson said that once a robbery occurs, workers are instructed to “scan a QR code. And that’s that. We’ve been told not to put it in any notes, because that might scare other people. We’re not supposed to call the police, not really supposed to talk about it.”

However, McDonald said that the policy is in place “because we put the safety of our team, of our guest, front and center. It’s only merchandise,” he told CNBC.

Question : Since it’s “only merchandise”, why even charge for it?

That is all.

To: Target Corp
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporouis Peasant
Re: Your Descent Into Totalitarianism

Target,

I started boycotting you a couple weeks ago, over the whole “grooming little kids” thing.

Truth be told, it’s been pretty easy.

And it just got easier:

I’d be creeped out of a company required employees to be Christian conservatives – but nobody, not even the dreaded Chik-Fil-A, actually does that.

Forcing political compliance on employees?

Yet another reason Minnesota needs to suck it up and elect an actual Attorney General.

Oh, yeah – not spending a dime with you for the duration.

What is the duration? That’s up to you.

That is all.

UPDATE: A friend of the blog emails:

The only significant difference between working for Target and joining a cult is that Target doesn’t kill you if you try to leave (Yet)

I was thinking something more like the French Catholics chasing the Huguenots out of the country

Western “woke” social imperialism apparently has its limits:

If one exhibits “pride” but nobody can hear it, does it exist?

Minnesota is transferring his first transgender female to the Shakopee women’s prison.

But I’m not here to talk about the obvious issue.

No – there are two issues that go way beyond putting (deep breath) bio-men into women’s prisons.

Stay In Your Lane: Shakopee is referred to as a “women’s. prison”.

Is the MN Department of Corrections a bunch of biologists?

Do are they experts in what “women” are? Like this PhD?

Which leads us to another, inarguably more serious problem.

Pronouns Pronouns Pronouns: What’s in the world “Prison?”

The word “Son”.

Since we don’t know the genders of the incarcerated (indeed, the incarcerated themselves may not know at any given time), it’s time to change the name of the facility to “Shakopee Prixyn”.

This piece – about “Allies” who joined forces to make money off of DEI by capitalizinging on someone else’s jape, and went on to eat each other – is almost too perfect to be parody.

SCENE: Minnesota DFL Executive Meeting.

KEN MARTIN (Chait of the MNDFL): Next order of business.

INGE “LUCKY” CARROLL (A former guidance counselor at a school for monomaniacs, Inge is Head Meme-Buffer at “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”). Our next plan is to start building safe spaces for hard drug use.

STACEY HINTON (Executive Director of “Keep All Racists Eternally Nonplussed”, a white progressive support group). Brilliant.

GRETEL STROMBERG ()Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, Stromberg is married to both a woman and a male illegal immigrant) Here’s the news coverage:

KEN MARTIN: Great piece. Fawning and morally bankrupt without going too over the top.

STROMBERG: Like Esme Murphy. .

KEN MARTIN: Yep. Now, we’ll be building these “safe spaces” at places like Summit and Chatsworth, and Crocus Hill, and down amid the condos across from the Guthrie…

( Entire group sits silently, in disbelief, jaws literally dropping).

KEN MARTIN: Hah! You shoulda seen your faces. Nope, we’re building them among the proles.

(Various expressions of relief)

KEN MARTIN: So – between legal weed and shooting galleries, and the schools teaching the next generation to be ignorant, uncritical , compliant and distracted by contrived grievances, the next generation should be really solid DFL voters!~

Round of applause as the scene fades to black.

…about the way high school was when I was a kid that makes me sit up and say “damn, they had the right idea.”

But I do know that if some students had started a petition saying “we don’t want to have graduation at the Civic Center [the only building in town big enough to hold the graduation], so move it or we won’t attend”, the principal – Virgil Buchholtz, who’d been a Marine fighter pilot during World War II – would have settled that quickly and sharply.

Perhaps it’s not being a teenager. Perhaps it’s having raised teenagers. Perhaps it’s reading some history, and realizing how deeply stupid movements on the macro scale led by “youth” tend to be.

But I wish someone in the Chaska/Chanhassen school district had the same common sense that Mr. Buchholtz had when I read stories like this:

Next week, Eastern Carver County Schools plan to host graduation ceremonies for Chaska and Chanhassen high schools at Eden Prairie’s Grace Church. But this year families are pushing for a change in venue after Chaska High Schooler Eli Frost created a petition.

On the petition that now has 364 signatures, Frost wrote: “Grace Church has a long history of making derogatory, public statements against the LGBTQ+ community. Further, they do not support divorce even in situations of domestic violence. As a community of students and parents who represent a wide variety of marginalized identities, we must change this venue.”

Young Mr. Frost has gotten a lot of facts wrong – go ahead and follow the link to Grace Church’s response.

And I hope the Chaskahassen schools have a sudden attack of common sense in the next week.

Whackjob environmentalist protesters crash a Swedish TV dance show.

Robocam operator scores a two-fer:

Consider my week made.

Zawahiri: “Austere Religious Scholar”

Lenin: “Controversial worker’s rights activist”

Nashville school shooter: “Tragic Victim”

Days of rioting, burning, looting: “Mostly Peaceful””.

Dolt in a MAGA hat carrying out perhaps the lowest level of vandalism possible:

“Terrorism”.

By the way – during the early days of the Civil Rights movement, activists were painstakingly trained not to lash out or do stupid things, since they’d be held against the entire movement.

The Tea Party got that pretty instinctively (which is why Big Left and the GOP Consultant Class had to invent their entire case against the Tea Party).

Someone’s gotta tell MAGA.

UPDATE: As you can see from the tweet, people figured it out.

It’s not a good week to be a Target shareholder.

Target’s stock price has taken a hit amid the backlash over its LGBT-themed products.

The New York Post noted on May 17 the retailer’s stock closed at $160.96 per share, giving it a market value of $74.3 billion.

But as of Thursday morning, its stock price was hovering around $140 a share. And its market value was down roughly $10 billion and around $64 billion.

Target is…

…I was about to say “pushing back”.

But it’s more “trying to deflect”: This piece is called “Target is being held hostage by annti-LGBTQ campaign”.

No word if any “pouncing” was also involved.

But here’s the part were I have a question. Target accepts a certain amount of “breakage”; shoplifting, vandalism, even people opening containers to see what’s i before they buy unopened ones. They accept it as part of the cost of doing business – even more so today, when their urban stores are plagued with rampant theft and vandalism.

So about this bit here:

The campaign became hostile, with threats levied against Target employees and instances of damaged products and displays in stores…In the end, Target opted to protect employee safety by removing certain items that it said caused the most “volatile” reaction from opponents.

DIsplays get damaged all the time. And Target employees are no strangers to angry, hostile customers. None of which is OK.

But Target is claiming there’ve been attacks, even violence, against Target workers.

So where are the reports of the actual acts of violence?

No video? Nothing in writing anywhere?

Call me a cynic, but it almost appears that Target is trying to deflect blame for its market bleeding away from tuck-under swimsuits for teenage boys and Satanic designers, and over to the Phantom MAGA Menace.

Someone show me if I’m wrong, here.

UPDATE 7:03 AM

Oh.

Given that the demand for “right wing violence” exceeds the supply by an order of magnitude or two, it was always a safe bet. But hate assuming

I’m not especially big on boycotts.

Problem is, most of the stuff that conservatives are supposed to boycott these days or products, I’ve never used, or companies I’ve never really patronized.

I hadn’t used Gillette razors for years before they beclowned themselves with their anti-masculine ad campaign a few years back. not because they were work, but because they just weren’t very good razors.

I haven’t had beer in something like five years – and even then, I didn’t drink American mass-market beer. So Bud Light was irrelevant (and is only beer in the loose possible sense of the term)

Likewise, given a choice between Starbucks, Caribou, and driving home and making French press, Starbucks always comes in last. Not because of politics, but because it’s the worst value for the dollar.

But after Target’s recent bout of self immolation, I figured that’s a company I can do without.

Yeah, self-immolation:

So, starting last Friday, that’s exactly what I did; I swore off Target until they come around – however, long that takes.

It’s been three days. I’m still alive. Go figure.

If there are two bright spots in this current legislative session, it is the emergence of Harry Niska and Walter Hudson, as two of the best state legislators in the United States.

Here, Walter finishes the job Harry started, giving the single best explanation of why the DFL, and the StarTribune, are lying about the removal of language, regarding pedophilia from state statute.

Pass this around, like it’s hot.

Hot on the heels of the pummeling of Bud Light over choosing a transgender spokesminstrel, this ad campaign claiming the history of beer for feminism, has surfaced:

Corporate virtue-signaling? Sure.

But that’s not the part that annoys me the most.

The worst part is what this says about women in America today.

Money Where Their Mouth Is: Advertisers are, in normal times, perhaps the ultimate practitioners of the free market. They, their campaigns, and their agencies and departments rise and fall on how successfully they gauge the sentiments of their audiences.

For example, the ad agency that conceived of a “Clydesdale” campaign for a certain brand of beer managed to do a superlative job of gauging the effect that ad would have on the ad-viewing audience – not only selling lots of beer, but creating perhaps America’s foremost celebrity draft horse team.

Likewise, the ad agency that thought a group of cute frogs croaking the name of the beer into the dark would sell beer – and they were right.

Good ad agencies, execs and campaigns “read” society correctly.

So – what are they reading?

Impressions: It’s not a big stretch – ads are aimed at the people who buy products.

And within families, households and communities, that varies by what’s being sold.

So think about products where the primary buy/don’t buy decision is men. Classic example – firearms. Ads for firearms portray men as sober, decisive, serious people. That’s how gun owners see themselves and their paths. An ad agency that portrayed their male customers as doughy comic relief would probably have a hard time getting their contract renewed, since the brand’s sales would probably tank. By the way – the women portrayed are also solid, serious people, as well.

Home improvement brands, like hardware stores, tend to take men fairly seriously as well

Beer? Well, the portrayal of men in beer ads is often tongue-in-cheek…:

…and the women portrayed with them tend to be – as the shrieking harpy in the Miller ad notes – somewhat idealized:

In a bikini? Sometimes. The purple middy top is close, in its own way.

But women are portrayed as idealized as a rule. Young, pretty, not stupid – it’s affectionate.

So – when the target audience is women, what then?

Complete contempt, that’s what. The males – especially fathers and boyfriends – in commercials these days wish they were portrayed with the sensitivity of a hot chick in a bikini (although the guy narrating this video gets the message all wrong):

The point being, our ads tell us something about how advertisers (who get paid to get attitudes right) see how we see each other. And from the ads – and the crushing preponderance of them by volume – we learn:

• Men, at least in the last 30-40 years, have affectionate respect for women, while celebrating attraction
• Women think men are hopeless incompetents.

And this has been going on for well over a decade.

So is it any wonder the young fellas of GenZ are forsaking the mating game for video games and pr0n?

It may have felt like I was picking on “Emery” last week, asking him to define exactly when “his” life developed enough moral value that it his. mother would have ceased being able to abort “him”.

Of course, someone who can’t define when their own life acquired moral weight also can’t, logically, tell you why it’s OK for their mother not to abort them now. “I’m alive”. OK – since when? And why? What is this magical threshold? Whistling and hoping the question goes away isn’t much more intellectually honest than telling your teenagers that the stork brings babies.

But I have yet to meet a Democrat, anywhere, at any level, who can, will or, I suspect, is allowed to try to answer that question.

So, that’s one such question.

What are the rest?

Let’s build a list: the questions no Democrat can, will, or is allowed to answer:

When Did It Become Not Acceptable For Your Mother To Abort You.

Not some generic woman. Not some abstract fetus. Your mom, and you. When did your life gain moral standing? When did your body (and, uh, associated consciousness, mind, spirit or soul) become someone with its own bodily autonomy?

How Can You Tell “Universal” Background Checks Are Working Without A Registry?

The police find a gun. They suspect that the person who got the gun to the perp didn’t take a background check. If the record doesn’t exist tying a transfer to the perp, how do you prove it if all of them aren’t kept on record?

And how is this record – of data points, almost like, I dunno, a base of data (is there a word for that) kept, without a registry?

So, What City Got (Sustainably) More Affordable After Rent Control?

Beyond New York and San Francisco, the list of places with rent control and the list of cities with literally zero habitable affordable housing are pretty much the same list.

Why do high school kids earning Minimum Wage – who, according to the BLS, overwhelmingly live in homes with middle class incomes – need a “living wage”?

Don’t say “because many of them support their families” – most of them don’t, and as we saw last week, the “living wage” has slashed low-income jobs in the Twin Cities.

So…why?

I’d like to continue the list. Any others?

University of Saint Thomas, as a matter of policy, apparently doesn’t tell young women if their assigned dorm roommate is is a bio-male who identifies as female:

This, according to [UST Housing Director Zoe] Chang, is done as discreetly as possible in order to avoid upsetting parents. The video, OMG said in an email, documents the “mountain of rule changes and preferential treatment provided to trans students when it comes to their housing accommodations.”

The video:

1st OMG Citizen Journalist-Led Story:

A Citizen Journalist was rewarded $1000 for this recording obtained about a Catholic University allowing "trans girl" to room in the girl’s dorm without their knowledge. pic.twitter.com/eFmsTZnm1W

— O’Keefe Media Group (@OKeefeMedia) May 10, 2023

If progressive policies are so unambiguously good, why do they have to lie about all of them?