Humans: “My God, this is horrible. Those poor girls…“
DFL/Media (pardon the redundancy): “OK, who leaked the video?“
Well, no – I’m actually not exaggerating (thread):
The problem, Ms. Moriarty, is that nobody trust you or your office. Not even a fair chunk of people who would never consider not voting for the DFL.
The Strib finally hired a new editorial cartoonist to replace the worthless and unlamented Steve Sack.
It’s Mike Thompson.
And he’s brought a new sound to Minneapolis.
No, not the popping of the Glock full-auto conversion.
It’s the wailing and gnashing of entitled, plush-bottom, White progressive Minneapolis Yoo-hoos losing their spit over being lampooned by an editorial cartoonist.
They have no frame of reference. Modern MSM editorial cartoons have all the intellectual diversity of The Colbert Show or NPR.
So the calls for “canceling” Thompson have already started.
It’ll be interesting to see if Thompson is forced to repent of his sins.
I flipped on NPR last night to catch a (large) part of a Terry Gross interview with historian Adam Hochschild, on his new book about the grave threats to democracy during World War 1.
And it was a dismal time indeed. “Sedition”, defined broadly, threw thousands in jail. The Department of Justice deputized people to enforce government speech codes and arrest people for suspicion of, basically, thought-crime; it was the first time in history that federal institutions had enough power and budget to get weaponized, and that is exactly what happened. Jim Crow was, by the way, federalized.
But here’s the thing; while Hochschild calls the repression “Trump-y” at one point, and Gross makes a raft of her usual Kaelian innuendos, you can listen to the piece all the way through…
…in vain for a reference to the fact that Woodrow Wilson, the father of modern “progressivism”, and an enthusiastic actual white supremacist to boot, drove all of this from the ground up.
“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.
The DFL is getting nervous about crime; their line has morphed from “We ARE tough on crime!” to “The other guys are no better”.
Dane Smith’s editorial parrots the execrable Paul Krugman; both of them are utterly, unforgivably wrong.
“Red” states with crime problems have one or more of the following factors in common:
1) They have one or more large cities, usually Democrat-controlled. Tennessee has Memphis. Louisiana has NOLA. Alabama has Birmingham. Even in Minnesota, if you leave out Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the violent crime rates are almost European level.
2) Scots-Irish culture, exacerbated by centuries of poverty driven by the servitude culture that led to “white trash” culture. Dueling, honor killing and violence as an accepted part of life are still fairly routine down south. They were even MORE routine when the South was Democrat. They were, in fact, routine before the US was a nation. It’s why parts of rural South Carolina and Louisiana are as dangerous, *per capita*, as Chicago.
Krugman and Smith ignore a couple of vital facts.
1) Yes, *Conservative* policies *do* curb crime. 30 years ago, New York City was one of the most dangerous cities in America. They elected Rudy Giuliani, who replaced social justice mewling with law enforcement – and made NYC a place you could take your kids to. He wasn’t the only one; Jersey City elected Brett Schundler 30 years ago, and nine years of his very conservative leadership turned Jersey City from a crime-riddle hellhole to the jewel of the Jersey side (for a while, anyway).
2) Why do neither Krugman nor Smith point out that places like the rural, hard-red West have crime down around European levels? “But empty land doesn’t have crime problems”, some innumerates may reply – but we’re talking *per capita rates*. Still, they make a point – cities have pathologies that lead to crime. And they are overwhelmingly blue. Correlation? Causation? I don’t know – and it’s for certain Krugman and Smith don’t.
3) “Red” policies DID work, already, in Minneapolis. In the late ’90s, the city went from being among the nation’s most dangerous to a fairly safe one for close to a decade and a half, ENTIRELY due to diliegent law enforcement, including cracking down on career criminals. (Were there excesses? Absolutely. That’s the hard part – given a choice between public safety and ethical police, CHOOSE BOTH, NO EXCEPTIONS .
4) Whatever you can say about “red” law enforcement, “blue” law enforcement has been a failure…EVERYWHERE. In large part because they believe, in Lisa Bender’s words, that public safety is a “privilege”.
So – if a Democrat says it, and it’s about crime in particular, it’s a lie. There’s no way to pretty that up.
Smith and Krugman are trying to deflect the gullible. Do not let it work.
The Star Tribune continues to earn its keep as the DFL‘s “unpaid “ PR machine:
For those of you who weren’t paying attention to the GOP convention last weekend – it hardly needs to be said, but nothing of the sort of happened.
A move to disaffiliate with the “Log Cabin Republicans” (to be fair, led by someone who has never been a fan of the notion of LGBTQ Republicans) wrapped up in a procedural motion to vote on the affiliation of each and every affiliate with the party (there are quite a few) led to the clock literally running out on the State Central Committee meeting on Thursday. For the evening, it left the affiliates unattached, and their delegates not credentialed to be seated in the convention.
The body of the convention itself reversed that action on Friday.
This squabble – largely led by a representative from the first congressional district – mirrors in large part a similar fracas a few years ago, when a group of Central committee representatives and convention delegates tried to introduce rules that would bar Muslims from holding Republican Party positions.representatives and convention delegates tried to introduce rules that would bar Muslims from holding Republican Party positions.
It’s the position of this blog that, whatever your personal beliefs about homosexuality and/or Islam, that there is very little that is more aggressively American than “coming out“ as a Republican. Not even buying a house in Burnsville, with a literal freaking picket fence surrounding your front yard.
Indeed, in many of the communities served by these affiliates – Somali, Latino‘s, African-Americans, mong and LGBTQ Dash “coming out“ as a Republican carries an affirmative social risk these are not people to be pushed away; they are frequently the toughest, most resilient Republicans there are.
People may disagree. Let’s disagree.
But let’s also focus on the things we do agree on; for example, the Star Tribune are a bunch of partisan hacks..
SCENE: The studio at the National Public Radio Twin Cities bureau. Mitch BERG is sitting, in headphones, in front of a microphone. Around the corner of the table is Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, she is the office manager at a small phrenology practice. Through the glass, an engineer, an assistant engineer, an editor, an editorial assistant, two associate producers, a producer, a digital producer and an executive producer sit, listening intently. Across the table from SCAT and BERG sits MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats.
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER 1: “Aaand we’re rolling”.
SILBERMAN: (Reading from a script). Thanks, Kathy. That dress is adorable, by the way. Now, we look at America’s large and growing political divide. With us today are Cat Scat, Executive Fact-Checker at the journalism site “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”, a source of journalism and news for Minnesotans since 2008.
SCAT: Hello. Is this thing on?
SILBERMAN: And Mitch Berg, blogger and talk radio host.
BERG: Uh…yeah, hi.
SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation…
BERG: Er, MylLyssa? That’s not true – on either side. People on the left were concerned about a rise in populism in Europe in the early 20`0s, when, rightly or wrongly, they fretted about the rise of the Volkspartei in Germany, and Victor Orban’s Fideš party in Hungary, as well as some pretty potent Polish nationalism. In the meantime, conservatives in the US have been concerned about the politicization of the state bureaucracy, with Barack Obama weaponizing some of the tools of excessive power that George W Bush instituted during his administration’s control over the War on Terror…
(BERG stops, noticing that SILBERMAN and SCAT are glaring at him).
ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Take two?
SILBERMAN: Yep
LEAD ENGINEER: Rolling.
SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation. As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting boog bang… (stops). we’ll cut that in the edit. (deep breath) book bans, restrictions on saying “gay”, bans on reproductive rights, and a rise in hate from the right…
PRODUCER: (breaking in on the talkback): MyLyssa – read that as “skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color and LGBTQ+ Americans.
EDITOR: …and “women and their children”.
PRODUCER: Love it. Got that, MyLyssa?
SILBERMAN: (scribbline on script) Got it.
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Take it from “As right wing…” (SILBERMAN nods)
ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Three, two, one…
SILBERMAN: As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting book bans, restridctions on saying “gay”, and skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color, LGBTQ+ Americans and women and their children, we want to get the views of our guests – Cat Scat, progressive journalist and activist, and Mitch Berg, right wing hatemonger.
BERG: Uhhhhh
SILBERMAN: Ms. Scat, what’s your take?
SCAT: The problem entirely started in 2016, when hatemongers took over the White House, ushering in an era of hatred for people of color, for LGBTQ+, for women’s reproductive choice, for transgender and queer folk, for demoracy itself, and replacing it with a paranoid neo-nazi ammosexual delusions of a bunch of red-state trailer-park dwelling cousin-f**king high school dropouts, which studies show the majority of red America are…
BERG: I’m gonna break in, here. Your statement is the kind of lie that gets legs of its own if you let it fester. It’s a preposterous slander of tens of millions of millions of Americans; we almost invariably are motivated not by hate, but by concern over the trashing of the parts of Western Civilization that have made us not only the free-est and most prosperous society in history – one where for the firs time ever, obesity is a bigger problem than starving to death – but more humane, especially for gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about, and don’t support authoritarians, ever, in any way.
PRODUCER: What can we do with that last bit.
ENGINEER: Wait one…
(freantic computer editing)
ENGINEER: OK, here’s what we got:
(BERG’s voice, edited, in the playback): “I’m gonna break…Your…legs …we… hate… the trash…of Western Civilization…obesi…gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about and…support authoritarians…in any way.
SILBERMAN: So you hate people of weight as well as POC, LGBTQ+ and Latinx people…
SCAT: You’ve been fact-cjhecked!
BERG: I did in fact record the original unedited exchange on my phone and this digital recorder.
SILBERMAN: Unfair!
PRODUCER: Chilling effect on journalism!
EDITOR: Why do you hate the free press?
And SCENE
Based, loosely but not nearly loosely enough, on an MPR piece I caught last week.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says — no mandate for you:
A federal appeals court has upheld its stay on President Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for companies with at least 100 employees.
In a 22-page ruling on Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the mandate was “fatally flawed,” and barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from enforcing the mandate “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for permanent injunction.
OSHA shall “take no steps to implement or enforce the mandate until further court order,” the ruling stated.
ADVERTISEMENTThe mandate, which was supposed to take effect Jan. 4, requires business with at least 100 employees to mandate their workers get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing.
Two predictions:
This blog was founded primarily to lend my small, relatively insignificant voice to pointing out the growing bias and ethical turpitude the mainstream media.
That was in 2002 – a much more innocent time, relatively speaking.
As we’ve documented the proceedings in the Rittenhouse trial, I’ve noted the scabrous, depraved slant in the coverage.
Someone actually put ’em in the same place:
Local media is no better; most ran headlines similar to the above during Monday’s proceedings – only Channel 11 made a quick headline reference to the fact that Grosskreutz incriminated himself and upheld Rittenhouses self-defense claim against him (without saying it in as many words, naturallly).
Public media? NPR and MPR this morning ran a report from Wisconsin Public Radio about yesterday’s proceedings that focused on a dispute over whether the owner of the used car lot where the incident started did or did not pay, or even ask, civilians to provide security – which will have no impact on the verdict, other than perhaps gulling any potentially dim jurors…
…and ignored the county Medical Examiner and photographer Nathan DeBruin, who largely upheld Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim.
I tend to give people the benefit of a doubt. Reporters aren’t largely lawyers. Many of them aren’t curious enough to go much past the press releases that seem to make up so much of one’s morning newscast.
But this goes way past ignorance, and given the amount of reliable information that is available, incompetence as well.
They are pushing a narrative; protesters good, protests mostly peaceful, resistance entirely depraved and motivated by white supremacy.
To the narrative, the battle is a reductionist cartoon with white hats on one side and MAGA caps on the other, counting on news consumers to be too dim to know the difference.
As the 2020 elections, the California recount, and the recent election in Austin Texas show, its not wrong.
That feeling when you search, and search, and search, believing that something you see on social media just has to be from the Babylon Bee.
NPR (I listen so you don’t have to) has a story on Paris’s crack problem – which, after a year of lockdown, has gone pretty public.
Near the end of the piece, the reporter reassures the NPR audience that at least there isn’t any gun violence, due to France’s strict gun controls.
Thing is, even in the US, guns and all, crack addicts rarely shoot each other. Oh, they sometimes use guns to rob people to get money and fence-able goods for their next fix – but the NPR piece doesn’t favor us with anybody sight as to how French baseheads pay for their buzz. Given hiw defenseless French Gun control, leaves citizens, there’s less need to use a gun to rob people, but again, the report goes into no details.
No, in the US it’s gangs, taking and defending turf and herding beeves, thst do the shooting. And it seems French gangs don’t have that much trouble getting guns.
SCENE: A conference room at “Minnesotans for All Progressive Causes” – a non-profit group financed by progressives with deep pockets – for the weekly message coordination meeting.
MyLyssa Silberman, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, waits in the conference room along with Betty Rae Torstengaardsen, senior staff writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, sit, along with Mesme PHURPHY, elite objective political reporter from WCCO-TV They nervously check their watches.
Eventually, Gretel Stromberg Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, and Inge “Lucky” Carroll, Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, enter the room.
CARROLL: (Looks at Silberman and Torstengaardsen and Phurphy, clears throat).
SILBERMAN, PHURPHY AND TORSTENGAARDSEN: (quickly rise from their seats)
STOMBERG: Be seated. (All sit, with STROMBERG at the head of the table). Americans are rejecting the term “insurrection” to describe the January 6 riot. We need to come up with another term.
PHURPHY: How about ‘genocide’?
CARROLL: Love the energy, Mesme, but it might be a bit of an overreach.
TORSTENGAARDSEN: I mean, ‘riot’ pretty much sums it up.
(STROMBERG and CARROLL cough nervously).
TORSTENGAARDSEN: Er…never mind.
SILBERMAN: ‘Coup’ usually implies the elites seizing control. ‘Insurrection’ implies a sustained, military campaign, like the Viet Cong or the IRA.
STROMBERG: I’ll go with “Putsch“.
(The three “journalists” sit, somewhat agape. Finally, SILBERMAN speaks)
SILBERMAN: So – a term that, outside a very thin film of political science and history academics, refers in American English solely to Hitler’s abortive 1922 Munich coup attempt?
(The three “journalists” look at each other)
PHURPHY: Works for me.
TORSTENGAARDSEN: Yep.
SILBERMAN: I hear and obey.
STROMBERG: (abruptly rising) Make it so. (Leaves the room with CARROLL).
And SCENE
If government tells you something, distrust but verify. And then, usually, distrust some more.
If the media tells you something – at least, anything about an event that is especially socially fractious – distrust, and verify even harder. And, as always, usually wind up distrusting even more.
If any of Big Left’s social hangers on declares some thing with immense servitude? Distrust, verify, and, well, you know the drill.
Last week was the fifth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
“Perish the thought, it couldn’t possibly have been a deranged man tied to and eliminationist sect of Islamism“, Big Media media assured us. “It was an anti-LGBTQ hate crime, nothing more, nothing less“.
Which is how the media and Biden administration have been treating it, over this past weekend
Distrust. Verify.
Continue distrusting.
REPORTER: “Maxine Waters called for violence”
EDITOR: “Did she do it on January 6?”
REPORTER: “No”
EDITOR: “Then it wasn’t violence”.
TEACHER: “Marco, can you gell us what the ‘Holocaust’ was?
MARCO: “Er…January 6?”
TEACHER: “Correct…”
PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “Gascoigne checks O’Reilly into the boards…”
COLOR GUY: “Oh, wow. Cheap hit, there…”
PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “Aaaaand off come the gloves. We’ve got a donnybrook going here”
COLOR GUY: “Hockey used to be such an artistic game. How far hockey has fallen, since it’s first ever fight, last January 7”.
PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “RIght you are, Guy”.
MOM: “Why isn’t your homework done, Junior?”
JUNIOR: “January 6”
MOM: “Fair enough”.
GUY A: “Who was that woman who got arrested here in Highland a few years back for being a terrorist?”
GAL B: “Sarah Jane Olson. She was arrested for being involved in January 6″.
GUY A: “I thought it was from in the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the seventies?”
GAL B: “Couldn’t be. There was no political violence before January 6”
GUY A: “Doh. My bad”.
TOUR GUIDE: “Welcome to Volgograd – formerly Stalingrad”.
TOURIST:”Excuse me – will we see any monuments to the Battle of Stalingrad?”
TOUR GUIDE: “What?”
TOURIST: “The epic battle between the Nazis and Soviets, in 1942-43?”
TOUR GUIDE: “I don’t understand. There was no war or violence of any kind before January 6”.
KOMMISSAR (yelling from off-camera left (where else?)): “Or since!”
GOVERNOR WALX: “Any questions?”
REPORTER: “Tell us why you moved people with Covid into nursing homes?”
WALZ: “It was January 6. It was responsible for everything“.
REPORTER: “Thanks!”
BOSS: “Er, let’s talk. You’ve turned in no work yet this year.”
PROGRESSIVE EMPLOYEE: “After January 6, how could I?”
BOSS: “Fair point”.
TEACHER: OK, Chad, what do the Gulf War, World War 2, World War 1, the Civil War, the War of the Roses, and the French Revolution have in common?
CHAD: Um…
TEACHER: Besides being called wars.
CHAD: Um…I don’t know?
TEACHER: None of them existed. Because there was no violence of any kind before January 6.
COP (PULLING WOMAN OVER): “Do you know how fast you were going, ma’am?”
WOMAN: “After January 6, does it even matter?”
COP: “Good point. You’re free to go”.
PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “Now, Barack, eat your lima beans…
CHILD OF PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “After what happend January 6?”
PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “Damn. He’s right”.
As clubby, self-referential and solipsistic as the modern “elite” (and even not-so-elite) media is, I should have probably predicted we’d see scenes like this whenever Trump was on the brink of leaving office.
Never mind that “the Lightworker” Obama was did a whole lot more actual oppressing of “journos” than Trump.
No. To these coddled hamsters…:
…covering Trump was up there with going ashore with the first wave on Omaha Beach, or like riding in a B24 with Charles Collingwood.
Which is a little ironic, given that The LIghtworker was, in fact, the most press-hostile President since Woodrow Wilson – and given the deep-state leaks with which the executive branch was riven, it would have been pointless for The Donald to even try to match Obama’s record.
Fresh from victory against CNN, Nick Sandman’s attorneys are widening their scope:
Lawyers for Covington Catholic High School senior Nick Sandmann reportedly will file lawsuits against five additional media companies this week for smearing Sandmann last year.
Sandmann’s lawyers submitted a status report with the U.S. District Court in Covington last week that showed that “they intend to file complaints against Gannett, ABC, CBS, The New York Times and Rolling Stone before March 9,” Fox 19
Functional representative government requires institutions that people can actually trust.
And thinking of all the institutions in our society that we just can’t trust…:
…and, of course, our news media, is one of the more sobering exercises when one wonders what the future of our republic is going to be.