As Predicted

Last December 8, when the DFL was crowing about having a “$17.6 Billion Surplus”, I noted tha the so-called “surplus” was nothing but bIllions of dollars in federal Covid stimulus dollars, routine Minnesota DFL overtaxation (plumped up by receipts driven up by inflation in the cost of the goods being taxed, and that all of that that taxation and inflation was going on over an epipandemic surge in stimulus-swollen consumer spending that would end with the subsidies.

And I predicted:

  • The DFL will turn that “$27.6 Billion in Surplus” into permanent spending
  • The economy will slow into recession (as even the DFL’s cheerleaders in their bespoke press are starting to observe).
  • Without the Covid stimuli, and with the economy contracting, tax receipts will crash again. “Unexpectedly”
  • The state will have a multibillion dollar deficit by 2026, probably 2024.

I think it’s fair to say the first bullet is in the 10 ring:

“Seemingly”.

Of course, some are taking this as a cue to celebrate:

No word from Rep. Stevenson if making the trains run on time is next.

My ultimate prediction – billions in deficits – is now inevitable.

No, it’s not just me. Walter Hudson:

Planting Season

A regular reader sent me this:

Social services get funding based on how much need exists – which means it’s in their interests to make sure people know to get their needs out, front and center.

No stone left unturned.

Tina Smith: Filthy Liar

Senator Smith took to Twitter to shill for “ESG“ – rules that require businesses to make decisions based on “Environment, Social Credit, [woke corporate] Governance l”practices.in other words, replacing fiduciary responsibility with “woke“ “social justice“ (read: Marxist) values.

there are really only two possibilities:

  • Smith really is this ignorant.
  • She knows she can count on a majority of her voters being this ignorant.

Given the last few elections in Minnesota, #2 isn’t the dumbest strategery .

Bottles

Never let it be said the DFL isn’t on top of the important issues.

Democrats have introduced a bill in the Minnesota Legislature that would ban the sale of bottled water in the state.

Introduced earlier this month by Rep. Sydney Jordan, a Democrat from Minneapolis, the bill would prohibit manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers from “selling or offering for sale bottled water in Minnesota.”

The bill defines bottled water as “water contained in a formed or molded container” that is “comprised primarily of plastic resin, sealed, and holds less than two liters when full.”

They’re not on top of them.

But the powers that be will never let it be said.

Pot Calling The Kettle A Terrorist

To: Senator Omar Fateh
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Bad Look

Sen. Fateh,

You said this:

I suspect you, like all DFLers, know your voters don’t know any better, and wouldn’t think about it critically if they could, which they can’t, but perhaps you’re not the one to be yapping about your colleagues’ propriety.

That is all.

Nothing To See Here

I guess everyone is just finding ways to economize, these days.

I suspect that’s one of the radionaliztions batted around the Strib, WCCO and MPR newdsrooms after learning that questions about the ethics of pouring “consulting“ money into a firm owned by her husband, Omar has been spending a lot less on consultants:

A lot.

Fox News is reporting that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign has paid out comparatively little in consulting fees after cutting ties with a firm co-owned by her husband.

According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings reviewed by the outlet, Omar’s payments to political consultants fell to around $1 million during the 2022 midterm election season.

That is a two-thirds decline from the nearly $3 million she had paid to E Street Group, a firm co-owned by her husband, Tim Mynett, during the 2020 election cycle, when she faced a far less competitive primary challenger.

By the way, they’re referring to her current husband. Not the guy who was no way, no how her brother, you racist.

Drip

Whenever your “progressive“ friends condescendingly coo “nobody’s coming after your guns“, just remember that career bureaucrat and St. Paul, representative Dave Pinto is out there plying his trade:

School counselors.

Leftist ministers at “progressive“ churches

Marriage counselors, with six hyphenated last names.

These are a partial listthe people that today’s DFL wants to give control over your civil rights.

By the way – where to fight that mental health crisis, making half the population distrust the mental health industry.

A Boot On Your Neck. Forever.

Democrats in Minnesota and nationwide are switching into enforcement mode.

The legal persecution of Jack Phillips continues…

Phillips’s public expression of his faith had placed a target on his back, and the narrow Supreme Court ruling in his favor had the two-pronged effect of further inflaming activists while simultaneously depriving the baker of decisive, precedent-setting protections against their agitations. In 2017, “the very day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist in Denver, called Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a gender transition,” David Harsanyi wrote. Scardina was allegedly a member of the Church of Satan, and court documents alleged the activist had also sought Phillips’s services for charming depictions such as a cake celebrating Satan’s birthday, which would feature “a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo,” with the requirement that the dildo must necessarily be “an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”

Phillips, of course, politely declined Scardina’s requests. Scardina, of course, proceeded to file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission, of course, ruled against Phillips. In August 2018, two months after his initial Masterpiece Cakeshop victory, Phillips was back in court.

Last week, a panel for the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld an earlier court decision requiring Phillips to bake Scardina’s transgender cake. No surprise there — the same court had also upheld the state’s original injunction demanding that Phillips bake the same-sex wedding cake. What should be abundantly clear at this point is that “civil rights,” in this context, are more about power — wielded against disfavored groups, and in favor of privileged ones — than any neutral conception of legal protection. Even as it ruled against Phillips, the Commission upheld the right of bakers to refuse to make a Bible-shaped cake inscribed with the message: “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2.” This double standard is a feature, not a bug, of how these bureaucracies function. As NR’s editors noted today, the practical effect of the Left’s weaponization of anti-discrimination laws “is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups.”

…and is so hamfistedly symbolic that a sophomore-year English prof would send it back for rewrite if it were fiction.

The process is the punishment.

Of course, the MNDFL does its darnedest to make it difficult, even impossible, to run as a Republican. I’ve heard more than one GOP legislator who’d been pondering running for higher office without having spent their teens and twenties as cloistered monks say they were going to demur on running , because the DFL’s opposition research crowd would make not only their lives, but their family’s, a living hell.

WIth that in mind?

Keith Ellison is going to show Scott Jenson that running against the DFL has consequences. Via David Strom:

…the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota has taken it upon himself to step up the harassment of Dr. Jensen based upon already adjudicated charges that should never have been brought in the first place. It is disgraceful and can be explained by nothing other than politics.

It is a political hit job–punishment not for what he has done, or even said, but for who he is. A well-respected Republican who dared to challenge Tim Walz in the last election. They are sending a message that taking on the Democrat establishment will ruin your life.

I said above that the process is the punishment. At some point, the determination that he may continue to conduct medicine will not exonerate him, nor return the time, effort, and money that he has to spend to defend himself. They have turned him into a doctor who has faced 5 investigations. How many potential patients will avoid him for that alone? Countless.

No matter how bogus the charges are, the punishment has taken place simply by making the charges and forcing him to defend himself.

Politics ain’t beanbag, and it is usual for people in the midst of campaigns to hurl charges at each other. But this goes way beyond that. They are mobilizing all the power of the state to destroy Jensen.

This is what tyranny looks like in America.

When all your oppoonent cares about is gaining and consolidating power, “democracy” is just a decorative verbal sprig of parsley on top of whatever horrors our new Leninists are hoiking up.

The Bullied Pulpit

Remember last year, in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, when Kansas referred a constitutional amendment banning abortion to a popular vote…

…and it lost?

In deep-red (but for Wichita and Kansas City) Kansas?

Big Left took it as a bit of great news – “Even Red America is pro-choice!”

Smarter Americans read it this way: America is divided on abortion:

  • About 15% want abortion through all forty weeks, and maybe even a little after (no, I’m not bveing hyperbolic).
  • 20-odd percent want to ban abortions completely – many with exceptions in the rare cases where the mother’s life is at risk.
  • The remainder support some form of abortion, with support sloping steadily downward from six to 20 weeks, and nearly vanishing after the halfway point in the pregnancy.

The DFL, dominated by that first 15%, has jammed down the most extreme interpretation of “choice” this side of California. Will the people lash back from the extremes, the way they (arguably) did in Kansas?

Well, if I have anything to do with it.

One group that should, doctrinally, be in the second 20% – or at least the most moderate parts of the larger 60% – is Catholics. Of course, we know Catholics oppose abortion, because Catholics never get divorced or eat meat on Fridays, either…

…but if there was ever a time for a hypothetical archdiocese to get serious about doctrine, one might think this would be it.

Ten Catholics in the House, and three in the Senate, voted for the “PRO Act”.

Now, at least a few Catholic bishops and priests have invoked ecclesiastical sanctions against some “pro-choice Catholics”, so it’s not without precedent.

So the question remains – is Archbishop Hebda going to do his job, or find some artful and obtuse grounds to evade it?

A Time For Choosing

A. send your goons after businesses, trying to survive your administrations unconstitutional lockdown. Openly sided with rioters against law abiding people.

Or

B. Yap about “upholding the dignity of every Minnesotan”.

Pick one.

What’s Ojibwe For “Buuuurn”?

Lieutenant, governor Flanigan – who is known to wear an Anishanabe costume when it suits her, politically – was crowing about Minnesota being on the brink of adopting, the most radical abortion law in the country., and one of the worst in the world:

Former senator Matt Dean caught her on the facts.

But Representative Donna Bergstrom – also an Ojibwe – had the burn that we’ve been looking for:

I bet the Ojibwe had words for “murder”, “outsider who’s not supposed to be among us without some scrutiny”, and “petty tyrant”.

The “Party Of Science” (TM) In Action

I was down at the State Capitol yesterday morning for the Gun Owners Lobby Day.

While there, I ran into a bunch of legislator friends, including former Representative, now Senator Eric Lucero.

Who told me this story, which I’m pleased to pass on to all of you now.

Anyone get the impression Senator Mitchell was a “Meteorologist” at a failing small-market TV station before becoming part of the DFL machine?

Maybe Steve Carell studied her before doing “Anchorman?”

The Ghouls Among Us

During the debate on the state’s #1 priority, Rep. Peggy Scott asked Rep. Skeletor when a baby becomes human.

Liebling’s response:

I’m going to park this is a post for 2024. The media will try to memory-hole this entire shameful episode. I may not be able to fix that, but in the little corner of the world I influence, this is going to be a topic in about 18 months.

Now Be Thankful

Amy Klobuchar should be thankful to the feminist goddess that Tina Smith is in Congress.

Because as long as she is, A-Klo is not the dumbest Senator in our delegation.

Shot:

Chaser:

To be fair, Smith says it because she knows Democrat voters don’t do critical thought.

The Party Of Science Part MCMLXV

DFL representative Sandra Feist, from the moldy blue suburbs of Henco, speaking on behalf of a bill that would, uh…

…put tampons in boys restrooms in Minnesota schools:

Remember – there is no such thing as “woke culture“, peasants!

While not a single tampon in will be used to deal with a “period” in a bio-boy, I do predict this will lead to a golden age of practical jokes played with tampons.

BTW, the Moe Howard estate called. There will be a cease and desist coming from their lawyers about that hairdo.

The Party Of Science In Action

I pity the poor schlubs at the Babylon Bee and The Onion.

How hard must it be to actually satirize the modern left?

Speaking of which – this was in the MN House:

While gender may be a, uh, “social construct”, so is insanity.

DNA, however, is not.

“Safe, Legal and Rare”

The Bad News: The DFL ran on abortion last fall, and won,.

The Worse News: They’re making hay with that “Mandate”, working to remove protections in Minnesota law for infants actually born alive:

The “Born Alive Infants Protection Act” was passed by the Minnesota Legislature in 2015. It states that abortion survivors should be fully recognized as human persons and provided with medical care to preserve their lives.

Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, wants to repeal these protections because they are an “insult” to doctors, she said during a House Health Committee meeting Thursday.

Her bill would also repeal restrictions on the use of public funds for abortion and a requirement that aborted babies be “disposed” of in a “dignified and sanitary” manner.

So not only can DFL doctors murder babies on their way out of the birth canal, they can dump the bodies wherever they want to. Hey, that’s progress.

The Good News, Maybe: After this session, there won’t be a whole lot more abortion for the DFL to run on.

The Worse News: I expect the DFL to run on legalizing murder of children up to age 13. Unless they’re transgender.

Open Letter To HennCo

To: Hennepin County
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: You’re Screwed Blue

Dear HennCo

I can’t believe I missed this; your new co-chief public defender (FKA “County Prosecutor”) was sworn in this past week.. As befits an unserious person in an unserious city at an unserious time, she was sworn in on a comic book:

The new attorney of Hennepin County, Mary Moriarty, took her oath of office Tuesday with her hand placed on a copy of a graphic novel about the late congressman John Lewis.

Photos from the swearing-in ceremony show Moriarty with her hand on a copy of “March,” which she described as a “graphic novel trilogy about Congress Member John Lewis and his courageous fight for voting rights.”

A comic book.

I may start rooting for the criminals at this rate.

Oh, yeah – no surprises here:

“Research and data show that non-restorative models of punishment do not prevent recidivism, do not repair families, and cause harm to a community. Incarceration, sometimes a year or more after a crime is committed, disconnects the punishment from the impact of a crime on a victim,” she says on her campaign website.

“Incarceration disconnects the person who committed violence from their community and makes reintegration extremely difficult,” the website adds. “Mary’s office will seek to provide an alternative to traditional prosecution through restorative justice as an option for victims.”

She also opposes the cash bail system, which is “not helping to make our community safer.”

So strap in, HennCo. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

This Is The DFL Majority In Action

The Senate voted to allow water bottles on the floor of the chamber.

After 45 minutes of debate.

And when I say “debate“ I mean this sort of thing from my “Senator“, Sandi Pappas.

Weird. I didn’t think Democrats believed in slippery slopes?

As someone else put it:

Mission Creepy

I used to think DFLers merely counted on voters being ignorant.

I was young and naive.

They actively promote ignorance:

Senator Morrison is an M.D, so she certainly isn’t stupid. She must know that the imponderably vast majority of those “children”. are boys aged 14+ who are involved in crime, mostly murdered by other young men like themselves, likewise started on the wrong path bright and early in life.

She must know that the only things that actually work to prevent that sort of carnage are:

  • Using the sentencing enhancements for gun crimes that so helped in cleaning up New York City thirty years ago – the type that Mike Freeman and John Choi never use on criminals of any age, and that Mary Moriarty hahahahahahaha I can’t even finish the sentence with a straight face.
  • Intervening with youth at risk of going into The Life.

Certainly she’s had this shown to her. There’s no way that hasn’t happened.

So she’s counting on promoting ignorance.

Look for a lot of that this session.

Proof Of Concept

How certain is the DFL that at least a plurality of Minnesota voters just aren’t very good at logic, civics or critical thinking?

Sure enough that they’re treating the $17 Billion “Surplus” a big win for progressive governance, and proof of some divine mandate:

What it actually is, of course, is a combination of:

  • BIllions of dollars in federal Covid stimulus dollars
  • The normal Minnesota DFL overtaxation…
  • …with receipts driven up by inflation in the cost of the goods being taxed
  • All that taxation and inflation going on over an epipandemic surge in stimulus-swollen consumer spending

Mark my words – and I have marked them myself, with “to dos” on my calendar on the first Mondays ijn December of 2024 and 2026: the following will happen:

We’ll check back on this.  Oh, yes we will. 

Be Still, And Know That We Are Government

To: Minnesota Peasants. Er, Citize…Subjects. Let’s go with Subjects.
From: Minnesota State Government
Re: Take Comfort

Your paycheck is worth 8% less than it was last year.

The price of food and gas is waaaay up.

Your rent is going up. Lots.

The cost of borrowing has more than doubled.

The schools are failing – and your government blames you for it, and for everything else.

But don’t trouble your hearts, simple peasants. Because while you may suffer, your government is doing just fine.

Because while peasants like you come and go, State Government is forever.

And in that, you should take comfort.

Signed
Minnesota State Government

Bogarted

The DFL ran the table in the last election.

If they want something passed, they will likely pass it (exceptions exist, and we’ll be talking about them).

Marijuana legalization should be a slam dunk. There’s no need for the party to mobilize its base to get out and pimp for bread and circuses…uh, I mean weed.

And yet they’re doing this:

Seems odd, doesn’t it? Coming up with weed merch for a measure that was a campaign “promise”?

Fearless prediction: the DFL will draw up a weed bill – or amend it onto an omnibus that won’t pass with certain amendments, including weed, included. The DFL will blame the GOP, and use it in two years to get the strung-along weed-voter dupes to trudge to the polls again in 2024.