Archive for the 'MNDFL' Category

The Party Of Science Part MCMLXV

Wednesday, January 18th, 2023

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:

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1615612642722254850?s=46&t=Iw7hbbQWYHb83IRjbtXkVQ

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

Tuesday, January 17th, 2023

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”

Friday, January 13th, 2023

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

Friday, January 6th, 2023

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

Friday, January 6th, 2023

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.

https://twitter.com/robdoar/status/1611011602823651329?s=46&t=1eHUA8BJxpzvLgfP99eDIA

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

As someone else put it:

Mission Creepy

Monday, December 19th, 2022

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

Thursday, December 8th, 2022

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

Tuesday, December 6th, 2022

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

Wednesday, November 30th, 2022

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.

Deja Vu

Thursday, November 17th, 2022

Reading this piece by John Phelan at the Center of the American Experiment about the rise and fall of Hubert Humphrey, it’s a little bit amazing how little, in someways, has changed over the past 60 years:

“We’re not going to let the political philosophy of the DFL be dictated from the Kremlin,” Humphrey said. “You can be a liberal without being a Communist, and you can be a progressive without being a communist sympathizer, and we’re a liberal progressive party out here. We’re not going to let this left-wing communist ideology be the prevailing force because the people of this state won’t accept it, and what’s more, it’s wrong.” His Republican opponent in Minnesota’s 1948 senate race had voted against the Marshall Plan for European aid, and Humphrey charged that “if American policy had been decided by the vote of the senior Senator from Minnesota, we might be negotiating with the Russians now in London instead of Berlin.”

Especially regarding the behavior of the left’s vanguard elite (emphasis added):

Whatever the motivation, Humphrey was now in the front line of an increasingly bitter civil war in the Democratic Party. Many young activists, drawn into politics and the party by the struggle for civil rights, were bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war. Known as the New Left, as distinct from the old left of Rauh’s coalition, their opposition escalated along with the war. Wherever Humphrey went, he was met with abuse from anti-war protestors. At Stanford in March 1967, for example, demonstrators mobbed his car screaming, “War criminal!” “Murderer!” and “Burn, Baby, Burn!” Several tried to break through the police cordon, and a can of urine was thrown over one of Humphrey’s Secret Service men. Humphrey had little affinity for the student radicals. Recalling his time as a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, he said, “I didn’t have much time to join a protest movement, I was concerned about being able to earn enough to eat.” He compared the protestors’ “foul language and physical violence” to “Hitler youth breaking up meetings in Germany.” In 1966, referring to his battle with the DFL Communists, he told reporters “I fought those bastards then and I’m going to fight them now.”

Of course, that was at a time when “the greatest generation“ were still in their prime working years, and the degenerate radical left was a relatively new abscess. Today’s “new, new left“ is the children, grandchildren and indoctrinees of the hippies Humphrey was talking about.

What The Klink Cabinet Was To “Transparency”…

Monday, November 14th, 2022

… it apparently also is to “diversity“:

It’s raising a hackle or two:

https://twitter.com/revtchristopher/status/1591112633566261248?s=46&t=2H_G6S0b3NGY_eId27lkcQ

Where, indeed?

Open Letter To Hennepin County Subjects [1]

Monday, November 14th, 2022

You voted for Mary Moriarty for Henco Attorney.

Granted, it was a closer race than one might have expected; the endorsed DFLer won by 20 points, rather than the expected 40-50.

Still, Henco spoke: they’re OK with carjackings, home invasions, random gunfire ripping through (black and brown people in North Minneapolis) houses, and criminals getting sprung over and over.

They made their choices. Now, they’ll be getting the consequences, good and hard:

Great job, voters. Enjoy the abortions.

[1] Yes, formally you’re still “citizens”. But honestly, “subjects” is a better term.

Tuesday’s Gone

Thursday, November 10th, 2022

Fleshing out my first thoughts on the most recent election:

In Minnesota, the age-old wisdom prevails: money talks, bullshit walks. Tim Walz is sputtering fool, but he will be governor for the next four years. Unless his A1C level approaches triple digits, it’s highly likely he’ll complete his term and step aside for another sideshow act once he passes his sell-by date, some time around 2027. The DFL has the money and the infrastructure to control this state for the foreseeable future and the GOP has nothing. The DFL proved they could elect any droolbucket with a brand name when they pushed Mark Dayton across the line in 2010 and 2014. A guy with Walz’s skillset and mien wouldn’t get beyond middle management for any respectable company in the state, but he’s won twice. We can see all see it for what it is, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest — for the fourth election running, the DFL showed Team Rocks and Cows their ass. I don’t doubt they’ll find another standard bearer who is (a) absurd and (b) likely to win in 2026.

Keith Ellison is corrupt as the day is long, a 30-year grifter. He let a $250 million fraud run without interruption for the better part of two years. He’s now won statewide office twice. We’re pretty far gone if he can’t be defeated. I don’t doubt Jim Schultz is a competent lawyer, but his affect was of a guy who doesn’t get out of the conference room nearly enough and he was too nice a guy to run against a bully. To take the AG’s office back, the Republicans need a crusading litigator type who can prosecute the prosecutor and expose the rot within. There has to be one of those out there.

On the national level, it has to be said: Donald Trump didn’t help. He was and continues to be horribly wronged by what he’s gone through at the hands of his persecutors. And since civic education in this country is essentially dead in the water, most citizens can’t recognize that Trump is living example of why the Founders were against bills of attainder. Having said that, Trump will never get a sympathetic audience. He’s an obnoxious boor and he can’t get past his own solipsism; if he had even a scintilla of self-awareness, he might understand where he is, but we’ve been watching him for well over 40 years and that’s not in his skill set. Trump fancies himself the indispensable man, the conquering hero, but if he sincerely loves his nation, he’d recognize that martyrdom is a better career move. Not a chance in hell he’ll accept his fate, though.

Aside from the utter domination of Ron DeSantis in Florida, election results did not go well as one might have expected. Even so, the Republicans could still flip the House and the Senate. Based on reports from Arizona and Nevada, the Republicans could get over the line despite the Fetterman debacle in Pennsylvania. It appears likely that Adam Laxalt will win his seat in Nevada and there’s reason to believe Blake Masters may squeak by with Kari Lake becoming the governor in Arizona. Meanwhile, Herschel Walker will be going to a runoff in Georgia and has a good chance of prevailing this time. Even if the Senate ends up 50/50 again, I can imagine Joe Manchin may try to cross the aisle to save his ass in 2024. What will be interesting is whether Mitch McConnell would want him. I am not convinced McConnell enjoys being majority leader; he has more opportunities for self-enrichment in his current position.

Meanwhile, the Donks own the next two years. And they are going to hate that. There is still an urgent need for them to ease out Biden before too long, but they aren’t going to have an easy path to removing him, unless they decide to use Hunter Biden’s depredations as the pretext. Still, they will need a plausible successor. Kamala Harris impresses no one. Gavin Newsom is an empty suit. Pete Buttigieg? I don’t think so. Maybe it will be time for President Fetterman. 

Place Yer Bets

Tuesday, November 8th, 2022

It’s finally Election Day and we can all breathe easier now that we won’t have to see Angie Craig’s alternating rictus grin/contorted face of rage multiple times a day on television, social media and other media. But will we see Craig going forward? While I sincerely hope not, it’s difficult to know. So let’s hazard a few guesses on how it will play out today and in the coming days.

Governor: Tim Walz deserves to be tossed out on his well-padded posterior, but I suspect he and Peggy Flanagan will survive. Scott Jensen ran a decent campaign but it’s difficult to overcome all paid advertising from Alida Messinger and the free advertising from the Esme Murphys of the local media.

Secretary of State: Steve Simon is a smooth operator and Kim Crockett is not. Should those traits matter? No, but they do. Simon wins.

Attorney General: We have had the DFL Lucys pull this football away before. Recent polling suggests Keith Ellison is in trouble and that Jim Schultz is leading. Do you believe it? I don’t, but I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

Auditor: If the Republicans are allowed to win a statewide office, it will likely be this one. Republican Ryan Wilson has run a fine campaign and you can’t spell blah without DFLer Julie Blaha. The auditor has limited power but a committed auditor can at least turn over a few rocks the DFL would prefer to keep stationary. Wilson wins.

CD-2: While there are 8 congressional districts in Minnesota, apparently only the 2nd is being contested this year. We’ve seen dozens, maybe hundreds of ads featuring the odious incumbent, Angie Craig, and her rival Tyler Kistner. It’s been a nasty race and Craig has serious money behind her. She’s vulnerable because of redistricting, but it’s not clear to me that Kistner has made the sale. A left wing veteran’s group has also run some stolen valor ads in the final weekend that may affect the outcome; I have not been able to determine if their claims are accurate, but if Kistner loses, that last-minute attack might make the difference. As an aside, I really wish we’d seen Republicans make more of an effort in CD-3, where it’s been entirely too easy for Dean Phillips.

Elsewhere: Control of the House and Senate are at stake and the deep unpopularity of the Democrats will almost certainly mean Congress will be in Republican hands in 2023. A few guesses on races in other states:

Wisconsin: while the population and demographics of Wisconsin are similar to Minnesota, Wisconsin is not a blue state. Milwaukee and Madison are lefty enclaves, but their overall population is less than 40% of the total population, while the Twin Cities are about 60% of the total population here. As a result, it is easier for Republicans to win. Ron Johnson, the incumbent Republican senator, is a bit on the crusty side, but he’s a smart, effective campaigner and looks to be a good bet to win against his opponent, Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, a gladhander in the Hakeem Jeffries/Barack Obama style, but less effective. In the governor’s race, Republican challenger Tim Michels is also a bit crusty, but the fluke incumbent governor, Democrat Tony Evers, is an ineffective milquetoast. Look for the Republicans to win both. (more…)

Redolent

Tuesday, November 8th, 2022

DFL communications guy on Twitter Dash which I’m told most Democrats will be leaving, apparently on their way to Canada:

https://twitter.com/briinmn/status/1589741147601383424?s=46&t=K4cVV3wvD7P1G3BSbWtbbg

Neo Marxist iconography? Specious reference to “democracy“ from a party that has been actively fighting the things that make American democracy good and useful?

Yes. Yes, it really does “say at all”.

Open Letter To All Minnesota DFLers

Monday, November 7th, 2022

To: Minnesota Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Fake Beliefs

DFLers,

A few points of information:

  • There is no “Swat Plan”. It was an off-the-cuff, tongue-in-cheek remark by Kim Crockett’s husband, at a Tea Party meeting, and of no more policy impact (or taste) than DFL staffers calling for “guillotines” for Republicans.
  • The Governor can not directly change MN abortion policy
  • Attorney General Ellison openly supported defunding cops.
  • A. Quarter. Billion. In. Fraud. So. Far. It’s going to be half a billion by the time they’re done.
  • MN, locked down, did no better in pandemic than our neighbors.
  • Nothing about Republicans or their ideology is remotely “fascist”, and we are less a threat to “democracy” than your beliefs are.

That is all.

Why I’m Voting GOP Tomorrow – Part I

Monday, November 7th, 2022

I think I voted for some Democrats in the 1982 midterms, when I was 20 and still fighting with my Democrat upbringing. The last Democrat I know I voted for was 26 years ago – because she was unopposed, and her constituent services person worked wonders (she actually went on to be one of the few sane members of the Saint Paul City Council). Not sure I’d do it again, but there you have it.

That, and a few elections during my Libertarian years, 1994 through 1998, were about as far as it went for me not voting Republican.

But notwithstanding that, it’s still not a “gimme” of a vote. The GOP has to earn my vote, or at least (some years) be the lesser of two evils – because if the lesser evil loses, you get a greater evil.

But I’ll be voting GOP this year, straight ticket, every race. No exceptions.

And I’ll be doing it for a lot of reasons.

I’ll be doing it for the guy who ran the little shop over on Snelling that tried to stay open during Walz’s arbitrary, scientifically-vacuous lockdowns – and failed, while the big-box store he competed successfully with for two decades trundled along with government’s blessing. And for every other business that got shut down.

I’ll be voting especially to repudiate Keith Ellison, who spent most of two years siccing his legal goons on businesses that were trying to stay alive, owned by people who’d done something Keith Ellison has never done; invested their life’s savings into trying to run a business in this state. I’m voting Republican to help bring the day when that might not be a stupid idea, maybe, someday, again.

I’m voting GOP for every cop who shows up and tries to do a good job, and is tired of having the political class spitting on her. For every officer that’s brought in a perp, and seen them sprung before the paperwork was done.

I’m voting GOP for every father that had to watch their kids being born via video. For everyone who had to watch their loved ones die via video, or hear about it after the fact from some overworked nurse on the phone.

I’m especially voting GOP for everyone that went through that, and then watched Governor Klink, mask stretched over his maw, jammed into a seat at George Floyd’s very public, very crowded funeral, for which “science” somehow made an exception. I’m voting to throw a huge, red finger at anyone who excused that.

I’m voting a straight Republican ticket for all the nurses, techs and doctors who got laid off about twenty minutes after being hailed as “front line heroes”, because their clinics were shuttered, or their hospitals and networks were realigning due to the market distortions caused by the lockdowns.

I’m voting GOP for everyone wondering how the hell they’re going to heat their house AND buy food this winter.

I’m doing it because of all your “SAVE DEMOCRACY – VOTE BLUE!” buncombe. The left is, year in, year out, the actual threat to our constitutional order, to “democracy”, to freedom.

I’m voting Republican to stick it to the Electoral College denialists and the Supreme Court Conspiracy Theorists. And because Democrats are inflation deniers, crime deniers, American History deniers and, here in Minnesota, fraud deniers.

I’m voting Republican for everyone that lost their job due to the Vaccine mandate.

I’m voting Republican for every National Guardsman – every “19 year cook” – who had to face off against their fellow citizen in the street because their political leaders in Mpls and Saint Paul were too PC and cowardly to enforce the law, reform the police and deliver the “privilege” of public safety for we pay all those f**k**g taxes before Minneapolis became a powder keg.

I’m voting GOP for every beleaguered homeowner in North Minneapolis and the lower East Side of Saint Paul who wonders if this is the night all that gunfire in the distance stitches the walls and windows of their house.

I’m voting GOP to tell every Latino and Black voter who is pondering voting GOP for the first time, and feels as I did when left the Left in 1984 – like they’re stepping off a cliff into the great unknown – “Welcome. Let’s kick some ass”.

I’m voting GOP with the “Rocks and Cows” – all the people in Greater Minnesota who are sick to death of being condescended to by chirpy little 20-somethings from Macalester with poli sci degrees and “mushroom head” haircuts and resumes of short careers spent chasing DFL non-profit bucks.

For every Iron Ranger who’s tired of being told “stocking shelves at Shopko is just as good a career as mining, and all that money’s probably pretty bad for you, really” by Metro-area “environmentalists” in 2 million dollar houses in Kenwood.

I’m voting Republican because they are coming for your guns. Over the past couple years, they’ve felt emboldened enough to admit it. They’ll get ’em, not over my cold dead body, but over theirs.

I’m voting GOP because the DFL turned a blind eye to their contributors taking anvil cases of money out of the US, with (I believe the record will show) a nudge and a wink. The $250 million for “Feeding our Future” is just the beginning.

I’m voting Republican to tell Lisa Bender and every DFLer who believes as she does, “You’re right. Law and order is a privilege. And delivering on that “privilege” is one of government’s few unambiguously legitimate jobs, for which we pay the taxes and lend out the liberties we do.

I’m voting for every cancer patient who wishes they could have had a biopsy six months sooner, or isn’t alive to wish it. For the people whose health – physical and mental – was directly impacted by a state that treated bureaucratic prerogatives better than they treated science.

I’m voting for everyone with chronic pain – the cancer patients and accident victims and repeat-surgery patients with horrible chronic pain who can’t get the pain meds they need, since the same ham-fisted system that locked down the state also investigates and destroys the careers of doctors who give “too many” opioid prescriptions (in the view of some soulless bureaucrat) – while the DFL basks in the sickly glow of having “stuck it to Big Pharma” (while in many cases raking in big contributions from “Big Pharma”).

I’m voting Republican for everyone who’s sick of the DFL-dominated “Laptop class” getting rich on your backs.

I’m voting Republican for everyone who’s more than a little irked at the crude irony of people who vote for Keith Ellison calling Scott Jensen “too extreme for Minnesota”.

I’m voting Republican because I don’t want my granddaughter to have to pay for Joe Biden’s re-election spending spree, although I fear it’s too late.

I’m voting GOP for every kid that slowly lost interest in school, in learning – and in all too many cases, eventually in life itself.

I’m voting GOP for the owners of the my drugstore, my luthier, and every other store that got burned, looted or vandalized; every shopkeeper that had to spent their nights patrolling their stores – or figuring out how to clean up the wreckage.

I’m voting GOP for every parent that is sick of politicized school administrators and school-board politicians undercutting them, and for every parent who’s wondering why their schools just keep getting worse even as the price just keeps rising.

I’ll be doing it for everyone whose car got jacked, for every victim of everyone sprung onto the street by the Minnesota Freedom Fund or whiffleball DFL judges and prosecutors.

I’ll be doing it for every poor family scraping by wondering how they’re going to replace a catalytic converter on top of all the other bills and crap piling up these days.

I’m voting Republican because the shrapnel from Governor Walz’s hamfisted “state of emergency” was utterly. bitterly personal. I had to delay moving my mother – whose husband had just died, and was in a long-term care in North Dakota, pretty much alone – for months while the state worked out all its many mistakes in nursing homes. She was in a competently run state, so she didn’t catch Covid – but the months alone didn’t help one bit. And for that, I have a grudge. Oh, yes I do.

I’m voting GOP for everyone who’s sick to death of being gaslit by Hollywood, by Academia, the media and our own government, and isn’t going to take it anymore.

I’m voting Republican for the 13 soldiers and Marines who died in Afghanistan. Joe Biden wants them forgotten – but I will not.

I’m voting Republican because I read and have critical thinking skills.

I’m voting Republican because I can, and I’m going to keep it that way. Don’t tread on me.

If We Take An Originalist View…

Friday, November 4th, 2022

…of Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering (“All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise”), it’s hard not to look at this story – “Klan literature” being handed out in a swing-y part of northeastern Minnesota long controlled by a DFL that’s not happy about losing ground in the are, four days before an election where the DFL is poised to lose, maybe big – and not presume it’s a hoax.

Unconditional Surrender

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022

Emily Oster at The Atlantic wonders if we mightn’t just bury the hatchet about all that Covid overreaction; call a social mulligan; just mooooooove on:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

David Strom – now writing for Hot Air – meets Dr. Oster halfway:

[Dr. Oster] has generally been a voice of reason on COVID policy, and even when I disagree I respect her. She supported policies I considered and consider appalling, yet she always shared her reasoning and her doubts. Plus she vigorously opposed the COVID excuse to destroy education, and that deserves great respect…Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers

But…:

Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.

COVID fanatics deserve every single bit of the consequences that are coming for them, and far far more than they will suffer.

I might be inclined to agree with David’s premise – in March and April, maybe May of 2020, when we really didn’t know what was going on, and we didn’t know that Covid wasn’t going to be a demographic scythe mowing down vast swathes of the population? Sure.

Once we got to about June or July – when it was very clear to anyone who could read a graph that Governor Klink’s prediction of 20,000 dead in Minnesota by mid-July, best case, was off by more than an order of magnitude, and he set about concealing the code for the model that led to the prediction because “someone might use it to get different results than we got” (which is the polar opposite of “science”?

For everything that came after – the schools closed, the tsunami of mental health issues, the endless emergency declarations, the boarded-over basketball hoops and bans on selling garden supplies – you want “Amnesty?”

After this?

I’m going to start the negotiation with “military tribunals”.

For the many millions who couldn’t get their cancer, heart disease and other chronic, sometimes life-threatening conditions seen, diagnosed or treated?

Drumhead court-martials are too good.

For the bans on funerals? For the loved ones that died alone in hospitals and LTCs?

https://twitter.com/benstanton77/status/1587123009663471619?s=46&t=MdTAU8OsNv76xs46QKVYmg

I’d be hard-pressed to deny those demanding a “purge night” their due, but this is a civil society.

For the huge advances in the power of the police and surveillance states? For the “emergency powers” seized, and held for well over a year, by tinpot piglets like Gretchen Whitmer and Tim “Klink” Walz?

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1587253046580776960?s=46&t=MdTAU8OsNv76xs46QKVYmg

Give me some heads on pikes – figuratively – and I I might, might, be persuaded to settle for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, as long as it has the power to imprison people for a long time.

My mother suffered from Alzheimers. She and her husband – also very ill – were in a long-term care in Minot. Her husband died in March 2020. The “emergency” rules in Minnesota – and the carnage caused by Governor Klink and the Department of Health’s policies – meant it took seven months to move her to Minnesota. Seven months during which, alone in a nursing home, my mother declined even more alarmingly than she had before.

Amnesty?

I’m more inclined toward demanding unconditional surrender.

But it’s likely my vote next Tuesday is my only recourse.

Rot in (figurative, electoral) hell, Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan, and anyone who votes for you.

Proud To Be A Minnesotan Today

Friday, October 28th, 2022

Governor Walz picked up a vital endorsement yesterday:

So let’s make sure we get this straight: An incumbent who dunks on Scott Jensen for being a “conspiracy theorist” is proud of his endorsement by a 9/11 truther who was an enthusastic employee of RT, Vladimir Putin’s propaganda network.

Good one, Governor Walz.

This Is Today’s DFL

Thursday, October 27th, 2022

This is what every family in the Minnesota public school system faces todaym. This person is running for the Centennial school board:

This is the educational/industrial compex’s priority.

This is on the ballot in two weeks. Never forget it.

UPDATE: And the consequence of school board members like her aren’t remotely, uh, academic:

“Fridays and breaks can never come soon enough for me this year. I’ve always been able to make it to MEA without needing time off to recover, but not this year. This year I feel like I’ve been run over by a train every day I leave. This week I politely asked a student, that wasn’t supposed to be in my room, to go to her class. This was four minutes after the bell had rung. Her response, ‘Quit talking to me. Get out of my space.’ I was 3-4 feet away. I then calmly repeated that she needed to leave, and she responded with, ‘Shut the fuck up you bitch ass ho.’”

This is an inevitable result, not only of people like the woman in the first tweet, but of the concrete policy prescriptions of “Pacific Educational Group” – the San Francisco consulting firm employed by the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Edina and many other metro school districts.

Same As It Ever Was

Wednesday, October 26th, 2022

The story: woman in Hibbing arrested and charged with stealing Pete Stauber’s campaign materials.

In a Friday press release, the Hibbing Police Department announced that Lisa Linnea Fitzpatrick, 61, has been charged under Minnesota Statutes for intentionally removing mail from a mail depository without claim of right.

The offense is a felony and carries a maximum sentence of 3 years in jail, a $5,000 fine, or both.

The story behind the story:

https://twitter.com/GrageDustin/status/1583976747812327424

Go ahead, Ms. Fitzpatrick. Take the deal, and give up the MNDFL officials who told you to do it.

If the SPPD and Ramco Attorney arrested and charged sign thieves, they’d need to rent a barge on the Mississippi to hold the suspects awaiting arraignment.

Or they would, if Republicans in Saint Paul bothered putting up signs anymore. Back when I still tried, the half-life was about six hours. Not sure we’d even be able to test John Choi on this.

How’s The Campaign Going?

Tuesday, October 25th, 2022

Shot: “Stop all that conservative talk or we’ll tell your dad”

https://twitter.com/mrotzie/status/1584535723901825029

Y’see, Jensen’s father was apparently a Democrat, and if there’s one thing “liberals” believe it’s that sons gotta follow their fathers footsteps in absolute lockstep.

Chaser: “Keith Ellison is so great…uh, my, you’re a little fella!

Remember – David Brauer is one of the deans of Twin Cities journalism.

Signs “Crime” Is Polling Badly

Monday, October 24th, 2022

Shot: Kamala Harris denies supporting the MN Freedom Fund, a group that opposes cash bail by bailing out “indigent” often-violent offenders, with occasional disastrous results

…after gleefully supporting it two years ago:

“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.

Chaser: Ellison runs away from the “Defund” movement he and his son championed last year.

Enthusiasm Gap

Monday, October 24th, 2022

This email was – ostensibly – leaked by a DFL operative.

If true, it indicates that the DFL is having a hard time getting people out on the street for the DFLin the Metro and ‘burbs:

The email includes a typo so perfectly placed, it almost makes me wonder if it isn’t a troll

I’m both pessimistic and a little tiny bit…not “paranoid”, per se, but I tend to try to assume that one’s opponents is smart enough to play mental games with you.

Still – if true, it explains a lot of things:

  • The Trafalgar polls just might correlate with reality
  • Angie Craig’s orgy of TV spending that indicate her internal polling has been worrying her for six months now
  • Ellison, Blaha and Simon turning up for debates; the “conventional wisdom” has it that debates only make sense if you believe the risk of making a campaign-scuttling flub is outweighed by the opportunity to goad your opponent into making a bigger one, because you need it.
  • Governor Klink’s evading debates – indicating he may be husbanding a lead too small to want to risk a disastrous performance that drags the Attorney General, Secretary of State and Auditor even worse than the polls show they are doing.

Remembering how the DFL acted in all of their statewide races since 2012, sitting on leads that their internal polling showed were pretty comfy in hindsight?

It wasn’t like this back then.

--> Site Meter -->