A few regular-ish Democratic commenters have taken umbrage at my occasional statments along the lines of “Democrat voters have no critical thinking skills”.

Let me explain.

I say it because…’

…well, it’s true. Universally. Without exception.

Case in point:

“Shots in arms” – thanks to Trump.

Billions for schools – that, with the DFL calling the shots, are still squabbling about reopening.

And every dollar in the pocket paid for by five dollars taken from someone else – including your own grandchildren.

But no – don’t you dare assume the party that would write tripe like this can’t safely assume their voters are a lumpen, bovine mass.

Back in the early days of this blog – the early 2000s – I used to refer to then -Senator Wes Skoglund of MInneapolis as “A Lying Sack of Garbage”.    

It was deeply uncivil – but it was accurate.   If it came from his mouth, and it was about guns, gun owners, gun laws, gun crime, the Second Amendment, it’s legal and factual history, it was a lie.  Full stop.

Favorite pullquote from history – in 2003, he opposed Shall Issue carry permit reform because he said, in the Strib, that it’d allow gang members to get carry permits (a claim never fact-checked by any local media).  I’m fairly sure he knew better – but then as now, DFL pols could count on their voters being less than adept at critical thinking.  

It’s been almost pointless to note which Democrat pols have inherited the “Lying Sack of Garbage” mantel – it’s generally easier to point out the ones that tell the truth than the ones that don’t.   

But in this op-ed in the Strib, Senator John Marty strips down to his skivvies and rolls around in a slop pit if lies, slander and dishonor, putting himself on the short list to inherit the title.

It’s about his proposal to ban carry at the capitol – an attempt to roll back legislation from 2015 that allowed Minnesotans with valid carry permits to not be disarmed at the Capitol.   

It’s almost Nancy Nord Bence-level:

The sight of people flaunting assault rifles is becoming commonplace at political rallies of Trump supporters and right-wing causes. During the past year, Michigan, Oregon, Kentucky and Idaho all had incidents where people, armed to the teeth and dressed for combat, walked into their state Capitols to threaten public officials. These incidents made national news because the brazen intimidation was so shocking.

It’s so cute that the party that has no problem with “Anti”-Fa thugs patrolling the outskirts and aftermaths of their “peaceful protests”, that employs “woke” culture to intimidate dissent at schools, in the workplace and in the public square, and sicced the IRS on their opponents as suddenly developed scruples about “intimidation”.

Fifty years ago, it wasn’t this way. In 1967, when the Black Panthers walked into the California state Capitol heavily armed, there was strong bipartisan support for prohibiting the carrying of loaded firearms. Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and even the NRA supported the Mulford Act, which sharply restricted the carrying of guns, not just in the California Capitol, but elsewhere. Reagan said there is “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

When people on the left start quoting Reagan, stand by for a gale of mangled context.

Reagan’s response to the Black Panthers was among the worst of his few mistakes. Marty deserves to be told as much.

Now however, when it is largely white conservatives who are taking guns to Capitols, the NRA and the Republican Party seem to consider it perfectly appropriate for their allies to use guns to intimidate political opponents.

I can’t speak to Senator Marty’s sense of proportion or stability. But given that the people with the gun are all people who are over 21, have all passed training courses and multiple background checks thereby proving that they are better bets, criminologically speaking, per capita, than the House DFL Caucus, one might suggest Marty is crying wolf.

And either doing it ignorantly, or (more likely) presuming his Democrat audience just doesn’t care that much about the facts:

We do not allow people to bring guns into county courthouses, into many big office buildings in the Twin Cities or at Vikings, Wild and Twins games. Thirty-two other states require people to walk through a metal detector before entering their Capitol buildings.

Where to start with that graf?

• We don’t allow carry in any courthouse, federal, state, county or municipal. Anywhere. The 2003 Minnesota Personal Protection Act let the judicial branch make those decisions itself.
• The office buildings and sports venues are private property. They have the ability – misguided though it is – to ban firearms. It’s one reason I rarely if ever patronize major league sports.
• Re the metal detectors – so?

Now, we leave mere ignorance – personal or implied – and get into actual prevarication:

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus urged their members to show up, armed, to those committee meetings. There were about 150 notifications for one such hearing in 2013, almost triple the number in the entire previous year.

A hearing on gun legislation does not pose any greater safety risk than other hearings and there is no greater need for personal protection. Opponents of gun legislation carry guns to those hearings to intimidate.

There are other ways guns are used to intimidate as well. One lobbyist told some legislators whom she was lobbying that she carried a gun at the Capitol because she feared people lobbying on the other side of the issue, calling them dangerous — an insidious way of undermining her opponents. It is not surprising that the opponents reported difficulty getting appointments to make their case with legislators.

The 2005 law that allowed carrying of handguns in public allowed the same people to carry assault rifles and other long guns in public. That has led to the increasingly common sight of heavily armed people at rallies and protests. They are not armed for personal protection. They do so to intimidate and strike fear in others.

Minnesotans can consider and discuss gun legislation as rational adults; hearings should be conducted without armed intimidation. Consequently, I have introduced SF 2048, which would prohibit the carrying of guns at the Capitol and restore the law that blocked people from bringing assault rifles to rallies and protests.

We should take security at the Capitol and at political rallies seriously before there is a tragic attack that kills people. At some point, security experts might determine that metal detectors are needed at the Capitol. Unfortunately, metal detectors create an oppressive climate which makes a place feel more militarized and less safe. Whether or not they are necessary now, we should prepare and plan for the possibility in the future, including quick implementation if a credible threat appears. But for now, it’s time to treat the Capitol like county courthouses and other places that prohibit guns. Public discourse on contentious issues can be done in a rational manner without allowing some to intimidate others. Public safety will benefit as well.

Allowing guns at the Capitol in these divided times is a recipe for disaster.

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus urged their members to show up, armed, to [the 2013 House] committee meetings. There were about 150 notifications for one such hearing in 2013, almost triple the number in the entire previous year.

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus wasn’t founded until 2014. The MNGOC has never urged people to bring guns anywhere, and has always eschewed the idea of open carry at the Capitol.

Marty is either lying, or assuming his audience is too stupid to know better.

My vote is “both”.

Oh, yeah – and that 2015 legislation that allows citizens to carry firearms, legally, with a permit, on the Capitol grounds?

Marty voted for it.

What would this blog do without Representative Ryan Winkler?

Not spend nearly as much time mocking and taunting, that’s for sure:

Of course I’m selling Winkler short. He knows that after a year of squatting on small businesses, levying the worth of families by “essential”, non-essential or just plain above it all, and putting kids’ interests and science behind those of the Teachers Union, his claim is baked wind.

But Winkler knows the most important fact of all: the DFL base is complacent, ignorant and just as sodden with self-satisfied hubris and Winkler himself. If any of them could think critically about anything, they wouldn’t be DFLers.

Hope I’ve settled that.

A group called “Capital Transparency” has posted this video, of DFL Representative John Thompson of HD67A threatening to “beat the brakes off” a couple of its reporters, near the scene of a triple homicide out on the East Side over the winter:

Given that Thompson benefits from immense Urban Progressive Privilege – the kind of thing that would have been treated as “a terrorist insurgency” if he’s been wearing a MAGA cap – he’ll never be held accountable for this…

…although I suppose attacking the media is a greater intersectional sin than threatening Bob Kroll’s neighbors.

UPDATE: I originally wrote this story last week. Since then, I actually got a response from the Capitol Transparency guys – and it turns out Thompson was the aggressor (which wasn’t initially clear to me from the video). I’ve rewritten accordingly.

The city looks for leadership.

And jumping into the vacuum is…

…Kate Knuth.

The exceptionally undistinguished former state representative who went on to be a city wealth-transfer bureaucrat who was distinguished, if “Anti-Distinguished” is a thing [1].

Remember – if the ineffective, over-his-head Pajama Boy Frey gets replaced, it’ll be by someone worse, farther to the left, and an even more overt puppet of the far-left interests that are calling all the shots in the city.

[1] And whose mother was in fact the bureaucratic gargoyle in the denouement of this story. While the sins of the mother aren’t necessarily visited on the child, I’m guessing the pie doesn’t fall far from the cow. .

We had a thorough discussion about Ryan Winkler’s tweet and established
that Democrats have a strong personal belief, perhaps even a moral
conviction, that public safety is a government responsibility.

We had a thorough discussion about a lawsuit against the City and
established that when citizens suffer because government abandoned its
responsibility, the citizens have no recourse against the government
under existing law.

So the obvious question is: Will Ryan Winkler introduce legislation
creating a right for citizens to sue the government for failing its
responsibility to protect them?  And will the new law be retroactive to
cover the riots?

Ryan Winkler talked the talk, but will he walk the walk?

Joe Doakes

There may be no more superficial person in Minnesota politics than Ryan Winkler.

Other than Erin Maye Quade. And Ilhan Omar.

OK, and probably a few others.

But you get the point.

And it’s because the progressive movement has it’s knee on the city’s neck.

Kevin Williamson explains, in a piece that’s too perfect to pullquote.

Ryan Winkler takes a strong moral stand:

About time Ryan Winkler took a strong, courageous stand against corporate prisons…

…of which there are zero in Minnesota.

Remember when I said DFLers can count on the fact that DFL voters are overwhelmingly badly-informed and lousy at critical thought?

Any questions?

.

LIke MInneaolis doesn’t have enough problems…

Jacob “McDreamy” Frey is going to run for re-election.

As one wag noted:

Suggested camaign motto: “Stay the Curse”.

The thing about Minneapolis, of course, is that if Frey gets unseated, it’ll be to someone from the left.

And that person will be unseated by someone from their left.

I’m afraid the vortex is unescapable.

It’s reapportionment time. And Minnesota – which held onto its eighth US House seat just about the lowest possible margin ten years ago – finally stands to lose a Representative.

California and New York appear to be in line to lose 2 or 3 seats apiece, with Florida and Texas the big winners so far, by all appearances.

But what’ll happen in Minnesota?

You can wager money that “combining the 4th and 5th CDs” won’t be on the table. Don’t even bother.

To my mind, it looks a little like this:\

• The 4th and 5th are sacrosanct. They’re not going anywhere.
• The 1st, 7th and 8th are associated with large, socially and geographically distinct areas.

But the 2nd, 3rd and 6th are all mixed bags. Now, I don’t think there’s much case to be made to dissolve the 6th, much as the DFL would love to send Tom Emmer back to private practice.

But getting consolidating either the 2nd or 3rd, and expanding the neithboring districts to fill in the gap, makes a lot of sense.

Thoughts?

ME (talking with a political operative who shall remain nameless): “So I see The DFL houses committee assignments are out, and representative Rena Moran is the chair of the house ways and means committee“.

OPERATIVE: “Ha ha. That’s pretty funny. “

ME: “No – I’m serious. Rena Moran. Chair of Ways and Means.”

OPERATIVE: “…”

ME: “ I know, right?“

Ever since the retirement of Phyllis Kahn for being too moderate for her crazy-left district in Minneapolis, it’s seemed fairly plain – no matter what happens in Minneapolis politics, the drift will be the left.

So this post is both a test of my theory, and a prediction.

Alondra Cano is leaving office.

Now, you know me. I have never come to praise Cano, but to try to bury her in ridicule.

But here’s my prediction: she will be replaced by someone who makes her look like Phyllis Schlafly in comparison.

Predictions as to what she’ll do next? Leave your predictions in the comment section.

UPDATE: Hardly seems possible this was five years ago, already. It may be my favorite post title in the history of this blog.

Ilhan Omar has been paying her husband’s firm $2.7 million in campaign donations.

Under most of your community property laws, that means she’s been paying herself a whole lot of money.

And yet while prospering mightily from Omar’s campaign (they grossed $4 million in the 2020 cycle, a nearly 25-fold increase on the firm’s 2018 billings), they received Covid payroll stimulus money:

Public records show that E Street Group, co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans. …

Public records show that E Street Group, co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans.

Federal Election Commission filings also show that the firm received payments for other campaigns, including $175,000 from the committee of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and nearly $130,000 from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

When Democrats say “never waste a crisis”…

Ilhan Omar thinks we’re the “Klan”:

Omar’s not stupid. She knows that’s not true.

She just knows that CD5 Democrats pretty much believe anything they’re told.

After a session of being neutered and stripped of their leadership positions by the increasingly metro-dominated DFL, there’ve been rumors bouncing around CD8 circles that Senators Bakk and Tomassoni were going to bolt the DFL.

And according to Tom Hauser, that may be in the near offing…:

…although not quite to the point of joining the GOP.

Rumors are bouncing about as to which party the “Independent Caucus” will work most closely with – but either way, Bakk and Tomassoni are going to be the most popular guys on Capitol Hill when the session starts.

It doesn’t seem a stretch that on issues of mining and gun rights – and, likely, a few more – the Senate has gone from 34-33 GOP to 34-31-2, and the DFL agenda just got even farther out of reach.

What’ll it mean for Governor Klink’s emergency powers?

My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that the House DFL will dig in harder and get more extreme.

Thoughts?

That’s the sound of DFLers realizing they’re going to have to jam ten days worth of fraud into one evening.

And they’re not happy about it.

The 8th Circuit returned a decision in Carson v. Simon yesterday. The presser from the Minnesota Voters Alliance explains:

 The 8th Circuit reversed a lower court decision which authorized the Minnesota Secretary of State to accept ballots seven days after the election, and required an injunction against Simon for extending the statutory deadline for election day for receipt of absentee ballots. 

In our view, this was a scheme concocted by Secretary Simon in the first place, where he identified and encouraged his allies to file a lawsuit against him, knowing all along that he would enter into a consent decree with them just to circumvent the legislature and the will of the people.  We can not prove that of course, but in our view, that is exactly what happened.  

To sum it up:

1. “Progressive” “group” “files” a “suit” against a “progressive” Secretary of State.
2. The SOS “settles out of court”, signing a consent decree with his allies signed off on by a “progressive” judge.

Presto change-o. Law changed by executive fiat (under cover of a convenient bit of “litigation”), without any pesky “checks and balances” or “legislatures” getting in the way.

It’s an end-run around state law, and due process.

And it’s a foreword to what we can expect – well, expect much more of – if the Democrats win on Tuesday, or whenever the actual decision is announced.

The DFL PR nomenklatura are doing their best to obscure the facts:

Could Murphy have gotten anything about the story less right?

Who’s got two thumbs, and is the only person in the world who can’t call Donald Trump’s Twitter feed “an ill-advised mass of ready/fire/aim malaprops?”

Why, that’d be Representative Ryan Winkler, if he were pointing two thumbs at himself:

50-90% of Covid patients are asymptomatic. For many others – myself included – it felt like the chest cold I get nearly every spring; if it weren’t for a strange rash on my hand, I wouldn’t have even gotten an antibody test, much less a serology test.

So – now Ryan Winkler is Covid-shaming. Seems he knows as much about epidemiology as he does black history.

This is today’s DFL.

Once upon a time, I got some great life advice.

“Find what you’re good at, and run with it”.

John Thompson, would-be DFL rep from District 67A, the East Side, apparently got and practices the same advice.

He does seem to like burning down suburbs. Or at least talking about it.

A lot:

Sure, that’ll solve police overreach against blacks. Run with it.

Hey, DFLers – this is the mainstream of your party.

I’m pretty sure the Minnesota GOP would have to invent Ryan Winkler.

This was him over the weekend on social media:

So in other words, our House Majority Leader stands for the abolition of Federalism – one of the things our country got completely right.

Oh, he’s not done yet:

He went to Harvard, you know – but apparently never read the Federalist Papers.

The Constitution is precisely about denying unlimited power to the majority!

Not sure if Winkler, and the people he’s aping, want a civil war

But if they do, it’s hard for me to figure what they’d do differently.

John Thompson – the DFL endorsed candidate for the Minnesota House, who threatened to burn down Hugo, Minnesota – is clearly not a fan of the police.

And it’s causing the DFL problems – while by all indications Ken Martin is keeping Thompson locked up in a closet and not letting him anywhere near the public, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, normally a reliable endorser of DFL candidates, has switched its endorsements in two swing House districts, and possibly more. The kerfuffle – which the media hasn’t been able to bury, despite their best efforts – caused the DFL to bag a fundraiser with Thompson and other DFL officials last week, which is a big deal, two months before an election.

Now, I’ve had a policy since the beginning of this blog: I leave peoples’ families out of it. Some of my various stalkers haven’t been quite as discriminating – and yes, that does make me a better person than them.

And I’m not going to change that now.

But while it seems that candidate Thompson’s son has had some brushes with the law, it also seems that the son also owes his life to one of the Saint Paul cops who, Thompson the Elder reminds us, “ain’t s**t”:

In early August 2018, a St. Paul officer was credited with saving his life after he was shot outside a funeral home on the 700 block of Portland Avenue.

Thompson was found in an alley with gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen after a confrontation with a fellow citizen became violent. The St. Paul Police Department said that officer Mathew Jones aided Thompson and stemmed his bleeding until EMS arrived to transport him to the hospital. It is unlikely that Thompson would have survived without the medical care Jones administered, authorities said.

Reports from Fox 9 and the Pioneer Press identified the man who was shot on Aug. 6, 2018 as Thompson’s son Damarco. The St. Paul Police Department confirmed with Alpha News that Damarco’s life was saved by Jones, who received the Life Saving Award for his actions that day.

“While the saving of a life is generally attributed to the hospital and responding EMS crews, the officers who take those initial actions, such as Officer Jones, should receive the lion’s share of the credit,” St. Paul Fire’s EMS coordinator, Captain Kenneth Adams, said of the incident. “For if it were not for them and their actions, the EMS crews and hospital staff would not have a patient to work with.”

I leave families out of things – but it doesn’t seem remotely unfair to point this out.

Ryan Winkler, the House Majority Leader, isn’t thrilled with President Trump stealing Joe Biden’s thunder:

Then the Majority Leader has had a pretty sheltered life.

Know what’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard?

Other than the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Rape of Nanking, the subjugation of Tibet, the history of Haitian slavery, or pretty much an garden-variety genocide?

Well, not this…

But it was pretty bad anyway. And if Bogdan Vechirko – who owned no “white supremacist” paraphernalia at all, and heroically avoided hitting anyone (who wasn’t trying to get hit) wants to sue for slander, I’ll host a fundraiser.

Have you people call my people.

Ryan Winkler, Minnesota’s House Majority Leader – let that thought rattle around in your head a bit – replies to Senate Majority Leader Gazelka yesterday:

“Trump’s America is deadly!”

But the Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan’s Minnesota is the part that is rioting, burning, looting, shedding businesses and jobs, boarding up, moving to the burbs or Wisconsin or the Greater or Lesser Dakota, buggering off, hitting the dusty trail for freer and safer horizons.

Alondra Cano’s Minnesota is the part that can’t run itself even in good times without massive transfers of wealth from the parts of the state that work (for now), the Republican parts.

Lisa Bender’s Minnesota is the part that considers “law and order” a form of unsustainable “privilege” for all you plebs, but pays a lot of your money so that it has that privilege for itself.

Ryan Winkler’s Minnesota is the part where a Harvard graduate and machine politician from a lilywhite “progressive” suburb full of NIMBYs can call one of the most distinguished jurists of our time an “Uncle Tom”, and then turn around and yap about “white supremacy” when his opponent compliments the men and women who are taking time off from their real lives to clean up yet another DFL mess.

If Ryan Winkler didn’t exist, the GOP would have to invent him.

To: Rep. Ryan WInkler, House Majority Leader
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Timing

Rep. Winkler,

Yesterday you tweeted in re the shooting in Kenosha:

Rep Winkler, I say the following with all due respect.

I’m just spitballing, here, but maybe a white, suburban Harvard grad who called one of the leading jurists in the nation an “Uncle Thomas” because he departed the Democrat Party’s plantation, might want to sit out the whole “white supremacy” thing.

That is all.

Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Is she:

• Anti-semitic.
• Allegedly corrupt.
• Allegedly a bigamist or an immigration fraud – one or the other. Or both.
• Member of a glam “power couple“.

Pick one.

The City Pages did.

Any guesses?

My MN House rep, Rena Moran, on Twitter yesterday:

The part Rep. Moran is missing, of course, is that Florida has over four times as many people as Minnesota has.

And that when you look in terms of fatalties per million people, it boils down (as of today) to:

• Minnesota: 276 fatalities per million
• Florida: 210 fatalities per million.

Now – does Rep. Moran truly not know the different between raw numbers and per capita numbers?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But the typical DFL voter, be they in the Midway or Wayzata, certainly does not.