[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.
Public safety is the responsibility of state govt. It’s not the responsibility of corporations, the rich, & well-connected. I introduced legislation today that bans private prisons from operating in MN. Proud to partner with @AFSCMEMN5 and @MAPEmn. Share if you’re with us. #mnlegpic.twitter.com/5lO7kMhPak
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.
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“.
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.
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.
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…:
BREAKING: 5 Eyewitness News has learned two longtime DFL Senators will quit the MN DFL Caucus and form an "Independent Caucus." Sources tell me Sen. Tom Bakk of Cook and Sen. Dave Tomassoni of Chisholm will announce the move sometime today. pic.twitter.com/aK374ovfs8
…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.
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:
“Progressive” “group” “files” a “suit” against a “progressive” Secretary of State.
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:
Stunning news 8th Circuit rules against Mn says ballots must be in by Election Night – apparently invalidating Mn State regulation in place for months allowing absentees to be counted through November 10th as long as it was post marked by Election Day –
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.
I’m pretty sure the Minnesota GOP would have to invent Ryan Winkler.
This was him over the weekend on social media:
If Republicans go forward with a Supreme Court power grab, we will see that our institutions need to change to actually reflect majority rule—filibuster, electoral college, statehood for DC/PR, gerrymandering all need to be on the table.
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.
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.
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.
Ryan Winkler, Minnesota’s House Majority Leader – let that thought rattle around in your head a bit – replies to Senate Majority Leader Gazelka yesterday:
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.
My MN House rep, Rena Moran, on Twitter yesterday:
I just heard on the floor that @kdaudt Florida has protected the elderly and thus their death totals are lower than Minnesota. Not correct! Florida total death 4514- Minnesota 1510. We could have easily been Florida if @GovTimWalz@LtGovFlanagan had not stood strong! Thanks Gov!
…that Kim Norton, mayor of Rochester, is simultaneously both the most authoritarian person in Minnesota politics and the most groaningly, er, ill-informed, incurious and tone-deaf.
But I will say…
..that if you think I’m inferring that message between the lines, I’m not going to argue with you all that hard.
To: President Trump From: Mitch Berg, Irasicble Peasant and Scott Walker supporter Re: Disaster Request
Mr. President,
This past week, Governor-For-Life Walz asked you to declare Minneapolis and Saint Paul “disaster areas”.
Make no mistake – they are.
But they are a disaster entirely due to generations of DFL policy, decades of mismanagement, and a week of seemingly assessing the situation during the various riots and seemingly selecting the stupidest, most self-destructive response.
Standing idly by while looters ravaged East Lake and other areas.
Sending in a token force of National Guard, nearly a day and a half after Mayor Frey’s half-hearted request, and basically hiding under the table as that force and the few Minneapolis cops left along Lake got chased all the way to Nicollet.
Responding days late with effective force.
Giving the rioters “space to destroy” at their will.
Trying to fob the blame on “white supremacists” when anyone looking at the graffiti can tell you it was the white, radical far-left – “Anti”-Fa – meaning “the children and nephews of the state’s and America’s leftist elite” – knowing that even if Minneapolis is burned to the last vertical stick and the earth is salted beheath the city’s feet, keeping the Minnesota DFL’s “progressive” wing fat and happy and unmolested is the real priority.
So – just as insurance companies won’t cover damage to your house if you take a sledgehammer to your walls and countertops, there is no way the taxpayers of the United States – or Greater Minnesota – should be on the hook for the Minnesota DFL’s stupidity.
As they point out whenever they win an election, they “…own these towns”. Paying federal tax money to ameliorate the stupidity of Walz, Frey, and generations of DFL politicians before them is throwing good money after bad.
But I’m nothing if not a uniter. So I have a suggestion.
Tell Minneapolis to start rebuilding with whatever’s left of the $500,000 Mayor Frey charged your campaign for the nonexistent “security” at your rally at the Target Center last year. You know – the one where mobs of leftist droogs (including at least one City Council member) attacked your supporters out in the streets (usually five or six of thugs, and their soi-boifriends, ganging up on an old guy, or a woman, usually from behind), all but cheered on by the Mayor. There is no way any of that “security” money got spent. Tell the DFL to use that.
Please don’t let Real America down on this. Please, please tell the Governor-for-life and Mayor Frey to go f*** themselves. Preferably in as many words, preferably on national TV. Until there are consequences for their, and their party’s, crimes against their positions and the people they govern, nothing will ever improve.
The Senate GOP – the only real bit of power the opposition has in Minnesota – is finally going to ask the question that it seems nearly nobody in our media will.
Republicans specifically want to know the details of what led Minneapolis police to abandon the Third Precinct police station. Additionally, they want to know why the National Guard was not a visible presence on the ground in Minneapolis until the weekend, four days after the violence started.
At the press conference, Gazelka did not directly answer a question about whether there will be subpoenas issued for the hearings, but a top aide clarified that the Senate Judiciary Committee does have subpoena power, and they will be involved in these hearings.
Democratic senators will be part of these hearings as well. It sets up for what is likely to be a spectacle at the Capitol, with Republican Senators, most of whom are from greater Minnesota, grilling top state and even city officials over the basic question of what happened.
The DFL’s evasion controls are set to “emergency”:
Susan Kent, the DFL Senate leader, responded to Republican plan to hold hearings, saying that Republicans should be just as focused on criminal justice reform as they are on the destruction of property. She noted that these hearing come after a recent special session, where no police reform proposals were agreed upon, during which the Senate held a single, informational hearing for criminal justice reform.
“It is deeply discouraging and troubling to see Senate Republicans prioritize hearings that completely fail to address racial disparities within our criminal justice system,” she said, adding: Minnesotans statewide are asking us to do our jobs and take meaningful action. The one informational hearing they held on weak proposals doesn’t cut it. It is now abundantly clear they were never really interested in passing critical legislation.”
And I’ll agree with the suburban doyenne Sen. Kent, at least halfway; we should examine the “racial disparity”.
Why is it always the black neighborhoods that the hordes of white “anarchists” and “anti”-fa and other members of the DFL’s direct action force flock to to burn and loot?
There is speculation that the revelation that the “World’s Largest Candy Store”‘s getting rated as “essential” because their owner is friends with and a donor to Waltz created optics that were starting to hurt Walz, and between that and the fact that Minnesotans are actually acting less sociallyi-distant than Georgians (who opened up to great calumny a few weeks back, and aren’t dying off in droves) led to yesterday’s modest, token relaxation of the shutdown.
We certainly see what it takes to get the governor’s attention.
