Tag Archives: Almost Dumb Enough For MN Progressive Project

Lie First, Lie Always: Delusions Of Adequacy

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It’s been a frustrating week to be a Real American in Minnesota – an American who believes that law-abiding citizens should have more rights in the eyes of the law than criminals.

More on that tomorrow on the show.  Oh, yes – the show will fairly crackle with rage.

But there’s some comic relief.  Grim comic relief, under the circumstances, but relief nonetheless.

She Who Has Never Made  A Single Substantial, Original, True Statement About The Issue:  It’s been interesting seeing what the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence has rattling around her little ELCA-coiffed noggin.  This was in her email blast yesterday (emphasis added to highlight particularly comic passages by me):

I am pleased to announce that the House public safety committee omnibus bill introduced today in committee does NOT contain the Permitless Carry or Stand Your Ground bills! That was the goal of our Cure Gun Violence lobby day and rally on Tuesday—and we succeeded!

Make no mistake about it – the criminal-protection, black-victim-disarmament lobby, after spending ten times as much as the Real Americans in this past year for almost no results, obtained a victory of sorts, for now.  But they didn’t win it.   It happened due to nothing they did on their own.   Not one iota of it happened due to anything The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence’s fact-free rambling, the sanctimonious preening of the Dreamsicles, or the trunks full o Jacksons that the Bloomberg lobby spent.

No.  The GOP gave it to them.  They “won” a forfeited game.

Leadership in the Senate, apparently rendered pusillanimous via winning the majority, decided to play “protect the incumbents”, even though it’s three years ’til the election.

House leadership, hearing this, decided to play it “safe” – thus earning themselves a raft of well-deserved and impassioned primary challenges supported by a group of people…

…who, I can tell you right now, are pissed off at having their votes courted, but their policies ignored in the breach.

It was the kind of stupid error that makes being a Republican such a trying thing in this Godforsaken state.   How hard is it to dance with the ones that brung you?

But it wasn’t “Protect” MN’s f****ng win.  Those lumpen fossils and caterwauling shrews dominate their little echo chambers in Crocus Hill and Kenwood, and not a hell of a lot more.

The Lesson:  Even after years of winning, and of beating back serious challenges while in the minority, Real Americans not not relax.  We can not be complacent.  We can not trust the party for which most of us worked our asses off.

While In Duluth Tomorrow

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I’ll be broadcasting live from the GOP State Convention on Friday from 6-8PM, and again on Saturday fro 1-3PM.

I’m neither a delegate nor a member of the State Central Committee, so I won’t be voting on anything

But I will be doing my level best to help any group that seeks to limit the power of the Judicial Elections Commission.  Perhaps not end the JEC, per se – but in exchange for leaving the JEC alive, I want the heads of those responsible for the Michelle MacDonald debacle displayed on pikes outside the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center.

Rhetorically speaking, of course.

Speaking of Michelle MacDonald:  she’s running for the Supreme Court again.  That’s certainly her right; hopefully the convention chair won’t make the same mistake that happened in 2014.

Speaking of MacDonald – her followers are making the technically true but contextually laughable assertion that MacDonald got a higher percentage of the vote than any other GOP candidate in 2014.   Which is true…

…and also deeply misleading – and I can not wait for the first MacDonald supporter to try to bring that up on the air.

MacDonald got 46% and change, it’s true – running mostly against the GOP, and little or not at all against David Lillehaug (who ran, effectively, no campaign at all).  As I pointed out after the last election, all contested judicial elections get an average of 35-40% – it’s an outlet for people’s obstinacy, apparently (I always, always vote for challengers, whether I know or care about them or not, and I can not be the only one).

So MacDonald got about 4% more than “background noise”.  And while I have no empirical evidence for this, I’m going to speculate with confidence that had she not been running against Darth Lillehaug – one of the most anti-gun politicians (excuse me, “jurists”) in the business, she’d have come in in the thirties without a whole lot of shooters voting against Lillehaug and not for MacDonald.

So while my actual means for dealing with the JEC and MacDonald are limited, I’m going to use what I can to encourage those who can do something about it to seriously punish the JEC, and send MacDonald back to famlaw.

Speaking of family?  Read this time-line of MacDonald’s most famous case.  I have no idea if MacDonald was involved in any wrongdoing – specifically, the systematic alienation of a custodial father’s children against him – but as a matter of principle, everyone who interferes with another parent’s access to their kids should rot in hell.

A Miracle Of Physics

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This form email has been making the rounds at the capitol in Saint Paul.  The person who sent it to me is under the impression that it shows the gun-grabbers are running out of good ideas and smart people.

Au contraire, said I.  This letter is a miracle, bordering on the first radio signal and the first nuclear fissile pile.

Because so much stupid is jammed into this email, it violates what were once thought to be inviolate laws of physics.

The woman – she’s a suburban matron from Mound – comes out swinging:

I oppose legalizing silencers in Minnesota (HF 1434). Silencers are designed to let people commit murder and get away with it.

Only in the movies.

They do the same thing for guns that mufflers do for cars; forestall hearing loss.  They take 30 decibels off the “bang” of a gun firing. What does this mean?

This:  “…for most commercially available fire arms and cartridges, this ends up only reducing the noise level to somewhere in the range of 130-150-ish dB for a supersonic cartridge and 117-130-ish dB for a subsonic cartridge. For reference on just how loud that is, an ambulance or police siren is typically between 100-140 dB. So this isn’t exactly the “whoosh” sound Hollywood depicts.”

Someone’s been watching too many movies:

In addition, silencers would compromise Minneapolis’ crime-fighting “shot-spotter” technology.

About as much as things like buildings and cars and anything else that gets between a shot and a shot-spotter microphone.  In other words, not really.

I also oppose HF 305, a bill to let North Dakota legislators decide who can carry guns in Minnesota. Under current law, state law enforcement reviews other states’ laws to determine if the other states’ permits should be recognized in MInnesota. That is as it should be. We should not let North Dakota legislators decide what is best for public safety in Minnesota.

This is mad ignorance.

The law allows the Commissioner of Public Safety decides whether other states’ carry permitting laws are “subsantially similar” to Minnesota’s.  North Dakota implemented a two-tier system – one permit for residents, and another for non-residents, specifically to cater to that absurd restriction in Minnesota law, to help avoid creating a felony trap for law-abiding citizens from both states.  Knowing, as I do, er, “friends” who have to stop in Moorhead or East Grand Forks when travelling west to move, er, payloads to the trunk, this change is long overdue.  Not that author of this post knows the difference.

Two other bills, HF 830 and HF 372, are unnecessary. In particular, weakening our laws around carrying guns at the Capitol is a step in the wrong direction.

But she doesn’t favor us with a reason why.

That’s simple; she’s parroting something someone else told her.  There is no downside to the proposal; Capitol Security has real-time access to the database of carry permittees; the current notification statute is a throwback to the days when permits weren’t computerized.

Please join me in opposing these bills.

[“Writer’s” name redacted]
Mound, MN 5536

She must be on the “Minnesota Progressive Project” farm club.