As predicted – Biden is claiming copious credit for things Tump actually did.

Pullquote:

When President Trump began promising a vaccine before the end of 2020, no one believed him. The Hill ran a piece headlined, “Trump’s new vaccine timeline met with deep skepticism.” NBC News published an article titled: “Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.” Similarly, ABC News ran a report titled, “Trump promises coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, but his own experts temper expectations.”

Back then, vaccine skepticism, which is now nearly universally condemned, was acceptable at the highest levels of our politics. Asked if she would take a vaccine approved prior to the election, then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said, “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us.”

Now, these same vaccines are a key part of the success story that Biden wants to tell about his response to the pandemic, and so the Trump effort has to be ignored or run down. Biden has referred to “the mess” he inherited, and Harris has said that “in many ways we’re starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year.”

I was intensely skeptical that there’d be a vaccine in less than a couple years, this time last year. It wasn’t a bad bet, historically speaking.

That Biden and Big Left are taking credit for the miraculous performance of Big Pharma is…

…well, not unexpected.

I always someone convincing me that Derek Chauvin can get a fair trial in Hennepin County. Really, the entire Twin Cities metro.

The evidence is not encouraging.

If your state budget is spending too much on old people and people with developmental disabilities, the easiest way to lighten the load is to kill them.

Joe Doakes

Far-fetched? Maybe.

But what are the downsides?

I bet a shiny new quarter Cuomo suffers no long-term fallout. As to the governors of states with policies no less apparently cynical and deadly – Massachusetts, New Jersey – who would know ?

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.

…of constant violence that he encouraged not only with as many words but with as many actions, Portland, Oregon mayor Ted Wheeler says people are “sick of” the constant sturm und drang that has made parts of the city unlivable:

Portland became a hotbed of civil unrest last summer during demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. Similar demonstrations in cities across the country were largely peaceful. But in Portland, some of the demonstrations have deteriorated into widespread arson, looting and assaults. ADVERTISEMENT

Rioters in the city, who have called for the defunding of the local police department along with other measures, have on several occasions targeted a federal courthouse, spraying it with graffiti, setting fires and destroying nearby storefronts and other property.  

“The people who work here support the voices of racial and social justice and will not be intimidated from doing our jobs by the ugly graffiti or broken windows,” Scott Erik Asphaug, a U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, said during the press conference, the AP reported. “We do not confuse the voices of the many with the shouts of the few who hope to hold our city hostage by petty crime and violence.”

The first two things that jumped to my mind?

1. After ten months of Wheeler all but setting Portland up as an “Anti”-Fa staging area, I wonder what powerful “progressive” constituency finally figured it was time to rein the party in?
2. Reading Asphaug’s quote, am I the only one who thinks it sounds like they’re trying to pin the violence on…”the right”?

While this article bends over backward to sandbag Florida’s perfomance (pointing out that if California had Florida’s per capita death rate that its death toll would be lower, without accounting for the radically different per capita ages and population densities), it’s hard to get around the fact that Florida, run by conservative Ron DeSantis, is doing much better than its “competitors” in Covid resonse, California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

My friend Sarah Cade Hauptman is prominently, and favorably, featured in a relatively decent piece in the relatively indecent Minnesota Monit…er, Independe…er, “Reformer” last week (where “relatively” means the piece spends at least as much space relating fact as it does gun-control movement propaganda).

The other guy? Not so much, but then I suspect if someone like Mr. Sharp weren’t featured prominently in a piece like this in a publication like the “Reformer“, author Max Nesterak would never do lunch on Grand Avenue again.

But that’s all fine – if there is a surge in people on the other side of politics who realize there’s a reason to keep government’s mitts off the Second Amendment, I can make limited common cause.

Here’s my beef, not so much with this story but with the whole “gun aren’t just for angrly middle-aged white guys” meme that’s been making the rounds this past year.

Don’t get me wrong – I fully support the idea that “gun culture” is “going viral”, and getting beyond their supposed “rural white male” ghetto. They seem to be – which is, I think, behind the Biden regime’s drive to try to get votes on as many gun regulations as it can, ASAP.

But when I read things like ““We’re doing our best to make sure that this information — which has historically been, you know, an angry white guy skill set — becomes something that is accessible to those that want to learn” and that guns are traditionally a “middle aged white guy” thing, I need to start responding like this:

When I first got involved in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the 2nd Amendment was on the ropes. “Gun Culture” was all but underground in popular perceptions. Gun grabber groups were very open about their goals (“Handgun Control Inc”, the “National Coalition to Ban Handguns”, etc) and couild smell their final goal. Polls that today show 80+% support for “Universal Background Checks” today were showing 80% support for banning all hand guns and registering everything else. In 1986, there were eight “Shall Issue” states, many states where carry permits were unobtainable, and local gun bans coming on the books all over the place.

Since then, things have changed – almost entirely for the better.

The reason there’s still a right to keep and bear arms to argue about is because 30-40 years ago a bunch of people – mostly male, many but by no means all Caucasians, disproportionally Republican, who were indeed a lot younger back then than today, and yes, some of whom were motivated by a bit of pique – organized, dug in, fought a “Siege of Vienna”-level last-ditch battle for survival and, miraculously, beat back the barbarians at the gate, and expanded gun culture geometrically so that there was an actual movement to welcome everyone else to.

Welcome, new gun owners.

I’ll urge you to respect our collective history.

Now, let’s finish this thing.

City of Minneapolis reaches an independent settlment with the Floyd family…

…just in time to jeopardize the Chauvin trial.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called it a milestone. The city council unanimously approved the settlement.

Announcing the settlement in the middle of jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin confused legal experts.

“It was absolutely terrible timing, I would say for both sides,” said Mary Moriarty, the former chief public defender in Hennepin County.

Prospective jurors in the trial can still be questioned about their thoughts on the settlement, but Moriarty says no one knows how the news will affect the seven already seated.

“Most jurors I think would perceive [the settlement] as the city’s belief that Chauvin did murder George Floyd and that they are liable,” Moriarty said.

It’s assumed that it’d be very difficult to insulate any jury from hearing about the settlement.

Given the Minneapolis City Council’s performance over the past year, it’s hard to guess whether it was incompetence, malice or arrogance.

I say “Its the Minneapolis City Council. Why choose?”

The RINOs and Never Trumpers in the Republican establishment hated Donald Trump and did everything they could to obstruct, undermine and sandbag him.  Still do, except when it comes to fundraising.  Then, they want to use his name and photo to beg Americans to send them money, because they know how popular he is with the rank-and-file.

Donald Trump understands the importance of a name-brand.  His name is on his hotels for a reason.  President Trump asked the RNC to stop using his brand, the party refused citing a First Amendment right because he’s a public figure, and the President rebuked them.  No more money for RINOs.

They shouldn’t have needed rebuking.  They should have had enough honor to drop his name and image.  They should have proudly used RINOs like Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, since those are the people they’re actually hoping to get elected.  Using President Trump’s name to raise money for candidates who don’t hold his beliefs is deceptive.  It’s bait-and-switch, false advertising, consumer fraud, lying and pretty much standard procedure for RINOs and Never-Trumpers.

I hope President Trump does run as a third party candidate. Can’t wait.

Joe Doakes

I’m personally going to go with “focus ASAP around candidates who can straddle the divide – DeSantis, Noem, whomever – and get back to the business of trying to save Western Civilization.

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.

Mass transit.

Old and busted: “it’s about moving people”

New and Fresh: “It’s about smashing racism”.

The Met Council released its new plans for yet another extension to the “Blue Line”, which would push the rail line – whose usage has plummeted since Covid – all the way up to Oak Grove.

And it would appear that the motivating factor was…equity?

“As a Hennepin County Commissioner and North Minneapolis resident, I’m excited about the transformative benefits light rail projects can bring to communities,” said Irene Fernando, Hennepin County District 2 Commissioner and chair of the Regional Railroad Authority. “The new direction of the Blue Line Extension is positioned to serve among the most racially and economically diverse communities in Hennepin, while also connecting transit-reliant residents to the broader regional transit system. This will change the trajectory of what’s possible for so many of our neighbors — connecting students to education, patients to healthcare, and workers to jobs.

“To pursue this work equitably, we must also recognize that large-scale public investments can accelerate patterns of residential and economic displacement, and work together to ensure this investment benefits corridor residents, builds community wealth, and meaningfully addresses decades-long patterns of disinvestment,” Fernando said.

I’d urge commissioner Fernando to come to the Midway and breathe in all the “equity” that the Green Line has brought to my neighborhood. Come with a group.

I heard Met Council commissioner Charlie Zelle on MPR over the weekend tie the change in plans to…

…you guessed it…

…George Floyd.

Is “George Floyd” turning into a progressive branding gimmick?

(The MPR News site’s search feature being apparently nearly worthless, I can’t quite find the clip from yesterday. I’ll keep looking).

This WaPo tweet reads precisely like something you’d have read in the USSR in the ’30s, or in North Korea today:

Poverty “was”, past tense, “cut sharply”?

By $1,400 checks that haven’t been delivered yet?

Kim Jong Un doesn’t think he’s that badass.

If you believe in anything America is supposed to be about, then the phrase “The Governor is giving permission for people to…” (fill in some normal thing, like gather in groups, hug their grandparents or go back to work) should be more offensive than snuff porn.

Should government be able to temporarily pause things under a state of emergency? Under some exceptional circumstances, with legally-defined exit criteria (y’know – like Florida has, and Minnesota doesn’t), it might be a lesser evil.

Advise people to modify their behavior for the community good, and sanction irresponsible behavior? Like in Florida or the Dakotas? Much better – where “perfect” is impossible.

But grant “permission?”

The phrase – which has been popping up in mainstream media with nauseating regularity – is an obscenity that must be fumigated from the American vocabulary.

After a year of hysteria, of gaslighting, of “Karen” nagging you from behind four masks, of plush-bottom public union employees telling unemployed waitresses “we’re all in this together” via Zoom from their ranch houses in Apple Valley, suddenly, after one barely coherent speech in the wake of the signing of an immense power grab disguised as a pork barrel bill…

…everything is OK?

So let’s get this straight – after a year of dictatorial control, now Minnesota is “ready?

And “we” are “ready” after a near majority have re-opened, without their governors publicly rolling around in the glory and majesty of their own omnipotence like Scrooge McDuck cavorting about in a vault full of quarters?

Yes. Yes, they are. Suddenly, “hope” is acceptable. Quadruple-masking? Scary new variants?

Pish-tush! The only thing to fear is fear itself! Happy Days Are Here Again!

The House majority leader, as if on cue:

And finally, Ryan Winkler tells (the second cousin of) the truth. While the pandemic was and remains real, the Minnesota government’s response has been entirely contrived to sway the election, and to give the political class a “big win” (they’ll let the media handle that for them) to use to evangelize transforming society into Big Left’s vision.

… And some of them write twaddle like this.

Minneapolis pushing ahead to eliminate cops.  Look at the photo to see who’s pushing the issue. 

Do any of those people look like they live in Hawthorne or Phillips?  Any of them look like they’ll be affected when cops stop patrolling dangerous neighborhoods? 

Looks more like White people from affluent neighborhoods telling the city council what’s good for Black people living in desperate neighborhoods.  “Pull the cops out of those bad neighborhoods, leave the Black people to die.”

In the olden days, instead of wearing backpacks and carrying signs, they’d have been wearing sheets and carrying torches.

Joe Doakes

Big Left always sells class conflict as cultural conflict. Today’s cultural conflict is racial. But behind it, always, is affluent honkeys with (at best) white liberal guilt and, otherwise, the kind of cynicism that is dripping from every pore of the American ruling class.

Urban Progressive Privilege includes being reasonably certain that none of the policies you promote for other people will ever really affect you.

Joe Soucheray on the Chauvin Trial and Minneapolis:

Yes, the trial, and the attendant protests, could be the end of Minneapolis. There is no political strength in place to save it. The council even exudes a vibe that suggests they are more concerned about the safety and convenience of protesters than their own citizenry.

The council cannot open an intersection because of their apparent fealty to those who occupy it. What are they going to do if rioters decide that they are going to take over six or seven square blocks of downtown, maybe the Nicollet Mall? This city let a police station burn. This is a city that called for help too late back in May 2020.

Minneapolis city council president Lisa Bender famously said that expecting public safety is a “privilege” – to which every taxpayer in that city should be saying “Yes. It Is. A ‘privilege’ I, whatever my race, creed or belief, pay through the nose for. Now provide it, stat, or get out of office and quite wasting our time”.

But they don’t ,and they won’t, and when Lisa Bender leaves the Council she, like Frey and even Alondra Cano, will be replaced by someone worse. That’s cynicism talking – well, not just cynicism. It’s the way Minneapolis politics is set up. It’s the way politics go wherever a small minority, committed to getting power at whatever cost, get their way. It’s the apotheosis of Urban Progressive Privilege.

Not even a complete apocalypse is going to change that.

It’s been a while – but my band, “Elephant in the Room”, is back in business.

After a year where we had precisely two, somewhat surreptitious gigs, we’re back in an actual bar, for the first time since February 29, 2020.

After a couple years of playing in the far northwest and far eastern suburbs, onSaturday night, we will be going north, playing at the Back To The SRO Bar and Grill in Oak Grove. It’s about 10 miles north of Anoka:

I’m not sure what the Covid rules are, other than the fact that we are playing from six until 10 rather than our usual nine until one – which isn’t entirely unwelcome.

Anyway – I’ve been there before, the food is pretty good, and the food and beverage prices have that “edge of the metro“ not-so-priciness about them.

By the way – enjoy live music while you can. Because while on the one hand states are slowly reopening, the Biden administration is doing its best to destroy the “gig“ economy. And there is literally nothing giggier than playing in a bar band.

As an American, I not only have no innate concept of “aristocracy” as a natural part of the social order, but I think it’s an anachronism at best.

As a conservative, I can see the value to a culture with a history of monarchy keeping some vestigial, ceremonial, constitutionally-innocuous version of a monarchy around. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain and others use their monarchies sort of like cultural museums, means of transmitting their nations pasts to their presents and futures.

Which is why Big Left has always wanted to tear monarchies down.

Speaking of Big Left’s attempts to destroy traditions like the monarchy: could someone make these two hamsters go away?

What Liberals believe will happen:

Gangbanger 1: “Hey, man, that guy was disrespectful to me.  I’m going to kill him.  Give me your gun.”

Gangbanger 2: “No way, man.  There’s a new law: you must pass a background check first.”

Gangbanger 1: “Dang, man.  I guess I’ll go play some basketball instead.”

Joe Doakes

Joe gives gun grabbers too much credit. I doubt most of them consider the notion that there are people out there we already prohibit from owning guns. They think the good guys are the problem.

Two points

1. “Racial Conflict” is a cover for “Cultural Conflict”.
2. Cultural Conflict is a pseudonym for “Class Conflict”.

Oh, yeah – and Berg’s 20th Law of Social Justice Warmongering is not called “Berg’s 20th Impromptu Notion” for a reason:

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.

I say this not to deny that hate speech happens, by the way – but to stop diluting the term.

But we saw it again: student at a posh college makes a claim against a couple blue-collar white guys. Blue collar members of the majority – a janitor, a cafeteria worker and a campus cop – get disciplined, and “cancelled”.

And then?

Then an outside investigation determined that, basically, it never happened. The campus police officer, the janitor and a cafeteria worker had been falsely tarred as racists, but they were not the beneficiaries of apologies, “compassion for everyone involved” or anything else. 

“Check your privilege” is a common term around higher education, but the notion that white janitors, cafeteria workers and campus police are “privileged” in that environment is not simply absurd, but monstrous. As Smith janitor Mark Patenaude told the Times, “We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone.”

Privilege is the ability to get an employee of many years punished simply by making a complaint, even a false one.  

As we’ve noted in the past, the woman who coined the term “white privilege” did it to deflect away from her absolutely colossal class privilege. And I’m not saying, flat-out, that it’s a psyop to cover a fairly deliberate class war…

…but if it were, it’d be hard to figure what they’d be doing differently:

The gentry class is in firm control of most of the institutions in America, from big corporations, to media organizations, to, most especially, colleges and universities. The Democrats are the gentry class’ party, as the GOP increasingly becomes a diverse coalition of working-class and small-business people. And the gentry class is letting the working class have it.

Barack Obama boasted about driving coal mines into bankruptcy; Joe Biden tells miners they need to learn how to [build solar panels]. There’s talk of forgiving student-loan debt, which would effectively transfer wealth from high-school educated truck drivers to social workers with graduate degrees. Biden’s open-borders immigration policy will once again open the “immigrant spigot” to push working-class wages down. Piling ruin upon ruin.

The US – at least, the “blue” parts of it – are starting to resemble Britain in the 1600s.

At best.

SCOTUS tells colleges “you can’t oppress free speech, and then drop the restrictions when someone sues you and claim there was never a problem“.

I bet administrators at Macalester, Saint Thomas and the like are popping out bricks today.

A friend of the blog emails:

As you can see you today more fencing and wire went up around the 4th Precinct in North Minneapolis.

Many traffic barriers are also set internal inside the fence in the police parking lot.

So where will all the rioters go?

It’s a rhetorical question.

UPDATE: Compare and contrast with when this shot was first taken, a couple weeks ago:

No less an authority than Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream informs me that public schools are hotbeds of systemic racism.

No less an authority than President Trump informed me that racism is evil.

Plainly, then, the conclusion must be obvious: public schools are evil.

Minnesota spends more than $13 Billion per year promoting evil.

We should stop doing that. 

We should close all public schools at once.

Parents who care about education and who can afford to send their children to private school, will.

Parents who care about education but who can’t afford to send their children to private school, will home school.

Parents who care about education but who can’t afford to send their children to private school nor to home school them will be out of luck and their children will grow up ignorant and poor like their parents who probably were Trump voters anyway, so they deserve it.

Teachers, administrators, support staff laid off when the schools close, should learn to code.

Joe Doakes

The thing about calling racism “structural” is you gotta get rid of the “structure” to fix it.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is shoveling landscaping dirt into a wheelbarrow, distracted. Avery LIBRELLE pedals up the alleyway on, naturally, a recumbent fat-tire bike, catching BERG by surprise.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Aaaaah, fffffffor crying out loud, Avery, long time no see. What’s…

LIBRELLE: America is built around structural racism.

BERG: Our “structurally racist” country elected a black president, twice, and we have a sitting Veep who is Black and South Asian.

LIBRELLE: Yeah, but that’s just politics.

BERG: OK. This country is capitalist, right?

LIBRELLE: Ugh. Yes. Ick.

BERG: And under capitalism – well, the parody of it you people observe – all things evolve back to money, right?

LIBRELLE: Ugh, yes. Awful.

BERG: Right. And there are few places in our society where “money” and the people who spend it are as attuned to peoples attitudes as in advertising.

And perhaps you’ve noticed – in advertising these days, “people of color” are represented waaaay out of proportion with their share of American demographics. And remember fifty years ago, when Norman Lear got all “transgressive” and cast a biracial couple as bit players on All in the Family? Pretty scandalous stuff, back then – but interracial couples are kinda the “it” thing in advertising these days.

Now – given the ad industry’s focus on consumer attitudes, and capitalism’s imperative to make money work, would advertisers be pushing “racial diversity” in ads if the general public, including the white middle class which makes up a large portion of advertisers targets, were just frothing with racial hate?

LIBRELLE: You notice skin color in ads?

BERG: I notice trends in advertising, a key part of the industry I grew up in and which is still my avocation.

LIBRELLE: That’s racist.

BERG: No, it’s utterly clinical. But shall I just ignore everyone’s race? Because that’s pretty much my default setting…

LIBRELLE: No, that’s racist, too…

BERG: So the only thing that’s not “racist” is shutting up and letting you tell me what to think?

LIBRELLE: Pretty much.

BERG: Naturally. Hey, loook (points into the distance) – a garbage truck!

(LIBRELLE looks around – giving BERG an opening to slip away) .

(And SCENE)