Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Governor Walz extended the Peacetime Emergency for another thirty days by Executive Order 20-78.  This extension ends August 12, 2020, after which it can be renewed again.

The justification for the extension is the increasing number of Covid cases in Minnesota. “On May 12, 2020, Minnesota had over 12,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with over 1,700 hospitalizations and over 600 fatalities. Minnesota has now had over 42,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with over 4,300 hospitalizations and over 1,500 fatalities.”

The Governor notes his authority ends if both houses of the Legislature over-ride it and he’s called a Second Special Session for them to consider it, but if they don’t over-ride him, then he’ll have the power to continue extending indefinitely, 30 days at a time.  

The Order says his acts have been science-based but does not mention that the total number of fatalities (1,500) is a tiny fraction of the projected number under the most strict scenario, the one we’re following (50,000).  There is no explanation why the science failed so badly, or why neighboring states with no restrictions have results equal to or better than Minnesota’s results.

The Order notes the virus is spreading in Minnesota and other states, but does not note the difference between “cases” and “serious cases” or “fatalities. Using the Governor’s figures, 90% of the “cases” are asymptomatic or have symptoms so trivial they didn’t require medical attention, much less ICU beds, ventilators or an $8 million refrigerated warehouse to store the corpses just North of the Capitol (the former Bix Foods building, which cost $7 to purchase but it was available for purchase because the state gave them a grant to move to Little Canada). 

The Order does not state victory conditions or cite scientific authority for any of the current or future restrictions.  Expect a state-wide mask order soon. 

Joe Doakes

It’s not an emergency. It’s an opportunity.

Like a lot of Twin Cities residents, I’m eyeing next spring – sometime after the scheduled March opening of the Derek Chauvin trial – nervously, remembering that the LA riots (at least the ones everyone remembers) began not with the pummeling of Rodney King, but with the acquittal of the four officers involved.

And here’s a fearless prediction (one I’ve already made): Chauvin will be acquitted of Second Degree Unintentional Murder – not because of any legal cop-fu, but because while I’m not a lawyer, I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to see why it’s going to be very hard to show that Chauvin was – check the emphasis, taken from the statute for 2nd Degree Unintentional Murder…:

(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or

Is a cop responding to a call “the commission of a felony?” I can see Alondra Cano believing that – but Ellison? Someone who’s ostensibly been to law school?

Unless there’s some bodacious lawyer-fu in store, or the Attorney General’s office plans on tampering with the entire witness pool, I’m just not seeing it.

But does the concept of qualified immunity mean there could be yet a third adverse verdict for George Floyd’s supporters and the Twin CIties’ far left’s many professional and amateur hooligans?

Was it “clearly established” on May 25 that kneeling on a prone, handcuffed arrestee’s neck for nearly nine minutes violated his Fourth Amendment rights? The issue is surprisingly unsettled in the 8th Circuit, which includes Minnesota.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit blocked civil rights claims in two recent cases with broadly similar facts: handcuffed detainees who died after being restrained face down by several officers. Unlike those detainees, Floyd was not actively resisting at the time of his death, except to repeatedly complain that he could not breathe.

While that distinction could make a difference in the constitutional analysis, we can’t be sure. Even if the 8th Circuit concluded that Chauvin’s actions were unconstitutional, it could still decide the law on that point was not clear enough at the time of Floyd’s arrest, meaning Chauvin would receive qualified immunity.

The 8th Circuit could even reach the latter conclusion without resolving the constitutional question, as courts have commonly done since 2009, when the Supreme Court began allowing that shortcut. To defeat qualified immunity in this case, says UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, a leading critic of the doctrine, Floyd’s family “would have to find cases in which earlier defendants were found to have violated the law in precisely the same way.”

The whole piece is worth a read – and the whole concept of seriously reforming qualified immunity is something conservatives need to take an enlightened lead on.

Because it’s for damn sure the other side won’t.

A friend of the blog emails in re the Taco Bell at Snelling and Edmund in the Midway:

Hmmm, are we positive that the city council didn’t pay people to riot in St Paul? Now I just read that the Taco Bell on Snelling can’t reopen until a conditional use permit for drive thru is issued because they need that in order to rebuild. (Even though they already have a drive thru currently). 

I know the city has been itching to get rid of the shopping center and the Taco Bell both. Seems too easy…

As we noted last week, the whole “renovation by Molotov Cocktail” thing this past month does seem to have been all too convenient…

Los Angeles schools, concerned about the Covid epidemic, will not reopen…

… Unless charter schools are shut down.Because epidemic. And shut up.

The feds turn down Governor Klink’s disaster funding request:

The federal government has denied Gov. Tim Walz’s request for aid to help rebuild and repair Twin Cities structures that were damaged in the unrest following George Floyd’s death.

Walz asked President Donald Trump to declare a “major disaster” for the state of Minnesota in his request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on July 2. More than 1,500 buildings were damaged by fires, looting and vandalism in the days of unrest that followed Floyd’s May 25 death in Minneapolis police custody, racking up more than $500 million in damages, according to Walz.

“The Governor is disappointed that the federal government declined his request for financial support,” [Walz spokesperson Teddy] Tschann said in a statement. “As we navigate one of the most difficult periods in our state’s history, we look for support from our federal government to help us through.”

The “disaster” was, of course, caused by sixty years of DFL governance that is swerving exponentially to the left, decades of mismanagement, a toxic culture run by white liberals more concerned with virtue-trumpeting than competence and justice, and of course by a city that simultaneously rolls out the red carpet for young, largely white, largely upper-middle-class radicals (the direct action arm of the DFL) which the city was packed full of when Mayor Frey made his ill-fated decision to evacuate law enforcement from East Lake Street.

Why should the American taxpayer – especially those who work hard to support competent government, almost invariably in red states – pay for the DFL’s decades of depraved indifference to their own incompetence?

You break it, you buy it.

The Washington Redskins will be announcing a new nickname today.

I’m going to suggest the Washington Possums. They get killed at home and run over on the road.

(Borrowed from someone on Facebook).

I’ll cop to it – I’ve been pretty cynical about “hate crimes” lately. Let’s stipulate in advance – they do happen.

But Berg’s 20th Law – “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” – is a law for a reason.

Or, rather, many, many reasons – including this one from, what else, a poitician from the west coast:

Jonathan Lopez, who is Latino and was a recent candidate for Umatilla County commissioner, claimed he discovered the hate-filled missive in his mailbox on June 23, the East Oregonian reported.

On his now-deleted Facebook account, he shared a photo of the letter, which said that Lopez and other “Mexicans” were “not welcome here,” according to local news station KEPR-TV.

“Don’t waste your time trying to become anything in this county we will make sure you never win and your family suffers along with all the other f–king Mexicans in the area!” the letter said.

Lopez wrote in the post that he “holds no resentment for whomever wrote this,” the outlet reported.

Oh, I bet he holds some resentment for the writer – or at least the writer’s judgment…:

“Our investigation has shown that Mr. Lopez wrote the letter himself and made false statements to the police and on social media,” Hermiston Police Chief Jason Edmiston told the East Oregonian.

“The end result is a verbal and written admission by Mr. Lopez that the letter was fabricated.”

Edmiston said the case would be forwarded to the Umatilla County District Attorney’s Office for review on charges for initiating a false report.

“This investigation is particularly frustrating as we are in the midst of multiple major investigations while battling a resource shortage due to the current pandemic,” Edmiston told the outlet.

In a party where reputations and political capital are ever-more based on intersectional virtue-signaling and dog-whistling, politicians are gonna virtue signal and dog-whistle.

Well, presuming the guy’s a Democrat.

Because Mr. Lopez’s party is never mentioned in the article.

Weird, huh?

Doug Willetts is ruhning for Senate in MN District 51 – Eagan and little slices of Burnville and Inver Grove Heights.

I don’t have a lot in common with former Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges. I took my fair, and justified, share of shots at her during her four years in office.

It seems the former Mayor and I share only two things: our mutual love of Darkness on the Edge of Town…

…and criticism of white “progressives'” unicorn-dust approach to social issues, especially racism:

As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.

These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.

In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.

Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing. Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town (where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience) and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live — where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death.

Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and our property.

Is there a certain amount of “I Told You So” on the part of a mayor who wasn’t rated a whole lot better on dealing with crime in those lazy, innocent days before Minneapolis became the new Los Angeles, Baltimore and Saint Louis? A little inter-party tit-for-tat?

That’s fine. Any energy they spend at each others’ throats is energy they can’t spare for the rest of us.

While Marquette University has always leaned as far left as any other American university, one of its graduates – my major advisor, Dr. James Blake – got his PhD in English from Marquette.

And Dr. Blake – who used to describe himself as so conservative he was a “monarchist” – was the first person to tell me that I wasn’t really a Democrat, and Wood in fact probably fit in best as a conservative.

But from the sounds of things, I doubt that Dr. Blake would get admitted these days.

Modern airplanes are equipped with a “stick-shaker” that vibrates the
control stick with increasing harshness as the airplane approaches a
stalled configuration.  The hope is the pilot will feel the shaking and
correct the airplane’s attitude before the stall occurs.

My work computer has a time-out safety feature.  If I don’t touch the
mouse every so often, it logs me out.  Which would make sense if I only
worked on-line, but I have lots of other stuff to do off-line as well. 
I’m forever logging back in.  I’m stalled.

I need a stick-shaker for my mouse.

Joe Doakes

It’d also be a great feature on credit cards.

…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: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: State Of Non-Emergency

Your Highness,

Your ongoing, and apparently endless, emergency declaration is, put mildly, draconian – especially if you’re in the private sector, especially an entrepreneur. You’ll notice that a sizable majority of people supporting the your most extreme quarantining provisions are public, non-profit or academic employees, students, or the retired. There’s a reason for that.

Now, we’re Americans. Most of our anscestors came here to escape tyranny – some petty, some very much not.

But for most of us in the private sector, “resisting” the worst excesses of your emergency measures is beyond our control or ability. Our businesses are shut down; trying to re-open leaves many of us open to getting ratted out to state licensing and permitting authorities on the government-sponsored snitch lines, which the “Karens” among our neighbors are all too happy to keep busy, thus making earning a living a risky venture.

Our jobs, our livelihoods, our social lives – especially those of us for whom “zoom calls” are no substitute for business or pleasure – are all on hold until events meet criteria that our Governor, in a display of abusiveness that would get him tossed in jail if he did it to his wife or kids, won’t tell us.

So what do we do?

History is dotted with ways in which people, deprived of all other means of hitting back at their oppressor, hit ’em anyway.

When Norway was occupied during the Second World War, Norwegians – the ones who couldn’t escape to the UK or into the mountains to carry on the battle – would draw a number “7”, or flash seven fingers at fellow citizens. It referred to Norway’s king, Håkon the 7th. It was a small, almost meaningless gesture – but it gave the people the feeling that they were doing…something, at least, that the occupier couldn’t control.

And so, I suspect, with masks. Minnesotans, their jobs reducing hours or cutting pay or just plain gone, their businesses gasping for air, their social lives and recreation limited to whatever’s in their houses, only as safe from retaliation as their least stable, least passive-aggressive “Karen” or “Chad” of a neighbor, are resisting with the only tool they have.

Their faces.

Work With Me, Here – And you know what? It didn’t have to be this way.

Been to stores that require masks? Many people gripe about it – but most people put ’em on.

I mean, I don’t personally care – I’ve already had Covid, and can neither catch nor spread the disease; I may as well wear a red rubber clown nose. But there IS a reason surgical staff wear them, too [1]

I have a hunch if Minnesota would have done it, given the right information and a choice, if the state had…:

a) Asked people, nicely, to wash their hands, stay home when sick, and put on a mask when around crowds, and

b) Foregone the whole “act like your scolding mother” and gone a lot lighter on the whole “emergency powers” thing

c) Focused the state’s efforts on protecting the vulnerable…

…things might have worked out a lot better.

Y’know – like they did in South Dakota.

Of course, that is all predicated on the notion that the state’s response was about mitigating the effects of Covid.

That is all.

[1] And no, people who get health problems from the minuscule amount of CO2 that gets trapped in their masks are about as common as people with actual Celiac disease (I’ll let our millennial readers shuffle uncomfortably and clear their throats).

Every year, I scan the news for stories of blind, fingerless, homeless Wisconsinites crossing the border into Minnesota.  Still haven’t found any. 

Fireworks that fly or explode are illegal in Minnesota.  Governor Walz vetoed a bill to legalize them.  But they’re legal to buy in Wisconsin and the Dakotas, so in a massive act of civil disobedience, Minnesotans cross the border to bring fun home.  The Twin Cities really did transform into Mogadishu for a couple of hours on Saturday night; sounded like it, at least.

DFL Karens insist fun fireworks are too dangerous for Minnesotans.  Firecrackers could blow your fingers off.  Bottle rockets could shoot someone’s eye out.  Your aerial display mortar could set the roof on fire.  You’re simply too stupid to follow the instructions printed on every package of Black Cats since I was a kid: “Lay on ground. Light fuse.  Get away.” 

If that were true, you’d think the news media would show the hordes of maimed and homeless refugees from neighboring states coming here for medical treatment, food, shelter, generous welfare benefits, solicitous churches . . . but no, there are no refugee stories.  I see only two possibilities: the news media is hiding the story, or there are no refugees which means Karen is lying.

And yet fireworks are banned.  There were 59 injuries from fireworks in Minnesota last year, half of them kids burned by sparklers which are completely legal.  For this, we ban fireworks in the entire state?  

The risk is negligible but the ban is permanent.  I see only one possibility:  DFLers believe Cheeseheads are so much smarter than Minnesotans, they can be trusted with freedom.  We cannot.  So they won’t give us any.

Actually, that explains a lot. 

Joe Doakes

And not just about fireworks.

I’ve never much cared for the “progressive-rock” band Yes (except for their 1985 reboot, saying which always starts an argument with my Yes-fan friends). And in saying that, I’ll stipulate a lot of that disdain was my own adolescent “too cool for school” arrogance about music.

But “a lot” ain’t everything. “Progressive Rock”, with its orchestral pretensions and acid-fueled subject matter, annoys me almost as much in retrospect as it did then.

But as I noted five years ago with the death of their founding bassist Chris Squire, they could really play.

Of course, they knew it. One of the things that probably got me off on a bad foot with Yes were a series of interviews I read with guitarist Steve Howe; with his academic background and classical guitar training, Howe came off like he was working on a cure for cancer, rather than…songs.

Keyboardist Rick Wakeman – he of the Gregg Allman hair and flowing robes and mad-scientist stacks of keyboards – is inseparable from Yes (although he’s left the band a few times, so Yes is clearly separable from him). In the seventies, Wakeman was practically a synonym for bloated pretension.

And they were right – but as always, there’s more to it.

This is htt a fairly fascinating piece about the Rick Wakeman story, including a lot of things I really never thought I’d want to know but am glad I now do. And I’m actually kind of interested…

…in the guy. Not the seventies Yes albums, or Wakeman’s (not making this up) ice show about the legend of King Arthur – although reading about the guys he produced it all with just gets more and more interesting.

And to circle back to Steve Howe? I saw this a few years ago, before Squire’s death – a “rig rundown” of Howe and Squires instruments, amps and other gear. And Howe comes across as a pretty dang likeable…

…well, not so much a “bloke”. Maybe more of an affable old professor who’s taken to genial chats about his favorite light reading.

There are times I kick myself for having sorted so much of the world out according to cliches I picked out of Rolling Stone.

Matt Yglesias, fighting in his own way for freedom (for him, but probably others as well), has found himself out-intersectioned:

Part of me thinks that if we just step back for a bit, the American left will just destroy itself and leave the rest of us alone.

I”m too optimistic, I know, especially on that last clause.

A few weeks ago, I joked – well, “joked” – that you could that most of the destructive rioters were upper middle class white kids, closely linked to the Twin Cities’ political class.

How could I tell this?

Because Allianz Field, home of “Minnesota United” soccer club, and a mere block from stores that were burned or looted wall to wall, didn’t have so much as a single graffito on it.

We’ll come back to Allianz Field in a moment.

The strip mall that adjoins Allianz, the “Midway Center”, essentially the Midway’s “main street”, was damaged extensively in the riots – but not comprehensively.

That hasn’t stopped the mall’s owner from terminating all the leases in the complex.

Jenny Hui got choked up earlier this week when talking about the family business being shut down.

She’s 28-years old and essentially grew up inside Golden Gate Cafe.

Her parents opened the restaurant in St. Paul’s Midway Shopping Center shortly after they emigrated from China decades ago.

“They worked super hard all these years to build everything we have now,” Hui said. “It’s devastating to see it go out like this.”

But the aftermath of civil unrest last month left parts of the Midway Shopping Center significantly damaged, and the landlord has informed tenants that he intends to terminate their leases.

The Pioneer Press obtained a copy of a letter dated June 25 in which the landlord cited a clause in the lease agreement that allows him to terminate in the case of extensive damage. He noted that all personal property must be removed from the premises by July 1

Now, stop me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t “MN United” looking to clear that shopping center out of the way to make way for its own development plans – plans that cater only dubiously to the neighborhood?

Major League Soccer’s Minnesota United principal owner Bill McGuire is involved in the property, though owner Rick Birdoff with RK Midway wrote the letter to tenants. Neither responded to requests for comment.

The Midway Shopping Center sits in the shadows of the newly constructed Allianz Field soccer stadium, home to Minnesota United.

Convenient, huh?

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.
• Evacuating the Third Precinct hours before the rioting re-started.
• 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.

That is all.

I hereby wager a shiny new quarter that this episode is one of two things:

1. A harried, part-time employee in a busy, loud store, hearing someone talking, very possibly with an accent of one kind or another, hearing “Isis” when someone, possibly with a mask on, said “Aishah”.
2. A hoax, exactly as spelled out in Berg’s 20th Law.

Any action on that bet?

… then stories like this have to be incredibly confusing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Looking at the recycle bin at my house, I’m curious how many trillion board-feet of lumber get turned into cardboard for Amazon boxes every year?

The lumberjacks and paper mills should be kissing the ground Jeff Bezos walks on.

Joe Doakes

Oh, I have a hunch they are.

And how long has it been since you heard someone protesting forestry?

The state is going after Senator, and Doctor, Scott Jensen, for…

…well, counterrevolutionary activity, apparently:

Minnesota senator and medical physician Dr. Scott Jensen says he is under investigation by the Minnesota State Board of Medical Practice for allegedly spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

Jensen revealed the investigation in a Facebook video on Sunday, saying the medical board is focusing on “reckless advice” he had given by comparing COVID-19 with the flu, as well as comments he made regarding CDC guidelines for the completion of death certificates in an interview with Fargo news broadcaster Chris Berg in April – which went viral.

“When I got this news, I was ticked,” Jensen, who is rumored to be considering a run for Minnesota governor as a Republican, said in the video, which has now been viewed one million times.

“If this could happen to me because of my views, it could happen to b ‘=, anybody,” he added.

Let’s sure we’ve got this straight;  the state’s bureaucracy is actively moving to squelch a prominent dissenter to Governor Walz’s incompetent, logrolling response to the pandemic.  

Powerline’s Scott Johnson on his wrapup of what happened in Minneapolis over Memorial Day.

In his initial comments the morning after the Third Precinct was destroyed, Governor Walz threw Frey under the proverbial bus for the decision to abandon it. Warned in advance of the decision by Frey, Walz professed himself “not comfortable” with it. These were perhaps the most truthful only words uttered by Walz in this entire series of events. Walz quickly reverted to the style of the stereotypical used car salesman that is his characteristic mode.

The decision to abandon the Third Precinct on the evening of May 28 was an open secret. The Wall Street Journal now looks back in “‘We’re Just Going to Walk Away From This?’ How Minneapolis Left a Police Station to Rioters.” MPR looks back in “‘The precinct is on fire’: What happened at Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct — and what it means.”

Unfortunately, MPR has no idea what it means. Led by the Star Tribune, we have a massive failure of the Minnesota media to settle accounts and assess responsibility. Their view is utterly blinkered, not by the fog of war, but rather by the fog of leftist sympathy. Sheer cowardice must be a substantial contributing factor as well.

The perpetrators of the terroristic crime wave were many and varied. Only a few have been charged so far. The Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota has brought arson cases against a dozen or so defendants to date. See the US Attorney press releases compiled here. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seems to be taking the lead in the investigation of the 150 arsons throughout the Twin Cities in the week following Floyd’s death.

The whole piece is worth a read.

But let’s set the record straight, here. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s wrapup of the abandonment of the Third Precinct:

Police were preparing another round of tear gas to use against a rock-throwing crowd when they got word from Mayor Jacob Frey on the night of Thursday, May 28, to abandon the city’s Third Precinct,

Here’s MPR’s team report:

It was 9:53 p.m. when a Minneapolis police officer sent out an urgent call to the other officers who remained in the 3rd Precinct.

“We need to move. We need to move,” he shouted over the police radio.  

Protesters were breaking into the back of the station, and officers were preparing to take an unprecedented step in American policing: to abandon their precinct building. 

Let the record show that Shot In The Dark, informed by a source with close connections in the Minneapolis Police, broke the news that the decision had been made, in a post timestamped 2:54PM Thursday afternoon.

Shot in the Dark – more better news.

The Paper of Walter Duranty, the one that published the deeply ahistorical, revisionistic and nothing-but-inflammatory “1629 Project”, the one that published Paul Krugman’s innumerate claims that “blue” America bankrolls “red” America, which has been openly advocating “progressive” ideals in its editorial pages since I was in high school, which has been one of the primary PR agents for the left in America’s cultural cold civil war, the one that has not only been a “progressive” flak for generations but whose young, “woke” red guard faction has moved beyond shaping the informational battlefield to actively purity-testing the left-leaning editorial staff to drive it further to the cultural and political left…

…has the victorian vapours about “cultural divisiveness” over Trump’s weekend speech at Mount Rushmore.

Watch for yourself.

The only thing that I could find that was remotely “divisive” was exhortation about three minutes in stating that Mount Rushmore would never be desecrated – which, I imagine, some post-modern academics find profoundly hostile.

Or maybe the bit around 5:10 here he said the rights of man will never be taken away. That has got to make Tim Walz nervous.

Perhaps the part around 6:10, where he points out that Americans aren’t “weak and submissive” in facing the war on American culture, but will in fact prevail. That’s a pretty clear and direct threat to…someone.

Too bad, so sad.

Berg’s Seventh Law is iron-clad and absolute.

Manny Laureano – friend of the blog, of the show, and of the good guys all over the Metro – writes this love letter to America on the Independence Day holiday.

You should read the whole thing.

I’m gonna pullquote a bit anyway:

I love being an American.

I love that in an airport terminal I can hear a strong Bronx accent, a Texas drawl, a sweet North Carolina lilt, and L.A. surfer-speak all spoken by people whose parents came from Germany, Japan, Ghana, and the Dominican Republic.

I love being an American.

I love that I’m different from others in the world. Because I love that I am secure enough in who I am to not want to be like others. I am content with the richness that is part of who I am without coveting the nature of others while accepting my foibles. I derive pride from living under the oldest constitution in the world. I love that we have grown over the last 233 years to amend that constitution to reflect some newer acknowledgements over earlier decisions. I love that we can bend without snapping in two although once we came close. We fought an internal battle and spent a long time healing.

And I love being an American.

And reading this – among so many other stimuli – so do I.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!