I have been crazy busy with my business (more later), so I haven’t been blogging nonstop about the primaries like I might have a few years back. 

But I’m about as excited as I allow myself to get, under the circumstances. 

I’ve got Republican friends who are upset that the GOP-endorsed candidates got pretty much ignored this time around.  After the convention, Walter Hudson had a great question:  what is the endorsement worth?  If it doesn’t come with advancing name recognition and funding in the primary, then to what exactly is one being loyal?

Anyway – let’s talk about the races:

Senate

I’ve got Republican friends who said Michele Tafoya was a non-starter because of her stance on abortion.  

These are also die-hard MAGA voters who want Trump to run for a third term.  

They have the same stance on abortion.   Identical. 

And neither Senator will vote on any abortion related issue – because Donbs three the issue back to the states.   The only abortion related vote that’s on the Senate’s docket is the hearings for whoever replaces Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas when they someday leave the bench.  Who would you rather have voting on that – the “imperfectly” conservative Tafoya or the DSA-adjacent Flanagan?

Choose wisely. 

And it’s nice to have a Senate who’s not “Dead Candidate Walking” right out of the gate for a change – remember Royce White, Kurt Bills and Mike McFadden?  No?   After a decade and a half of watching the top of the ticket drag the down-ballot races, it’s fun seeing a race where the top might just  have a shot at lifting the rest of the field.  

Governor

Is Lisa Demuth a perfect conservative?  No.   And as Speaker for two years with an evenly divided House and a DFL Senate and Governor, it’s a given that she’s got her name on some bad votes.  Divided government leads to horse-trading.  There’s a frightening share of MNGOPs that think yelling loudly about the purity of ones principles wins races and slashes DFL power. 

She wasn’t the most conservative candidate in the primary.  But I think she’s the most conservative who can win.  

Who was the last statewide elected GOP official?  Tim Pawlenty.  

The haters called him “RINO”.  

The rest of the state called him “Governor”. 

Remember that – having a GOP governor?   Able to veto bad laws and sign good ones, and use the bully pulpit for fiscal sanity/. When Minneapolis was a beacon and the streets were safe?

All the evidence available showed Mike Lindell would have dragged the ticket (even before his self-immolation on immigration).  And there’s a solid chance to flip the Senate, with 1-3 DFL seats feeling. pretty squishy (Kupec, Seeberger and especially Hauschild).  If we don’t lose a bunch of other seats because of yet another self-inflicted wound at the top of the ticket, we could flip the seat, take CD2 back, and be I a good position for the 2028 races with, hopefully, a presidential bump.  

Why would we want that, after all ?

Joe Doakes. no longer from Como Park, emails about the situation in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa currently being deliberately swamped by military age Muslim migrants:

Learn the lesson of “Camp of the Saints.”  Sink the ships. Machine-gun the beaches. Or flee and surrender your country to the invaders.

 

Or – in the interest of an ounce of prevention being worth a belt of cure, stop giving the impression you’re open to getting stormed.  Trump set that bar in the right place – but God help the US if we get a DSA president in three years.  

In the Daily Wire world, I genuinely like Ben Shapiro.   I often enjoy Michael Knowles.  

But I tolerate Matt Walsh most days.   He has just enough flashes of brilliance to get me past the fact that he’s built an entire career on trolling people.   Which is generally the part I like – he does that part well.  

It’s just that occasionally he botches up the other part of the job – thinking and reasoning.  

Like this:

Has Walsh ever met a college athlete?  Especially a really good one?

Clark is a 24 year old woman who’s spent her entire life training to be, not a social crusader, but an athlete.   Part of that has been learning to go along and get along with the “mean girls” on her teams, in her middle school homeroom, wherever.   

She may need to be that crusader – or, more accurately, some may want or need her to be that crusader.  

But answer honestly – is there anything in what you’ve seen of Caitlin Clark so far that makes you think she has ever wanted to be anything but a basketball player?

Sophie Cunningham seems to have that gene.   Go with the horse that wants to run that race, Walsh.  

I’ve said it a time or two in the past – Trump is as Trump does.  I didn’t vote for him in 2016, but he impressed me enough to figure he was worth holding my nose and voting for him in 2020 as the lesser of two evils – holding my nose because of his really terrible down-ticket performance.  Four years of Biden, and I didn’t hold my nose two years ago, hoping that his election-time hijinx would moderate a bit. 

Yeah, about that. 

You’ve no doubt heard Trump endorsed Mike Lindell for governor.  

Joe Doakes., once of Como Park, emails:

Trump endorsed candidate for governor, Mike Lindell, goes wobbly on immigration.  Idiot.

I know, he didn’t actually call for amnesty, he called for a temporary moratorium so illegals could get legalized.  That might have been a reasonable position a couple of years ago.  But after the craziness of attacking ICE officers, billions lost to fraud, and Walz actually pardoning a child molester to keep him in the country, the Overton Window has shifted.  

I don’t want illegals to be legalized, I want them to be gone.  All illegals, criminals, workers, families, all of them, gone, and cut off from all government money, welfare and scams alike.

Mitch called it – Lindell is a terrible candidate and will go down in flames.  I hate when that happens.  

Joe Doakes

 

 

The race appears to be coming down to Lindell vs. Demuth – and between voters who think in terms of magical thinking about big statements, stories and proposals, and doing a dirty, ugly job well.   Which means negotiating, which in a divided government inevitably means compromise.   

Like Pawlenty before her, Demuth is a legislative leader.  And Demuth accomplished a lot in two years – stopping the DFL cold and elevating the fraud issue outside the legislative branch to the national stage.  It’s boring stuff with exciting results.  

And she – and Qualls, for that matter – deserve. better than to have Trump plotz the entire race. 

But here we are.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Too many Americans, and Far too many Republicans, think there is only one important issue, my issue, and any time President Trump spends on Other issues is time not spent on My issue, and therefore wasted time, the big dummy.

Imagine you wanted to change the global economy to make America the dominant superpower for decades to come. How would you do it? Maybe by getting all the oil producing nations on our side? Capturing Venezuela’s production, uniting the Middle East against Iran, isolating Russia, securing the Strait of Hormuz. Doing that.

Imagine you wanted to change the American economy to make America the dominant superpower for decades to come. How would you do it? Maybe by imposing tariffs on imports to spur domestic production, bringing manufacturing back to our shores instead of sending it offshore, renegotiating trade agreements with Canada and Mexico in our favor, and kicking out illegal aliens working for cheap who undercut American employment and wages. Doing that. 

Imagine you wanted to guarantee free and fair elections to keep America the dominant superpower for decades to come. How would you do it? Maybe by cutting off the money-laundering schemes running through welfare and non-profit and foreign aid programs which funnel money to America’s enemies, and by exposing foreign influence and domestic corruption in recent elections. Doing that. 

Imagine you wanted to do all that while most of Congress is actively opposing you, the judiciary keeps blocking you, the media puts you under a blackout, and people keep trying to shoot you.  

I used to think President Trump was only the third greatest president, after George Washington and Ronald Reagan. I’m reconsidering my opinion. 

Joe Doakes

 

I’m with Joe, and Trump, on a lot of this.

His gubernatorial endorsement, on the other hand…

I’ve got a piece coming up in the next few days at “Hot Air” on the movie “Citizen Vigilante”.   I’m going to hold off on my opinions here until that comes out.  

But Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, sends us his review:

I watched the much-hyped Citizen Vigilante movie. Not great. Looks like a college film class project – random flashbacks, choppy scenes, wooden dialogue. SPOILERS:

Here’s the set-up: The vigilante (not named so I’m going to call him V instead of typing the word every time) is a rich American, about 35 years old, white, male, fit, no mention of wife or kids. His mother died when he was young. His father shipped him off to boarding school so father could concentrate on the business, only saw each other twice a year at holidays. V eventually graduated from West Point and spent time in the military. Dad died, V inherited the business, thousands of units of rental property. 

All of that explains why he’s such a cold-heart bastard who knows how to use a firearm, and has an overdeveloped sense of justice, and has time and money to spend. Good so far.  

Of course, the film makers don’t spit it out as I have. Those background facts are revealed in dribbles and flashbacks. Very confusing.

The rental units are in Europe. V enters the country illegally – no explanation why – and acquires/brings in a boatload of firearms – no explanation how – and begins killing immigrants who have wronged European women. The immigrants definitely need killing, no argument there. One woman had her throat slit in broad daylight by a random stranger, one was gang raped by half a dozen teenagers, one was beaten into a coma for no reason. White European women, North African immigrants, that part is realistic.

The women are victims not only of their attackers, but also the “justice system” which sympathizes with the attackers because society hasn’t given immigrants enough help adjusting to our ways, some of which are against their religion anyway, and besides, the women were asking for it. The attackers get lawyers and bail and social workers and endless continuances, the victims get forced to relive the trauma and called liars.  

For sure, I’m on V’s side there – some people just need killing, and maybe their families, too (thinking of the Henry Nowak case in Britain, where an immigrant stabbed an 18-year-old and filmed him dying, the immigrant’s mother took the knife and hid it, the immigrant’s brother made up a story telling the police the stabbed kid attacked the brother in a racially motivated attack, the cops believed the family and when the kid claimed to have been stabbed, the cop said, “I don’t think you have, mate” as the kid bled out and died. Yeah, that whole family can go).

So V decides to do something. It’s not personal, like Bronson in Death Wish. He’s setting an example, trying to motivate people. He does a bunch of blurred screen videos (half-hearted attempt to disguise his face but not his voice) which somehow get on TV – not explained how – giving long speeches claiming the system is corrupt, people are misled, they need to take back power over their lives. He’s an internet sensation – people all over the world love him – and the news media does their usual furrowed brow pondering why he’s popular when he’s such a racist. Again, I have no objection to the substance of his speech, only the way it’s done in the film. In real life, he’d never get on TV or the internet – he’d be banned instantly, nobody would ever hear or see him. Like the manifesto of every spree killer is instantly suppressed so we have no idea why they did it. 

Some of the attackers can be identified from court records. V tracks them down and shoots them. For some reason, he kills a couple of bleeding heart judges by faking suicides instead of just shooting them. No explanation why. If they’re all part of the same social rot, and subject to the same ultimate cure, should they all die in the same method? Wouldn’t that be a more effective message/motivator than hiding the punishment as suicide? 

V did some other stupid stuff, too. There are two guys flirting with two women in a bar. The women go to the bathroom together, the guys order shots of liquor and use an eyedropper to put something in the women’s drinks. V sitting at the bar having his own drink sees it, distracts the guys, switches their drinks, the guys pass out, V tells the women what just happened, they all leave. Why interfere? Why draw attention to yourself? White-knighting is risky. His actions are observed by an Interpol agent who picks up V’s glass from the bar with a cloth and presumably takes it for fingerprints. Why? What’s the Interpol crime of foiling the rape plot?

Now that Interpol has the fingerprints, they get V’s identity but don’t release it to the public, they somehow track him to a house and move in to arrest. About five minutes of dramatic music as cops load weapons, drive armored personnel carriers through the streets, climb up the stairs single file behind the shield guy, breach the door and storm into the house. It’s completely empty except for a giant cube made of plate steel that has two firing slits facing the room and two AK-47s sticking out. Rather than fall back or take cover, the cops line up in a straight line across the room facing the box and shoot at it. Naturally, there are no ricochets but their pathetic 9mm rounds don’t penetrate, either. V gives them a warning to leave, which obviously they won’t, so he opens fire, killing a dozen cops. That was weird, too. It’s a European country but all the cops’ uniforms say POLICE and SWAT. Maybe that’s just for American audiences, doesn’t matter, the cops in the room all die. The Interpol officer – the bar glass lifter – is behind a sheetrock wall so he’s completely safe from all of V’s rifle rounds, don’t penetrate a bit. The officer gets a backup team, they mill around the room looking horrified at their dead comrades, then cut their way into the steel box, it’s empty. There’s a trap door in the floor. V must have escaped that way.  

Now I axe ya – would you grab that handle and lift the trap door lid? After all the cops’ V’s killed? Knowing his military background? Or would you think, “Gee, I wonder if it’s booby-trapped?” That was my first thought but it never entered the cops’ minds. They yank up the lid, the explosive goes off, the cops inside the box are incinerated and everyone in the room (including our glass lifter) is slammed into the walls, critically injured or dead. 

Big climax is when V goes to the apartment of one of the gang rapists, forces his way inside with a silenced pistol, shoots the boy in the leg to convince Dad, Mom and Sister to sit down and shut up. Big lecture about justice, family pushing back that they shouldn’t have to give up their religion and the way the girl was dressed made the boys horny so she wanted/deserved to be raped. Nice scene showing the whole family has no intention of assimilating, they were in it together, and all deserve to die. Although I wonder that the leg wound doesn’t hurt after the first few seconds. 

V then tells the boy to call his rapist buddies to come over right now, tells them his lawyer is here, there’s new information they must know. As the buddies arrive, V shoots them and the rapist family, too. News footage of the bodies being hauled out of the apartment is on TV, watched by the rape victim, who cries tears of joy.

People say the film is banned because of gratuitous violence. Hardly. Didn’t they ever watch John Wick?  

It could have been a great movie. It’s not. But one positive note – it’s already banned in a couple of countries because it speaks truth about migrant crime. Elon put it on X which is where I watched it. News media are horrified that truth is being spoken. So it might do some good. 

Joe Doakes

 

I agree with Joe on some parts.  There could be, and needs to be, a really good movie about what happens when the rule of law becomes a social engineering tool.   It’s something I’ve talked about on SITD many times in the past.  More later this week.  

“Reality has become too absurd to be satirized”

Ironically, tracking down the attribution for this classic aphorism is, itself, an exercise in absurdity.   Depending on what corner of the internet you ask, it might be GK Chesterton, Tom Lehrer, Fran Leibovitz, Christopher Buckley or Evelyn Waugh.   

Kyle Mann notes that the aphorism has been floating around the English Language in one form or another for about a century, maybe more.  

Mann is, as this is written, the editor in chief at The Babylon Bee, an online satire site disguised as a news outlet that on the one hand is all satire, and on the other not-at-all disconnected hand may be one of modern America’s best news sources, not despite being a satire publication but because of it.  The Bee’s satirical “news” coverage has not only been covered as hard news by several mainstream media outlets – the hapless Snopes has “fact-checked” the Bee’s satire several times, and the Bee took the New York Times to the brink of litigation over the Times classifying the Bee as a “Hard Right” news source –  but has anticipated actual hard news on more than a few occasions. 

So – maybe the aphorism is wrong?

Maybe reality, especially the reality of politics in modern America, has become so absurd that satire is truly the most accurate way to analyze it?

In the summer of 2004 that was the last thing that was on my mind. 

It’s high time I did another book.  

And Berg’s Law is probably the stockpile of material that is most begging for me to do something with it.  

So I’ll be doing that in serial form in the coming…weeks?  Months?  Year or so?  I think it took me nine months to write Trulbert, and this is likely going to be a much bigger project. 

So stay tuned.  

Joe Doakes, ex-Como-Parker, emails:

President Trump is getting grief from all sides.  He shouldn’t have bombed Iran.  He shouldn’t have stopped bombing Iran.  The job’s not done and never should have been started.  The peace agreement is too generous, Iran won’t honor it and neither will Israel.  Everybody is unhappy with the President.  What’s a guy to do?

Walk away.

The purpose of the American government is to protect the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of American citizens, says so right in the Declaration of Independence.  There might have been an argument that Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with its ballistic missile program, could have threatened American interests.  That might have been a good enough reason to start the war.  But we’ve set back those programs by a significant (if impossible to determine) amount.  Mission accomplished.  Move on to solving America’s many other problems in the short time he has left in office.

Democrats aren’t happy but they never will be.  Their sole purpose is to hate Trump and all his works, even down to demanding pond scum in the reflecting pool by the Washington Monument. Ignore them.

RINOs aren’t happy but they never will be.  Their sole purpose is to get re-elected, wait out Trump’s term of office, and get rich on kick-backs and insider trading.  Ignore them.

Israelis aren’t happy but they never will be.  Their sole concern is survival in a tiny state surrounded by enemies.  Tough situation for them but not our problem.  Ignore them.

The media is happy.  They’re thrilled with the President.  They have something to talk about on the air: controversy, name-calling, second-guessing, fake polls, dire predictions . . . couldn’t be better for them.  But theirs is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Ignore them.

So who should the President listen to?  Me.  You.  People like us.  Ordinary Americans, the kind of people you meet at McDonald’s or a farm in Wisconsin or the Mack Truck factory.  Real people with real lives doing real jobs in the real world, raising our kids, paying our taxes, praying for a better future.  We are the reason the President’s job exists.  We are the people he should be looking out for.

Walk away, Mr. President.  Walk away from the Strait of Hormuz, we don’t need it.  Walk away from Israel’s feud with Lebanon, doesn’t concern us.  Walk away from the religious fanatics heir to the Persian Empire, they’re no threat to us now.  Focus on America.  Put Americans First.  Make America Great Again.

Joe Doakes

 

Well, I agree in principle – other than the little matter of letting terrorists have nukes, which aren’t geo-fenced even if they don’t build a concomitant ballistic missile program.

Michelle Griffith at the Minnesota Reformer has a think, sorta, piece about the first anniversary of the shooting of Melissa and Mark Hortman (and the Hoffmans).   

We need more civility, we’re told, and we just don’t have it yet:

In the year since former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed, their son has spent countless hours researching political rhetoric. He used the moment with his late mother’s co-workers to emphasize that how legislators craft their arguments matters. He wasn’t there to lay blame on any individual lawmaker or political party. 

“This can really feel abstract for the general public, but the people in that room, for myself, for my sister, for our whole family, political violence will never feel abstract again,” Hortman said in a Reformer interview. 

 

Conspicuous in its absence in the article – Aisha Gomez telling Elliot Engen to “go shoot himself” over the GOP’s refusal to pass the DFL’s cynical gun grab bill.

But who’s counting individual hypocrisies?  Even I gave up on that years go – and to quote Rochefoucald, “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue” – only people with principles can violate them.  

But back to Colin Hortman:

In the year since former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed, their son has spent countless hours researching political rhetoric. He used the moment with his late mother’s co-workers to emphasize that how legislators craft their arguments matters. He wasn’t there to lay blame on any individual lawmaker or political party. 

“This can really feel abstract for the general public, but the people in that room, for myself, for my sister, for our whole family, political violence will never feel abstract again,” Hortman said in a Reformer interview. 

 

I’m going to try to invite Mr. Hortman onto my show one of these weekends to talk about this research.

Because I have a strong hunch that having a presidential ticket including our governor calling half the nation “Nazis” and “Fascists” – people are near ancestors spent the best years of their lives killing – didn’t help a whole lot.  

The big news in right-wing alt media lately has been the travails of the Daily Wire – heretofore the most successful conservative alt media source in the business.   In many ways, DW was what picked up Limbaugh’s mantel after his untimely passing. 

But the Wire has had its problems lately:  some chalk it up to MAGA’s decreasing  tolerance for Israel, which Shapiro’s DW supports.  

I think the problem is a lot simpler than that.  I think it boils down to two things:  it’s spread its focus too far, and much of what it does focus on just isn’t that good.  

Unfocused:  the nation needs a solid conservative news and opinion source.  Limbaugh was that.  Fox News used to be.   Limbaugh’s gone, Fox News is in a mushy middle zone, and the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are lapping up the horseshoe right – there’s a definite market for the DW, or something like it.  

But along with that very worthy mission, DW took on trying to enter the culture war.  Which is, again, and again very noble and much-needed venture.  

But their entries, although no doubt catastrophically expensive, have been pretty much trash.   They’ve released a non-documentary movies – all of them properties the various studios passed on, and so were available on the relative cheap.   “Run Hide Fight” was the first – a concept (high school girl takes on school shooters) that I loved, but it came off like a high school theater class production of “Die Hard”.  “A” for concept, “C-” for execution.  And it was a lot better than some of the other efforts – “Ladyballers” would have been a fun ten minute Youtube short, sort of like one of the Babylon Bee’s videos.  But they tried to make it a feature length film, which was about 110 minutes too long and, I suspect, 110 minutes too costly.  Can’t say I’ve had the interest to sit through their other offerings.  

Their documentaries are better, more or less – “What is a Woman” was a good concept (and only 20 minutes too long).  The follow-up, “Am I Racist”, started out strong and swerved into cringe, finishing “Meh”, for all the same reason.  Which we’ll come back to. 

The two documentaries did well enough at the box office.  Well enough to pay for the turkeys – or the gargantuan “Pendragon Cycle” that seems to have been in production for years? 

Not to mention some of the dubious dives into merchandizing?   “Jeremy’s Razors” would have to not just shave your face, but make you taller and richer to be worth $30 more than a pack of Harry’s Razors.   Harrys’ made a stupid woke ad; for $30 for razors, I can overlook it.  

All of that – and running a news service as well – had to have been a huge money suck.  

The cash cow should have been their basic content – the podcasts and radio shows that bring in the listeners and viewers.

And that’s the bad news.  

No Beat:   I’m a Ben Shapiro fan.   No bones about it.  If you’re not, that’s fine – there are plenty of forums for you out there.  He’s brilliant.  On a scale of 1-100, his podcasts are a 90 with a standard deviation of about 2 always good, frequently brilliant.  

But the rest of DW’s flagship personalities?

Matt Walsh may be the least interesting person in media today.  He’s a professional troll – sometimes brilliant (“What is a Woman”), frequently more like an entitled ninth-grader.  His podcast is a 50, with a standard deviation of 20 – occasionally brilliant, frequently cringey.   Part of the problem for me – admittedly someone whose style is “radio” – is one of the tics in his delivery;  he will frequently (like, once or more in every podcast) make a point, then re-iterate it, then re-re-iterate it, and re-re-re-iterate it…I’ve heard seven or eight repeats of a point or conclusion, done with out irony.    A nervous tic, or a mark of sloppy thinking?  Who cares?  It’s annoying as hell.  And unlike the Medved-like information vacuum that is Shapiro, he’s frequently crushingly ignorant.  Last year, talking about Trumps’ record on abortion, he went through one of his muttering, sometimes barely audible lists of examples to the contrary, and got to “Reagan.  Ronald Reagan.  What did he ever do for us?”, ignorant of the fact that Reagan ever controlled the house, barely he’d the Senate for six out of eight  years, and had to spend his political capital on the top of his agenda, eliminating the USSR and fixing the economy.   I’d love to ask Walsh which he’d prefer to have tried (futilely) to trade.   His one strength?  He’s a troll with a level of commitment that Shapiro called “sociopathic”; it was tongue in cheek, but it lands.  It’s a personal thing, but a little trolling goes a long way for me.  “What is a Woman” was pretty brilliant – 50 plus two standard deviations.   “Am I Racist” had moments – shaming Robin DeAngelo to cough up a purse full of pocket change for a black guy was a classic – but I descending hard and fast into the kind of cringe that has me tuning out on “Fawlty Towers” these days.  

Michael Knowles is better – I’d call him a 70 with a standard deviation of 5.   He’s an agreeable sort, with some intellectual heft on matters of the Catholic Church, campaign politics, the Catholic Church, history, the Catholic Church, logic, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church.   An avowed former atheist, he brings that “the douchiest New Yorkers are the ones that grew up in Buffalo” vibe to his discussions about the nature of faith.   And enough of the cigar talk, ffs.  

The res to the lineup?  Can’t say I can be provoked to care all that much, although watching Reagan Conrad’s rise to her “Token Gen Z Podcast” slot gave me “Top Forty Radio in the ’90s” vibes.  I suspect there’s a lot of money going out there.  

I hope DW can pull it out.   Or that Salem is smart enough to pick up the scraps if it doesn’t.  

Remember 1998? 

Minnesota was doing so well that we could play a practical joke on ourselves.   

We were one of the most successful states in the union.  The combination of “good government” Democrats – naive, misguided but not actively malevolent – and a Republican Party that in retrospect still hadn’t caught up with the Reagan Revolution gave us a government that on the one hand did too much, but on the other hand kind of left things alone enough for them to work.  

Things were so good that we could elect a professional wrestler as governor.  

And things stayed good, or at least acceptable, until…

…well, sometime after 2010.  I can’t quite place it – sometime between Mark Dayton’s election and 2020 – that that ended.   Maybe it was the fourth tier of taxes, or the takeover of Minneapolis and then the DFL by the DSA, or Walz’s idiotic response to the pandemic.  

But in that time, Minnesota has gone from one of the good states to somewhere between “laggard” and “death spiral”.  

I’m not mongering doom – I think the state can be saved.  But the slice of time where that’s possible is flying on by.  

With that in mind?  It’s convention weekend.   

The DFL

The DFL’s convention is happening in Rochester.   And the only real question is, “will it matter”?  Klobuchar is going to win the nomination and, barring an epic October Surprise on fraud or corruption from the Feds, she’ll likely become governor.   More on that when we come to the GOP side.  

The Senate race – which is no longer a race – is more interesting.  Angie Craig yesterday announced she’s headed straight to the primary, after learning 75% of the delegates were pledged to Peggy Flanagan.   

In 2010, knowing the delegates were insane, Ken Martin stepped in and poured on the money to overthrow Margaret Anderson-Kellihers endorsement at the primary, with Mark Dayton.  Eight years  later, after the convention gave the nod to the Karen twins, Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade, as well as actual Communists Matthew Pelikan for attorney general, Martin brought in the money and the public union clout to jam down Walz and Flanagan as well as the relatively moderate Ellison in the primary. 

Peggy Flanagan is likely the weakest statewide candidate the DFL has endorsed in my memory.   She could be beaten – more on that below – and I suspect smart DFLs know that Craig would be a much easier sell outside 494/694.   

If it we were talking about Ken Martin and a DFL before, say, 2020?  No question about it, the statewide DFL leadership would yet again nullify the convention and jam down a more electable candidate.  

But the DFL has changed since 2018 – they took their defeats in 2018 and 2021 (on the police funding question in Minneapolis) as a signal get really serious about taking over the DFL.  And you can say two things about Richard Carlbom; no way, no how does he look like a young Hermann Gôring, and he’s no Ken Martin.   

I wouldn’t put it past the DFL, though. I know if I were a GOP Senate candidate, I’d much rather face Flanagan.  

The MNGOP

The Governors race appears to be a tossup between Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth and Kendall Qualls, although Mike Lindell has been doing well in Central Minnesota and has some strong delegate support as well.   I suspect Demuth will win the endorsement, and I’m going to guess it goes to a. primary.  I like both Demuth and Qualls (Lindell’s got a great story, but in the general he’ll make the GOP long for the good old days of Kurt Bills), and I think Demuth has the lead with delegates so far, but let’s be honest – the real key to this election lies with the Feds, and if they drop a huge string of indictments against key DFLers in October.  And the media will be doing its best to mute even that.  

And it’s a shame, because getting a Republican – any Republican – into the executive branch to check and balance the DFL’s depredations may be the only sustainable hope the state has to pull out of the tailspin it’s in.  

So fingers crossed for the Feds.  

For the Senate race?  

This is the first time I’ve harbored any genuine hope in a Minnesota senate race since the mugging they call the 2008 election – mostly because Peggy Flanagan is such a very weak candidate. 

The three contenders are Adam Schwarze, Michelle Tafoya and Royce White.  

I follow the Buckley Commandment – vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. 

White has his proponents – mostly among the “burn it all down” crowd pushed by “Action4Liberty”.   A4L has cracked the code on weaponizing ignorance of politics and, along with “Minnesota Gun Rights”, profits from defeat. I don’t see him getting the nomination, “rocks and cows” support notwithstanding.   He will , I suspect, have enough oomph to be a kingmaker or to deny any endorsement at all.  

It’s going to be be between Adam Schwarze and Michelle Tafoya.   Schwarze likely has the lead among the delegates, although Tafoya has been working the room pretty hard for someone who is generally considered to be headed for the primary.  

Schwarze has all the things that delegates and activists love – a former SEAL, impeccable conservative credentials, and a vow to abide by the endorsement.  He’s also got next to no name recognition outside party activists, and will have to buy some by November.   

Tafoya has some cons – a stance on abortion that is simultaneously too accomodationist for many GOP activists and identical to Donald Trump’s position (12 weeks), and a “path to citizenship” stance on immigration that is a poor sell at the convention but likely not a problem in Maple Grove.  She’s also got name recognition, is raising serious money, and has at least some polling showing her close to the margin of error against Flanagan.  

I’d pay money to see either of them debating Flanagan or Craig.  

So – who is the most conservative candidate who can beat Flanagn or Craig?

I was in a discussion a few weeks ago about what the future holds for the Twin Cities. Someone – a Minneapolis booster and fan of the current administration in Minneapolis and Minnesota – said the cities’ current decline is a sign that the metro is in “the throes of a new city being born”. 

Well, maybe. Good times aren’t guaranteed to last, and any city can turn things around. And they can turn in either direction – fifty years ago Detroit was a thriving city with some worrying symptoms, and Nashville was a backwater with some music companies. The elevator goes down *and* up. 

But a whoooole lot of people, particularly boosters of the status quo in Minneapolis and Saint Paul over the past ten years, think that’s the *normal*. 

It occurs to me – when we talk about what the Twin Cities and Minnesota used to be, people under 40 have no idea what we’re talking about. Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination. It was certainly a destination when I moved here in 1985. 

Let’s recount what’s changed since I’ve lived here.

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader. It wasn’t just defense.

In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time.

This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Sure,” you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the East Side of Saint Paul. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, IBM, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Tyme; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of all kinds of music. And not just music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside New York. 

And we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy. And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices. That’s all gone now.

It wasn’t all local. Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized (freeing up a tidal wave of capital that financed the prosperity of the ’90s). Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere. 

But state tax policy was exporting jobs long before Clinton cashed the “peace dividend”, much less NAFTA. 

3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. 

And it’s not just big businesses. The startup I’ve been working on (www.storyaliz.com) moved, along with 2/3 of its staff (of, uh, three people) to the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Between taxes, regulations, the “family leave” policy and the stagnancy of the small business climate, there’s just no upside to trying to do a tech startup in Minnesota. 

And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite. 

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things.

In 1986, when I was producing the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from Fodors Travel Guides – which were where you went for information about places you wanted to travel, before there was an internet, and were pretty well-respected at the time – for the show. He’d just written an article calling the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. 

Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

So when people like the one I was talking with say “we’re watching the birth of a new city”?

Sure. It happens. 

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. 

So ask yourself this: do our current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, scotch tape, comedy, brilliant ideas and products of all kinds – or just consuming goods and services? 

Because that determines the city and state you get. 

I think there’s a very strong case that Minnesota has become a consumer, not creator, culture. 

That’s a problem.

But I have a hunch if the GOP ticket has a major chance of turning things around in Minnesota, it might just start here:

I have no idea if any of this is true – but if I were writing this as a movie, then the Republicans in the legislature, knowing full well that the law enforcement apparatus in the state reports to Keith Ellison and that one might as well report fraud to the state’s cattle herds as the Attorney General, bypassed state authorities completely and went to the Feds.   

And as the extent to which the DFL-dominated executive branch is riven with crime becomes known and more and more DFL officials are frog-walked to Leavenworth, even the densest “soccer mom” in Eden Prairie stats to realize the depravity they’ve been abetting and repents at the polls this fall. 

A guy can dream.  

Joe Doakes, erstwhile of Como Park, emails:Hind Rocket at Powerline reports on the Cuban Drone crisis, saying, “Cuba is a great example of how long an incompetent, tyrannical and utterly discredited regime can hold on to power as long as it has a monopoly on guns.”

Sure.

And given Cuban mechanics’ facility at keeping old cars going, I’d think sending the plans for Sten guns to Cuba might work, too…

I’d love to know what Peggy Flanagan is, er, “thinking”:

“Avenge” what?

The DFL has controlled the executive branch for 15 years, and most of state government the past eight.  Flanagan has been in power for eight years.  

Avenge…what?  Her regime’s actions?

I presume she’s talking about “avenging” Metro Surge – the federal operation that negated Minneapolis’s “sanctuary” status and went after the sex traffickers and drug wholesaling that made Minneapolis and other “sanctuaries” home.   And while you can disagree with some of ICE’s methods – and I do – the bulk of the disruption to the city was caused by the masses of leftists with Main Character Syndrome, organize by professional progs to spend their days roaming the city with their @#$#^ whistles and vuvuzelas making the city sound like a roaming Chuck E. Cheese. 

Avenge yourself.  

Please, MNGOP.  You could win this one. 

 

Joe Doakes, ex of Como Park, emails:

President Trump is threatening to pull US troops out of Italy because they weren’t there when we needed them to help us in Iran. It’s the right act for the wrong reason.”Tribute” is a payment from the conquered countries to the Imperial conqueror, an act of submission. Mongol Horde, Chinese Dynasty, Aztecs, Romans … they all did it.

If the United States was any kind of Imperial power, money would be flowing from the rest of the world to us; but instead money flows from us to them in the form of military aid and welfare.  Instead of them paying tribute to us, we are paying tribute to them.

Either we are the Conqueror or we are the Conquered. I prefer the former and we ought to start acting like it. Pull the US out of our subservient role in UN, WHO, NATO, and NAFTA. End foreign welfare payments. 

Notify England, Spain, Germany and Italy that we are no longer leasing our bases while giving them rights to deny our use, but instead they are gifting that land to us in exchange for our continued troop deployments there. 

Then we can talk about Greenland.

Joe Doakes

 

If we were an empire – like the British, Roman, Napoleonic or Alexandrian ones – the armies of our various cliens (let’s call ’em “vassals”) would be parts of our military. The Romans had a word for it – “auxiliaries”.

After a few months of listening to some of my Libertarian and “Alliance 4 Freedom” friends yakking about how the Trump administration and the GOP are the real gun control party – driven by a couple of dumb remarks by Kristi Noem, Jeannine Pirro and Trump himself – Joe Doakes points out something that I’ve written about over at HotAir. 

Trump, for all his northeastern ambivalence about guns and the 2nd Amendment, has done more to reinforce the right to keep and bear arms as a right (let’s not focus on “bump stocks” for right now) than any president…

….I was about to say “of my lifetime”, but the correct ending to the sentence is “…that any president has ever needed to”.  

It’s of particular interest to me – partly because of the orgy of gun grabbing that the MN Senate just passed (it’s going to die in the House, and it’s pretty much intended to rile up the Karens for mid-terms), and partly because I am a litigant against the city of Saint Paul’s peek-a-boo “assault weapons ban”.  

Anyway – Trump’s prior squishiness about binary triggers notwithstanding, I never thought I’d see a Department of Justice react to a pinheaded local and state gun control bills quite like this:

It’s a great change. 

Let’s hope it survives 2028. 

It’s safe to say I’m not a Peggy Flanagan fan.  She was the ultimate diversity hire – an ultra progressive (by 2018 standards) “minority” woman (we’ll come back to that) to help drag “moderate” Tim Walz over the DFL’s finish line.  She’s been the most visible Lieutenant Governor I can recall in Minnesota history – during Walz’s first term, I think Flanagan was listed as a co-equal, and appeared in the background of all the Governor’s social media (which ended when Flanagan started making noises about running against Walz’s third term attempt befere…well, you know).  

I think the fact that the DFL is going all-in on torpedoing Angie Craig to support P-Flan is the best thing to happen to the GOP in years, in spite of itself; it gives the GOP the best chance it’s had to win a statewide race since the 2010.  

But there’s one criticism she’s gotten, and has resurfaced, that I’m going to sit out:

In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, if I hadn’t had German, Civics, History and music, I’d have likely had a worse GPA.  I was bored stiff.  English class was always 50% literature, which I loved, and half grammar, which bored me stiff.  I knew how to talk and write, for crying out loud.  

In 10th grade I had Geometry.  My six-weekly grades were C, D, F, F, F and F.   So I musta not gotten Geometry – right?

Then I got a “B” on the final, which salvaged a “D” for the year.  

Anyway – I went on to 11th and 12th grades, and had probably a 3.7 – I cared about the classes I was taking, I’d started working at the radio station and so finally had an identity outside of “greasy-haired cello-playing athletically-inept nerd”, and things just started clicking.  

All by way of saying a number one acquires between ages 14-18 doesn’t define an adult. 

A lifetime of being a “public service” leech does.  So I’ll stick with that.  

Joe Doakes, late of Como Park, emails:

Headline: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Gives Firsthand Account of WHCD Shooting: ‘I Was a Few Feet Away from Him as He Was Shooting,’ Says He Wondered, ‘Is He Trying to Shoot Me?’

I’m sure that was pretty much everybody’s first reaction:  “Shots fired near the President.  Holy cow, they must be trying to kill Wolf Blitzer.”

Joe Doakes

After eighty years on camera, or however long Wolf Blitzer’s been doing it, it’s probably hard not to think one is the main character.

As if telling the least stable people in our society that the President and his supporters are part of a crowd that our grandparents spent the best years of their lives killing eighty years ago, the incentives for leftists to commit violence against their enemies just keep piling up. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

A brewery owner in Minocqua, Wisconsin promised free beer on the day President Trump dies but alas, another failed assassination attempt. No free beer today.

Now every Democrat in the nation and half the RINOs in Congress are hoping:

Wel, that is the point of incentive structures, after all.

SCENE:   Mitch BERG is fixing some broken chain link fence.   Avery LIBRELLE pedals down the alley on a recumbent bike, catching him by surprise.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG: Ugh…er, hey, Av…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Billionaires are evil. 

BERG:  Huh.  So why’s that…

LIBRELLE:  They pay no taxes! It’s wrong for a billionaire to pay less taxes than a teaching assistant!

BERG:  Their employees and subsidiary businesses pay immense taxes – and they personally defray taxes by using deductions and business losses – same as your progressive plutocrats.  

LIBRELLE: That’s just wrong.  

BERG: OK.  Put a pin in that.  Did you see where Ilhan Omar’s personal fortune dropped from $30 million down to well under $100K?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah?  So?  It was an accounting error.  

BERG:  Right.  The error being that the accountant didn’t consider…what, now?

LIBRELLE:  Deductions and…

BERG:  Go on?

LIBRELLE:  (Mouth flaps like a trout on the dock)

BERG:  Same as the billionaires, right?

LIBRELLE:  Pouncer!

BERG:  Nah.  But if we find out that her and Hubby Number Four used that “mistaken” valuation to get credit, I’ll be pouncing….

(But LIBRELLE has already pedaled away)

And SCENE

At Columbine, it took four hours for the SWAT team to enter the building.   There’d been reports of bombs – half-true – and protocol was to make sure the bomb squad had had its say before sending the SWAT team in.  By the time SWAT got into the school’s library, the victims and shooters had been dead for hours.  

Police training changed after that, as Federal law enforcement studies showed that the most successful deterrence to spree killers was to try to kill them.   It threw off the careful planning that almost all of them put into their attacks. 

Nevertheless, the police at Parkland dawdled for long enough for the murderer to have enough time not only to kill 17, but to leave the premises.  Uvalde was even worse – cops not only stalled for an hour, but threatened to arrest parents to wanted to take matters into their own hands while it still mattered; it took a team of Border Patrol to end the standoff.  

And now comes news that the Brooklyn Park police knew what was going in the Hortman residence for half an hour before they went in – by which time Vance Boelter was halfway to North Minneapolis on the bizarre chase that led to his eventual arrest.  

Some are hollering “cowardice”.  As my first carry permit instructor Joel Rosenberg said about civilian self-defense shooting, “a life or death decision you make in a split second in the dark is going to get analyzed to a fine sheen by lawyers sitting in a warm, well-lit, secure room for as long as they need”., and I suspect that’s true for police as well; room-clearing against someone who’s expecting you is frightfully dangerous, body armor ain’t perfect and even when it does stop a bullet it leaves you pretty banged up.   I’ll wait for a more thorough investigation (and I may be waiting a while) before I judge anyone’s character.  

But for those crying “cowardice” – this seems like a fine time to point out that people in our society consider our own lives  to be of incalculable worth, needing to be preserved no matter what and defended…

…by cops, who are expected to put their lives on the line for what a cop makes – an average of about $68K in the US today.  

So – what is it that makes your life of infinite value, but a cop’s worth risking for $68,000?

That’s the central thesis of Geoff Snyder’s classic “A Nation of Cowards” – a seminal article on the moral imperative to see to one’s own defense first before blithely expecting society to do it for you.  

It is, of course, a personal choice – but like most personal choices, there’s a moral component to it as well. 

This past weekend the Strib went after the Minnesota Political Class’s elephant in the room:  what’s the problem with Minneapolis?

I’m not going to do a bunch of pull quoting – I’m not going to pay, and the piece was pretty much meh.  

But I’ve found another problem;  when you try to discuss the collapse of Minneapolis with people under, say, 45, it quickly becomes clear – they have no idea what Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and the state declined from.   

When I moved here in 1985, Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination – which was a big part of the reason I moved here.  

Let’s recount what we’ve lost

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader.

It wasn’t just defense. In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time. This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Wait”, you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the *East Side of Saint Paul*. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Time – Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and some of the biggest hits of the era; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of *all* kinds of music, pop and punk and what later become grunge.

And it wasn’t just  music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside NYC, and we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy.

And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices.

That’s all gone now.

Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized. Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere.

But tax policy was exporting jobs long before NAFTA. 3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite.

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things. In 1986, Fodors Travel Guides called the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

People like the Strib columnist, and people who take the Strib seriously, are saying we’re “witnessing the birth of a new city – different from the old one, but just as good in its own way.   

Maybe. Sure.

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. So ask yourself this: Do this state’s current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, software, scotch tape, and the ultimate vote of confidence for the future, families?

Or is it just a bunch of people in buildings, just consuming goods and services?   And I’m not just talking welfare stacks – the “walkable city” is nothing but a vision for how people consume goods and services – a genial fantasy that never includes offices, warehouses, repair shops, utilities – or schools, playgrounds or kids.  

Because that determines the city and state you get. MN has become a consumer, not creator, culture.

That’s a problem.

The other day, I went to downtown Saint Paul and actually parked and patronized a downtown business for the first time in probably over a year and a half.  I was meeting someone at a downtown cafe to talk some business.  

I met them at 4PM, on a Robert Street where a desultory car or two swished past as I wrangled with one of Saint Paul’s byzantine meters.  

I hit the button, entered my space number, and waited while it buzzed and whirred…

…and said “Invalid Space: Rush Hour No Parking Zone”.  

I looked up and down the street.  I saw a northbound car a block away.  

That was it.  

Downtown Saint Paul hasn’t had a rush hour that “rushed” since Norm Coleman was mayor.