This can’t be good news for Democrats:
I’m waiting for the inevitable ACLU lawsuit in response.
That Screaming Sound From Chicago
2
The Klink Administration In One Clip
I have a hard time describing the contempt this bit here makes me feel:
She left the windows open (presumably at the Governor’s mansion, safely dug in down on “old money” Summit Avenue, miles from the actual rioting) and “smelled the tires burning”, because it was a “touchstone to what was happening”.
I smelled it a little closer up.
It was less a “touchstone” than it was my neighborhood – the one I’ve invested a few decades in – getting looted and burned by DFL voters.
Like all communists, Gwen Walz sees everything in theoretical terms. She’s one of the ones who is literally in the dacha, now. She can afford to.
The rest of us? Not so much.
America, 2027
SCENE: On Broadway at Central, in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s late fall; winter is clearly on the way. Stray papers blow down the street, nearly deserted in, visibly chilly. Outside the boarded up remains of what had been a breakfast place catering to “laptop-class” white progressive “new urbanites”, one of many boarded up stores on that once-lively stretch of street, a small group of people stand around a fire in a trash pail.
The group includes Tyrese and TayShawnda GROVES, a 40-something black couple; Steven SPALSKI, a 31 year old white male with his girlfriend, 30 year old Summer BLEAKER; 58-year-old Cindy HARLESS; Juan and Marcella VEGA, both 50, with their 11 year old son Arturo; and 45 year old Thai NGUYEN..
A police car creeps down the rutted road, dodging potholes, the officer avoiding the gaze of the people around the fire.
TYRESE GROVES: (to Spalski): So what did you used to do?
SPALSKI: You mean…before the joy?
(The group laughs, mirthlessly)
SPALSKI: I was a graphic designer for a startup that had just done its IPO.
BLEAKER: He was in line for a ton of stock options.
MARCELLA VEGA: What happened?
SPALSKI: (sighing with a weight greater than his years): All our customers went bankrupt.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Same here. We ran a little grocery store over North. We were getting by…
TYRESE GROVES: …til the “anti-gouging price controls” hit.
NGUYEN: F***ing “anti-gouging act”
(Several of the people spit onto the dirty sidewalk).
GROVES (To Juan and Thai) You?
JUAN VEGA: I ran a little repair shop. Couldn’t get parts anymore.
NGUYEN: Thai restaurant. All our wholesalers went bust.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Well, they took care of the “gouging”.
(Bitter laughs ensue)
MARCELLA VEGA: At least we had all that “joy”.
(General murmurs of disgust was the group warms their hands).
A Subaru, belching oil smoke, pulls up. Two women – 27 year old Emily FRONTENAC and 48 year old Emily MONTPETIT-EMILY, roll down a window. FRONTENAC’s hair shows little flecks of long-neglected blue dye at the end of long dirty-blond roots. MONTPETIT-EMILY, a blocky-looking woman, stares ahead grimly.
FRONTENAC: Hey – do you know the guy who’s selling the gluten-free eggs?
THAI: I might.
JUAN VEGA: Hey, just a minute ( points at the shirt MONTPETIT-EMILY is wearing, which looks a little like this…
JUAN VEGA: You’re one of the “pissed off women” who dragged Harris and Piglet over the line into the white house!
MONTPETIT-EMILY: Er…uh…
SPALSKI: You’re the ones that brought us all the “Joy”!
FRONTENAC: Uh….
JUAN VEGA: I had a good life before you “pissed off white progressive women” tanked the economy!
FRONTENAC: We saved abortion rights…
HARLESS: I can’t feed my grandkids abortion rights!
FRONTENAC: But…
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Hey, it’s a couple of the “pissed off women!”
JUAN VEGA: You always knew better than everyone.
SPALSKI: I had a life before you and your idiot president!
(Arturo Vega picks up a small rock and whips it at the Subary, dinging off the door)
FRONTENAC: Heyyy!
NGUYEN, HARLESS and TYRESE GROVES pick up handfuls of rocks and garbage and start pelting the car, which accelarates away as SPALSKI kicks at the back bumper.
MARCELLA VEGA: Feeling the joy yet, b***h*s?
JUAN VEGA sails a rock down the street, cracking the Subaru’s back window.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: I’ll show you pissed off women…
(General murmurs of asssent)
NGUYEN: So what are you all having for dinner tonight?
BLEAKER: Probably more joy.
(MIrthless laughter).
SPALSKI: Never gets old, does it?
And SCENE.
Open Letter To America’s Dumbest Senator
To: Senator Tina Smith
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re; Democracy
Senator,
Yesterday you (via your social media intern) tweeted this:
“History” may mark those words, if it’s written by someone dumb enough to be a Tina Smith voter.
But – and saying for sake of argument that Donald Trump was in fact any way a threat to “democracy” between election day and Joe Biden’s coronation – the big story is our constitutional system worked. It easily dealt with whatever “threat” Trump might have been.
Your personality cultism is more appropriate for a Maoist dictatorship…
…but I suspect you know that, and are OK with it, since you will likely be one of the people in the dachas rather than the gulag, at least for a while.
But stop calling it democracy.
That is all.
The Fine Print
Governor Klink and other state officials are fond of trumpeting “studies” that seem to come out weekly, telling us Minnesota is doing just great.
Klink’s enforcer, Keith Ellison, did it the other day:
Figuring that this observation contradicts everything our lying eyes are gelling us about realiity around us, I figured I’d click through to read the actual study.
CNBC scored all 50 states on 128 metrics in 10 broad categories of competitiveness. Each category is weighted based on how frequently states use them as a selling point in economic development marketing materials. That way, our study ranks the states based on the attributes they use to sell themselves.
So, it weights the quality of states’ sales pitches?
And apparently subjective weighting counts for a lot, since Minnesota came in fourth place for “quality of life” (measured how?) but 35th for “cost of doing business” and 24th for “economy”.
It appears to be a measure of a state’s commitment to happy talk.
“Moderate”
Tim Walz loves him some Chinese Communism.
Well, at the very least he loved it, back when he was teaching kids “social studies”:
There appears to be precious little evidence that he changed anything but his surface decorations (during 12 years as a “moderate” while campaigning in the rural 1st CD).
On Behalf Of The Entire Midwest
Dear “Democrat Governors Association”:
Perhaps this isn’t the image of “energy” you want to attribute to “the Midwest”:
A couple of obese politburo members with a penchant for authoritarian shenanigans?
Please see to this.
The Entire Midwest
Among Tim Walz’s Many Tall Tales
When Governor Klink and the DFL legislative majority were making the case to squander the “surplus” [1], they put “cutting poverty by 30%” as one of their goals.
So – how is poverty in Minnesota doing?
Well – we don’t know.
Official poverty stats conveniently trail real time by a couple of years.
Official poverty rates trail real time by a couple of years. In 2022, the official poverty rate in MN was 9.6% – up from 9.3% in 2021, and an even 9% in 2020.
So at some point – 2023? 2024? 2025? – the poverty rate needs to drop to 6.4% – a rate the state hasn’t seen in recent memory.
I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess the rate isn’t dropping to a historic low next year.
Any action on that bet?
[1] Which, let’s not forget, wasn’t really a surplus
Walz: Where’s The Beef?
I’ve got a question for the hive mind of this blog.
Yesterday, Governor Klink made perhaps his most, to coin a term, “weird” attack on JD Vance:
Now, what he’s talking about is theWhich brings up the question – does the term “Runza” occur in Minnesota at all?
It’s apparently named after a chain of burger joints in Nebraska.
And on that burger joint’s menu is a meat pie.
In North Dakota, it’d be called a Fleischkikla (German-Russian for the German Fleischküchle. In Northeast Minneapolis, it’s a Pierog. There are other names in other languages. They probably have a local term in Ohio that would flummox Klink
But in all my years in Minnesota – admittedly almost none of it in the First CD – I’ve never ever heard the term Runza.
Am I missing something?
Or is this literally the dumbest attempt at a dunk that Walz has ever tried?
IMPARTIAL!
The Strib’s Rochelle Olson is at the Democrat National Convention, and, uh…
…well…
I mean, I can’t possibly be the only one that notices, can I?
Solo
Tonight’s the anniversary of my first. night ever “soloing” on the radio. I’d been at KEYJ, learning the job a couple of weeks; I’d worked a couple of shifts with DIck Ingstad over my shoulder making sure I knew what I was doing.
And tonight, I was on my own, working the evening shift.
The following Saturday, I’d switch to my regular shift – Saturday mornings from sign on (in the studio at 5AM, start broadcasting at 5:55AM, on the air to 3PM).
But I needed to get through this evening first.
KEYJ’s control board.
And for whatever reason, I remember the first three records I played.
First up – this pretty obscure Art Garfunkel solo effort.
I guarantee you, the only reason I remember this song at all is the fact that it was the first song I ever played on the air.
Then? Cliff Richard’s last Top 40 single:
Which, I”ll be honest, I still kinda enjoy.
And then came Dan Peek – former member of America, who’d turned into a solo, Christian artist:
It occurs to me, I may be the only person who remembers any of them.
A 20 Year Parade Of Lies – Prelude
We’ve known it in Minnesota for a while. But the rest of the nation needs to know.
Governor Walz has a tenuous relationship with the truth on topic after topic.
I want to put together the ultimate compendium of Tim Walz’s lies. And I need your help .
If you can recall an episode about which the Governor lied, drop it in the comments. If you’ve got a link to “the receipts”, so much the better.
I want this to be a resource for everyone who needs to prompt everyone to remember – or learn for the first time – what a, er, creative fella the Governor is.
Pass the word.
The Eternal Pot
“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
— P.J. O’Rourke
So I’ll be a little stupid. This was the DFL Monday night:
The party that gave us MNSure, MNLARS, and the entire parade of MN IT hits…
…is heckling the grownups about software glitches.
Joy! In Action!
These are the people calling Republicans “weird”. In this case, the Democrat party’s leading public intellect, James Carville.
Here’s his measured, Socratic response to Fox’s Jesse Waters’ attacks on Tim Walz:
Has anyone told him that is, er, suggestion is actually what “trans men” are supposed to do?
He might not do lunch on K Street again…
Walz: Artifice All The Way Down
Long ago, there were a couple of regular-ish commenters who felt the need to reinforce their claims by invoking information “from neighbors” living nearby them, who just happened to be world-class experts on the subject – but couldn’t be named, because they didn’t want to get pelted with questions from people from a blog. So we’d just have to take their word for it.
It’s easier than looking up data to support your case, and it sounds more credible than just saying “in my opinion, yadda yadda”.
It comes, I think, from being either being insecure in one’s own capability to hold up their end of the argument, or a need to stretch six square feet of factual tablecloth to over ten square feet of table.
Governor Walz has been having a week of it. We talked yesterday about his episode butting his time in the MN Guard up against a trip to Afghanistan he took as a congressman, without adding that little change of context in there.
But it goes on:
Like Walz, I grew up on the Great Plains.
There are plenty of terms for “a blue-collar or ag-class person from a physically and/or socially isolated place”.
That term is never “Hillbilly”. That term doesn’t occur organically on the Plains. It comes via the media (“Beverly…”, “…Elegy”, dozens of country songs), or from the occasional transplant.
But not organically.
Walz is trying to appeal to the blue-collar white guy vote with which Harris is incredibly weak, and doing it with all the grace of an Australian break-dancer.
The Only Thing…
…that amazes me about this “interview” with the loathsome Senator Smith…:
…is that Acosta actually called her on her lie.
My expectations of the media have fallen that low.
On the other hand, Esme Murphy wouldn’t have done even that.
Flash Of Daily Epiphany
Looking at the various lines of approach in the Democrat campaign this time around:
“You’re weird!“
“You’re terrified of Walz’s manly masculinity!!!
“What, do you want children to starve? You must want children to starve!”
The Democrat campaign is being run by middle-school mean girls.
Joy!
SCENE: A small postwar “starter” home in New Hope, Minnesota. It is about 10PM. Josh McGILL, 35 year old estimator and sometimes technician for a family HVAC business, and Cassie McGILL, 33 and an office manager for a real estate firm, have finally gotten their kids to bed for the evening. They are working on the bills as the evening news plays on the TV in the background.
JOSH: Well, if we just had $100 more, the budget would be balanced.
CASSIE: But Junior is going to need new skates for hockey soon.
JOSH: Ugh. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get a lot over overtime.
CASSIE: And then there’s the elephant in the room – this house is just too small for three kids.
JOSH: The way mortgage rates are going, we can’t afford to move.
CASSIE: And with food up 30%, gas and heating up…
JOSH: …don’t forget taxes on everything going up…
CASSIE: …that too – I don’t know how we make that work.
JOSH: And with our commercial customers dropping like flies, we are going to wind up laying people off at this rate.
CASSIE: (sighs heavily). We’re still paying for that catalytic converter that got stolen. What are we going to do?
(The TV mysteriously gets louder, and Kamala HARRIS and Tim WALZ dart their eyes to CASSIE and JOSH, through the screen)
HARRIS: Feel joy!
JOSH: DId you say something Cassie?
CASSIE: It’s…the TV.
HARRIS:
WALZ: Do it for One Minnesota!
CASSIE: Oh, Madame Vice President and Governor Walz. Hi. It’s just that things are kinda…stressful…
(The sound of Beyonce’s song “Freedom” turns up, and HARRIS and WALZ start dancing)
JOSH: It’s kinda like, prices have gone up way, way faster than our incomes, and business is slowing, and interest rates for my business are crazy, and whatever savings we have are getting bled out, and our kids school just isn’t doing the job, and…
(The music stops abruptly. HARRIS and WALZ’s eletronic gazes fix upon the McGills)
WALZ: Perhaps you weren’t listening.
HARRIS: Don’t be weird ,Josh and Cassie. Feel joy! Because joy is what you should feel if you don’t want to be the weird person who isn’t feeling joy.
JOSH: Er, that’s great, but it doesn’t…
HARRIS: (Scowling). I said feel joy. .
WALZ: Now. For One Minnesota.
HARRIS: And One America, not weird America, a joyful America, unburdened by the weight of what has been.
(And just as suddenly as they appeared, they are gone, as KARE 11 shows TikTok videos of the Saint Paul City Council dancing.)
CASSIE: What was that?
JOSH: I have no idea.
And SCENE.
JOY!!!!!
Calling Republicans “weird”, and demanding “Joy”, is about as substantive a policy discusion as you’re going to get from a 2024 Democrat.
As Richard Fernandez reminded us in 2016, it’s largely Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s fault:
The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them. But as Christopher Hitchens learned on Bill Maher’s show, people don’t want to consider that possibility:
I – and many smarter than I – have been observing for well over a decade that the Democrat party’s messaging seems to be aimed exclusively at people who might have an MA or PhD, but left their critical thinking skills at graduation.
Under Fire
The Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum is a non-partisan, private museum located inside Camp Ripley, up near Baxter.
It published a book referencing MInnesotans’ involvement in twenty years of the Global War on Terror.
It includes Governor Walz’s comments at a 9/11 address the the Capitol.
I’ve screenshot this quote from those remarks:
Let’s forget for a moment that Bagram is in Afghanistan; people flub things when speaking in public. Let’s just let that slide for the moment.
He said “he was in the Guard – and one night, he stood on a ramp at Bagram”.
Was this yet another cutesy turn of phrase – “I said I was in the Guard, and that I was at a Ramp Ceremony; I didn’t literally say my Guard service and this ceremony intersected, you weird Repubulican”.
But it sure does look like he’s saying he was in the Guard in…er, someplace in action, doesn’t it.
Ilhan, Unbound
Ilhan Omar won er primary against Don Samuels last night.
And boy, was she a class act afterwards:
So, if you’re a Don Samuels supporters in MInneapolis – a moderate, or just someone who’s sick of crime – I’ll invite you to take a look at Dalia Al Aqidi.
She’s smart, She’s sane. She’s never called anyone’s voters “nazis” unless she was describing German voters in 1932.
What do you have to lose?
UPDATE: When you look at the world through the lens of Berg’s Seventh Law, it starts to make sense:
Maybe she was just deflecting away from the DFL’s support of actual Nazis in advance…
Honor
SCENE: Mitch BERG is boxed in in at a stoplight. Avery LIBRELLE rides up in between cars on a recumbent e-bike. BERG ponders getting away over the sidewalk, but figures it’s not quite worth it.
BERG: (dejectedly, resigned to the inevitable). Hey, Aver…
LIBRELLE: Shut up, Merg. Republicans like you are slandering a good man who served honorably for 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard.
BERG: So you dispute…
LIBRELLE: Shut up! There is no overriding or exception to the honor that must be bestowed on people who serve .
BERG: Unless it’s George W Bush.
LIBRELLE: He was a silver-spooned coward!
BERG: Right. (Checks traffic. No joy). So, to recap, Governor Walz served…
LIBRELLE: …with impeccable honor. For 24 years.
BERG: Right. Now – you do realize it’s not me saying this.
LIBRELLE: It’s a bunch of political hacks!
BERG: It’s his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kolb:
And it’s his battalion’s chaplain, Captain Bjertness:
The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.
“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.
Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq. Walz has said he did so to run for Congress, and he was elected the next year.
And it’s the guy who replaced him as the Command Sergeant Major at the virtual last minute before they went overseas.
“He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States. That’s not who I would pick to run for vice president,” Thomas Behrends, one of the retired officials who signed the letter, told the New York Post on Tuesday.
They have between them, if I’m doing my math correctly, a bare minimum of 55 years of honorable service among them.
Does that not make their point of view not merely dispositive, but above reproach?
By your logic?
LIBRELLE: (Looks around, quietly rides away).
BERG: Recumbents look stupid…
And SCENE
New Opportunity For Republicans!
I was “yesterday years old”, as the kids say, when I learned about this:
Truly we live in a time of miracles; there is now a pro-skyrocketing debt, pro-foreign-policy collapse, pro-Middle East war, pro-weaponization of the institutions against political opposition, pro-censorship, pro foreign policy of “losing slowly”, pro packing the SCOTUS, pro-crime, pro firearm confiscation, pro collapse of education, anti-federalism, pro redefinition of bedrock societal institutions, anti free speech, pro-rule-by-executive-decree, pro-open border, anti-sovereignty, pro-untrammeled bureaucracy, pro-socialism wing of the GOP.
We truly live in a time of wonder.
I mean, for those of you for whom “Duck Hunters for Gun Safety” isn’t enough.
UPDATE: I see Michael appropriated Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” title.
Among the choices Reagan put forth in his speech, Michael chose the wrong one.
The wrong choice 60 years ago, the wrong choice now, the wrong choice always.
Misspoke
I didn’t know this until this morning- but Governor Klink still has a House of Representatives twitter account.
It’s in effect a zombie account, but it’s out there.
And as of this 0445 this morning, it’s still “mis-speaking” for the Governor:
It’s all right there – for the time being, at least.
If he “misspoke”, he’s been doing it for a very long time.
Republicans Pounce On Mostly Peaceful Austere Lawn Stylist
Judd Hoff is the DFL endorsed candidate running against Mary Franson in HD12B, the Alexandria area.
He’s also a convicted felon, having threatened someone with a machete and served prison time.
He’s also made a public display of stalking Rep. Franson, even moving in across the street from her to carry out his mania…
…against his opponent.
And now:
Alexandria cops reportedly found hundreds of lawn signs – one supposes Franson signs – in his garage.
Remember – they are the party calling Republicans “weird”.
Wonder if Mike McFeely will be contributing to Hoff’s defense fund?