Give the drumline some!

We are and we will. Light posting for the next few days.

Off to Ohio to kick butt and take names

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match

This amuses me:

The CD8 DFL had a very long convention on Saturday,  After ten ballots, everyone promised to go to the primary.

Nothing especially unusual htere.

The unusual thing?  The DFL trucked a bunch of Latino activists from the Twin Cities to canvass for the Metro DFL’s chosen candidate.

CD8 is pretty vast -- it extends from the far northern suburbs all the way to the Canadian border. But it's primarily a place where the local politicians that matter are from Duluth or the Iron Range. So, of course you'd want Alondra Cano to pick the candidate. Hit the link for more -- it's Mitch Berg, so you know it will be a fun read.

Who's up for a little defenestration?

It's a tried and true method of dispatching your enemies:

A prominent regional journalist investigating crime, politics and the war in Syria has died following a fall from a window of his fourth-floor apartment in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city.

Maxim Borodin, 32, was found by neighbours on the ground outside his apartment on Friday. He died in hospital two days later, without ever regaining consciousness. 

Of course, the authorities aren't gonna admit to much:

Police say there were no signs of forced entry into his apartment, and the door was locked from the inside. But friends and colleagues have said they are suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his death.

Locked from the inside proves nothing, but don't worry about that. It hadn't gone well for Mr. Borodin in recent months:

Mr Borodin was well-known for delving into Yekaterinburg’s criminal underworld. He was among those who broke the story of unreported deaths in the Kremlin’s shadow armies fighting in Syria. He also published investigations into Russia’s religious right, and the violent protests around “Matilda”, a supposedly blasphemous film depicting a love affair between Tsar Nicholas II and a young ballerina. 

As one of only few investigative voices in the region, Mr Borodin often felt the brunt of official and criminal displeasure. Just two weeks ago, he was in intensive care with a major head injury. And in October, he was hit over the head with a metal pipe – that attack he linked to his work covering the Matilda protests. 

There are places where being a journalist is a dangerous job. It rarely is here, but it's worth remembering the price you pay for running afoul of those in charge in a place like Russia.

You'd have to be nuts to. . .

move to Illinois. You would:

You’d be mistaken to think Harvey, Illinois has a unique pension crisis. It may be the first, and its problems may be the most severe, but the reality is the mess is everywhere, from East St. Louis to Rockford and from Quincy to Danville. A review of Illinois Department of Insurance pension data shows that Harvey could be just the start of a flood of garnishments across the state.

Harvey made the news last year when an Illinois court ordered the municipality to hike its property taxes to properly fund the Harvey firefighter pension fund, which is just 22 percent funded.

If you're not familiar with Illniois, Harvey is in the southern suburbs of Chicago and desperately poor, while the other cities mentioned are scattered throughout Illinois. There's more:

Now, the state has stepped in on behalf of Harvey’s police pension fund. The state comptroller has begun garnishing the city’s tax revenues to make up what the municipality failed to contribute. In response, the city has announced that 40 public safety employees will be laid off.

Under state law, pensions that don’t receive required funding may demand the Illinois Comptroller intercept their municipality’s tax revenues. More than 400 police and fire pension funds, or 63 percent of Illinois’ 651 total downstate public safety funds, received less funding than what was required from their cities in 2016 – the most recent year for which statewide data is available.

The linked article from Wirepoints goes into significant detail concerning the pension shortfalls that many cities in Illinois face. Of course, Illinois has gigantic pension problems at the state level as well:

Since the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in its May 2015 decision on Senate Bill 1 that pensions for current government workers can’t be modified, debate over pension reform has faded from view.

But ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. In 2015, Illinois’ state pension debt reached a record $111 billion. Government-worker pensions already consume one-fourth of the state’s budget. And every day Illinois goes without a solution to its pension crisis, the state’s pension debt grows by over $20 million.

The state’s pension crisis threatens to burden taxpayers with massive, ever-escalating taxes to bail out a system that is simply not sustainable.

I mention these things because Illinois isn't the only place where the wolf is at the door. In fact, you could look much closer to home:

Bloomberg Markets recently released a bombshell of a story on Minnesota’s public-pension system. “New Math Deals Minnesota’s Pensions the Biggest Hit in the U.S.” It reported that “Minnesota’s debt to its workers’ retirement system has soared by $33.4 billion, or $6,000 for every resident, courtesy of accounting rules. The jump caused the finances of Minnesota’s pensions to erode more than any other state’s last year … .”

Bloomberg has called attention to the fact that the financial stability of Minnesota pensions, relative to other states, has plummeted, and that even judged against its own standards, the system is in big trouble. The system admits to an $18 billion unfunded liability for state, local and school district employees. But the Bloomberg report puts our total unfunded liability at $108.9 billion. That’s more than $20,000 for every resident.

Do you have 20 large lying around? No? Me neither. Very few people are talking about these issues. It's long past time we did.

Dawn breaks, maybe a bit

The invaluable Jon Gabriel, from his perch at Ricochet, concerning the NeverTrumpers still out and about:

There’s an old maxim in marketing: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Likewise, no reader will take advice from a pundit who despises them.

Right. And even David Brooks is starting to figure it out:

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.

Trump opponents, the academics say, are open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse and desperate for security.

This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.

Yep. That approach is going to be persuasive. There's more:

The main reason Trump won the presidency is that tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving and their religious liberties are under threat. Trump understood the problems of large parts of America better than anyone else. He has been able to strengthen his grip on power over the past year because he has governed as he campaigned.

Until somebody comes up with a better defense strategy, Trump and Trumpism will dominate. Voters are willing to put up with a lot of nonsense for a president they think is basically on their side.

My own NeverTrump stance was predicated on the belief that Trump didn't really care and that it was a put-on. As it turns out, I was wrong about that. The evidence mounts that his concerns are real and genuine. His solutions may not work, but that's a public policy debate, not a personal debate. And for the Left, it's always personal. And almost always ad hominem. I keep seeing college friends who are openly cheering for the old white men who supported Trump (no one else could have, natch) to die so they can have their imagined paradise. I know a lot of old white men who have spent their lives making sacrifices for their families and paying plenty of taxes to support the bien pensant class that would spit on them if given the opportunity. Trump may not succeed; the forces arrayed against him are powerful and persistent. But he wouldn't be in the position he is if the people who claim to be better were actually better.

Brain dump

Random thoughts as we prepare for the 5th or 6th Snowmageddon of this endless winter:

• Paul Ryan is leaving. He meant well, but he was never suited for the job of Speaker of the House. I'm guessing we're not done with him, though.
• As mentioned, the forecast maps for Minnesota are increasingly dire for the weekend. We have already had nearly a foot of snow in April. Yes, it's April. I am sincerely hoping we won't have to worry about winter driving conditions when we go to Ohio next week. At this point, you can't rule anything out.
• The Timberwolves are back in the playoffs for the first time since 2004. To put that in perspective, Fearless Maria was still in preschool then. She's off to college this fall. They're likely to get their butts kicked, but it's a start.
• The only thing that is taking longer to arrive than spring is the IG report on the corruption in the Obama-era Department of Justice. I always have wanted to believe that the truth will out, but increasingly that seems like naivete.

No time

No time for posting today, either. So it's an open thread. I'm hoping to write a longer piece later in the week about what's happening in New Brighton -- for now, let's just say the local government is having an extended clown show moment at taxpayer expense, all while claiming their continuous rake-stepping is about saving money. Here's a representative video:

Mellow out or you will pay

More prescient by the day:

You think they were kidding? Consider this:

If you were a political strategist looking to make California a model of how America could change for the better, what would you do? First, the Republican party and the conservative movement that captured it essentially would have to be neutralized — completely discredited and marginalized to the sidelines of politics. California would have to get beyond dealing with crazy conservative ideologues who could not face up to the real world of facts and let go of outdated ideas already proven not to work. No bipartisan dealing with zealots, no trying to pry one brave soul from a ridiculous pledge of no new taxes. No, the whole party must be decisively beaten — so decisively that it would take at least a generation for the party to get back on its feet again. In California, that very mission was accomplished by the Democratic Party and the voting public. Now the state is totally run by Democrats. All statewide offices are controlled by Democrats, and both Houses of the Legislature have Democratic super-majorities.

That's the vision they have. Do they get to impose it? Better decide now, while you still theoretically can. And you really ought to read the linked piece from Tom Leyden and Ruy Teixeira. They have a plan for your life and what you might want is irrelevant.

Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back, you say
Mellow out or you will pay 
Mellow out or you will pay

It's a coup

Let's just call it what it is. There is no way in hell that Robert Mueller, or the Southern District of New York, or anyone else, should have any ability to raid the private attorney of the President of the United States, looking for something, anything.

If I were Donald Trump, I'd simply say the hell with it and do the following:

1. Fire Mueller
2. Fire Rosenstein
3. Fire Sessions
4. Fire the entire Justice Department, if that's what it takes to clean house
5. Declassify everything, and I mean everything
6. Release the IG report concerning what these shaved apes in bespoke have been doing to the country. All of it.
7. Dare Adam Schiff to do anything about any of it, since I suspect he's up to his eyeballs in a lot of this, too

They've come to kill the king*. Either the king fights back, or the king dies. There's no point in showing any deference to someone with a dagger in his hand.


*Yes, I know Trump isn't a king, nor would I want him to be king. But he was duly elected and what is happening now is outrageous beyond measure.

Three-peat

As regular readers of this feature know, I grew up in Wisconsin and experienced the majority of my childhood in the 1970s. As a result of that timeline, I didn't get to see too many winning performances or experience too many championship seasons. I have vague memories of the Milwaukee Bucks winning their only championship in 1971, and I have better memories of the magical run of Marquette in 1977, as they won the NCAA men's basketball championship and sent Al McGuire out as a winner. Most of the other entities I cared about didn't do so well, though.

The world of marching band wasn't on my radar in those days, either. My high school, Xavier, did not have a marching band program. When we had our homecoming parade, they would have the pep band sit on folding chairs (with their music stands, of course) on the back of a big flatbed truck and play their songs as the vehicle rolled slowly down College Avenue. It was (a) ludicrous and (b) really, really unsafe, but that's how we did it. I knew the marching band was a big deal in college, but it wasn't anything that mattered. The band at Appleton East marched in the Orange Bowl parade in the early 1970s, but that was about it.

For the past four years, Fearless Maria has been part of the marching band program at her high school. And on Saturday night they won their third consecutive state championship:

3 in a row

Irondale High School competes in all the typical high school sports, occasionally doing well, but they aren't known for great success. They are great in winter drumline. Up until the last three years, I'd never had a chance to experience what it's like to be a state champion. Xavier won some state championships during my high school career, but that was at arm's length. Fearless Maria and her fellow drumline members are a full-on dynasty now and it's been a real education for me to see what it really takes to win a state championship and, even more importantly, what it takes to stay there. These kids put in an amazing amount of time into their shows. The other high schools that compete successfully in drumline in the state are mostly other metro schools, and the schools that Irondale will face in the WGI championships in less than two weeks span the gamut from small town enterprises to huge high schools. It's been an amazing experience and while we're ready for the next stage of her life, we'll miss these seasons.

Sleep with the fishes

The saga of Kevin Williamson, acerbic Never-Trumper, went into full-on frog and scorpion territory yesterday, as he was ashcanned from the Atlantic only a few weeks after he'd been hired to be the fully caffeinated Jennifer Rubin on their masthead. Where to begin?

• Williamson is a talented guy and his primary value as a pundit is his willingness to call things as he sees them. Who could forget his initial discussion of the Trump campaign, Witless Ape Rides Escalator? You want invective? Have some! 

Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at Trump Tower, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?

• So, if you're looking for a guy who can bash Le Grand Orange with flair, he's a great choice. But the problem is a guy who can write like that might have a few other opinions that might frighten the neighbors. And Williamson does: 

KEVIN WILLIAMSON (CO-HOST): And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, “If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.” And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging....

 Later in the same episode of the podcast, Williamson continued that when it came to punishment for those who had abortions, he “would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging” -- going so far as to say that he had “a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment” because “if the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence. Let’s not pretend like we’re doing something else.”

• Was Williamson serious about that last part? You could read it as an argument against capital punishment, but not if your goal is to get a guy ashcanned. And so he was.
• Now, in some ways this is a classic frog/scorpion moment -- you would think a guy who has lived in the media world as long as Williamson has would recognize that liberals like his former boss, Jeffrey Goldberg, aren't really his friends, and that he liable to get the Luca Brasi treatment at any moment that seemed propitious. But at the same time, if hacks like Jennifer Rubin can collect that sweet sweet Bezos money from the Washington Post simply by being reflexively against the Leader of the Free World, why wouldn't a more talented writer assume he could cash in, too, at a different portside enclave?
• In some respects, Williamson is no different from Cindy Sheehan or the latest flavor of the moment, David Hogg. Williamson was potentially useful as long as he did the dance as it is choreographed, but the only opinions his minders really wanted were the ones they could sell to their audiences. He wasn't allowed to have any opinions of his own. And if you want a "peerless sign of our times," that's it.

Springtime in Minnesota

It's April 4, 2018. This is our mailbox:

Nothing is delivered

This is the forecast for Sunday:

I'm officially tired of this crap.

Friends who say things

Verbatim quote from one of my college friends, on Facebook:

The old white men who voted for Trump don’t need to be won back/appealed to. They need to die.

This lovely thought earned a "like" from 11 people, including 7 who were also college classmates.

That's the endgame, kids.