I may have to vote for Scott Jensen after all (no, not really)

There was a big debate between the candidates for governor of Minnesota last night. Did I watch it? No, I’ve already made up my mind that Jensen is an evil poop-flinging ape with regressive views on just about everything. I also knew what was coming after the debate: Jensen is throwing Twitter hysterics and is sounding rather desperate. He did say one thing I appreciate, though.

Minnesota’s southern border is with Iowa, and I think building a wall might be a very good idea. Perhaps an eastern wall as well, to defend against Wisconsinites. And then maybe a western wall to protect us from Dakotans.

But wait! I just remembered that winter is coming. Maybe Minnesota can instead be like a scrotum in the cold, and just contract and pull up into Canada. Cheaper all around. Never mind, I’ll cast my vote for Walz again.

By the way, the Feeding Our Future scandal has nothing to do with Walz or the Minnesota state government at all. Some grifters set up shop here, taking advantage of a federal program to provide food for families during the pandemic, sending in false invoices and getting reimbursed to the tune of $250 million. Minnesota investigators turned them over to the FBI, so blaming on Walz is just flailing.

There were two things Jensen isn’t talking about, though. One is his abortion policy: he wants to ban it altogether, but knows that won’t fly in this state, so he’s evasive about it now.

The other is that he’s an election-denier, one of a number of people running for office in this state, including these rascals:

Fischbach is my representative, and she’s probably going to coast to re-election because this region is largely populated with red-hatted gomers. None of those people should be elected to anything, though. That’s my great fear about the November election, that a swarm of anti-democratic Trumpkins get into office and begin playing games with election laws and triggering unwarranted doubts about every election, but especially ones where Democrats got elected.

It has the potential to be a colossal shit-show, thanks to those kinds of people who should be in jail rather than running for office. But, you know, we have to compete with the UK for the most spectacular political collapse ever, and we’ve got a shot at it.

What Sviggum really thinks

Steve Sviggum wrote a real purty apology, seemed sincere and contrite. He really did.

Then he got an interview with a sympathetic reporter and said what he honestly thinks.

Sviggum, who served in the Minnesota Legislature for 30 years, said he has dedicated his life to public service and will not be pressured to resign. He said he’s concerned identity politics is ruining the country.

If the far left doesn’t ruin it, identity politics will. The woke community, the liberal community, if I may be so bold as to say, has taken [my question] and jumped on it. They say it’s racist and sexist. That’s the community that says, ‘If you don’t think like me and you’re not part of the group, you don’t belong. You’re a bad guy, and we will destroy you,’ he said.

Yeah, his apology was a pretense.

It’s always projection with these guys

Look at that! American flag and everything!

Last spring, Randy Kaufman, Republican running for the governing board of the Maricopa County Community College District, was deeply concerned about those leftist perverts and just wanted to protect the children. The children! Think of the children!

In a Facebook post from May, Kaufman said he wanted “our children protected [from] the progressive left.”

Now, in October, a policeman noticed him parked near a pre-school, and approached him to see what was going on.

“[Kaufman] appeared to be looking at a cell phone in one hand,” the police report said. “I immediately became alarmed as I saw [Kaufman] had his pants down mid-thigh and was exposed showing his fully erect nude penis. [Kaufman] was manipulating his genitals in a masturbatory manner.”

He now faces a felony charge and has suspended his political campaign.

I guess he was thinking really hard about the children.

When they tell you who they are, believe them

Matt Keefer is running for the school board in Zion, Indiana. He just admitted who he is on Facebook.

Keefer responded by saying, “All Nazis weren’t ‘bad’ as you specify. They did horrible things. They were in a group frenzy in both cases you site.” He goes on to write, “Who is to say if we were both there in the same place and time, that we wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

Do you know why they say “never forget”? It’s so you don’t do the same thing if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

Just to make it even more fun, he goes on to suggest that someday people will look back on the people who responded to the pandemic with sane health measures in the same way we see Nazis today. And he’s an MD?

You know, everyone should scrutinize their local school board candidates carefully. The wackaloons all know that school boards are a great entry point to inject all kinds of lunacy into a community.

Proud to be part of the coalition of chaos

The Tories are getting all het up over there in the UK. Suella Braverman put on a fine display.

it’s the Labour Party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, dare I say, the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption that we are seeing on our roads today.

I do read the Guardian, and I quite like tofu — I had a marvelous spicy tofu-and-shrimp soup from an Indian kiosk this past weekend — so I fail to see what her complaints are all about. I’m not sure that a party that hates immigration so passionately should be accusing others of being anti-growth.

By the way, just this morning it was announced that Ms Braverman is out of a job. Chaos! More chaos! The current UK government is truly the epitome of chaos!

So far…the US has midterm elections next month, and I expect even more chaos here.

Her departure was a resignation.

She was specifically irate that they weren’t dispatching those dirty immigrants fast enough to suit her.

Boy, the Truss government sure is crumbling rapidly.

Morris is too diverse, according to a Republican regent

WHAT THE FUCK? It’s hard to believe that a regent of the University of Minnesota asked this fucking stupid question, but then you notice that it’s a former speaker of the Minnesota house of representatives, a Republican, and it becomes a little less surprising.

Steve Sviggum asks if my university has become too diverse, from a marketing standpoint. Jesus.

His concern, or rather his excuse for his concern, is that two people, two bigots, wrote to him to say that the diversity on the University of Minnesota Morris campus made them uncomfortable and they wouldn’t send their kids here.

Seriously. This is one of the people who controls the pursestrings of my university. He got two letters that he should have instantly shredded, and instead he decided to confront our chancellor with the fact that the Republican bigots of Minnesota have his ear.

Fortunately, Chancellor Ericksen responded calmly and appropriately to such an outrageous assertion.

It’s a good thing she has the job, and not me (not that there’s ever a chance I’d end up in such a position), because I’d have just yelled, “Fuck you, asshole” and scrabbled for something on the desk I could throw at Sviggum.

Weird guy, weird senate race

Pennsylvania politics is taking a twisty and unsavory turn. It seems Oz has a long fascination with drinking urine.

OK, it’s odd and rather woo-wooish (but then we knew he was a quack), but what’s particularly annoying is the lying. Med schools don’t expect you to taste urine. It’s not part of modern medical diagnostics. Historically, it was a test to diagnose diabetes, but Oz is not a centuries-old doctor who might have done such a thing. I like CD’s take: it’s a kink that isn’t going to endear you to the voters, but if you’re doing it at home, it’s not something that would disqualify you for office. If you’re trying to promote it as a tool for better health, though, you’re wrong and you’re a quack.

Flying to Washington state tomorrow

Should I worry?

It’s no secret that Washington state has a white nationalist problem. Among the rugged mountains and towering pines are neo-Nazi groups and one of the largest chapters of a violent white supremacist organization. But there’s one group that has been increasingly and alarmingly connected to these extremists: Washington state’s GOP.

The latest example is a pro-Nazi blogger Greyson Arnold’s affiliation with the state party. According to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by The Daily Beast, the Washington State GOP paid Arnold $821.87 on July 15 for “payroll.”

Arnold runs the far-right Telegram account “Pure Politics,” which traffics in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, praise of controversial lawmakers, and anti-COVID-containment sentiments. It also has more than 12,000 followers who frequently comment with racist and antisemitic language.

But Arnold himself has said plenty of distressing things. As CNN reported last year, Arnold has advocated shooting refugees, killing undocumented immigrants, and has posted praise for Nazi Germany. He actually once said Adolf Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand.”

Nah, I’m not going to worry any more than usual, because the Republican party is pro-fascist everywhere. It should not be at all surprising anymore that Republicans are finding common cause with Nazis.

Also, I grew up there. I knew people who were exceedingly deplorable; I had good friends of Japanese descent who could tell stories about how their families were mistreated in WWII; I’ve been reading David Neiwert for years (his blog has gone quiet, unfortunately, but he’s now a staff writer for Daily Kos). It’s a great state with some ugly veins of authoritarianism running through it. Also, being dependent on a single major employer, Boeing, for so long, now supplanted by places like Amazon and Microsoft, really enabled a lot of pro-business Republican types.