A Moment of Silence that Speaks Volumes

At the Minnesota state Republican convention, currently underway, they held a moment of silence. 

Was it for the elementary-age children who died in the Annunciation School shooting in Minneapolis last summer? No.

Was it for the member of the Minnesota Legislature and her husband who were murdered last spring? No.

Was it for the state resident, serving in the U.S. military, who was killed in Iran in the first days of the war there? No.

You can't even guess who it was for. 

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It was for Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd six years ago this week, who is alive and I assume well, and serving his sentence for the crimes he committed. 

They all stood there in silence, honoring a convicted murderer whose actions were so reprehensible that even some cops denounced them. (The fact that it is only some cops is part of why we are where we are at now.)

Which reminds me: I was reviewing my posts from the week after Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and I went back to my post from the day before the murder. That was May 25, 2020. 

It's a very strange thing to read now, given all that has happened since January 6, 2021:

A thought from Joyce Alene, a former U.S. Attorney and current law professor:

"I never thought I’d live in a country where I’d have to seriously worry about the President pervasively cheating to steal an election or refusing to participate in a smooth transition of power if he lost."

I've thought about the transfer of power on Inauguration Day sometimes and wondered what it would be like if the sitting president didn't relinquish power, marveling at how easily our leaders of different parties turned over control from one to the other.

I wasn't taking it for granted because I did notice it. But at the same time, I was assuming it was how things worked in this country.

We'll see if it continues. 

Republicans in Minnesota held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin.

What If Lee Won at Gettysburg?

I toy with alternate history a little bit, though usually in 20th century settings. And I know I'm just a piker compared to people who take it seriously. 

The Alternate Historian account on BlueSky asked, a few days ago, "Which historical individual's reputation in alternate history (whether good or bad) is not well deserved?"

One of the answers he got was something I've never thought of before. It came from Sean McKnight @ynot1989.bsky.social:

Robert E. Lee, and it's not even a contest. The man's treated like a noble patrician and military mastermind in actual history, and I am aware of precisely zero works of alternate history that treat him as the myopic military commander, and profoundly evil slaver he actually was.

The best thing that ever happened to Lee was losing Gettysburg. If by some miracle he'd gotten over his own bullshit and won that battle, the victory would have almost certainly led to the total destruction of the ANV during their planned assault on DC.

His army had expended most of their artillery during Gettysburg. They would have gotten swamped at Washington, which was a fortress by the summer of 1863. Defeat would be obvious, but Lee's ego was so inflated before Gettysburg that after, he probably would believe God would provide him cannons.

He'd do a typical dramatic charge, hoping for a dramatic final battle to decide the war, and end up getting obliterated. If he wasn't killed by the Union counterattack, calls to hang him would be deafening.

Lincoln would face enormous pressure to take a harder stance against the Confederates, which with the ANV taken off the board would carry fewer risks.

Lee would be remembered in the North as the greatest traitor in the country's history, and in the South as the man who lost the war.

The destruction of the ANV would also likely mean the death or capture of some of the South's other mythologized leaders. Ewell, A.P. Hill, Longstreet, Jubal Early, J.E.B. Stuart, and Pickett would likely be captured or killed, and their post war reputations would suffer.

Huh. I never thought I should have rooted for Lee to win at Gettysburg, but it sounds like I should have. Then maybe the South would have both lost the war and the time after it, instead of winning Reconstruction.

Stuff

For those of us who have had the responsibility of clearing out our parents' homes, whether before or after their deaths — and for anyone who hasn't begun to think about it yet, for themselves or for a parent — this essay by David Weiss is worth your time.

It's called Trashing My Dad (or What's Left of Him). 

Oh, the Suffering Afrikaners

After yesterday's story about the tiny number of asylum cases that are found in favor of applicants by Trump regime judges, it was extra bad to see a version of this AP story in today's Star Tribune.

The headline is "Trump administration plans to admit more white South Africans as refugees this year," and the lede sentence reads, "The Trump administration plans to admit up to 10,000 more white South African refugees into the United States in the coming months, arguing that their status as Afrikaners has left them open to discrimination and persecution at home."

Are they threatened with death and sexual violence like the Central American woman described by Steven Thal in yesterday's Star Tribune op-ed? Only in Stephen Miller's racist imagination. Are they threatened by their families with death for being adopted and somehow disgracing their clan, like the young Somali man whose story in MinnPost I belatedly appended to yesterday's post? Of course not.

The version of the AP story that ran in the Star Tribune does not carry the AP byline, and ended with two paragraphs that are not in the AP story online:


Yeah, because having your history erased from school textbooks is clearly persecution that deserves a response from governments around the world. Maybe compensation! And any country that does that to some of its people should definitely stop doing it. 

How do people like Christopher Landau, who work for the Trump regime, manage to say things like this without their heads spinning right off?

Relocating 17,500 white South Africans to get them established here will cost U.S. taxpayers $100 million, according to AP. Which is only about $5,700 per person, so I'm not sure I trust that figure. It seems kind of low. 

Asylum Has a Purpose, and It's Not for White South Africans

Steven Thal, a local immigration attorney, wrote in today's Star Tribune about his experience over 43 years representing people with asylum claims, and what has changed during the second Trump regime. (Gift link: Immigrants vs. the deportation machine: This is America today.) He particularly emphasized the fact that domestic violence and gang violence are no longer considered grounds for asylum. Since 2025, sex or gender is not considered a "particular social group."

On top of that, Thal pointed to Trump's appointment of judges whose purpose is to carry out deportation, rather than fairly hear cases of asylum. 100 immigration judges have been fired or "pushed out," replaced by 140 sworn to uphold the Trump method:

These new appointees, termed “deportation judges” by the Department of Justice, are characterized by a lack of immigration law experience and by a focus on enforcement.

Rates of asylum-granting nationally, he says, have declined from 42% during the Biden administration to 7% (by February 2026). The woman's case Thal describes in the first half of his essay is one that any rational person would think should meet asylum grounds. But no. 

His analysis fits perfectly with an infographic the Star Tribune ran a few days ago, comparing asylum cases in one month in Minnesota, 2024 vs. 2026:


The approval rate under Biden was a not-stellar 13%. Under Trump, it is 0.2%.

It was obvious this would happen when we heard news about the firing of immigration judges, knowing their replacements would be dedicated to the Trump/Miller ideology. But it is still hard seeing it come to fruition. 

And now they want to have people applying for green cards return to their home countries to apply. It's nonsensical obstructionism. 
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When I posted this, I meant to include a link to this MinnPost story on Minnesota asylum cases, which also ran on Tuesday. As in Thal's commentary, the particular case it focuses on is clearly one that deserves asylum. And check out this graph that accompanies the article:

Minnesota clearly had a preexisting and long-term lower rate of approved asylum cases. Is it from bias against Somalis, or what? I wonder what the reason is. 
 

Good News from the Pope

I like this Pope. 

In the encyclical Leo issued today, he finally — finally — did what the church should have done forever ago, and asked for forgiveness for the Vatican's past role in legitimizing the international slave trade. (AP story here.) Quoting that story:

In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls [that] authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.... [One] bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” 

Moving forward, unlike some of people we could mention.
 

A Bad Stat, and the Wrong Word

I just finished reading Camille Dungy's 2023 memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden as part of a book group. I recommend it generally.

There was one particular set of facts she relayed late in the book that I didn't know specifically, though it fits with others that are familiar. 

It comes up at a point in late spring or summer of 2020, when Dungy's husband has been on a long bike ride. She tells her friend Tim, who is white, that she tracks her husband's whereabouts with her phone while he's on his rides. 

Their conversation was just a few months after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by white men while jogging in Georgia, and of course, not long after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.

After recounting their conversation, she goes on to write,

A recent national study reveals that Black cyclists are 4.5 times more likely to die in an accident than white cyclists. Law enforcement agents in cities around the country cite Black cyclists at grossly disproportionate rate. Though the population of Tampa, Florida, is only 25 percent Black, Black cyclists accounted for 80 percent of the city's bicycle citations in 2015. In a nine-month span in 2017, Chicago law enforcement agents issue 321 citations to cyclists in Austin, a predominately Black neighborhood, and only 5 in predominately white Lincoln Park (page 235). 

I found a 2022 article about that national study. The higher rate of death for Black cyclists, it turns out, isn't because they ride bikes more than white people. In fact, it's the opposite:

...Black residents logged proportionally fewer miles on foot, bike, or car than most other groups, relative to their share of the population, according to the National Household Travel Survey data from which the stats were sourced.... White cyclists, who are the demographic group most likely to ride exclusively for recreation or sport rather than transportation, logged significantly more miles per capita than cyclists from other demographics...

This 4.5x statistic raises the question that I always ask when things like this arise: when there's clearly either a structural problem at fault (such as the road designs in Black communities vs. white ones) or overt racism of drivers (!)... are those "accidents"? 

Can we stop using that word and start using at least a neutral word instead, like crash? Calling them accidents is adding insult to injury, or in this case, death.

Bologna, 10 Years Ago

It's been a busy, beautiful day here in Minnesota, one where you want to be outside digging in the earth, or maybe going to a book club, and you don't have time to think of a blog post. 

So instead, you spin back through your photos and come up with some from just about 10 years ago, inspired by a friend who mentioned she will be in Bologna for a conference soon.

Here are a few photos of signs I saw in that city that I didn't share at the time:

The Broadview Six

I'm far from the first person to note the MO of Trump and his regime when it comes to violating laws and the constitutional order, but after the many court cases they have lost, including multiple judges decrying their actions, it was the one yesterday against the Broadview Six that has finally put some words in my mouth.

Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and First Amendment litigator who was Twitter-famous as Pope Hat and is now on BlueSky, had a great thread explaining what happened in the Broadview grand jury case. To summarize, the Trump prosecutor improperly vouched for aspects of the case to the grand jury, communicated with grand jury members off the record, redacted parts of transcripts and lied about it, and finally "when grand jurors voted no bill the first time, [prosecutors] asked grand jurors who had 'made up their mind' not to participate in the next ones." Essentially, they shopped for jurors who were most likely to agree to indict.

Given all of that, the judge released the six defendants from all charges, such that they cannot be charged again. The judge will be looking into prosecutorial misconduct.

The thing I want to say about this regime's way of conducting itself is this: They act like a badly brought-up first grader on a playground, one who does what he wants to other kids until he gets called on it and told to stop. And then his only words are "Who says?" and "Make me." 

Like I said, I know I'm not the first one to point out that the regime functions at a low level (or no level) of morality. But it's good to allow yourself to feel the shock of it again once in a while.

Lost & Found

This is from the Lost & Found of a large event held recently here in the Twin Cities:

I took a photo of it because I'm fascinated by the metal logos and namemarks of companies found on old equipment (as I've written about a few times in the past). 

But I'm also sad that a person has lost this hammer and hasn't come to claim it. It seems likely that it has a family story behind it. 

I hope it has a new life with whoever ends up with. I hope they cherish it and use it for another lifetime and hand it on to another generation.
 

Ban It

Why is this legal to drive on a city street? Why is it legal to drive this without a more advanced driver's license?

There is no good reason for either of those facts, except this country hates pedestrians and its policy-makers think everyone should be driving everywhere in the biggest vehicle possible, armored cars preferably.

Get it off of my street.

What Do We Do with This?

Yesterday, I wrote that it wasn't possible to come up with adjectives to describe the corruption of Trump and his administration. As Chris Hayes said last night, the news of his stock trading and then promoting the same companies alone would normally be the biggest presidential corruption story of all time, if we didn't have the now-$1.8 billion IRS extortion scheme to talk about. 

Here is one day's worth of the best BlueSky posts I saw on the IRS story. These are in chronological order: 

Even by Trump standards, reading his “settlement” with the IRS made me feel insane. Every lever of this thing is controlled by Trump, or some lackey he controls. A diabolical little Rube Goldberg machine of corruption, to the tune of $1.8 billion in public resources. Vile stuff. Trump doesn’t literally decide who gets the money. But everyone on the commission is appointed by the AG, and can be removed by Trump *at any time*. It’s a machine to reward his allies. I promise you, not one dollar will go to anyone he doesn’t deem worthy of getting rich at your expense.
Jay Willis

the president is raiding the treasury to put your tax dollars into this man's personal checking account as a reward for what he's doing in this picture:


Andrew Lawrence

So you CAN get reparations you just have to be a reactionary white person who tries to overthrow the government because black votes shouldn’t count
Adam Serwer

In a sane world, we'd be discussing giving a million dollars to Jeffrey Epstein's victims and not to the traitors on January 6.
Christine Slemmer @slem63.bsky.social

An American president sues/extorts his own government, then settles with his own justice department to funnel money to his criminal allies. He will go down in history as the president who came up with forms of corruption never contemplated before.
Rick Stengel

Ask yourself: Why would a settlement over leaked tax filings include a prohibition on examinations of previously filed returns? One answer, which lots of people are missing: For years, Trump has been fighting an IRS audit that could have resulted in a $100M bill. No longer, apparently.
Connor Ewing

look trump can have his government sign any docs he wants; either the next democratic government throws all the corrupt motherfuckers in jail and seizes all their assets, or it's pointless anyway.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

A canny lawyer friend always says "A contract is just a starting point for a negotiation." The most generous fallback option the Dems should offer is "give it all back and retire from public life." Next best is "live the balance of your days in jail or embroiled in 25 concurrent prosecutions."
Daniel Suitor

Every day brings a new set of headlines that if you'd predicted them in October 2024, you'd have been diagnosed with a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome:


Matthew Gertz

There should be more screaming about all the corruption. And a corruption-watch/tally/list updated daily. Plus projections on DC federal buildings and airplanes trailing banners. Also Trump in jail.
Rebecca Solnit

I think the reason I've been a little ambiently mad all day is because January 6th rioters are statistically the most likely group of pedophiles in the world and they clubbed a guy to death and they're going to be rich from the tax money that I give to the country I live in.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president and VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

And that's not even mentioning the 14th Amendment argument against the scheme. 

What do we do with this? What do we do with this?