Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Friday, March 01, 2002

Police On My Back(pack)- A few days ago, Tom Swift posted this item from the LA Times on the Minnesota Politics website. It seems famous Dakota County prosecutor Jim Backstrom is pressing to bring the full weight of the law to bear against...school bullies.

From LA Times:
February 27-28 -- Jail for schoolyard taunts?

In Hastings, Minn., prosecutor James Backstrom has announced "one of the toughest juvenile-justice
policies in the nation: School bullies will go to jail." Subject to the policy are not only kids who
violently lay hands on classmates but also those who"intimidate, harass, pick a fight on the playground or the bus...

Mr. Backstrom wants those who are at least 13 years old to hear a cell door click behind them. ... The jail-for-bullies policy has been in effect since last spring here in Dakota County."

Local prosecutors complain, however, that some judges are undercutting the policy's intent by taking into account such mitigating factors as whether a youngster's misbehavior was provoked.
("New plan to put bullies behind bars", Los Angeles Times )

Remember when schools would just expel the little monsters?

Here's the real rub - from the earliest ages, "masculine" behavior is actively squelched in little boys. Playing "cops and robbers" and pantomiming guns is enough to earn a kid detention or a reprimand. So at the age when little boys are supposed to be learning to moderate their masculine behavior, it's squelched, bottled up. Now, every school psychologist knows you're not supposed to force people's real personalities into a closet. They'd never think of forcing, say, a gay kid to keep his true personality in the closet.

So - when the kids grow up, they're supposed to magically keep that behavior under control without actually being allowed to practice it - and if they don't, the full weight of county government is going to come crashing down on top of them.

Does any of this make sense?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/1/2002 07:04:17 AM

Multiculturalism in Action - Liberals like the Vacuous Eleven, when talking about Education, stress the need for multiculturalism.

I won't say that this kind of thing is the inevitable end result of multiculturalism taught without the sort of cultural grounding of which the "pledge of allegiance" is the tiniest possible entree. But you know that's what I'm getting at, right?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/1/2002 06:59:32 AM

The Vacuous Eleven's Idea of a Perfect School - U of California at Berkeley has reinstated their controversial, not-necessarily-for-credit sex ed classes.

Perhaps this is what

Karen Clark (S Central Mpls)
Steve Dehler (St Cloud)
Mindy Greiling (Roseville)
Phillis Kahn (U of M)
Mary Jo McGuire (Falcon Heights, SIGH)
Jean Wagenius (S. Mpls)
Andy Dawkins (St Paul Frogtown)
Scott Dibble (Mpls Kenwood/Lakes)
Alice Hausman (St Paul Como/St Anthony)
Rob Leighton (Austin ?!)
Tom Osthoff (St Paul Como/North End)

...have in mind with the time the kids aren' t spending on the Pledge of Allegiance.

posted by Mitch Berg 3/1/2002 06:56:32 AM

Waxy Sixties Buildup - Eleven of our Representatives (including mine, Alice "The Phantom" Hausman) voted against the Pledge of Allegiance bill in the House yesterday:

Karen Clark (S Central Mpls)
Steve Dehler (St Cloud)
Mindy Greiling (Roseville)
Phillis Kahn (U of M)
Mary Jo McGuire (Falcon Heights, SIGH)
Jean Wagenius (S. Mpls)
Andy Dawkins (St Paul Frogtown)
Scott Dibble (Mpls Kenwood/Lakes)
Alice Hausman (St Paul Como/St Anthony)
Rob Leighton (Austin ?!)
Tom Osthoff (St Paul Como/North End)

I call them "The Vacuous Eleven". The left in Minnesota is portraying them as heroes, fighting for "the real meaning of the flag", as one wag on MN POL called it. I disagree (there's a shock), although there was a time in my life I'd have agreed (that might actually be a shock). No, the Vacuous Eleven are fighting for their intellectually-bankrupt, fatuous sixties notions; that America is a horrible thing to inflict upon the world, that we should be ashamed of our culture and society and nation and traditions, that we should protect our children and immigrants from the essense of our culture, that a nation is nothing but a bunch of administrators (fully unionized, of course) processing a herd of compliant taxpayers through the stages of their lives.

Most of these hamsters, I suspect, fully subscribe to the Buddhist/Taoist/Hindi notion of the mantra - a phrase one says to oneself to get into a desired frame of mind. So why is a ten second, voluntary mantra at the beginning of the day, one which affirms that we are "An indivisible nation" that stands for "liberty and justice" such a bad thing?

Because none of these hamsters supports any of these things.

posted by Mitch Berg 3/1/2002 06:52:46 AM

Thursday, February 28, 2002

Peace In Our Time, Part 3 - Robert Pollock writes about something I've been thinking for most of the past decade; Bill Clinton was the Neville Chamberlain of our era.

The mantra - no, the cliche - of the era was the "peace process", as if dictators could be weaned from butchery by an international twelve-step program. "Step One: You need to recognize you're a racist totalitarian butcher...".

Pollock writes:

For Colombia's peace process was based on an idea so stupid that it could only have been the culmination of a U.S.-led decade of appeasement that saw terrorists installed in the governments of Palestine, Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone, and butchers like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il using negotiations as cover for the pursuit of aggressive aims.

War is bad. Sometimes an unjust peace is worse. A peace that allows dictators and terrorists to aggrandize themselves through manipulating the "process" - and allowing it to happen in the name of "process", like achieving piece is some sort of law-school project-mediation exercise - is utterly unjust.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/28/2002 01:52:14 PM

Adios, Jesse? - Will Ventura recover from the big override?

Let's connect the dots; he has one fellow party member in the legislature. He's just had his head handed to him by the legislature on the budget. His star power is in the toilet. His major legislative initiative, the unicameral legislature, was DOA from the beginning and is deader still now. The only people who still support him are sitting in icefishing shacks wondering if the world isn't just an atom in a much bigger organism, dude.

He was a fluke - a fluke that served as a mouthpiece for influential wonks like Tim Penny and Dean Barkley, but an electoral fluke nonetheless.

My bet - it's over. He'd be nuts to run.

But then, he was nuts, and I was wrong, in 1998...
posted by Mitch Berg 2/28/2002 11:53:04 AM

Bombay Calling to the Faraway Towns - Critics of America's system of government rarely deign to show better alternatives. Perhaps because there aren't any.

As we see now in India. This is scary.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/28/2002 11:47:20 AM

Adios, Miller - Not only did ABC extinguish the last remaining reason to watch Monday Night Football by firing Dennis Miller, they've now stomped on the ashes of those reasons by hiring the most irritating voice in the world, John Madden.

Not that it's normally an issue - I never watch it, I'll take baseball every time. But...ick.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/28/2002 11:44:06 AM

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

The Devil and Bono Vox - I've been playing in rock and punk bands since I was a kid. I've also been a Christian pretty much my entire cognitive life. It's a given that a lot of my rocker friends don't "get" the Christianity part. But many of my Christian friends had an even bigger problem. "You should be playing in a Christian band", they'd insist. I'd reply, "why preach to the choir?". "Contemporary Christian" music always bored me stiff - because it was designed from the ground up to be safe to the consumer, the already-converted.

The examples I held up of Christians who were Rockers were the ones I wanted to emulate (back when I wanted to be a rock star), the ones who took their beliefs and waded into the jungle of the world's most profane business: Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, T-Bone Burnett, Mike Sharp and Dave Peters of The Alarm, arguably the late Stuart Adamson of Big Country...

...and the big kahuna, U2, led by Bono (Paul Hewson), the greatest rock band since the Beatles (and as distinct from Bruce Springsteen, who's less a Rock act than a Rock 'n Roll institution).

In the wake of their magnificent performance at the Super Bowl, Jim Boulet of the National Review finally nailed the dichotomy that Bono, U2, and that entire generation of Rockers who are Christians represent.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2002 04:05:16 PM

The System - Here in St. Paul: A local businesswoman with deep ties to the DFL, the Hamline/Midway Community Coalition, and DFL councilman Jay Benanav is buying a piece of city-owned property at 60% under market value - under the rubric of "Neighborhood Revitalization". This transfer is the subject of a St. Paul Housing Redevelopment Authority hearing today.

I wrote a long post on the subject for the St. Paul Politics discussion list. I was going to post it under my "Articles" section - but later yesterday afternoon, it got more interesting. I'm going to rewrite it, and post it under "Articles", later today or early tomorrow.

Is it a great smoking gun of urban corruption? Perhaps not. Is it a piece of the system that allows patronage perks to local politicians? I'll post the article, and let you be the judge.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2002 06:41:10 AM

The Free Market Versus Islamic Extremism - Reason Magazine points out why the market - not sanctimonious posturing - might hold part of the answer to Islamic Extremism.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2002 06:36:25 AM

Oops - Yes, I ended up taking yesterday off. Work called. Drat the luck. Hopefully bigger and "better" today.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2002 06:33:16 AM

Monday, February 25, 2002

Sorkin it up, Toughin' it Out - Liberal drug addict and TV producer Aaron Sorkin is in trouble for ripping on the president.

So in the interest of kicking a dog when it's down - "West Wing" is almost as dull as it is prissily sanctimonious, but not quite as much as it is blinkeredly pollyanaish about liberal dogma.

And "The American President" was a groaningly dull movie.

And I could never be bothered to watch "Sportsnight".
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2002 07:46:40 PM

The Councilman and the Coffeepusher - The story of Jay Benanav, and the sweetheart deal given to St. Paul businesswoman and Benanav supporter Kathy Sundberg, tomorrow.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2002 06:33:17 PM

A Tale of Two Politicians - When Ronald Reagan contracted Alzheimers, he kept his ailment to himself until he couldn't any longer - and then gracefully withdrew from public life, to protect his family's privacy and, one might presume, not inflict his suffering on the rest of the public.

Yesterday's news - Senator Paul Wellstone has a very mild form of Multiple Sclerosis. So why did he pick yesterday to announce it - during the same news cycle that Roger Moe was using to announce his gubernatorial bid?

Why is he announcing it at all? If it's not serious or life-threatening, why is it a matter of any public importance?

Could it be a craven play for the sympathy vote in a race that even his supporters say is going to be brutally tight?

Can we expect to see fawning coverage of the Senator rescuing a cat from a tree, soon?
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2002 12:17:30 PM

I Blog, Therefore I Am - I've had people ask me how this site is done, and what I use to do it.

It's a good question - and the tip of a new web-society iceberg, as explained by Andrew Sullivan.

WebLogs are either one possible path for the future of web "journalism", or a fun fad. The next few years will tell!
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2002 12:12:22 PM

Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive