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

Saturday, March 09, 2002

One Wonders what Alec Baldwin would do without President Bush and the fiasco of our last election. Granted, he has nothing to go on legally - he keeps repeating the Big Lie in hopes that the weak-minded and ill-informed will go along with his bizarre and partisan reading of current events.

Here, Baldwin begins to cement his reputation as one of our nation's great embarassments.

I can't wait for Barbra Streisand's next appearance in the public eye. I can't believe she's restrained herself this long.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/9/2002 03:30:22 PM

Them Thar Yurpeens - This is actually a bit about writing.

I play guitar. By most standards, I'm pretty good at it. Now, Richard Thompson is the world's most amazing guitarist. I've seen him three times. And every time I see him, I walk out of the show thinking it's time for me to try needlepoint.

And every time I start to fancy myself a writer, I end up reading something by James Lileks, like this screed against DC city workers, Ted Rall and European pacifists, and think it's time perhaps to drop blogging and take up bowling.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/9/2002 10:27:39 AM

The Return of the Anti-War Left - "Earth Times" talks about the resurgence of "The Nation".

I'll be looking for further signs of this at our host of leftie wacko Twin Cities campuses.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/9/2002 10:06:33 AM

Friday, March 08, 2002

Garage Illogic - My friends assume that, because I am a conservative, pragmatic Republican, I must love Joe Soucheray's Garage Logic, on KSTP-AM. Well, I used to work with Joe, and his show is occasionally side-splittingly funny, and his skewering of Minnesota's obsessive political correctness is usually dead-on.

But I want to leap through the radio and swim back down the phone lines and throttle some of the so-called "garage logicians".

Many of them punctuate their phone calls with incessant calls for "personal responsibility", as Soucheray keeps finding "the Mystery" under more and more rocks. And I'd like to ask them this:

If a Garage Logician hears someone saying "We need to protect our communities from from angry European Males, who want to take away our handouts and oppress us", they're trained well enough to know who they're dealing with - a Euphorian! But ask yourself this: If you replace "our communities" with "Garage Logic", replace "Angry European Males" with "Euphorians", substitute "handouts" with "roads", and finally replace "oppress" with "inflict The Mystery on", who are you describing?

Different language, same whininess, same desire to fob their problems off on the actions of others.

Good luck.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/8/2002 01:08:32 PM

King of the Roads- The never-ending war over the future of the Twin Cities traffic infrastructure just goes on and on, with the current word being that a referendum might be required.

For those of you not familiar with the story: On the left, we have the Metropolitan Council, a de facto unelected government body that "plans" the Metro area, who are calling for more rail tranit and less road building. On the other side, advocates for more highway construction point out that mass transit of this type has never been successful in an area with such low population density.

I'm a Republican, but I"m not sure I'm entirely behind more roads. The record of cities that try to build their way out of congestion is dismal, and the whole effort of building roads serves effectively as a subsidy for the suburbs. Nothing wrong with living in the 'burbs - but why is the taxpayer on the hook to support that lifestyle choice?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/8/2002 12:55:59 PM

Thursday, March 07, 2002

The Anti-War Left - There's been plenty of anger about the resurgence of the anti-war left in recent weeks. Some of it's been here. I've personally interpreted much of their stance as an opportunistic combination of opportunistic triangulation and pandering to the wacko left.

I'm both right and wrong, as we see in this fairly even-handed look by Stanley Kurtz.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/7/2002 09:46:53 PM

Iraq and Roll - George Will profiles the leader of the Iraqi opposition, on whom some of our hopes of unseating the dictator Hussein rest.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/7/2002 08:43:41 AM

Enronned, Part II - In the wake of the Enron crisis, the predictable cries arose from the predictable people - "We need government to make things safer/fairer/more stable".

Government oversight of passenger rail service has done us all wonders. Rail service between Chicago, St. Paul and Seattle is on the block now. Michael Lynch shows us what that attitude has done for America's once-usable passenger rail sytem.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/7/2002 08:41:18 AM

Wednesday, March 06, 2002

Minnesota Caucuses - Minnesota went through its periodic "precinct caucus" ritual last night.

As predicted, conservative Brian Sullivan beat Tim Pawlenty by a wide margin in the GOP straw poll. This will be widely extolled by the left as a sign that the GOP in Minnesota is dominated by the "theocratic far right". The truth is, the caucuses are dominated by the theocratic far right. In fact, that is one of the more difficult things about going to the GOP caucuses; a group of well-meaning but utterly single-issue prolifers will spend most of the time introducing pre-printed resolutions from various prolife groups, all permutations of the same basic idea (no abortion, no stem cell research, no cloning, no euthanasia). Not such a bad thing (if you're even just opposed to the frivolous disregard for life that the extremes of teh "pro choice" movement espouse). However, all too many of these people are utterly illiterate about non-life issues; frequently, these people have no idea why tax cuts, tort reform, concealed-carry reform and preemption statutes and many other bedrock conservative issues are of any importance. If the "theocratic far right" has done the GOP any disservice, it's bringing this much illiteracy about the full spectrum of conservatism out in full force at caucus time.

In the meantime - I've been predicting since roughly about the time of Ventura's inauguration that he had no legs as a political force, and that the Independence Party would never elect a single candidate that wasn't already a major celebrity. Much of his support, at least in the Metro area, came from college students - further evidence that the voting age should be raised to thirty. However, the Minnesota Daily reports that attentance at the Dinkytown IP caucus was...well, about like sales of the Governor's last book.

Will the IP lose major party status? Maybe not this election - but if Ventura doesn't run, look for the IP to be somewhere down below the Libertarians again by 2004.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/6/2002 08:12:18 AM

History Repeats All Over Again? - William F. Buckley writes on historical precedents in the Middle East.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/6/2002 07:46:03 AM

Big Box - My liberal friends all bought "Nickeled and Dimed - on Not Getting By in America", by the generally-incoherent Barbara Ehrenreich, and acted like they'd caught all of us conservatives pilfing from the fridge at night. The book, of course, was a trite look at life in minimum-wage America - an upper-middle-class dilettante taking a year to try to live in the lower wage brackets, while exercising all of the lower-income survival and budgeting skills one might expect of...well, an upper-middle-class dilettante.

Now, Virginia Postrel has written an excellent article on how Wal-Mart has helped raise the American standard of living. That'd include everyone, mind you, not just Sam Walton.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/6/2002 07:36:36 AM

Our Unbiased Media - Liberal pundits swear that if the media is biased at all, it's toward the right. My Green friends insist that the media is really utterly a great conservative cabal (and compared to most of my Green friends, Mao was something of a moderate).

Blogger Patrick Ruffini has done a fascinating analysis of the major media's use of the term "right-wing" in its coverage.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/6/2002 07:28:40 AM

Tuesday, March 05, 2002

Diversity means Lots of People Like Us - A conservative student at Berkeley has been getting death threats for criticizing racist propaganda by a hispanic separatist group on campus.

The big surprise is that there is a conservative at Berkeley in the first place.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/5/2002 07:37:11 AM

Doh! - Yes, I missed writing yesterday - and my hit count showed it. My life has re-acquired some of the chaos I was missing. More later.

But I'll be keeping a more regular schedule!
posted by Mitch Berg 3/5/2002 07:27:46 AM

Raise the Voting Age to 30!- Years ago, I used to work at a software company with this pinhead kid. He'd just graduated from Macalester (aka "Berkeley on the Prairie"), and it showed; he had the same loopy-left retro-sixties naivete about the world around him that would have seemed mildly charming had it not been so aggressively, debasingly smug.

This guy's big ambition was to open the first internet service provider in Havana. He felt that Cuba was "already free", and probably a better place to live than the US.

This article, by David Wallis, talks about the attitude on the part of similar students.

I think the guy in my story ended up working for some el-floppo dotcom in San Francisco. So he nearly achieved his goal, after all!
posted by Mitch Berg 3/5/2002 07:23:23 AM

President Visits - The Strib took note of some of the idiots who were out in Eden Prairie protesting President Bush's visit. The usual throng of handout-mongers and America-lasters were out in some force.

Many were waving pretzels - a reference to the President's near-miss in January. I love the qote from the Bloomington cop when asked about the charges to be filed against the two pretzel-waving snotnozzles that were arrested: "It's got to be a felony. You could have called it attempted murder."

Criminy. Why wasn't I out waving a big blue dress the last time Clinton came to town?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/5/2002 07:16:33 AM

Daschle: Political Suicide? - Many of us on the right are wondering what's with Daschle's nascent anti-war slant. Andrew Sullivan sums up one view - nothing that Daschle's doing has anything to do with being a loyal opposition.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/5/2002 07:08:26 AM

Duuuude, Where's the Sense? - The "War on Drugs" has just gotten too absurd.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/5/2002 07:05:50 AM

Sunday, March 03, 2002

Rumors of the end of the war are premature. The world just gets scarier and scarier.

In light of the gravity of the <">threats that we're only now beginning to comprehend, the "anti-war" faction in this country just seems more and more specious.

At the risk of sounding like a hawk - we need to kill terrorists before they kill us.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/3/2002 07:04:34 PM

His Justice, Her Justice - The feminist left's usual rant is that "the system" is irredeemably slanted against women. Women earn drastically less (untrue with men and women of equal education), women are unfairly denied custody of "their" children (statistically absurd), and women face a glass ceiling (untrue with women of equal experience).

But the most jarring difference is in criminal court. The Yates case shines a light on the biggest, most victorian difference between the statuses of men and women; when a father kills his children, he's a criminal who needs to be punished; when a mother does it, she's someone who needs help.

Doug Saunders, of the Toronto Globe and Mail, illuminates the differences. Justice is not gender-blind in America.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/3/2002 06:56:14 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