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

Friday, April 05, 2002

Nanny's Retreat - the Legislature, after decades of serving as the scolding mom, finally okayed some fireworks.

Not very important? Maybe. But this is the sort of bill that got nowhere in the last twenty years of absolute DFL hegemony. Today, fireworks. Tomorrow - concealed carry reform, real tax and welfare reform, public school reform...?

With the redistricting reflecting Minnesota's newer, more conservative face, anything's possible.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2002 07:59:06 AM

Less about Moore - I've never liked Michael Moore. "Blood in the Face" was an interesting movie about American nazis and the Klan, but drew wider sociological conclusions that weren't supported by any rational evidence. His rants against corporate America in "Roger and Me" were delivered with such self-satisfied smugness that I eventually rooted for Roger to come barrelling of the podium with a squad of goons at the climactic shareholders meeting. The smug (that word and Moore are permanently linked in my mind, so it keeps coming up) derision he heaps upon the former GM workers who started the lint roller factory is the part that sticks in my bile duct. Moore hammered the theme with all the grace of a Polish jazz band during the movie; the narrator would be talking about economic improvement, Moore would roll a lint roller around, apparently mopping up scraps of scorn that dribbled from his mouth to his lap. "What morons", the message seemed to be, "trying to start their own business instead of railing at GM, as I do..."

"Downsize This" was worse. Easy layups against corporate bigwigs, plus stretchy screeds against such difficult targets as an angry limo driver.

Now, word is dribbling out, at least through the blogosphere, about the liberties Moore takes, and the sloppy research he foists off, in his current book, "Stupid White Men".

I don't add much to this (other than my article above). I'm just hoping this adds to the critical mass against Moore. His fifteen minutes should have ended ten years ago.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2002 07:52:44 AM

Thursday, April 04, 2002

What's in a Domain Name? - Local activists are playing dirty...with internet domain names.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2002 07:29:09 AM

The Slickster Returns? (Why I Love Ann Coulter, Part II) - Ann Coulter talks about the effort to rehabilitate "the Clinton Legacy".
As she says it:

I THOUGHT THEY WANTED TO "MOVE ON." But now that all the statutes of limitations have expired, liberals won't shut up about Bill Clinton. To little evident success, they have been desperately trying to launch their lumbering Rube Goldberg of a Clinton Rehabilitation Project for months now.

The revisionism involved is astounding. As is the shallowness and inconsequence of "the Clinton Legacy".
This will be an interesting testament to either the ability of the American people to discern when they're being manipulated - or their willingness to be.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2002 07:18:54 AM

Sunday, March 31, 2002

The Problem with Hate Crime Legislation - When justice is equal - when we are all equal before the law - then there is no real reason to abuse the law. It's when inequalities are introduced into the mix that the problems arise. That's true if some are less equal - it was not only very hard for a black man to get a fair shake in court (and in some cases may still be), but it was eminently possible for the more equal class to use the law to abuse those less equal.

But today's news from Saint Cloud - a man has been caught falsely reporting a bias crime - shows that the opposite is true; when you create a more powerful class, abuse is also endemic.

And when laws make some people more equal than others - whether they be hate crime laws or domestic abuse laws that recognize only violence against women and ignore violence against men (which have led to an epidemic of false abuse charges against men, designed to win leverage in child custody trials) - it goes far beyond the academic legalistic objections that many have to hate crime laws. In short - not only do such laws erode the concept of equality before the law, they provide a direct, well-lighted four lane freeway to assist one in going down that road.

Time to rethink all such laws.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2002 11:15:00 AM

Break - It occured to me that I haven't had a vacation in 13 years that didn't involve either job-hunting, painting my house, or visiting my parents in North Dakota.

Not that there's anything wrong with any of those things, of course. But it's time for some new horizons.

So today, my kids and I are going to take off to Chicago for the first half of the week. There will be no new contributions to this blog 'til Thursday (or maybe Wednesday night at the earliest).

Hope you all have a good beginning of the week, and we'll see you on Thursday.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2002 09:55:50 AM

A Blessed Easter - Lest you forget amid the Hallmark (TM) hype that's nearly taken the day over, today's the observed anniversary of the day Christ died for your sins. (I'm not going to throw in any of the usual "...as Christians believe..."-type qualifiers. If you're Jewish or Moslem, you have my personal dispensation not to bow and scrape to my sensitivities on your holy days. If you're an atheist - find you own holiday!)

Easter is one of my favorite holidays mainly for the religious experience, which has become, if anything, vastly more profound for me over the years. Christmas is Christ's birth, and itself a deeply religious holiday for me, personally. But Christmas is so deeply associated with family (still the main time we're all together), the weather (I love the cold crispness of the air I always associate with Christmas) and, since I've had children, the joy of the whole gift-giving part of the holiday, as commercial as it is. Christmas is an overload of sensations, really - religious, familial, parental, gustatory, sensory - that it leaves me fatigued, needing the (otherwise inexplicable) New Years Day break more for relaxing from Chistmas than to recover from the drinking binge I haven't gone on in over a decade.

Easter, however, is rejuvenating in a mostly spiritual sense. The weather varies (often gorgeous, sometimes deep in snow, today gray and threatening rain), the only family involved is my own, and I'm free to focus much more on the meaning of the holiday than I am for Christmas, even though my approach to Christmas is still perhaps just a bit more spiritually-centered than that of most in our society.

At any rate - whatever your faith or approach to life, I hope you find today the sense of renewal and redemption that we all need, from whatever source. And for Christians - may you all have a blessed Easter.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2002 09:52:32 AM

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