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

Friday, May 03, 2002

See ya! - I'll be at the DFL convention tonight. I'll be working the Concealed Carry Now! booth (sort of like being in the JDL booth at a Michigan Militia rally).

But I plan on telling all my DFL acquaintances that I'm registered as a delegate under an assumed name, just to see if they're paying attention.

As a Republican, I'm hoping that the party's granola-munching Birkenstocking base helps Becky Lourey win the nomination. She's a textbook, Ann Wynia-level ultraliberal, and either GOP candidate should make short work of her.

Which isn't to say the heir apparent, Roger Moe, isn't plenty vulnerable, although as one MN-POL corresponded wrote, this last year at the legislature has been, in effect, a Moe campaign speech.

I'm looking forward to the election!
posted by Mitch Berg 5/3/2002 06:41:57 AM

Grrrr - Where did Molly Ivins get her reputation among Democrats as...sentient?

This woman is to thought what David Schwimmer is to Shakespeare.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/3/2002 06:35:55 AM

Danger - Homeland Security director Tom Ridge announced yesterday that the feds are thinking about national drivers' license standards.

The feds' strategery must be to wear us down. Every few years, some federal apparatchik tosses some sort of National ID off as a trial balloon, just to see how it flies. It never does - civil liberties groups always manage to cook up a big negative response. But how long until the public reaction to the constant testing finally fades, and the feds figure the coast is clear?

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance", indeed...
posted by Mitch Berg 5/3/2002 06:33:44 AM

Thursday, May 02, 2002

Coming Soon - And I thought the idea of an Ellen Degeneres TV Show was a bad one; Former president Clinton is apparently entertaining offers.

Granted, he does need to find a job, but...
posted by Mitch Berg 5/2/2002 07:21:18 AM

Them is Them - James Lileks has a great screed (at the end of the Daily Bleat) about the fallacy of "understanding" the other side in a war. You know the type - "if you only took some time to understand the Palestinian [Iraqi, Taliban, Russian, German] side of things, you wouldn't be so pro-[Israeli, America, etc...].

Read the whole thing - but my favorite quote is:
If Saudi Arabia had a Star Trek, do you think they’d put a Jewish Chekov at the helm?

posted by Mitch Berg 5/2/2002 07:18:59 AM

Open Minded Liberals - Blogger Angry Clam notes the appearance of rancidly anti-semitic posters ("Kill Jews")...

...at UC Berkeley.

And conservatives are supposed to be the bigots...
posted by Mitch Berg 5/2/2002 03:09:16 AM

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

Smoked Out - It's not often that I compliment Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch. In fact, I never actually have.

But Hatch led the charge to strip the Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco (MPAAT) of its funding - $202 million. MPAAT got the money as part of its' share of the spoils from Skip Humphrey's assault on "big tobacco" four years ago.

The charge continues. And if it means no more Target Market ads, then it'll be more than worth it.

Talking with the Enemy - OK, not "the enemy", per se - I like to be a bit more civil than that. But it's DFL Convention time again, and I'll be there.

No, I haven't lost my mind. Fear not. I'll be there with a group out in the lobby. And I'll be watching eagerly.

Criminy - I don't even ownany Birkenstocks...

Europe, Part IV - Another theory of the psychology behind the Euro-intelligentsia's loathing of America.

When Juergen Goes Marching Home - On the other hand, the best of Europe was in the news again, today.

One of the spookiest moments I recall after September 11 was looking up in the sky on September 13 - two days after all air traffic in the US was shut down - and seeing contrails in the sky. Curved, not straight. Two of them, in formation. Military aircraft flying Combat Air Patrol over the Twin Cities. I caught my breath - only rarely did that happen over US cities in the middle of World War II. But there they were - F-16s with air-to-air missiles, patrolling to fend off the terrorist attack on the Mall of America or the IDS tower that never came.

It was unprecendented - suddenly, the USAF had to go from its Clinton-distended peacetime footing to having to continuously patrol the skies over most of America's major cities, while simultaneously gearing up for a war in Afghanistan. It was a stretch.

So NATO sent a unit to help out - a multinational squadron with some AWACS aircraft, in the first invocation of NATO's "An attack on one is an attack on all" principle. Today it was announced they're standing down and going home.

Thanks, NATO.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/1/2002 06:19:23 PM

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Accessories - Rumor has it that that a number of DFL concealed-carry supporters are going to stage the quietest protest in DFL convention history.

They'll be carrying their legally-permitted pistols in the convention, just to show the DFL - always pollyanaish and paternalistic about guns - that guns in the hands of the law-abiding do not equal violence.

More as events unfold...
posted by Mitch Berg 4/30/2002 07:47:03 AM

Saud Off - Have you seen the billboards (one is on I-94 in Frogtown), or heard the radio ads from...Saudi Arabia? I heard them on KSTP the other afternoon - a sonorous talking head declaiming the need for us to support the Saudi peace plan. I thought they felt simply incongruous - a nation whose media demands the liquidation of the Jewish state, and the enslavement of Jewish women, wants to teach us about peace?

Bizarre.

Several American cable networks felt the same, apparently.

The Enlightened Union - American liberals, awash with ambivalence toward (or inflamed with hatred of) the US, often decry the racism in the US, comparing it to Europe's "more enlightened attitude".

This is so untrue in so many ways,and France's record with the Jews is only the latest symptom. People today forget the anti-semitic hatred that pre-Vatican-II Catholicism engendered; during WWII, Polish Catholics were quoted as saying they would rather kill a Jew than a Nazi.

So why is France the only place it seems not to have changed?

The Incoherence of the Left - This critique of Arundhati Roy - an Indian economist and critic - could be applied to so many; Chomsky, much of the Green Party, vast swathes of people at the U of M...
posted by Mitch Berg 4/30/2002 07:32:46 AM

The Unravelling Legacy - I squirm when I recall people referring to Bill Clinton as "the first black president". I thought it was joke at first - a take off on Steve Martin's line from The Jerk, "I was born a poor black boy...", something too absurd to even bother with. Yes, it's was a given, blacks'd vote Democrat, yadda yadda, but a draft-dodging yutz from Arkansas claiming any fellowship with Afro-Americans? Even in 1992, it just seemed so...

...exploitive.

That's the word I used then. And now, some NAACP members are doing the same.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/30/2002 07:27:32 AM

Monday, April 29, 2002

It's Not Easy, being a Green with a Brain - Greens are outraged - and queuing up with plenty of lousy science,and worse - over Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Lomborg, by the way, is a Danish Green who, in the process of trying to refute Julian Simon's various debunkings of Green gospel, discovered he, too, was a skeptic.

Ronald Bailey's article has the quote I wish I'd come up with.

Unfortunately for the doomsayers, their central predictions are simply not coming true. And so their best and perhaps only defense against a dispassionate analysis of their claims has been to smear the analyst
.
I spent last Thursday evening in a room full of Greens (it's not quite as bad as it sounds), and have run into a lot more lately - and Bailey's dead on in so many areas. The smear is the left's main rhetorical tool these days - which is subject for another screed, another day...

The book, by the way, is a must-read, whether you're a Green or a free-marketeer (although a lot of Green acquaintances respond by saying "I don't want to read it!").
posted by Mitch Berg 4/29/2002 07:39:53 AM

Due to Gun Control - An article in that notoriously conservative tool, the LA Times, begins to get it right. In noticing the effects of last week's massacre in Germany, the article begins to note the great truth that most liberals and liberal media figures ignore: it's not the guns, it's the social problems.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/29/2002 06:24:52 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