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

Saturday, November 02, 2002

Just Plain Depressing - The current Zogby poll shows Americans, while still approving of the job the President is doing, believe some just-plain stupid things:
Latest Zogby America Poll results also show that Democrats are now judged the party best suited to handle the economy (43% - 41%). In June, Republicans were judged best suited to handle the economy (44%-38%).
In a related story, 44% of Americans would leave a cat to guard chickens.

That's right - 44% of your fellow Americans feel raising taxes and stifling initiative is what we need.

Who's not paying attention?
posted by Mitch Berg 11/2/2002 02:12:48 PM

Friday, November 01, 2002

TGIF - I'm having an incredibly brutal day today. I'll post more stuff over the weekend, when the dust dies down a bit.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/1/2002 05:18:17 PM

Thursday, October 31, 2002

Heel - The DFL Fiesta Tuesday night was planned at the DNC in Washington. It was about as inadvertent as the Super Bowl. And they know it.

Capitol Hill Blue breaks the story.
While Kahn's firey rhetoric, and walkouts by Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and GOP Senate Leader Trent Lott, fueled controversy, Democratic political operatives in Washington congratulated each other Wednesday.

"Mission accomplished" was the message of the day at the DNC and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee offices.
We were lied to, everyone. The denials, the "it got out of hands", the campaign manager's acceptance of blame - all a sham, all a lie.

And if you read DFLers' side of it, the line is
"This is war," one operative said. "The Republicans are too busy planning war on Iraq. They won't even see us coming."

If it was war, why did Norm Coleman, honorable as he is, sit it out?

We have to beat these dirtbags.

Yeah, I'm angry.

posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 08:29:36 PM

Why I Love America - Reason MMCLVM - Think this sort of thing ever happens in Sweden or Japan?
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 04:14:14 PM

On the Ropes? - Al Quaeda's in the midst of a power struggle, caused by the death of its leader, Bin Laden.

That's James Robbins' theory, anyway. And it's an interesting one.
Another symptom of system breakdown is the inability to coordinate action. The recent fall offensive is a case in point — the terrorists are pulling off some attacks, but most are not large scale (Bali being the exception), and many have been unsuccessful. Of course, al Qaeda is highly decentralized anyway, and if the objective is simply to disrupt, attacks do not have to be coordinated precisely. Yet, in the October 12 al Qaeda statement on the anniversary of our attacks on Afghanistan, "Osama" ordered that efforts should be concentrated on the U.S. and Israel, and not on other countries — while also congratulating the Yemeni bombers of the French oil tanker. A few days later a rambling statement was issued under his name in which he said either the Yemen bombing was al Qaeda's responsibility, or it wasn't; he was not telling, and it was bad for the United States either way. "We leave [the enemy] to drown in all the assumptions and possibilities," he wrote. If his intent was to confuse, mission accomplished.

These are only a few of the bewildering series of messages in recent weeks and months that indicate that al Qaeda is in turmoil. The messages are uncoordinated, sometimes contradictory, varying in tone and style. Many come out in bin Laden's name, others only refer to him, and some, significantly, do not. Last summer a statement was issued that Osama bin Laden's eldest son Sad had taken over day-to-day operations of al Qaeda while his father was recovering from illness. Sad is a twentysomething with computer skills who allegedly controls the bin Laden audio and videotape archives. ...This was followed quickly by another statement that Osama was feeling much better and was back in charge.
"I'm feeeeelling better!". Sorry. I needed a Monty Python break. Back to the article
The abortive move reportedly raised the hackles of other more seasoned al Qaeda leaders, particularly the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's number two. Zawahiri was reported dead by the Russian press in early October, and rushed out a few statements and an interview to show he was still alive and fighting the infidels.
Read the whole thing. It's a little complicated, but worth it.

And fun to ponder.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 03:48:43 PM

Unbelieveable - This is a new Gray Davis campaign poster.

This was brought to my attention by my friend Brian in Atlanta, who writes:
Heh. Guess they know their constituency all too well.

(Yes, I know, Martin Sheen is a hero in his own mind.)

(I mean, in his own rite.)

(RIGHT! I meant right.)
Write. Er...you know.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 02:58:11 PM

Blah, Part 4 - It's been a rough year for us Eighties kids - the coolest artists are dying off way too fast:
Ben Orr, of the Cars
Joey Ramone
Dee Dee Ramone
Stuart Adamson (guitarist for great Scottish band Big Country)
Warren Zevon (not dead, but with terminal lung cancer)
and now, Jam Master Jay, of Run-DMC.
"But Wait", you say, "You were a white kid from rural North Dakota in 1983, when Run-DMC released King of Rock". Yep, I was. Run-DMC was one of many blasts of fresh air in that decade, still my favorite decade in music. Back when Rap was still fresh, as well as "fresh", Run-DMC were wry, funny, raucus, low-budget, bawdy and pugnacious. Rap today, 20 years later, is pompous, deadly dull, predictable, drearily slick, depraved and violent.

It's yet another big loss.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 02:53:01 PM

Can't Make It Up Fast Enough - Years ago, there was a rash of airplane hijackings by Islamist terrorists who threatened to kill themselves and their captives if their demands weren't met. I sprang into action and hatched a plan - equip aircraft with sprinkler systems that, when tripped, fired a spray of liquified pig fat throughout the plane.

Devout Moslems believe that contact with pigs, pork, pig byproducts, or apparently footballs will get them rejected, Studio-54-style, from Paradise.

Of course, I wrote my idea off as impractical, both technically and theologically; any Islamist terrorist that can ignore Quranic rules against, say, killing the innocent, probably won't have much problem with the pig thing.

So imagine my shock when, today, I read that the Russians plan to bury the Chechens who died at the Theatre siege last weekend...wrapped in pigskin.

Teaching Moment: when the urge to get that patent strikes you, follow it
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 02:22:53 PM

Fritz and Me, Part 1 - This post is going to appear in two parts - apparently Blogger.com can't handle posts this big:

I can understand, and empathize, with the reasons the DFL loves Walter Mondale. He's Minnesota's LBJ - a backroom fixer non-pareil, the guy who put big teeth in Hubert Humphrey's legacy. I've met Mondale. He's a perfectly fine human being, for a career politician. That's not as sarcastic as it might sound.

He's also a link to the DFL's glory days. I can understand the nostalgia. And in understanding that nostalgia, you can understand the main reason that I'll oppose him - beyond his party, beyond his policy, beyond his record.

It's the sense of Deja Vu he brings about.

Scroll back to 1979. I was a 16-year-old high school kid - working at my first radio job, driving too fast, one of three Punk Rockers in North Dakota. And I was a committed Liberal - I thought George McGovern was the future, and I wanted to be part of it. Walter Mondale was Jimmy Carter's vice-president - and, as someone from the next state over, I took some regional pride in that fact.

And then, in a speech right around then, Jimmy Carter started a process that took three years - my morph from left to right - in a speech when he said "the best days are behind us. We need to tighten our belts, learn to expect less from life". And I thought "oh, swell. I'm hearing THIS from a guy who's already got more than he can ever possibly deserve?"

In 1979, the nation was in a funk; depressed; in a "malaise" (thanks, Erik). We - and by "we", I mean the professional nattering classes - thought that our nation's best days were behind us; we were in a cultural midlife crisis that would inevitably lead to our culture's declining years, requiring endless doses of cultural Prozac and political Group Therapy. We were a sick, sick nation, said the left, and the affliction was terminal, and we had best just accept the fact that the end was coming (eventually - one never knows, really), and do our best to make the declining years as comfortable as possible. If we only made sure we assuaged the aches and pains with the right programs, there'd still be many good years left in which to expiate our national guilt...
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 11:41:49 AM

Fritz and Me, Part II - In other words, it was the golden age of the DFL. The party of measured
decay, the party whose prescription is long-term palliative care for a society
gone terminal. The hospice party.

The party for people, and societies, that had chosen to make a slow death
more bearable.

Four years later, when Ronald Reagan snapped the nation out of its' hypochondria,
I'd converted; a strong dose of O'Rourke and Solzhenitzyn and Johnson had
gotten me in tune with the rest of the country. We'd gotten our asses off
the cultural couch, started running again, lost some weight, started socializing.
We felt twenty years younger.

And Walter Mondale, looking like he'd come up from the Lutheran church basement,
scolded us; "That backache you feel? Could be cancer! Take your metamucil
and get back to bed!".

It was 20 years ago, but I can still remember how depressing it all was.
And Mondale brings it all back. I don't EVER want my children to have
to experience that.

Mondale's a credit to this state. We could do worse in a Senator, truth
be told (and, indeed, with Mark Dayton we ARE). But he represents the lowest
ebb of this nation's history (IMHAAHO) - an era which the DFL apotheosizes;
an era of big, sixties-style statements combined with feeble, sickly seventies-era
application. So while we could do worse - we can also do better.

So I'm not just voting for Norm Coleman. I'm voting AGAINST the Seventies;
against malaise; against submission; against the inward-turning, inward-feeding
angst that ate this nation's guts out 25 years ago.

I'm choosing life.

posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 11:36:29 AM

Whoah - Greetings to any of you coming over from Instapundit. Glenn Reynolds linked to this site yesterday, and my hit count jumped by, literally, an order of magnitude.

Feel free to drop me a line, and come back soon.

I usually do my serious writing over lunch. It probably shows...
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 10:47:03 AM

Fritzstock - Howard Kurtz has the best wrapup of the "Memorial" fiasco that I've seen yet, including a wide range of opinion on the subject from the punditry, left and right. Worth a long read.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/31/2002 10:45:45 AM

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

For Whom the Bell Polls - A Star-Tribune Poll released yesterday showed a major shift in the gubernatorial and senate races.

First, the great news for Tim Pawlenty - he's up by four points. Yes, this is the same poll that showed Skip Humphrey as the winner four years ago - but Tim Penny is no Jesse Ventura.

Read this quote, and tell me who's been saying this all along:
Pawlenty's strength comes from several factors. He is stronger among Republicans than Moe is among DFLers, and stronger among conservatives than Moe is among liberals. Pawlenty also wins among self-described independents. And he probably loses fewer votes to the Green Party's Ken Pentel than do Moe and Penny.
It might just be that the message is getting out - Tim Penny's no Jesse Ventura. He's a wonk. He's the type of guy who loves going to zoning meetings. The IP is DFL Lite. It's not a choice.

In the meantime, the poll shows Mondale leading Norm Coleman by 8 points, 47-39. But the poll was taken before the furor over the Wellstone "memorial" last night. There are so many ways this could trip Mondale up - and the poll wouldn't have gotten any of them. Coleman's got a chance.

Five more days.

posted by Mitch Berg 10/30/2002 09:26:57 PM

Cry Conspiracy, Again! - The National Review's Andrew Breitbart answers the left's new wave of conspiracy wackoes.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/30/2002 04:08:28 PM

Kudos - to Governor Ventura, for walking out of last night's festivities...er, "memorial" for Wellstone.

This may be the first thing he's done in his administration that I can honestly say I respect.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/30/2002 12:50:53 PM

Feeling Sick - Last night's "memorial" for Wellstone went far beyond being a partisan canonization of a political figure for purely political gain; way beyond being a four-hour commercial for the DFL.

It was a lot scarier than that.

If you don't live here, it's hard to describe. Maybe it's like this elsewhere in the country. All I know is, it's totally on the sleeve of this state, and showed in spades last night. It's something that started as a vague sense of unease seven years ago, when I first started becoming active in politics in Minnesota. It grew to a more coherent notion in 2000. It whacked me over the head when the mob booed the assembled Republican senators.

Hatred of Republicans is part of the majority, *mainstream* DFL culture in Minnesota.

Not dislike. Not disagreement. Hate.

You see it in bits of day to day life in this state: women theatrically holding their noses when talking about Republican candidates at the coffee shop; people who put "No Republicans Need Apply" at the top of personal ads; a mob of 15,000 mainstream, work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy Minnesotans baying at the moon at the recognition of Republicans.

This is not the lunatic fringe; it's not analogous to the rantings of those Republicans who act from hate, the party's loud but isolated homophobes, anti-immigrants, clinic-bombing-coddlers. This is the mainstream of the Minnesota DFL.

I really don't like my neighbors too much today.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/30/2002 12:49:30 PM

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Volunteers? Form A Line to the Right - Any takers?
posted by Mitch Berg 10/29/2002 04:07:46 PM

The Culture War - A bit of background, here. Last year, Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University, published a book, Arming America, which purported to show (among other things) how the so-called "gun culture" is not a product of American history, but rather firearms-industry marketing. The book received rave reviews from the NYT Book Review, and a Bancroft Prize, among many other kudos.

The problem is, the data was all wrong; slapped-together, out of context, or just plain made up. After the accolades passed, a number of critics began noticing the gaps in Bellisiles' data - a process that ended with his resignation from Emory, last week. Emory's student newspaper has been remarkably candid about this issue, by the way.

John Rosenberg, author of the Discriminations blog, writes about this fracas' place in the culture wars. Read the whole thing.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/29/2002 03:40:24 PM

The Vanishing European - For the past decade, Japan has suffered an economic downturn that has been terribly exacerbated by the very structure of their economy.

Europeans, especially Germans, thought they were above it all - engrossed in reunification and the EU, but with a vastly different banking system and political (and to a lesser extent, social) structure, the Europeans thought they were immune from the Japanese economy's illness.

Today, they're confronting the ugly truth - they may share more with the Japanese than they thought. This article appears in the relatively conservative (by German standards) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (English and German editions):
Both countries are former economic miracle countries whose strength has failed amid a number of shocks - in the German case, above all the effects of unification and the stock market collapse. Both are heavily export-oriented and suffer from subdued domestic consumption, with a relatively rigidified labor market that does not respond well to external shocks. Most disconcertingly, both share an inability to reform.
With government's latest policy proposals set to perpetuate Germany's economic ailments, some economists believe the specter of deflation is no longer out of the question in a country that traditionally fears inflation more than anything else.
Now, the big question - will the US be ripe for the same sort of deflation? Some think so. It's not a pretty thought.

posted by Mitch Berg 10/29/2002 03:23:31 PM

T-Shirt Fodder - This was seen (via an Italian newspaper) on the side of a US plane on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

I want it silkscreened!
posted by Mitch Berg 10/29/2002 03:18:21 PM

What Would Wellstone Think? - Last night, Lewis reminded me of one of the more interesting facets of Paul Wellstone's character.

While he was liberal enough to make Ted Kennedy blanche, and his convictions in that direction were utterly unshakeable, he had great intellectual respect for opposing viewpoints.

More than that, his closest friends in the Senate, irrespective of affiliation, were other Senators of deep conviction; people who went to Washington on the basis of their ideas; people who didn't consult polls and focus groups and consultants before voting their consciences. People like Jesse Helms and Barry Goldwater; people who, despite their opposing beliefs, were people like him.

Contrast that with the behavior of so many that'd call themselves Wellstone supporters around here. I will be charitable and call it "intolerance", but whatever you call it, you see it everywhere: posts on this list; teachers teaching their students that Republicans are bad; personal ads with "Republicans Need Not Reply" as the headline; implausible conspiracy theories,which people grasp onto like intellectual life rafts; people who all but plug their ears and run away when one voices a conservative idea, or respond with red-faced, spittle-flecked vituperation; the growing separatism of so many arguments from the left these days.

In the meantime, the wacko (but not-far-from-mainstream) left is responding with the type of bizarre conspiracy theories that people used to associate with the lunatic right. We talked about that yesterday.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/29/2002 07:26:52 AM

Monday, October 28, 2002

Unbelieveable - This poster, via Samizdata, is a production...no, not of the Chinese secret police, or of some utopian cult...

...but of the Metro London Police Department.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/28/2002 11:18:09 PM

Something About Harry - Andrew Sullivan on Harry Belafonte's corrosive bigotry.
Again, the simple test here is the following: If a conservative had used these expressions, would it have been denounced by liberals? The answer, obviously, is yes. Imagine if George Will had called Colin Powell a "house slave." Imagine if Pat Buchanan had called Barney Frank a "nasty faggot." Imagine if Trent Lott had called Hillary Clinton a whore. Do you think they'd be invited on "Larry King Live" to further elaborate on their comments?

Very, very few liberals call such expressions what they are any more: bigotry. Left-wing homophobia is now having a resurgence -- in Democratic ad campaigns and political discourse. Left-wing racism is now so common it scarcely bears mentioning. "Stupid White Men," anyone? Left-wing misogyny directed at women who dare to differ from certain political positions is endemic. Left-wing anti-Semitism can be found on campuses across the country. At anti-war rallies, copies of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are openly sold. [Emphasis is Mitch's]. All these unsightly trends exist on the right as well, of course. But who on the right has said anything recently as offensive on racial matters as Belafonte, in his remarks about Colin Powell?
It's amazing - and predictable. The left gets away with saying, and believing, things that would get any conservative justifiably pilloried. Anti-conservative black, anti-conservative-gay, anti-conservative-woman...

Add this to the "Conspiracy" post, below, and you have to ask yourself - where is our "objective" media?
posted by Mitch Berg 10/28/2002 03:56:30 PM

Conspiracy - Didn't it used to be the conservatives who were tagged with the conspiracy-theory-nut label? I do believe so.

Yet in this past week, we've been treated to the following:

Wellstone signs (before the crash) were being vandalized - by the Coleman campaign.
The conservative response to the Democratic Socialists of America ad recruiting young socialists to come to Minnesota to either organize voters or exploit our lax identification standards to illegally vote? That was really intended to shake down minority voters, who apparently can't find the polls without the aid of young not-too-bright Iowans
The management of the Minneapolis branch of the US Post Office is in cahoots with the Coleman campaign, for denying time off to Wellstone supporter who wanted to spend the time working for the campaign
The mentally-incontinent Gore Vidal with the latest, greatest 9/11 trope
Perhaps we should let them know about the black helicopters, huh?
posted by Mitch Berg 10/28/2002 03:33:45 PM

RIP Wellstone - The state-wide mourning continues - sometimes segueing into outright caterwauling. His passing is marked by mourning on the part of his followers that seams more appropriate to a cult leader - I mean, a cult of personality leader - than an American political figure.

I don't mean to sound in the least insensitive to the loss of the Senator or the other seven people on the plane. Their deaths are senseless and utterly tragic.

No, I'm talking about the followers. The legions of the invincibly sensitive, the phalanxes of higher consciences that threw their garments on the ground before Wellstone in life, and seem in many cases to have lost their reasons for existence with his death. The ones that are turning his death into a political statement in and of itself - a sort of secular liberal Easter.

A friend of a friend - a committed Wellstonocrat, needless to say - is wondering if there isn't some sort of foul play involved. That pretty much had to follow, didn't it? Let the conspiracy theories begin.

James Lileks had probably the most cogent point of the lot.
posted by Mitch Berg 10/28/2002 03:19:45 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