Friday, August 29, 2003

Joint Statement - Scrappleface calls it exactly right.
The so-called 'blogosphere' today released an official statement on the potential 2004 presidential candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton. The complete statement reads as follows:

Please...Oh, Please...Oh, Please. Heh.
Indeed.

Heh.

OK - now I'll see you on Tuesday.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2003 03:44:57 PM

Blogging - the Foxfire Way - Day two without a computer. May have it back by Wednesday at this rate - maybe. Between the 60-minute limit they have at most libraries, and the demands of my job-hunting, I'm getting kinda pathetic, driving from library to library, cadging an hour here and there. But now, I'm done for the week.

I'm cutting out for the weekend here. I'll be seeing the great Franky Perez at the State Fair Bandshell tomorrow. I'll be the only 40-year-old, 6'5 guy in the place, I'm sure. Say hi.

Have a great Labor Day. Probably see you on Tuesday.

Or Sunday. The news never sleeps.

The Hateful Left - I've been wanting for the past ten days to blog about the controversy involving Indymedia (a internet lefty media "collective") that has come under allegations of anti-semitism in its "editorial" decisions, censoring a cartoon by talentless Brazilian cartoonist Latuff on primarily political (anti-semitic) grounds.

Chicago Boyz write the article I wanted to. Very much worth a read.

Crossfire - I'll bet anything today's bombing in Najaf is an extension of that most classic Islamic tradition - killing the moderates, those who express any rapprochement with the infidels.

The countdown for the left to blame this on Bush has begun.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2003 03:33:49 PM

Meet The New Left. Same As the Very Old Left - The left - from Jeff Fecke to Josh Marshall and everyone in between - is all but declaring victory in 2004 already. They see the President's slip below 60% approval in many polls as a harbinger of electoral doom.

Podhoretz (via Instapundit and Jarvis) in the NYPost has an excellent piece today on the new left and the pitfalls - the culture of snobbery and hatred, as well as the preening overconfidence that seems to be swallowing so many - that await them.
The triumphant success of Howard Dean's once-quixotic presidential campaign in marshaling genuine grass-roots support and money over the Internet demonstrates that there is a large and hungry audience in the land for a leftist political-cultural message.

The Dean campaign is a more mainstream outgrowth of the popular demonstrations against the Iraq war organized last winter by the Stalinist anti-Semites of International ANSWER.
That's the part that so many relatively well-meaning people on the left miss - or, perhaps, just don't find all that bad (as I think we're seeing in the left's complete ignorance of North Korea and the cynicism of their spin in Iraq).
Part of what fuels this alliance is a feeling of powerlessness — of not being heard, of not being paid attention to. Note the rise of what I like to call "Foxanoia," the lunatic theory popular these days in leftist circles that the Fox News Channel has become the dominant voice in all of America and is controlling every piece of information that gets out to the American people.
This is, of course, what gave rise to "conservative talk radio", as well as the libertarian/conservative hegemony over the Internet.

I think it's interesting to watch what sort of media arise from these feelings of powerlessness:
  • Conservatism - Decentralized media like the large, well-developed libertarian/conservative presence on the Internet, as well as entrepreneurial assaults like talk radio.
  • Liberalism - Highly-centralized media hives, whether in the open market (the publishing industry, the media), or "independent" media that exercise a high degree of collective control (Indymedia).
Podhoretz continues:
...it's absurd to claim that, because Fox has bested CNN and MSNBC in the cable-news race, its influence surpasses the combined might of the three broadcast networks, the news magazines and the editorial guidance given at most of the major daily U.S. newspapers.

It's so absurd, in fact, that few on the right genuinely believe that people on the left genuinely suffer from Foxanoia. My fellow conservatives tend to think the argument that there's no liberal media anymore is simply a smokescreen, a sophistic dodge.

It's not. They do believe it, because they believe so ardently in the power of the media that they figure their inability to stop the Iraq war from happening can only be explained by the rise of a pro-war media.

In fact, they lost an argument about the nature of terrorism, rogue nations and world power after 9/11. But they can't bear to admit that, so they instead argue that Bush only prevailed because of lies he told, that Fox and Ann Coulter only succeed because they lie.
This last statement is interesting to me, personally.

This site has long documented the nearly-institutional condescenscion liberals feel for conservatives at large, but the extent to which this has devolved into open hatred.

This connects with the feelings of powerlessness Podhoretz addressed earlier. For indeed, what breeds hatred and bigotry but the feeling of powerlessness?

Examples abound throughout history:
  • During reconstruction, Southern whites felt deprived of power. Disbelieving that their loss could be chalked up to the bankruptcy of racism, they blamed everyone - carpetbaggers, the Northern/Jew/Catholic media, conspiracies in every holler.
  • As many empires or societies have decayed, the majority stakeholders have taken out their frustrations on their minority countrymen; Turks against Armenians, French and German skinheads against Turks, New York English against New York Germans...
  • After World War I, German powerlessness combined with what Goldhagen referred to as the endemic, eliminationist antisemitism in German culture to lay the groundwork for the Holocaust.
  • Yeah, I think the conservative exodus of the nineties may have created a lunatic fringe market for Michael Savage. Nostra Culpa.
Powerlessness breeds bigotry and hatred.

And the denial that goes with it...:
These folks believe a grotesque, nearly cosmic unfairness is going on — a wrong that must be righted. Everything — everything — has gone wrong since 2001. "The Bush administration has done virtually nothing good for the country," says Michael Tomasky, who as editor-elect of the American Prospect magazine will be making the more cerebral versions of the arguments offered in Franken's unabashed screed.

That is a powerful glue, the perfect opinion for the rise of a mass movement.

The problem for the Foxanoia axis is this: What, aside from hating Bush and the Fox News Channel, do they believe in?

Is there anything positive they can say about America? And I don't mean about George Bush's America — I mean about America in general.
Ask a liberal. Let's find out.

Most of them are out of practice.

Podhoretz continues:
Take almost any subject. On race, can a Foxanoid leftist say anything other than the relations between the races are in disastrous shape? On the environment, does a Foxanoid have anything to offer other than that the sky is falling and the earth is melting?

On economics, the Foxanoid mantra is always the same: There is a growing gap between rich and poor, a growing deficit that will eat away at everything, a growing job loss. Oh, and tax cuts are evil.

And don't even ask about the War on Terror, which according to the Foxanoids is a) going badly because we haven't been tough enough on al Qaeda and b) going badly because we've been too tough in the application of anti-terror laws and c) going badly because the world hates us and d) going badly because we deserve it that the world hates us.

What can the Foxanoids offer as a message of hope for the future? Cheaper prescription drugs? Please.
Bingo. It's a message not unlike that of Bob Dole's "At Least I'm Not Clinton", back in '96.

I want to highlight this next bit, for the Jeff Feckes and Josh Marhalls and Kos Kosensteins of the world to try to absorb. It's an important point:
Yes, the left is rising. But for the left to truly challenge the right for dominance of the intellectual debate, its leaders and thinkers will need to be able to offer a picture of a better, safe and wealthier United States.

And the problem for those who describe themselves as "progressives" is that they can see no progress anywhere. All they see is misery stretched out far into the future.
Bingo. There is not a single "progressive" vision for American that doesn't read like my daughter's vision for the hamsters she wants to buy; everyone taken care of, nobody wanting for anything (at great expense to Dad, but never no mind)...none of the stuff that the hamsters citizens themselves say, and feel in their guts, that they need to really live with confidence in this world. No More Terror. A Nation that can say it's done its part to rid the world of the type of human bacteria that carried out 9/11, that jail children, that rape women, that feed families into plastic-shredders.
Their failed philosophy has blinded them, left them incapable of conceiving of a positive future or offering even a road map out of their own misery.

Except, maybe, if somebody would come along and invent a rival to the Fox News Channel.
I can't wait for the fabled liberal talk network to go on the air. Expect wall to wall kvetching, wrapped in the invincible, myopic belief that everyone would really feel the same, if they just weren't so stupid (and susceptible to lies, lies, lies, of course).

posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2003 03:08:12 PM

Minister of Whaaaahuh? - Memo:

To: Fraters, Hewitt
From: Berg
Subject: Feud

I'm not sure what's up with the dispute between the Fraters and Hugh Hewitt, on which Lileks opined this morning.

Cheese it, guys. We have a blogosphere to conquer.

MBerg

XOXO

posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2003 11:59:04 AM

North Korea - In the church I used to go to, there was a woman that always reminded me of the rampantly-bigoted South African woman in P.J. O'Rourke's "Holidays in Hell" - the one O'Rourke called, and I'm paraphrasing, ugly in the way that is a symptom of really bad character. Seventyish, boundlessly crabby, tall in a craggy sort of way, never a smile for anyone. I called her Hawk Woman, because she hovered like a hawk over all church activities, ready to pounce on any sign of political incorrectness - not in the sense of "we need to be inclusive", but more in a "More PC than thou" sense.

During congregational prayers, she'd always raise her hand, and respond with a prayer request for some fashionably lefty cause; "the Honeywell Project" or "an end to police brutality in Saint Paul" or some such.

One day, after the news broke in the mid-nineties about the cataclysmic famines sweeping North Korea, she asked us to pray "for the people of North Korea, who are caught up in a famine caused by the United States' imperialist aggression".

I sat, stunned (along with about three quarters of the congregation) - then raised my hand. The minister - a lefty with a great sense of humor who, alone in that church, knew of my conservative past - recognized me. "Let's pray for people who are being starved to death by Stalinistic dictatorships who are diverting their nation's food supply to the support of immense military buildups at the expense of their own people". I heard a few muted chuckles, and saw Hawk Woman glaring at me in disgust. Although she'd never actually spoken to me in the past, it was clear she Never Spoke To Me Again.

So goes the double standard with North Korea; leftists who are ferocious in their vigilance for human rights abuses among small-l/d liberal democratic nations, are completely, often willfully oblivious to the abuses of the likes of Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, and of course Kim Jong-Il.

Google the subject sometime. See any major, left-wing media in the list?

Search any leftist publication - say, The Nation. Search their databases for articles on North Korea; you'll see serried ranks of stories about the whys and wherefores of negotiation over nuclear weapons; endless, yeshivic arguments about whether or not Yongbyon is really a serious threat; breathless justifications of the Clinton policy that may have led us to this showdown with the North.

But the refugees?

The current left, at its best, seems to share its grandparents' myopia for the sins of the likes of Kim, Stalin, Mao, Hitler.

And that's at best. At worst?

Abject support. Check out the likes of Indymedia - they know who the real aggressors are.

In the meantime, the story goes on.

More to come.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2003 11:49:33 AM

Thursday, August 28, 2003

More On North Korea - Check out Fraters and the SCSU Scholars. Both are also answering Hugh Hewitt's call:
Like Rwanda, Cambodia and germany before it, North Korea today is a country of death. The few who raise their voices against this holocaust deserve every attention.
And, most of all, check out the Free North Korea blog. I'm going to be looking into it for bona fides - but it looks to be well worth a read.

UPDATE: Here are the pictures of the defectors who, like the Mrs. Cho from Claudia Rosett's article, seem to have disappeared back into the maw of the North Korean Gulag - and from the face of the world.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2003 12:45:58 PM

Cold Turkey - My computer is in the shop.

My office desk beckons to me, but when I sit down to try to write something, or surf my favorite site, there's no computer there. I sit, hollow-eyed, and start to shake.

Then I leap to my feet and run down to the library, where there are computers - but only for an hour. DAMN BUREAUCRATS! DAMN DAMN DAMN!

Deep breath.

OK. So blogging will be both limited and rather hasty for the next THREE TO FOR FARGING BUSINESS DAYS...deep breath...until my computer is back from the shop.

Aaaagh.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2003 12:39:40 PM

History Calling - Walking through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is, to say the least, sobering.

An elevator carries you up to the uppermost of the four floors, as a speaker plays a recording (or uncanny simulation) of an American unit's radio call on discovering a concentration camp - real or recreation, the static-y voice of the officer captures the unfolding horror the soldiers, no doubt veterans of untold horrors in battle themselves, feel on seeing the sights the visitor is about to see. Then, you work your way down. The top floor covers the pre-war years - the roots of German antisemitism, Hitler's rise to power, the Anschluss, the building of the legal and social groundwork that led to what we run into on the second floor.

The next floor - the third - covers the beginning of the war; the beginnings of the Endloesung, the Final Solution. An overwhelming grayness settles over you as you see the nightmare unfolding. While we all know how the story ends, you get the sense that it's all creeping up on you in its immense import.

The next floor - Two - is the nightmare in its full fury; the floor is dedicated to relics of the industrialization of murder. It's jarring and awful and shakes you to the very core of your soul, if you have one. My stepson - 14 at the time - had to bow out of the tour. It was too much for him.

The designers of the exhibits must have known what they were dealing with, because the final - First - floor of the museum lightens up. It's dedicated to the liberation of the camps, and the story of the Danish Resistance (which managed to smuggle the vast majority of Denmark's Jews to Sweden and safety) and a copy of Vad Yashem's list of the Righteous, the depressingly small yet hope-inspiringly long list of people who risked death to save Jews from the death machine.

Walking out of the Holocaust Museum, one whispers "no, never ever again" through teeth gritted to keep from crying, and hugs one's children a little more tightly.

Why do I bring this up?

Because it's happening. Again. And, just like the first Holocaust, you're not going to hear about it on the major media until it's far too late.

North Korea maintains a series of Gulags that put Stalin's - perhaps even Orwell's - to shame for their relative size and comprehensiveness and ruthlessness.

The horror is immense. And - worst of all - the truth is out there - somewhere. Just not in the New York Times, or the Big Three, or the BBC or CNN.

The Infinite Monkeys had an excellent digest of new, emerging information on the topic yesterday. It's very much worth a read.

The Monkeys link to a ghastly - and dead-on - article in OpinionJournal from Claudia Rosett. The article starts off noting the disappearance of one of the many refugees from North Korea, one of very few that had the "luck" to encounter Westerners after escaping to China. I add emphasis in places below:
America, erstwhile haven for the tempest-tossed, seems to have room for refugees from everyplace on earth--except North Korea. And though America serves as home to many a would-be-democratic-government in exile, there is no such North Korean presence here, no resistance movement. Nothing. Plenty of North Koreans have tried to escape the regime of Kim Jong Il. But, dear readers, have you ever met one? Or even seen one on television?

Instead, the free world looks to South Korea as the keeper of this important human trust--to offer a haven for North Koreans who value freedom. Usually, it is in such havens that exiles from tyrannies can form a base, get out the word about atrocities back home, offer insights into the vulnerabilities of tyrants and find ways to smuggle into the tyrannies some words of truth and hope.
But in today's South Korea, fat chance. This is the place where authorities have twice this past week roughed up German doctor Norbert Vollertsen, the single loudest voice trying for three years now to draw attention to the depravities of the North Korean government, the plight of the people still there, and the civilized world's utter abandonment of the refugees. There was some attention in the news last week to the efforts of Mr. Vollertsen and some of his activist colleagues to send solar-powered radios into North Korea, attached to balloons--which the South Korean authorities stopped them from doing. The prohibition and the beating of Mr. Vollertsen that accompanied it, underscore Mr. Vollertsen's message--which is not simply that conditions in North Korea rival the atrocities under Nazi Germany, and that some refugees are desperate enough to die trying to escape. It is also that the civilized world, South Korea at the forefront, simply does not want to see, hear, know, or help, and in ignoring the 22 million people of North Korea, while we parley with their jailers, we throw away our best hope of peacefully ending this nightmare.
One can not dig into this story long without getting that feeling from the second floor of the Holocaust Museum.

One can also find precious few references to the story in the major media.

On the eve of World War Two, most of the Western world buried the story of the Holocaust, until they couldn't bury it - when the troops started liberating camps. Before the war, it was an inconvenient stumbling block for diplomatic negotiation. During the war, the powers that be either doubted the story, or thought it smacked of WWI-style propagandistic overkill. In the end, they were both wrong.

The US State Department (along with the UN and the South Koreans), spooked by Kim Jong Il's blustering and the threat that the North may have nukes, wants smooth negotiations with the North. Talk of human rights is a prime target to get left off the table. It's inconvenient, when dealing with a petulant madman like Kim.

And so we get stories like those of Dr. Vollertsen (of whom more tomorrow):
Yet for all the horrors I witnessed in North Korea, here I once worked for 18 months as a medical worker for Cap Anamur, a German aid organization, I was never beaten by the police -- not even in my last days there as persona non grata, just before my expulsion for the expression of pro-human rights views.

Here, in South Korea, I have been beaten by the police -- among others.

During our balloon-launching attempt on Aug. 22, a young South Korean (well-fed, wanting for nothing) attacked me, threw me to the ground and escaped with a bundle of radios intended for his starving, destitute brothers across the border -- an assault carried out right under the noses of the riot police. Then I was attacked by the police themselves. One officer jumped on my twisted knee while I was lying on the ground. But even that was not as painful as the incident in March this year when some riot policemen kicked me in the groin while I was standing in the middle of their crowd during a protest in front of the Chinese embassy here in Seoul.


On Sunday, I was attacked by North Korean "journalists" at the World University Games in Daegu, while holding a peaceful press conference in front of the convention building there. The South Korean newspapers reported that I "exchanged punches with the North Koreans." In reality, I was standing on my crutches, still suffering from my injuries from the balloon-launch assault, and could barely stay upright. I was also wearing a neck-brace, and so was unable even to swivel my head to face my North Korean attackers.

Afterwards, the same newspapers called me an "extreme ultra-right-wing activist," even "fascist," which is ironical, given that I am doing what I am doing for the North Koreans mainly to atone for the shameful fascist history of my home country, Germany.
Attacking Kim - or Castro - today is like attacking Hitler or Stalin in 1933; despite their ghastly crimes against humanity, the lunatic left fears the beginning of a slippery slope.

The story may go away - it may never even arrive, as far as the consumer of American news is concerned. We - those who pay attention to these things, and the part of the Blogosphere concerned with actual rights for real humans - need to do our best to fix that.

I'll be writing on some variety of this topic for the rest of this week. Tomorrow (computer access willing) I'll be going over whatever I can find about the left's approach to this issue. Saturday - all caveats still apply - I'm going to try to write something about those who are the Danish Fishermen of 2003 - who, like Vollertsen, know the depth of this story and are speaking out.

Also, check out some of the other Northern Alliance blogs, as well as the Monkeys.

And stay tuned.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2003 09:15:56 AM

Just You Wait - My computer is incredibly susceptible to humidity. First the mouse dies, then the computer locks up. When the humidity is low (say, at 4AM), I can work for an hour or more before lockup. When it rises (and with the impending thunderstorms, it's currently at "Junior High Locker Room" level), the computer frequently boots completely locked - it can take 2-3 tries to get a browser running long enough to type this before I lock up completely.

I'm on my way to get the computer overhauled - I can't afford it, but with more little contract jobs coming up, I also can't afford not to do it.

The drag is, I have a couple of very big pieces to work on. I'm going to post as soon as I can get into the library...

See you then.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2003 08:54:51 AM

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Homecoming - Lieutenant Smash describes his homecoming from Kuwait.

It's a great read.

Welcome home, LT.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 12:48:27 PM

Grrrrr - I can work on my computer either very late at night, or very early in the morning. Outside that window, it seems to work for a bit. Then, the mouse locks up, and I'm limited to using keyboard shortcuts. Then, the whole thing locks up, and I have to reboot.

It seems to get worse and worse as the humidity rises - at times during the mid-day, the computer will boot up completely locked.

So - until I figure this out, or can afford to overhaul this @$@%^ computer, my posting will likely be nocturnal.

Now - hopefully I get this posted before it locks up again...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 10:31:49 AM

Keep 'em Barefoot, Pregnant, and Helpless - The BBC wrote an incredibly stupid article about women and guns a little while ago, that's been on my mental "to do" list for this blog for a while.

Brian Carnell beat me to the job of fisking it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 09:19:08 AM

Aiding and Abetting - Via Powerline, this comment about the links between the UN and the institution of terror.

First, read the quote:
"For more than a quarter of a century, the U.N. has actively encouraged terrorism by rewarding its primary practitioners, legitimating it as a tactic, condemning its victims when they try to defend themselves and describing the murderers of innocent children as 'freedom fighters.' No organization in the world today has accorded so much legitimacy to terrorism as has the U.N."
Second: Ask yourself who wrote it:
a) Paul Wolfowitz
b) Jeff Abramowitz
c) Alan Dershowitz
d) Hugh Hewitt.
If you answered anything but "c", you guessed the way I would have. But no, it was indeed Dershowitz.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 08:51:18 AM

Our Enlightened Academy - Yesterday, we poked fun at Saint Cloud State's diversity training.

Today? Not funny anymore. King, from the SCSU Scholars, was there. And he wrote a letter to Limbaugh about it:
"If your office mate wants to listen to Rush Limbaugh -- you know, he's one of those dittoheads -- and wants to listen to Limbaugh, he can, but here are your headphones." (I was taking notes on my laptop as he spoke. I typed it as I heard it.) So the comparison is someone looking at scantily clad women on a calendar to someone listening to your radio show. I just shook my head, and thought well, the guy's a liberal, and taking a cheap shot at Rush is all in a day for liberals. I let it go.

But in a separate session this afternoon, he does it again. He refers to students listening to your show again as "dittoheads" and says "you know, so that they don't think, they just follow whatever Rush says." Laughter around the room. What I thought was a throw-away line appears to be a regular part of his training. Conservatives are not thoughtful, no better than visitors to a peepshow, just follow the script.
He finished the thought in his blog last night:
Now I confess to not being Rush's biggest fan, largely because his command of economics pales before that of his own guest host Walter Williams. But it struck me that the man felt perfectly safe saying this. Here he had discussed (in the afternoon session) how we won't speak out about racist or sexist comments unless there's a person of color or a woman in the room, but did anyone speak out against this rather crass treatment of conservatives?

Does part of his definition of diversity include "diversity of thought"? Hell, no.
It never does.

I think I've noted it in the past - I could write a blog, an only slightly less-prolific one, that merely catalogued the manifestations of Democrats' hatred for Republicans.

This is as good a rejoinder as any to those like Kos, or Marshall, or Fecke, who think that the Democrats have the momentum. No, they don't - not yet, not in any meaningful way. Because none of them are articulating any sort of vision. They are merely venting, at this point; Which of us hates hates hates Dubya more?

And while that truly wins momentum among Democrats - I'll wager Bush is back down to a minority of the Democrat base - it doesn't win elections.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 08:33:07 AM

Now That You've Caught Him, Time To Let Him Go - The Strib turns a blind moral eye to the Hatch/Pawlenty "feud".

Of course, like all reportage in Minnesota during Fair Season, it's got to start with a big plate of lutefisk and Pronto Pup references:
It's said that the State Fair is a reflection of Minnesota. This year, the politics being practiced at the fair is a reflection of the relationship between GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty and DFL Attorney General Mike Hatch. Step right up to the DFL and GOP booths, and see hostility and mistrust on display.

At the Republican booth, "DFL lies on a stick" have been catalogued in a handy take-away format that leads off with disbelief of claims by both Hatch and DFL state chair Mike Erlandson that Hatch did not participate in the party's coordinated campaign in 2002.

The stick being jabbed at Pawlenty by the DFLers is of the figurative type, but is still sharp. It's a postcard and e-mail campaign, appealing to the governor to release his tax returns to prove that he paid taxes on 2001-02 telecommunications consulting income that he only this summer disclosed. At the DFL corner, the word "recall" is being bandied about in a way that, for a fan of orderly democracy, is scarier than the fair's haunted house.
The editorial then gets down to business:
That's edgy partisanship, by State Fair standards. But it's tame compared with what's been going on at the Capitol. There, the Pawlenty-Hatch feud threatens to interfere with good government.

That is the impression created by a report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor, released last week. It details the steps that led to a settlement earlier this year with United American Insurance Co., accused of defrauding senior citizens in the sale of Medicare supplemental insurance policies. The report found fault with the settlement's confidentiality provision and its characterization of the required $103,000 payment as a "fee reimbursement" rather than a penalty or fine.
So far, so good. This would seem, according to the Legislative Auditor's report [warning - large PDF file], to violate state rules:
We think this characterization of the company’s payment is misleading since all companies having a market conduct examination are required to reimburse the examination revolving fund established in Minn. Stat. Section 60A.03, even in the absence of a consent order. The company was assessed and paid costs for the examination, pursuant to this section. However, the $100,000 payment from United American did not have anything to do with the cost reimbursement provisions of Section 60A.03, Subd. 5. When the department received the $100,000 payment, it deposited the moneys in the General Fund, as it would other fines and penalties, rather than in the revolving fund. We think the $100,000 payment would more accurately be described as a penalty, fine, or investigative fee. Department officials told us they were willing to characterize the payment as something other than a civil penalty or fine in order to achieve a settlement agreement.
Now, the Strib has long been accused of backing Attorney-General Hatch when the chips are down, at least in terms of editorial policy (as opposed to the work of the reporters covering the various stories). Is that what we're seeing here?

The Strib continues:
It described how "significant conflict" between the state Commerce Department and the attorney general's office contributed to the flawed settlement. Pawlenty administration officials told the auditor that Hatch's attorneys appeared to support the settlement in the early going, then backed away later. But the department staff refused to waive attorney-client privilege to provide documentation of their complaint.
The Strib's editorial phrases this to sound as if the Auditor thought the Department of Commerce was being evasive.

Here's what the Auditor's report actually said:
after the settlement had been signed, Assistant Attorneys General Aafedt and Goings sent a memorandum to four officials at the Department of Commerce highlighting several terms from the settlement agreement and consent order. Mr. LaVasseur said that the memo was the subject of a great deal of controversy at a subsequent meeting. In their statement to us, Mr. Aafedt and Mr. Goings said they drafted the memorandum to provide their interpretation of the unique settlement provisions. They also stated: “This Memorandum should not in any way be construed as our approval of the confidentiality provisions.” However, department staff told us that no one from the Attorney General’s Office had ever expressed any reservations or concerns about the no-comment provisions in the proposed and final settlement agreements. Because the Department of Commerce classified the memorandum from Mr. Aafedt. and Mr. Goings as protected by attorney/client privilege, we cannot quote its specific advice. The department also claimed attorney/client privilege for subsequent e-mails between the two agencies discussing the settlement and whether the department was allowed to post provisions of he settlement on its web site.

Commissioner Wilson, in his statement to our office, said he received limited advice prior to signing the consent order, and that he received no direct advice or counsel from the Attorney General’s Office.
So - the Department of Commerce claims it didn't get good advice, and the "Attorney-Client Privilege" seems to have been related less to evasion than to obeying existing rules about the release of information.

To the Strib, the answer is obvious:
"The conflict continues," the audit report states, leaving one to wonder where next in state government the public interest will suffer because Hatch's attorneys and Pawlenty's administrators don't get along.
Let's tally it up here:
  1. Hatch tries to turn the American Bankers' settlement into a scandal, until his fingerprints in the controversy are revealed.
  2. Hatch tries to turn a cut in the Gang Strike Force budget - for a group whose activities, vital as they are, can be considered redundant to what local police are supposed to be doing - into an anti-Pawlenty scandal - unsuccessfully.
  3. Hatch tries to turn out-of-context talk about options for dealing with incarcerated sex offenders into an anti-Pawlenty scandal - and fails.
  4. Hatch tries to turn the NewTel flap into a major anti-Pawlenty scandal, even though there's really very little "there" there (barring a possible issue with the Lawyer's Board for Professional Responsibility regarding Pawlenty's billing practices, which are a minuscule political issue compared to the charges of influence-peddling that Hatch and the major editorial boards tried to pin on the Governor
  5. Mike Hatch's name seems to be writ large on the state's settlement with Qwest
  6. Now, this - yet another controversy with Hatch's fingerprints every bit as prominent in the story as those he accuses.
The Strib's conclusion?

Naturally:
Partisanship is as much a part of the State Fair as cheese curds. But it ought not be an ingredient in the enforcement of Minnesota's consumer protection laws, or in countless other routine government actions. Hatch and Pawlenty are putting more than their own political futures at risk with their feud. A truce is overdue.
No. An accounting of the Attorney General's politicization of his office is overdue.

A truce that doesn't follow a reckoning for misdeeds is a Versailles peace - one that just leaves the principals, principles and motivations in place for a larger, uglier war later.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 01:37:04 AM

Marshall, Again - Longtime reader EB noted my observations about Josh Marshall, and listed his own:
To:
Subject: "Dr." Josh Marshall


Don't let the bright lights fool ya; Josh Marshall is as ignorant as they come. He might know a few things but understands very little. This is a guy who writes about tax policy but doesn't know the difference between the payroll tax and the income tax. If it were not for the support he receives from other Clinton apologists and liberal media shills, his site wouldn't be worth the time it takes to load. The only reason to occasionally browse his site is to find out what the enemy is up to. The sad irony is while he is steeped in the netherworld of doublespeak, he has no idea how it works or how he is being used.

He's bright but poorly educated, or more accurately, thoroughly miseducated. "Indoctrinated" might be the better word. He's just another sock puppet for the Left and is a victim of the deformation of language that is pervasive in higher education these days. In other words, garbage in = garbage out. He reminds me of a guy who takes a course in college, relies on the booklist, sucks up to the professor, and then considers himself well-informed because he got an "A." It never occurs to him that there might be more than one class, more than one professor, more than one booklist, or that he got an "A" because everybody else got an "A."

The future result is as predictable as the saliva in Pavlov's dogs, as is true with most modern liberals today. They have no grasp of history before they were born. They just know what they know because that's what they've been taught, but they don't know how they know it, or why it's been taught, or even if it's true. They just know it's "true," because that's what they know. Doesn't "everybody" know? So, when the factual record contradicts their argument, it's just proof a right-wing "conspiracy" exists, you see, and thus is just one more example of how the jackbooted opposition wants to take over the world, kill all the babies, poison the drinking water, and throw the elderly in trash dumpsters, and so on and so forth.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Josh Marshall hasn't figured that out yet. I doubt he ever will.
As to Marshall - I'm going to read him in some detail for the next few weeks before I really render judgement.

As to liberal knowledge of history - oh, the stories I could tell.

Or, in fact, will tell, as time permits. Sometimes it seems as if an atrocious understanding of history - and the present - is essential to be a left-of-center believer.

Stay tuned.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 01:35:09 AM

A Pack, Not A Herd - Longtime reader MC was flipping through a copy of Lavender - a local gay magazine - when he saw this letter to the editor:
Subject: Lavender

I was in a coffee shop on Saturday night and was flipping through diferent magazines when I saw this Letter to the Editor. I haven’t ever read Lavender Magizine so I do not know if this is a normal editorial, but I don’t think so.

Is That A Gun, Or Are You
Happy To See Me?
By Brent M. Saba

In regard to all the gay bars and predominately gay establishments and businesses in the Twin Cities that have posted signs "GUNS ARE NOT PERMITTED IN THESE PREMISES":

You are sending a message to all of the antigay people and those who wish to do us harm by informing them that all of those seen exiting your establishment late at night will be unarmed, and, therefore, an easy target. You are sending a message that we are still unable and unwilling to fight back.

If I personally am ever victimized by such an attack because I chose to leave my firearm secured in my vehicle in order to enjoy an evening in any establishment that is posted "NO GUNS"--gay or straight--I intend to file a lawsuit against that establishment for violating my personal right to defend myself.

Not only are those signs informing that patrons are unarmed and easy victims, it also lets any potential wrongdoer know that the respective business or establishment is also a much easier target for robbery.

Basically, it is a big red flashing neon sign that says, "ROB US"!

It has already happened at eight bars in the metro area, all of which were posted: "NO GUNS PERMITTED."

Wouldn't it be better and safer for all of us if those who hate us and wish to do us harm didn't know whether or not we were carrying a weapon?
Exactly.

It's interesting to me that some of the most ardent supporters of concealed carry reform are the people most affected by violence - women (the Second Amendment Sisters) and gays (the Pink Pistols).

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 01:30:17 AM

Unspoiled - So Lileks spend the week partying with Hewitt, and breaking bread (or cracking cylinders) with Medved.

In the meantime, the Fraters guys were either sucking up to Hewitt for a ride in the Jag, or chasing Patriot glitterati around the paddle boat.

Powerline? Yep - on the air.

That leaves me, I guess, as the sole member of the Northern Alliance unspoiled by temporal fame.

(Well, I guess the Scholars didn't get on the air - but had they been in Saint Paul...)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/27/2003 01:22:37 AM

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Hot, Hot, Hot - I hate heat. I'm a winter person.

It could certainly be worse, though. France may have suffered 10,000 deaths from heat in the past month.

According to Virginia Postrel (via Instapundit), France's addiction to socialism may have been part of the problem:
but isn't it interesting that the fabled solidarity of French socialism leaves old people alone to die from the heat as the whole country goes on vacation at the same time? Yet that seems to be a consensus view of what happened.
She quotes Jacques Chirac from a USA Today piece which ends:
"Critics turned on the French themselves for going on vacation while leaving aged relatives alone.

"These dramas again shed light on the solitude of many of our aged or handicapped citizens," Chirac said.
Far-fetched? The weather was little cooler in Germany - but Germans, marginally less-socialized than the French, were also in town...
Professor Gerd Jendritzky, a doctor who works for the German Weather Service, said that the situation in this country could not be compared to the disaster in France, where as many as 10,000 deaths have been attributed to the intense heat that plagued Europe in the first half of August. In Germany, he told F.A.Z. Weekly, “I expect a few hundred people died who would have lived without this heat.“ Jendritzky said a major difference was that Germany does not “close down“ as France does in August, meaning there were more people around to look after elderly, the most common overheating victims, and hospitals were well staffed.
C'mon, snow!




posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2003 11:54:27 AM

The News Cycle, 2003 - The Lemon has it figured out.

Hilarious.

(Via Bovious)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2003 11:03:10 AM

Dream, Accomplished - Call it "aiming very low" if you'd like, but I've always thought it would be a kick to have one of my offhanded comments included in some other blog's masthead.

And now - voila!

You could observe "Maybe you need bigger goals in life", and you'd be right. But it's a kick, anyway.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2003 08:41:28 AM

Words Matter - Josh Marshall seems to be the leading blogger of the left these days.

Truth be told, I have a hard time reading most lefty-bloggers. I'm not talking the ignorant, stupid ones (I have a hard time reading ignorant stupid conservative blogs, too, and there are plenty of them - including a couple on my blogroll). No, I'm talking about the A-list liberal blogs.

The Daily Kos gets a lot of attention. He's behind the Political State Report, a large group-blog featuring writers from every state, and officially all political outlooks. But at the end of the day, most of his material seems like DNC spin. And occasionally he uncorks a real lulu, as today:
Saddam was, whatever else you can say about him, a bullwark against Islamic fundamentalism. The US is increasingly unable to push back against the rising tide of fundamentalist in that nation. And in the long run, that may prove deadlier than an impotent Saddam.
Atrios Eschaton? He loses a lot of points for the name. The blog is occasionally interesting, but takes things like the LA Times polls at uncritical face value; when a conservative blogger parrots Fox News, the left taunts and ridicules. I think the irony is self-evident.

Marshall seems to be the Tiffany name among lefty-blogs lately. I've read Marshall a few times (he's a good writer) and heard him on the Hewitt show (he's a good writer).

But three things bug me. Two of the aren't Marshall's fault - well, not entirely. He uses three names - it's "Joshua Micah Marshall" - which strikes me as groaningly pretentious, but is also none of my business. He seems to seed his writing with generous dollops of urban wonk lifestyle droppings - which bothers me a lot than middle-aged single-dad musician lifestyle droppings.

But Marshall writes like a wonk - which is fine, because he is a policy wonk, and does it for a living, the lucky sod. But it also shows something of the perspective from which he writes. Like this piece.
Words matter. Often, that's just a conceit of people in the word business. But it's also true.

A few moments ago I was in a cab heading toward the DC train station. On the radio, the president was commenting on the recent troubles in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism.

He said something to this effect: We're in a war on terrorism. When the civilized world expands democracy it's a challenge to the terrorists' totalitarian vision. And so they strike back with increasing terror. They're hoping the civilized world will flinch. But we're not going to flinch, and so forth.

I understand what the president's saying. I recognize a general truth in it.

But the generality, vagueness and abstraction is the problem. They are becoming the engines of policy incoherence and the cover for domestic bad-actors who want to get this country into fights few Americans signed up for.
Leave aside that the war in Iraq exposes what must be the biggest perception gap in American history (the vast majority of Americans approved, and continue to approve, of the war that "few Americans signed up for").

Are generality, vagueness and abstraction "the problem?"

No, not in and of themselves. One of the keys to communicating is knowing ones' audience. Bush's audience, the American people, are not only not policy wonks - I'd argue most Americans are cordially irritated by policy wonkery - but really don't care about the details of how government implements the policies that they heard about on their seven-second soundbites. It's anathema to the way a wonk operates. The man and woman in the street just wants government to work. The wonk wants to know the details.

A good communicator - and a good leader - knows this, and figures out how to express the goal to the people, in terms that everyone from custom combiners to policy analysts can twig to. Ronald Reagan spoke in generalities, certainly - and policy wonks excoriated him for it. But the people aren't wonks - and the goals, or as Marshall would put it, "vague, abstract generalities," resonated with the voters. In contrast, Al Gore and Bill Clinton, being people in love with the inner machinery of government, spoke in specific, concrete terms about their goals for government; it can be argued that neither was (or would have been) anything like the leader Reagan was - but wonks (like Marshall) loved them both for exactly that reason.

Most importantly, Reagan accomplished a lot - his "vague, abstract generalities" eventually became reality, through tax cuts, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, wholesale decommissioning of nuclear weapons, a peace dividend, and a boom that only unravelled during the last years of the Clinton Administration.

Bush's administration is still a work in progress. The stakes are immensely high. And while the people generally have little background in policy, they have immense background in results. Expressing a "vague, abstract, general" vision that never substantiates itself will eventually destroy the administration.

Words matter, indeed. But that phrase cuts both ways. Marshall continues:
We've heard critiques of this phrase, the 'war on terror,' ever since 9/11. But only now, I think, are we seeing the full effects of its mystification. We're at war with al Qaida and any and all radical Islamist groups who threaten mass casualty terrorism against America or her vital interests abroad. We are at war, even if it's a war fought by non-conventional means against non-conventional, non-state entities. That's who we're at war with: a loose-knit network of radical Islamist groups who practice mass-casualty terrorism against us.

Radical Islamist revisionism is a primary foreign policy challenge for the US and probably will remain so for a very long time. That understanding should (and already has) decisively shape our policies toward the various states in the Middle East. But we're not at war with it any more than we were or could be 'at war' with right-wing or left-wing extremism in the second half of the 20th century.
If words truly matter, then I'd like Mr. Marshall to suggest a better word to convey to an audience of non-wonks exactly what we're doing in a mortal struggle with people that want to achieve their ends through killing their opponents (or enough of them to terrorize the rest)? People whose ideal, in their own words, is a version of theology applied through totalitarian means, and who operate in groups that are "Fascist" by any rational definition of the term?

Because if, indeed, Marshall's complaint is with "vague, abstract, general" language, isn't it his job to be specific and concrete?
Just as vague and abstract language makes for bad prose, it is also the handmaiden of bad policy and the abettor of buck-passing.

All this talk about civilization, totalitarianism, fascism and terror is just preventing us from looking at what's happening and recognizing what our own interests are.
While Marshall is right in the sense that it can happen, I don't think that's the case here. I think the Administration has recognized our interests, and is acting in what it sees is their best interest. Remember - it's not the Administration's job to necessarily get complete consensus as to what our interests are - but I think you'll find broad electoral agreement they include:
  • Removing WMDs from the terrorists' catalog of options (and whether Iraq "would have" had WMDs in five to ten years or not, it's a safe bet they won't now)
  • Preventing Islamofascism's threat to the entire Western (as in "free world") economy,
  • trying to head off the next 9/11, and to choke off the supply of funds and weapons that are making the streets of Israel run red, and hopefully prevent that from being imported to the US
Did the Administration express a case toward these goals in terms that were "vague, abstract and general?" Arguably - and the argument is coming from people whose language itself, like that of Marshall, isn't any more specific.
They also make it possible for some people to convince themselves that it's not a screw-up that we've turned Iraq into a terrorist magnet. After all we're at war with 'the terrorists' and it makes sense that 'the terrorists' would attack us anyway, if only in a new venue. And we always knew it would be a long fight, a long twilight struggle, and yada, yada, yada and the rest of it. Same with the mumbo-jumbo about totalitarianism.
Marshall says this as if all is a given. Among his audience, no doubt, it is...
Look at the difference thus far between Afghanistan and Iraq. In the first place, we drained the swamp. In the second, we've made the swamp.

It's really that simple.
Only if you either claim clairvoyance or look at the world through a lens that is every bit as rosy (to your worldview) as Marshall would no doubt claim his opponents do.

Marshall continues:
Bear in mind that the author of these words is a fairly convinced Wilsonian, a strong supporter of our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, someone who's convinced that our values cannot be divorced from our national security interests, a believer in the power for good of American military might, and someone who thinks progressives who recoil at this administration's excesses should avoid the safe-harbor of foreign policy Realism (creeping Scowcroftism).
And I can respect the views of the Democrats who realize that in an imperfect world we may have to enforce peace and security through imperfect means - while adding that the actions Marshall lists, Kosovo and Bosnia, were all about values, and concerned "National Security Interests" only in a "vague, abstract and general" way.
But the White House is being run by men and women who've already made a lot of really stupid mistakes that are going to cost a lot of American lives, money and credibility. And now they're trying to hide from accountability in their own idiot abstractions.
Leave aside that the jury is still very much out about how things are going in Iraq. Marshall believes his sources, I'll believe mine.

The real point? Sometimes an "idiot abstraction" is exactly what is needed.

Marshall's ideological forebears wailed and fumphered about Reagan's "Evil Empire" incantation, and the "vague, abstract, general" nature of so much of his policy. The only way they'd have been right is if the implementation of the policy had also been vague, abstract and general. It wasn't.

The Administration's challenge isn't necessarily to be as specific about its goals as a policy wonk wants it to be. It's to implement the "vague, abstract, general" goals successfully.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2003 08:21:12 AM

Dollars for...Diversity - The SCSU Scholars report that their administration has resorted to bribery to get faculty to attend diversity training:
Today comes word from the new Dean of our College of Business that the President of St. Cloud State University will award “discretionary dollars” to that college on campus that has the highest percentage of its faculty attend this week’s “non-mandatory diversity training sessions,” keynoted by a Penn State administrator profiled earlier by King.
Scholar Dave also has the official line on which of Saint Cloud State's constituent colleges will win the "Discretionary" dollars:
College of Education: 2-5
College of Social Sciences: 4-5 (would be co-favorite except Econ dept. is here)
College of Fine Arts & Humanities: 3-1
College of Science & Technology: 20-1
G.R. Herberger College of Business: 500-1
We'll await the results.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2003 06:49:11 AM

The Terrorists Have Won - First they came for the smokers. And I said "I'm not a smoker, it doesn't affect me."

Then they came for the SUVs. And I said "Pfft. I drive a Saturn. Get lost."

Then they came for our guns. I waved my CCRN card in their faces.

Then they came for McDonalds', and I told them "Piffle. If I eat fast food, it's at Wendy's, and only rarely at that."

But now...the barbarians truly are at the gates:
The sound of bagpipes has always been a distinctive and somewhat acquired taste.

But acoustic experts claimed yesterday that, as well as inducing earache, the instrument could be linked to hearing loss, repetitive strain injury and alcoholism.

A survey has also found that having a passion for the pipes can contribute to the breakdown of players' marriages.

Once used as an instrument of war, the bagpipes are dangerous and should come with a health warning, says the report by Piper & Drummer magazine.
That this report exists is one thing; that it comes from the relatively conservative Telegraph merely adds insult to injury.

Of course, the insults are fairly easily dealt with:
James Bousquet, a bagpiper and acoustics expert, measured the noise from a single instrument and found that it reached 122 decibels - louder than a chainsaw or a plane landing.
Well, duh. How many people go into bagpiping thinking it's going to be quiet and sedate?
About 10 per cent of players said their hobby had ended their marriages
...but I'm willing to bet any hobby will end ten percent of marriages.
...while 84 per cent knew pipers who were alcoholics.
What does this mean? I'll bet 84% of Yogis know of an alcoholic Yogatiste. For that matter, I'll bet 100% of the reporters at the London Telegraph know alcoholic reporters - or are alcoholic reporters.

I'll bet 84% of humans know an alcoholic human.
Mike McNeill, a former World Pipe Band Championship contestant, said: "Piping can take over your life. Your social life tends to revolve around hard drinking with other members. It can really take its toll."
Downside: I suspect he's right. Although the band I'm learning pipes from doesn't seem to be any more alcohol-based than any other group of adults, it does eat up a lot of time for a lot of the participants. Upside: I'd be happy to have a social life at all at this point.
Dr Robert Sataloff, an American lung disease expert, said pipers often developed large stomachs because the bag acted as a breeding ground for spores.

"Pipers are more likely to have an hour-glass belly in which they develop distended stomachs filled with the air from playing the instrument."
Good point. We should all play the autoharp, sing sixties folk music, and eat granola.

(From an email from longtime reader EB)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2003 06:39:55 AM

Monday, August 25, 2003

Ninety-Five Posts - Midwest Conservative Journal is all over the gradual drift of the Anglican/Episcopal Church into a non-Christian institution.

Even though I'm in a denomination that trends toward the far-left politically, I guess I'm still shocked - newly-so, which means I'm probably sheltered - at the extent to whcih many churches are turning not only into whiffle-ball versions of Christianity, but in fact seem to be edging away from the divinity of Christ.
Through an explanation of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, participants begin to uncover the man and his teachings from layers of theology and dogma that surround and hide him. The assumption is that as we reach toward Jesus, his experience of God and how he sought to live that out in his relationship to people, principalities and powers, we are helped to discover our own divine reality.
Scroll around on MCJ - there are quite a few posts on the subject.

If I were an Anglican or Episcopal, I'd be really upset right now.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 11:37:24 PM

No Pix - Went to the State Fair Friday night:
  • Had an eggroll (Mmm, good), a Chicago dog (I'm still feeling it), and a couple of beers.
  • Met Lileks for the first time in about fifteen years.
  • Saw Gary Puckett briefly at the Bandshell. The guy - who had two hits in the late sixties - is a walking testimony to the Branson Cocaine Diet; in his commercial heyday, he was a pudgy guy. Friday night, he was as thin as Mick Jones in his heyday. Puckett, of course, was one of the very lowpoints of my stint in oldies radio - and he hasn't improved one iota in thirty-odd years. Note to self; next year, wait a day, see Suzy Bogguss instead.
  • Had a generally low-key time. Lots of fun.
But no pictures. Or spam. Or - and I want to make sure we're perfectly clear on this count - No Pronto Pups.

But I did sort of gel with my next big million-dollar invention - the deep-fried, breaded White Castle Slider on a Stick. Look for it at the fair next year.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 09:27:03 AM

Got Our Mojo Workin' - Jeff Fecke writes Blog of the Moderate Left.

He did a piece last Friday, claiming that the left - lefty blogs - had seized the initiative:
"Before the war, the righty blogs had all the mojo. Reading Insty or Lileks or Mitch Berg's site was fun, because they were so damn giddy. They knew they had the momentum, they knew the big issue of the day favored them, and they were joyous.

Meanwhile, the lefty blogs were either dispairing or furious or, in my case (and a few more notable cases, like TPM), circumspect. The left knew we were on the wrong side of the White House door, and while not all of us opposed the war outright, most all of us were leery, to say the least, at the way the war was sold and prosecuted.

Fast-forward six months, and look around. Kos is at the top of his game, Josh Marshall is witty as Hell, Pandagon has found his voice, Atrios rules, and...well, pretty much any lefty blog you stumble into is sweetness and light, while righty sites grumble about media coverage and why people don't see things like they do.

And I realize something:

We've got the mojo now."
A couple of key points here:
  1. Kos is at the top of his game - and his game is channeling DNC spin directly through his blog.
  2. Atrios rules...but rules what?
  3. Marshall is witty as hell - and he's going to need to be, because he's rapidly shaping up as the only left-of-center site anyone will take seriously. And that's assuming people really do take him seriously - accusations that he operates more from ideology than reason are piling up.
  4. More seriously - no, the right still has the mojo.
Although I really hate the term "mojo" - it's such an ephemeral notion. The better metaphor is "Possession Time".

Conservatives have the ball. Once you get the ball - and get over the giddiness of fielding the punt - you have to move the ball down the field.
  • The election was a messy punt return that got us out of the endzone to the 10 yard line.
  • Pushing through the incremental tax cut was a messy squib that the President managed to scramble out of bounds for four yards on first down.
  • September 11? A broken-field tip (caused by crowd interference) that ended up as a 20-yard gain.
  • Afghanistan? The prez led off on first and ten with a surprise reverse to Rumsfeld via Powell, that broke through on first for a dime, getting to the GOP 44.
  • Iraq? A blitz broke into the GOP pocket, and part of the crowd started to boo - just as Bush rifled the fastest screen of all time to Wolfowitz in the right flat, for 14, to the Democrat 42.
  • The occupation? Phase one was a fullback-up-the-middle that got three yards in a cloud of dust for second and seven.
  • Phase two - a lateral to Powell - ended with a two yard gain (which the New York Times sports reporter Paul Krugman called "A Thousand Yard Loss") and an injury on the play, as Annan (the left end) decided to tell the rest of the team that he didn't want to run his pattern (instead opting to stand immobile at the line of scrimmage, where he got blindsided and left the field with a bloody nose).
So it's third and five, and Bush knows he has to convert. A field goal is not an option.

And the hogs on the front line - conservatives and Republicans nationwide, in the streets and on the internet - are hunkering down, listening to the Democrat cheerleaders prancing about the left sideline: "We got the mojo! Look at the polls!", waiting for the snap, listening for an audible ...

Mojo, Schmojo. We've got the ball. Until they get the ball away from us, it's our game to lose. By the same token, it's ours to win.

We're in that in-between time - no major news is going on, just the daily grind of winning a limited counterinsurgency war, conducting a war on terror that's moved to the shadows, out of media range, and carrying out politics-as-usual in a country that barely realizes it's at war, getting ready for an election (against a full-court hostile media press). It's not a time for giddiness, for "mojo"; it's a time for hard work and grim determination.

Third and five is not about giddiness or mojo. It's about toughing it out.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 09:07:56 AM

Al Franken Is a Boring, Passe Idiot - And a lucky one - Fox News' lawsuit against him was dismissed.

Ernest Svenson comments:
"Fox, and its lawyers, seem to have bungled quite badly --losing not only the battle but perhaps also the larger war. In the wake of the lawsuit, Franken's publisher, Penguin Group, added 50,000 copies to the publication run, which had originally called for 270,000 copies. Penguin also moved up the book's release date from September to last Thursday. The book is currently the #1 bestseller at Amazon.com.

Franken, was obviously pleased by the first round victory (the court simply denied Fox's request for a preliminary injunction). He was also pleased with the performance of all of lawyers involved: 'In addition to thanking my own lawyers,' Franken said, 'I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life.'

I didn't see the briefs so I can't comment on that, but I did read the complaint that was filed in state court and I can say it was, not only devoid of legal merit, but also highly unprofessional. I invite you to read the complaint, in particular the allegations in paragraph 77. It is obvious, to me at least, that this lawsuit was brought because of the documented disputes between Franken and Bill O'Reilly. Clearly, the two men don't like each other, and at least one of them may have been openly rude to the other."
Of course, many lefty blogs are pitching this case as a setback for the conservative media.

Hogwash. It's a setback for Bill O'Reilly. And attenuating O'Reilly's incessant browbeating yammer can only be good for conservatism.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 08:40:38 AM

Flush - The current status of Iraqis in the "Deck of Cards".
posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 07:54:51 AM

Accidentally Like A Martyr - Powerline draws our attention to this superb NYTimes piece by Anthony DeCurtis (the only Rolling Stone writer today worth wasting ink on) on . Warren Zevon.

It's all worth a read. I liked the close:
Mr. Zevon had to stop working on "The Wind" for several months earlier this year as his health worsened. Then, in the spring, he recovered sufficiently to complete two final songs at his home, including "Keep Me in Your Heart," the ballad that closes the album. It's a wish that is both honest and modest: "Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath," he sings. "Keep me in your heart for a while." Few artists get to write their own farewell as Mr. Zevon has here. It is high praise to say that "The Wind" would stand honorably beside his best work even if he were not dying when he made it.
The phone won't ring,
and the sun refuses to shine.
Never thought that I would pay so dearly
for what was already mine,
for such a long, long time...


In a year or so filled with musical deaths (Ben Orr, Stuart Adamson, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone), Zevon's terminal cancer is one of the most depressing stories of all - and also potentially the most enlightening and ennobling. Zevon was one of few rock stars to make recovery from alcoholism more than tabloid-fodder - to bring the insights from his recovery, articulately and unstintingly, to his music, and to great effect.

Lose great artist, gain some great art. Not a good exchange ratio...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 12:52:57 AM

Extremely Funny - Davejames' "Curious/Furious" is now on my weekly read list. He should be on yours, too.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 12:27:20 AM

Houserockers - In the late seventies, there was a group from Pittsburgh called the Iron City Houserockers.

Now, normally at that point of the post I'd link the name "Iron City Houserockers" to one of the host of fan sites that has sprung up in absurd profusion over absolutely everything in our society, from "Hamster Dance" trivia sites to appreciation pages for C-list porn stars.

But I can't do that for the Houserockers, because no such fan site exists.

Existed, anyway. Because one does now.

The Iron City Houserockers were the best band you never heard, especially their four critically-praised, commercially-near-miss albums between 1979 and 1983. During that time, there was no better, fiercer, harder-edged, more passionate rock and roll band in the world. That they are not synonymous with eighties heartland rock, mentioned in the same breath as Mellencamp, Petty, even Springsteen, is a testament to the incompetence of MCA records. They were led by my songwriting idol, Joe Grushecky. Their fanclub includes Steve Van Zandt, Ian Hunter, the late Mick Ronson, Steve "Play It, Steve" Cropper, and the Boss himself - all of whom have produced the band's records over the years.

And they were a band whose music is a lynchpin of the musical soundtrack of my life.

So while I would never waste the time it would take to make up a common fan site, this is more than just fandom. This is righting a colossal injustice. For every time someone mentions "Great American Songwriters" without including Joe Grushecky, an injustice is indeed taking place. I'm just doing my part.

Here it is. Go forth and be better educated.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2003 12:09:01 AM

Friday, August 22, 2003

This Doesn't Count - Next week, we'll be talking about:
  • Alpha Boys
  • A death penalty case that's kinda interesting
  • My first attempt at a fan site
  • Mike Hatch
  • Urban Conservatism. Really.
OK. Now I'm off for the weekend.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/22/2003 12:30:11 PM

How The Other Half Lives - How nice must it be to be an Andrew Sullivan. He holds a fund drive, and rakes in $80,000 twice a year. Then, he takes off the entire month of August. And when he comes back in September, he'll still be getting a hundred thousand visitors a day, and he'll STILL earn a living from the site, and he'll still one of the Big Four Blogs ( Instapundit, Mickey Kaus, and The Volokh Conspiracy along with Sullivan).

At this time last year, Shot In The Dark was averaging about 20 visitors a day, mostly friends, relatives, and a few politics junkies drawn by my constant, shameless cross-promotion on the E-Democracy MN-POLITICS mailing list. During the run-up to the election, it rose to between 30-50 a day.

Then Instapundit linked my fisks of Garrison Keillor and attacks on the MN DFL's culture of hate, giving my humble little blog a couple of 10,000 visitor days. Through the winter I averaged 250 visitors a day - which boggled my mind. It only got better - I currently average around 800 visitors a day, with occasional spikes when the likes of Reynolds or Lileks or Powerline link me.

By the way - yesterday was a fun milestone for this blog. It was the first time Instapundit linked me without my sending him an email saying in effect "HEY, CHECK OUT WHAT I'M WRITING ABOUT TODAY! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!" (although the Professor has been gratifyingly and flatteringly amenable to my writing in the past year or so). So in the midst of this very difficult year, it's fun to see something going right.

And while my donations link doesn't pay the mortgage, it covers my hosting (and, some months, a bit more), which is not only a relief, it's flattering. Thank you all.

But because of that, it's very, very hard to settle for any time off. Something - my ego, maybe - thinks it'd be a personal setback if I took a week off and came back to 30 readers a day, again. I got here (whereever "Here" is) by writing. A lot. It's been fun - my morning ritual involves getting up at 5:30AM, rounding up the usual suspects (when all else fails, Doug Grow and Laura Billings are bottomless sources of fodder) and dashing off a couple of posts. But it's also work, trying to keep enough quality (hahahaha) material coming to keep you all coming back. There are times I truly envy some of the Twin Cities' excellent group bloggers, like Powerline and Fraters Libertas, with a deep stable of excellent writers (to say nothing of people like Lileks or Reynolds or Sullivan, who are just plain good enough to do this all. The. Time).

This screed has no point, other than to say I'll be taking the weekend off. REALLY off! Not in the "Yeah, Mitch, you say that every week, and then Saturday night you post five column-feet on something or another". I mean, I'll see you Monday.

I am, however, going to try to see Lileks at the fair tonight. So if you're around, say "hi". How will we meet each other? Simple; just stand in front of the "Patriot" booth and yell "BLOG! BLOG! BLOGGIE BLOG BLOG BLOG!" at the top of your lungs. I'll find you.

Til Monday, thanks for reading. I truly, genuinely appreciate it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/22/2003 12:20:53 PM

Not Just For Sandbags Anymore - Pioneer Press columnist Nick Coleman has noticed that sometimes the National Guard has to be soldiers:
"The Minnesota National Guard is seeing a lot of action these days. Maybe too much. Instead of sandbags, the unspoken undercurrent, in wartime, is about body bags.

I always drop by the National Guard booth at the Fair in the hopes of seeing an old friend or just to take the pulse of things. I've developed a lot of appreciation for the Guard over the years from watching it work through flood or tornado. But the National Guard is being asked to do a lot more than help out in the Red River Valley or St. Peter. More than at any time in the last 50 years, members of the National Guard are under fire."
Perhaps over those fifty years Mr. Coleman never noticed this, but It's A Military Force! The National Guard is Part Of the US Army and Air Force! They exist to Go Places And Kill People when called upon!

With nearly a quarter of the Minnesota Army and Air Guards either overseas or on deck for deployment, Coleman does note a key problem:
Almost 1,100 Minnesota Guard soldiers are en route to Bosnia, where they will take over the lead role in peacekeeping efforts. Another 500 are on their way to Europe to beef up security at U.S. air bases, and 1,000 more will head to Kosovo this fall. Add smaller deployments to Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf (almost 200 are in Iraq and Kuwait) and you will have a quarter of the Minnesota Guard — 3,000 men and women — overseas. For some members of the Air Guard's 133rd Airlift Wing who are being redeployed to the Persian Gulf, it will be their third overseas assignment in less than two years.

Although morale is strong in general, it has begun to suffer in the 133rd Airlift Wing.

"I don't think their morale is very good right now, and mine wouldn't be, either," says Col. Denny Shields of the Minnesota Guard. "Frankly, we're concerned. Because when you keep going to the well, more and more you get midterm people — people who have 10 or 12 years' experience — who might end up pulling the plug. That's a lot of experience to waste, and we really hope it won't happen."
It's a fair point; Guard and Air Guard units that have much needed skills - like the 507th Chemical Recon Company from Fergus Falls, or the 133rd Airlift Wing - are going to find themselves on tap for a lot of duty time. The military relies especially hard on them for their technical skills, the sorts of things where the Guard's long-term part-timers with ample civilian-world experience are invaluable.

But Coleman concludes:
High school kids thinking about joining the Guard are weighing the college aid they would receive against the chance they'd be called to fight and die for their country.

It ain't just about filling sandbags anymore.
In my hometown, the National Guard company had fought in the Spanish American War, WWI, WWII (Guadalcanal, New Guinea, the Philippines, and a solid year of occupation duty in Japan) and Korea. I don't know that many of us contemplating a hitch in the Guard had any illusions about spending a career filling sandbags.

Are kids today any dumber?

After 9/11, I doubt it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/22/2003 10:50:25 AM

State Fair - I live in the Midway, so the State Fair usually means snarled traffic (although as a resident, I know all the shortcuts that the madding mass of fairgoers don't) and endless lines of tired or drunk people at the gas station on Snelling.

And the concerts, with few exceptions, have been nothing to write home about. But I've always loved the Bandshell shows. I've seen a lot of people there, including a very young Alison Krauss and a hyperkinetic Doug Kershaw.

This year has its moments:
"Suzy Bogguss, who's leaning toward jazz these days, will also try to make up for the surprising paucity of country by holding forth from the Bandshell on Saturday and Sunday.
Bogguss was one of the higher points of working in country radio in the early nineties; a genuinely talented singer who visibly strained to break free of Music Row "Generic Female Country Product" ghetto. Worth a listen.

And next week?
Other headliners include pop-rockers of disparate resumes, rookie Franky Perez (next Friday and Aug. 30) and ageless Midwestern roadhouser Johnny Holm (Aug. 31 and Sept. 1).
"Ageless roadhouser" - that's one way of describing Holm, the midwest's answer to Sha Na Na (not to take anything away from Holm, a great showman).

I've already raved about Perez in this space. His CD is solid, with a little bit of filler - but he's the best live performer I've seen in years. I'll be there.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/22/2003 10:34:06 AM

He Who Owns the Press - Good news from the FCC, as Michael Powell appears to be leaning toward approving low-power FM radio licensing.

The licensing - which would allow FM stations with a range of around 3 miles - would open up non-commercial broadcasting for community groups. This was the norm until FCC rule changes (pushed by NPR and the National Association of Broadcasters) changed the rules in the late seventies. It's significant that the "community" radio stations currently active - including KFAI and KMOJ in the Twin Cities - were all started before 1978.

According to Reuters:
Additionally, Powell wants to accelerate the licensing to get more low-power FM radio stations on the air. Low-power FM was launched a few years ago to provide non-commercial programming to audiences in a radius of 3.5 miles.
Good idea or bad? Glenn Reynolds (on whose site I found the story this morning) likes it.
As James Plummer wrote here a while back, ending the suppression of microradio is a better way of promoting diversity than more regulation. If Powell really believes in broadcast diversity, then now that the bogus interference concerns raised by NPR and the National Association of Broadcasters have turned out to be, well, bogus, he should endorse the growth of low-power FM stations.
Who opposes the idea?

The National Association of Broadcasters and National "Public" Radio.

(Via Instapundit)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/22/2003 09:58:29 AM

Thursday, August 21, 2003

Dirty Harvey? - Fraters brings us the story of Hennepin County judge Harvey Ginsburg, who took the law into his own hands (allegedly) when he caught some boys who'd allegedgly stolen his son's bike:
One teenager told the officer that Ginsberg asked which one of them had stolen the bike and then slapped both of them in the face.

The first boy, who admitted taking the bike and hiding it behind the drugstore as a joke, said he rode away on his bike because he didn't want to get hit.

The judge grabbed the other boy off his bike, threw him onto a wooden bench, held him by the throat and threatened, "If you mess with my family again you will be dead," the complaint said.

That boy was able to free himself and told Ginsberg he was going to call police. Then Ginsberg said: "Go ahead, I'm a judge and I'll have you charged with a felony for temporary theft."

But the money quote, from Fraters' Elder:
Bike thieves in St. Louis Park be warned. Judge Harvey Ginsberg is on the case. And he's not afraid to open a can of pat ass either.
Torn. Sooooo torn.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/21/2003 12:14:20 PM

Will the Real Arianna Please Stand Up? - Susan Estrich on the depths of Huffington's opportunism - which is now affecting her family:
"On the day she announced her candidacy at 'A Place Called Home,' in South Central Los Angeles, her children moved out of hers in Brentwood and into their father's. 'Our oldest daughter has been devastated by it,' her dad said.

'A Place Called Home,' according to its Web site, was created to give inner-city kids somewhere to go after school to do their homework, watch TV, play with their friends and 'be with people that care about them -- basic rights that all kids should have.' That's what most kids get from their mothers...

Huffington has no chance of winning. Never did. The only reason to run was her ego, self-aggrandizement, attention -- at the expense of her kids.

She is running on a platform she didn't even believe in a few years ago. Nor is it one she lives by.

How could she do that to her children? my own children ask.

In Huffington's case, of course, it may be a bit more complicated than that, financially speaking, since it's slightly more difficult to live off your children's child support when your children aren't living with you. But don't bet against her. This is, after all, the woman who runs against oil interests and lives in a mansion financed by oil money, rails against pigs at the trough and pays no taxes, runs as an independent and supports a guru. She's even got a documentary crew following her for the campaign. I wonder if they filmed the children moving out."
Michael Medved took her tax record (she pays none) sternly to task earlier this week; she's a poster child for the need for a consumption, rather than an income, tax.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/21/2003 12:09:26 PM

Daschle and the Media - South Dakota's major newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, has been in bed with Tom Daschle throughout his career.

Talon News - a web site which has been working the story - takes it from here:
After two weeks of stonewalling, Randell Beck, Executive Editor of South Dakota's largest newspaper, the Argus Leader, finally acknowledged the relationship of its political reporter to Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD). Wednesday's admission of David Kranz's 35-year friendship with the Senate Minority Leader came during a Sioux Falls radio talk show hosted by Greg Belfrage on station KELO AM.

Kranz and the Argus Leader have been at the center of a controversy that began when potential Senate candidate Neal Tapio revealed the ties in a press release. Tapio implied that the newspaper's reporting has been excessively favorable to Daschle and the Democrats and unusually harsh to their critics and Republican candidates. The New York Times and Washington-based Roll Call criticized the Argus Leader's biased reporting in the 1990 South Dakota senate race.
In addition to the obvious media bias angle, the story includes hints of the new media/old media conflict; Talon News doesn't get any respect from South Dakota's elite news organizations:
KELO's Belfrage declined Talon News request for a representative to appear on the program. He wrote, "Midcontinent Radio considers this to be a dispute between Talon News and the Argus Leader." A call to KELO's General Manager Mike Costanzo with the same request was not returned.
Full Disclosure: I used to work for a Midcontinental affiliate. They were the most half-assed media company I ever encountered.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/21/2003 09:21:25 AM

Janklow - South Dakota Politics has coverage on the accident involving Rep. (and former Governor) Bill Janklow and Minnesotan Randolph Scott. Janklow allegedly ran a stop sign and hit motorcyclist Scott, killing him.

South Dakota Politics is an excellent blog that's been getting heaped with attention. That's no surprise. The surprise, to me, is that the blog is written by a law student. Growing up in North Dakota, I had no idea that South Dakota even had a law school.

(Via Powerline)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/21/2003 09:13:12 AM

Davis Toast, Arnold the Most - According to the Today show, 59% of Californians favor the recall, and Ahnold is leading by five points.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/21/2003 09:06:12 AM

Kids TV - This is the first summer in memory the kids have had TV.

I'm only exaggerating a little. Two years ago, our TV broke just about the time school let out. At least, that's what I told the kids. There was nothing wrong with it, of course - I just wanted to see what would happen if they went a few weeks without TV. The experiment lasted all summer. The results were astounding; when school let out, my son was reading at a second-grade level (which was fine, since he was in second grade). The next fall, he tested at a fifth-grade level. Or forget about the assessments (which are frequently bogus) if you'd like; he cordially hated reading in May, and he audibly loved it in September.

Last year, the TV actually did break right about the time school let out. I didn't bother replacing it until the fall. No problems - the kids never really even asked me to fix it.

This year, since I'm home full time, I left the TV alone. Yep, I'm that awful parent who uses the TV to babysit, when nothing else jumps to mind. Mea Culpa.

No, I keep it to a relative minimum. But I've heard a lot of what passes for kids' TV this summer (heard, not seen; I usually hear it in the background while I'm working, cooking, or whatever. The biggest impression for me, by the way, is the theme songs. Oh, lordy, the theme songs.

The shocking part isn't that so much of it is as bad as it is. The real shock is that so much of it isn't horrible.

A partial list:
  • Rocket Power (Nickelodeon) - When "Rug Rats" came out all those long years ago, I (and lots of parents) waffled back and forth; is this cartoon fairly decent, or is it irritatingly awful? "Rocket Power" - which seems to be about a bunch of adolescent Rug Rats on skateboards - shows that it could have been either, or both; its hamfisted animation manages to make stunt skateboarding look dull, and its hammer-to-the-forehead dull storylines make Rug Rats' cutesy baby tales seem pretty good in retrospect. The theme song - faux surfer punk that combines the Offspring's sound with the pure irritation of Dexter Holland's voice, with none of Holland's wry humor, is a harbinger of tedium. D-
  • The Amanda Show (Nickelodeon> - Amanda Bynes is to Hillary Duff what the Dave Clark Five were to the Beatles; why buy one when you can have the other? The funny part - most of the kids watching it are completely unaware of the irony of the show's format (a "variety" show, with music, a monologue, and endless, groaningly repetitive skits - like a grammar school Carol Burnett). Bynes can act - she was just fine in the surprisingly good Big Fat Liar with Frankie Muniz and Bart Giamatti. But the show is so dull, even my kids tune it out. Unfortunately, they don't do it in time to tune out the show's wretched theme song - "Amandamandamandamanda, AmandamandamandamanDA, Amandamandamandamandamanmanmanda shoooooooooow", which could be used to wrench testimony from the most dedicated mafioso. D+.
  • Ed, Edd and Eddie (Cartoon Network) - Easily the worst cartoon ever made. The show seems to be about three kids named Ed - a retarded one (done with the most grating voiceover in the history of psychological warfare), a nerd and a criminal. They try to scam their friends...oh, who cares? I'm not sure which is worse - the fact that the animation actually, physically induces a headache, or that there was obviously some intelligence spent (misspent) on this show; it's clear that there is some sort of writing and animation talent in the crew behind the show. It's just all gone terribly, terribly wrong. I cordially hate this show, and have taken to turning it off immediately. Ironically, the theme song - which sounds like it was lifted from a faux big-band, perhaps the Squirrel Nut Zippers - is one of the best of the bunch. It doesnt' save it from its grade, G- (I needed a grade worse than F).
  • Lizzie McGuire (Disney) - Surprisingly un-awful. PC, of course, but not relentlessly so. Clever. The parents are portrayed as relentlessly dim, but that's to be expected (especially on Disney, which seems to have declared war on parental respect). Hillary Duff has a future - not that you'd know from the dismal "Lizzie McGuire Movie" (oh, the kids programming I've had to sit through...). The theme song - a not-entirely-unpleasant bit of powerpop treacle - would make a better single than any of Duff's upcoming onslaught of songs. B-.
  • Sister, Sister (Disney) - On SNL in the mid-nineties, there was a spoof Afro-American game show starring Chris Rock. First prize was something fairly innocuous. Second prize? "Your own series on the WB!". The only reason I remember this was that the skit flashed a little graphic showing a bunch of circa-1995 WB shows, including one showing...Sister Sister. Well, Disney has exhumed this one (as they did "Boy Meets World", of which more later). That it shows everything that's wrong with the WB is obvious; the relentless pandering to the lowest common denominator among the Afro-American audience has to be insulting. The worst part, though? No, not the awful and unappealing Mowry twins. Not even the atrocious Jackee, who has to be the Amos and Andy of the 1990s. No, it's the fact that it stars Tim Reid. Reid is a wonderful actor (He was Venus Flytrap on WKRP, and he starred in the wonderful, underappreciated Frank's Place in the late eighties), writer and producer; that he's had to sink to this to earn a living is a tragedy. The theme song - a dismal piece of pseudo hip hop - signals drear. D
  • That's So Raven (Disney) - Not as bad as I'd expected. Theme song is dismal fake-hop, and the show is pretty predictable. But it's one of few shows that still do old-fashioned, Lucille-Ball-style pratfalls 'n slapstick, and does it fairly well. C.
  • Boy Meets World - Another show rescued from the networks, BMW (which ran a total of seven years, but is still unescapable in reruns) is relentlessly earnest, occasionally very well-written, and featured the crusty William Daniels playing a crusty teacher. Theme song? Good question. The show had at least three, all of them variations on one power-pop theme or another. C+
  • Even Stevens (Disney) - Too good for kids. Sends up most of the PC cliches of kids programming with a nudge and a wink. The scheming little brother Louis (Shia LaBoeuf, whose unforgivable name is balanced by some talent - he starred in the excellent adaptation of Holes) is very clever, and the older sister Ren (Christy Romano) is the best pseudo-conservative teenager since Alex Keaton; she's a fine role model indeed. The music is often relentlessly clever, the writing is sharp, the parents are played less as morons than like true founts of comic wierdness. The show is a pleasantly twisted treat. The theme song is fairly generic, but very identifiable, fake rockabilly. A
I'm not sure which is worse - the fact that I could actually write a column about kids' TV, or that I'm sitting here wondering which shows I've missed...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/21/2003 08:56:58 AM

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Citizens for Disarmed Victims - The "Repeal Concealed Carry" "movement" is taking one mighty swing at relevance.

They'll be staffing a booth at the State Fair this year. I plan on stopping by and going through their literature, point by point. By point.

Hmmm.

Attacking the "information" on the Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota website is sort of like clubbing baby harp seals. Here's a bit from their site:
CONCEAL AND CARRY DIDN'T PROTECT HIM

New York City Councilmember James Davis, who was shot and killed inside City Council Chambers on July 23, 2003 was a former police officer and was armed at the time of the attack. He and the shooter, Othniel Askey, bypassed the metal detector located at the building entrance. The shooting occured at one of the most heavily protected sites in the city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg now requires everyone, including city council members, to pass through the metal detectors.

Ironically, Mr. Davis was killed just as he was about to introduce a resolution to prevent workplace violence.
So according to Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota - if granting permits to the law-abiding citizen doesn't instantly end all crime and prevent every wackjob from commtting every crime of passion or insanity, then Concealed Carry is worthless?

Also note: you can pelt opponents of Shall Issue with dozens of real-life cases of people deterring crimes, with or without shootings, and it won't matter to them; let one NYC cop get shot by a wackjob (never mentioned in the excerpt in the CSM website) and suddenly the threshold of proof drops to one case.

You can smell the desperation.

The tide continues to swing against them, by the way. The one defeat that "Shall Issue" laws have suffered in recent years - its rejection in Missouri in 2000, followed by a veto of a bill in the Legislature - may soon be reversed:
The Missouri legislature is poised to soon override the veto of Gov. Bob Holden, a Democrat, and validate a bill passed this spring allowing the right to carry concealed weapons.
Colorado will also join the ranks of shall-issue states before long, while the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently overturned a ban on concealed weapons of any type - which may lead to a shall-issue effort in the coming session.

Clearly, the national trend is very much against the Repeal gang.

By the way, it's funny to notice that the Repeal Concealed Carry NOW! website hasn't been updated since sometime in May.

That's dedication.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/20/2003 10:35:22 AM

Shopping List - My pal Flash from down the street (not his real name) has been hearing my endless list of things I want/need to get when I finally get a job above subsistence level. He said I should put it on my blog - so he wouldn't have to hear it anymore.

Fair enough! So without further ado, Mitch's Post-Unemployment Shopping List:
  1. 15 gallons of paint- due to dreadful planning last fall, I finished scraping and priming the house, just in time for the weather to get too cold to paint. Naturally, I planned to finish the job in the spring. No job, no paint. Gotta finish it - my house is an eyesore on my street.
  2. A Bunch of Lumber - I need to build new beds for my daughter and I, not to mention kitchen shelves and a decent bookshelf in my bedroom.
  3. Major Overhauls - for my pickup truck and my computer.
  4. Presents - Both of my kids have had birthdays since I've been on the beach. Both have gotten very simple birthday parties, with not a whole lot of presents. Not bad, really, in the great world scheme of things - but I'd like to throw them a slightly bigger to-do.
  5. Kitchen Stuff - my kitchen is a disaster. Not in the sense women think of "disaster" (the china clashes with the wallpaper) or in the "Queer Eye..." sense of the term (the pots are so 1998). No, I mean in the "avalanche wipes out Austrian Village" sense of the term disaster.
  6. A TV bigger than my Toaster - I don't watch a lot of TV. I surely don't like my kids watching much. But my TV is about the size of a security camera monitor. Not that that's a biggie, but for the rare occasions when I actually do want to watch something...
  7. Windows - My house is about 118 years old. Most of the windows are, if not original equipment, at least dating to before WWII. I'm tired of heating the neighborhood.
  8. DVDs - I haven't had a working VCR in years. I always hated videocassettes - big, delicate, subject to degeneration. I bought a cheap DVD player for Christmas, and was converted instantly - just in time to have my entertainment budget drop to near-zero.
  9. New Camera, preferably Digital - I need one, badly. I've been way too remiss in taking kid pictures - sorta the anti-Lileks. I need to fix that, and I need to do it now.
That should cover it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/20/2003 10:30:22 AM

Forget Arnold? - Longtime reader PZ writes:
Also there’s another conservative in the CA governor’s race who isn’t getting much press, but I thought you might want to check out her website if for no other reason then to add her name to the ever-growing pantheon of Conservative Babes
Excellent point, P. Although some of her stuff is hardly hard-core conservatism - check the Issues page.

But PZ is right on both counts; she's more conservative than Arnold, and a definite candidate for inclusion in the Pantheon.

Whenever I build it.

Hmmmmmm.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/20/2003 09:28:22 AM

Northern Alliance Trivia Slapdown?- Fraters see themselves as trivia buffs.

I may have to try this Keegan's place.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/20/2003 08:59:09 AM

Kids In America - I wouldn't say that my college was "conservative". Far from it - most of the faculty was as solidly left-wing as anyone at MacAlester. But most of the students - the children of farm kids and small-town businessmen and teachers, with a smattering of kids from the Twin Cities and Chicago who were there because they couldn't get a scholarship at a Division I school - were apolitical. Neither the College Republicans nor their Democrat counterparts ever really drew a crowd; most students were working too hard to bother. My major adviser - who'd gone to Rutgers, NYU and Marquette - expressed amazement at the school and its students; "12 credits here is as hard as 16 credits anywhere I've ever taught", he said.

He was also one of very few conservative English professors you'll ever meet ("I consider myself a monarchist", he joked). He lent me a copy of "Modern Times" by Paul Johnson, and had me dig hard into the political critiques woven into "Crime and Punishment", and he started me on my path away from the liberalism I inherited from my parents to the conservatism I got from Reagan.

"Whatever", said my dorm mates, who were cramming for a chemistry exam.

I knew, of course, that there were other colleges out there. I was the editor of the college paper, and I got a weekly package of canned copy from the Collegiate Press Service - stuff that was skewed far enough to the left to make the BBC blanche. And when I finally moved to the Twin Cities, I met college kids that not only had time and energy to focus on things like politics - it was their major. It was why they'd gone to school in the first place. Places like the U, Mac, Hamline and St. Kates were breeding grounds for young DFLers (or Greens).

Fast forward twenty years.

The SCSU Scholars have an interesting piece on the rightward drift on campus today.

They link to a fascinating piece on Economist.com, which notes the statistics:
Bob Dole lost the 18-29-year-old vote by 19 percentage points; Mr Bush lost by two points. Students have been sceptical about bossy governments for years. Now they are increasingly sceptical about the “Ab Fab” values of the 1960s generation—particularly in regard to casual sex and abortion—and increasingly enthusiastic about America's use of military might. A poll by Harvard University's Institute of Politics in April found that three-quarters of students trusted the armed forces “to do the right thing” either all or most of the time. In 1975 the figure was about 20%. Another poll, by the University of California at Los Angeles, found that 45% of freshmen supported an increase in military spending, more than double the figure in 1992.
The article also delves into the why - students' natural sense of rebellion, of course (and what is the campus left but the status quo?) - but something more; a desire to have a nation worth going on to lead:
Another reason is September 11th, which not only produced a surge of patriotism but also widened the gap between students (who tended to see the attacks as examples of evil) and Vietnam-era professors (who agonised about what America must have done wrong). The Harvard Institute of Politics found two-thirds of students supporting the war in Iraq. Pro-war groups sprouted in such liberal campuses as Brandeis, Yale and Columbia. At Amherst College many students were noisily furious when 40 teachers paraded into the dining hall with anti-war slogans.
The Economist also struck on a parallel that I find fascinating, one I've been flailing about to try to find for months. It makes sense:
They needed troops on the ground. In 2002 College Republicans (together with gun activists) played the same sort of role in the party that trade unionists and blacks have long played in the Democratic Party.
King Banian of the Scholars notes:
Combine this with 9/11 and the fact that Republicans right now are doing a good job of recruiting youth to their programs like College Republicans or YAF, add an enthusiastic leadership from people like the CRs' Scott Stewart, and the groundswell, argues The Economist, turns into a youthquake.
Of course, like all youthquakes, it can change with the turn of a generation and its influences. That's what got us here in the first place.

But consider the possibilities: We have a generation that is edging to the right, coming up through the system. In 20 years, when they move into positions of leadership in academia, business, the media, we could be in position for a major change in the outlooks of American institutions.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/20/2003 08:09:39 AM

Terror - Little Green Footballs covers the left brain.

Lileks covers the right.

Mindless, pointless speculation: I'll bet anything that the old political prohibition about cooperating with Israel, lest the "Arab Street" rebel en masse, is now as cold and dead as Color Me Badd's career. Under the table, of course; but I'll bet anything that the links between the US and Israel's anti-terrorism efforts are going to extend far beyond the traditional, pro forma exchanges of intelligence.

I have nothing to back that up. But ask yourself, what is there to lose? The only "Arab Street" that's mattered in the past two years is the one in Dearborn, Michigan, where Arabs protested in favor of the intervention. And yes, I know I'm being glib - the street in Karachi was pretty angry, and hopped up and down burning flags for days...

...and in the end, confirmed that in any real sense the feared "Arab Street" is a toothless tiger.

Yes, a lot of Arabs will get boundlessly irate if it comes out that we've cooperated with Israel. What of it? The ones that truly matter are already in the crosshairs; the Saudis may be starting to realize they have to fish or cut bait. The Iranians (yeah, I know they're not Arabs) keenly know they could be next on the agenda.

The clinker in the mix? Pakistan (also not Arab). They have a huge Moslem fundie population that has chosen sides. They have a large, accomplished intelligence service that has actively supported Al Quaeda and the Taliban. They have the bomb.

But they also have an interest in controlling all of those; they've done this so far.

It's all just wind in sails, of course. But I'll bet that when the history of this thing is written, there'll be a chapter on Israel's sub rosa cooperation with the US.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/20/2003 07:34:00 AM

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Another Tricky Day - I know I've written this post before. I may write it again.

This is the part of the job hunt that I hate the most. Waiting to hear if I made it to the final round of interviews.

It's not the rejection that kills me; if I have one leg up on much of the job-seeking public, it's that I started in radio when I was 16. I got fired from my first radio job when I was 17 (I've never been fired for cause in my life), and of the stations I worked at, I think I only quit a job one time under my own power (two of them closed on me, and the rest were all mass-firings after management changes). Rejection, I can handle. I have scar tissue a foot thick.

Nah. It's the waiting for news that kills me. I still haven't heard from the company I interviewed with on Thursday, which puts things on the border between "they're still making up their minds" and "this isn't going well".

Worse, companies today have taken on a very rude attitude toward job seekers. Rejection letters are very rare - resumes usually go into the void, never to be heard from again (I've sent over 300 in the last seven months). Which may be normal enough in these times, but the worst part is that companies frequently will leave interviewees hanging for weeks or longer after they've made a decision, without a letter or phone call.

It's not all bad; another job lead popped up yesterday, and I think I have another little job locked in for next month. But again, I'm waiting for confirmation.

And waiting.

And waiting is bad enough. Waiting in a pool of sweat, writing away at a computer that gets very balky in this humidity, is worse.

Gaaah. It can only get better, right?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/19/2003 10:55:50 AM

Nub of the Gist - DJ Tice has a great column on the reasons underlying the media circus that scuppered the Pentagon's 'Terror market" last month. The market - which would have used market methods to assign a market value to different theories about future terrorist activities - was hardly a new idea.

But not only did many opponents of the "Terror Market" not have any time for new ideas - they don't like the "P" word:
:The short, unhappy life of the Pentagon's "terrorism futures market" was wonderfully instructive. It illuminated, through exaggeration, the point at which communication breaks down between two groups: those eager to unleash every power of economic markets, and those who recoil from the cold amorality of the profit motive.
I had many acquaintances who recoiled in horror at the idea - and with whom, as Tice says, communication was impossible:
  • People who thought that it was "sick" to "tie human lives" to something as ""crass" as markets, and
  • people who have great misplaced faith in the status quo of the current intelligence process (and in the media's willingness or ability to explain this idea, for that matter)
Tice continues:
Such "aggregation of information" is the magic all markets do. Stanford Professor George Parker speaks of a creature he calls "Mr. Market" — the collective mind of scores of millions of investors who trade in stocks and other investments. Mr. Market, Parker says, knows everything, reads everything, hears every rumor and checks them all out. And every day Mr. Market blends all that information together to estimate the value of investments
This, of course, incited a storm of misplaced moralism:
And yet, of course, it was impossible. The reason it was impossible is an extreme example of the cold, moral "realism" of market economics that causes many people to dislike capitalism — to the endless frustration of champions who focus on its good results.
But there's something the naysayers miss - and always miss - about capitalism: While its methods may be divorced from any direct moral imperative, its results are inherently moral anyway:
Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand" causes a manufacturer, say, to make quality products, not necessarily out of pride or concern for customers, but because quality products sell quicker at higher prices.

By making each person's profit depend on pleasing others, the market spins the abundant straw of avarice into the gold of the common good.

It's the same with markets. Every time an investor buys or sells an investment (causing its price to rise or fall), he or she is sharing information with others — not out of generosity, but to make money. Nonetheless, the information gets shared.

Similarly, a terrorism market would inspire people to do out of a selfish desire for gain what they should have done out of moral decency — to tell what they know.
Tice hits the main point:
And of course that's just the problem. The motives of terrorism "investors" would be simply too barbarous to be tolerated, and too repulsive to be used, even for the best of purposes. No result, however beneficial, is worth the moral debasement involved in rewarding such motives — or at least that's what the politicians quickly decided.

In a much less inflamed way, different levels of tolerance for the reality of human selfishness determines how a person responds to the whole of free market economics.

Some people find it fairly easy to accept that human beings are self-interested. They think it a marvel (almost a miracle) that markets can convert self-seeking into unintentional generosity. Such people care about results more than motives.
Tice concludes by noting that, for most people, there comes a point on almost any issue where motives become more important than results.

But here's the problem; the motives were consistently mis-reported by the media and the opinion-shaping classes. There was lavish coverage of those who were indignant - "we're going to have fatcats profiting, profiting I tell you, over the deaths of innocent people!" - and almost no reporting (certainly no competent, detailed, economics-based reporting) on the potential strengths or value of the concept.

People - and I'm one of them - do balance motives and morals against results. But when the battle is being fought in the realm of public opinion, those who help shape public opinion do the world a gross disservice by focusing on only half the story.

Which creates more misery?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/19/2003 10:46:38 AM

Whodunnit - Instapundit notes that there are lots of people with motive in this morning's bombing at the UN compound in Baghdad.
The problem is that everyone in Iraq, both pro- and anti-Saddam, has a reason to dislike the U.N., which makes assigning responsibility tricky. Put this together with the mortar attack on (presumably pro-Saddam) Iraqi prisoners the other day and it almost makes me wonder if there's a third force at work here. Follow the link for updates as they come in -- The Command Post is all over this story.
Of course, the major media have already declared this further sign of Quagmire; the Today show this morning was all but declaring defeat.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/19/2003 10:19:21 AM

Monday, August 18, 2003

Sorry - Our condolences and prayers go out to Hugh Hewitt, whose father reportedly passed away today.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/18/2003 09:50:32 PM

Mischkified - Scrappleface is on a roll:Scrappleface - making Monday mornings bearable for the past year.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/18/2003 09:28:27 AM

Strib - the Ugly Americans - Whilst eating at a cafe in sunny Toscano - oh, heh heh, excuse me, in English that's "TUS-cany", I'm sorry, I can hardly stop lapsing into Italian since my trip to Italy...did I mention I'd gone to Italy on holiday...er, that's "Vacation" in American? No? Oh, silly me! Yeeeesssss, Geoffrey and I went to Toscan...er, Tuscany for our anniversary! Oh, it was wonderful - everything we'd heard about on Splendid Table, and more!

And the locals? Soooo colorful. Not like in Rome - my goodness, what a tourist trap that was. Nooooo, TUScany was fabulous. Why, I even wrote about it in this week's editorial!
"Oh, don't mention that man to me," the woman in the restaurant said. "How he and his ilk got elected I'll never understand. He's a pure criminal. He certainly doesn't represent me. And to think that now the whole world is watching him!"

Another embittered Democrat, bewailing President Bush?
If it's on the Strib editorial page, the choices are pretty much:
  1. Embittered Democrats bewailing Pawlenty,
  2. Embittered Democrats bewailing talk radio,
  3. Embittered Democrats bewailing any politician to the right of Martin Sabo,
  4. Embittered Democrats bewailing George Bush.
But today, they go internazionale - er, I'm sorry, that's "international", in English...
Hardly. The speaker was Tuscan, the object of her ire Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Just a few days into his half-year term as president of the European Union, the Italian leader was already aswim in controversy and calumny. To a person, Italians are rolling their eyes at the "honor" Berlusconi has claimed for their country. Some honor, to have Italy's chief bully and braggart, and conceivably its biggest crook, strutting on the European stage.
"To a person?" Polls, please?

And I'm trying to figure out which is funnier - that Italians, who are no more corrupt than any other people, but who institutionalized it more than any other western nation due to their rapacious trade unions and omnipresent Mafia connections, and whose flirtation with socialism and communism caused untold dislocation and misery, are complaining about Berlusconi any more than they did about any previous leader, or that the democratically elected Berlusconi is drawing the sort of universal excoriation the editoral claims.
That's how they seem to see it, and who can blame them? Italy's landscapes may be sunny, but its politics tell a dark story. No government seems able to hold on to power for more than a twinkling, and corruption in high places is almost de rigueur.

Take Berlusconi. Though the billionaire owns most Italian media outlets, his countrymen know very well their leader is a con man. They're well aware of his penchant for ducking taxes and pressing his thumbs on the scales of justice -- most recently by hectoring Italy's parliament into granting him immunity for pending bribery charges. Italians seem largely unsurprised. This bit of legerdemain, they know, was necessary to secure Berlusconi's opportunity to take over the rotating E.U. leadership.
"They"?

Who is this "They?" The Strib seems to think that a conversation in a Trattoria al Toscano...er, sorry, Tuscan cafe, gives them some broad mandate (and indeed, does the editorial source "they" at all?)
But of course it has also raised questions about his fitness to serve. And how has Berlusconi responded? Petulantly. One of his first moves was to make a Nazi jibe against a German parliament member.
Oh, dear. Those jibes again.

When the German labor minister made a Nazi "jibe" at President Bush, I don't recall this level of indignance. I guess only the jibee matters, huh?

The next part is where the Strib takes leave of its senses:
The E.U.'s new president has already said he'll focus his term on stemming immigration into Europe -- a pledge consistent with his xenophobic reputation.
And a pledge consistent with those of a large and growing part of the Euroean Electorate!

The Strib editorial board, driving from their offices high above downtown to their North Oaks ramblers, can not comprehend what immigration means in Europe. In America, immigrants move here, and after a generation or two, become Americans (despite the best efforts of the multiculturalists, whom the Strib supports). They can do that here - our culture is all about assimilation. You become American when you take the oath, learn the language, work at the job, and drop your ballot in the box.

It is impossible to become French, or German, or Italian. It's a connection passed on at birth. Immigrants do not assimilate - the cultures are not intrinsically equipped to accept them, and for the most part they do not want to be accepted. Immigrants in Europe live in neighborhoods apart from the rest of the society, speaking their own languages, eating their own foods, roaming the streets in their own gangs, reading their own newspapers. They form large, and increasingly disaffected, and unassimilable, minorities in many countries.

And across Europe, people are getting nervous - and electing more conservative governments who want to dial back the power and impact of immigrants. Italy, Hungary and Denmark have all elected more conservative governments; Germany's socialists held on by the skin of their teeth in the last elections, and state elections have been swinging consistently to the right. Some say only the murder of center-right Pim Fortuyn prevented his election last year in the Netherlands.

Across Europe, people are nervous about the power, the anger and the dissociation of immigrants.

But not, apparently, in the Strib's Tuscan cafe:
Berlusconi himself has said that "the West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with another civilization, Islam."

Those aren't the words of a humanitarian or a democrat, nor of any sensible European.
One wonders if anyone who differs from the Strib's soft-left cant will ever be called "Sensible".

Europe teems with ethnic hatred; gangs of locals immolate families of Turkish workers; French skinheads torch synogogues; "Sensible" European intellectuals are condoning a rise in anti-semitism; and across the Adriatic from Italy, the inevitable end-result of multiculturalism has been playing out for the last decade, spattering the Balkans with blood (and sending refugees across the sea to Italy, yet again).

Who's sensible?
Europe's population is aging -- its birthrate dropping -- faster than that of any other continent. It desperately needs a thoughtful and continentwide immigration policy that welcomes young immigrant workers to join its enervated societies, underwrite its pension needs and advance its economic growth.
Right.

The Strib, however, misses the key fact that the European Union's "thoughtful, continentwide immigration policy" is that of the multiculti - bring in people, dump them in the cities, and let the hatreds keep on festering.
That's one way to "conquer peoples." Calling them Nazis is another. But neither approach appeals much to the ordinary Italian. And to the extraordinary experiment called the European Union -- a venture meant to strengthen and revitalize an innovation called democracy -- such vile volleys must surely be deemed a disgrace.
The EU is not meant to strengthen democracy; it's meant to strengthen bureaucracy. The elections of Berlusconi and the rise of the European center-right are what is "strengthening democracy", bringing two voices to the table even as the European Union tries to regulate which voices can say what.

Perhaps if the Strib's editorial board needs to spend a little more time in the Moslem ghettoes of Antwerp and Rotterdam and Milan and Vienna, and doing a little less time in cafes alla Toscano.

Er, sorry. That's "In Tuscany".

Laws of Physics, Part II - Some observations:
  1. Gravity pulls downward.
  2. Nature abhors a vacuum.
  3. Systems will tend to conserve their energy.
  4. In every Tom Clancy novel, every protagonist will have an unstoppable urge to resume a long-dormant smoking habit.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/18/2003 06:50:22 AM

Just As Every Cop Is A Criminal - According to today's Strib, it's really the Democrats who are "fiscally responsible":
A group of prominent Democratic economists organized a conference call last week to blast the economic performance of President Bush. Nobel laureate Robert Solow of MIT pointed out that three federal tax cuts in three years have done little to stimulate the sluggish economy.
As of 1983, President Reagan's tax cuts hadn't yet gotten the economy going, either - should it have been tossed out? Oh, wait - the Strib wanted us to do exactly that.
Laura Tyson, who ran President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, observed that the government has traded structural budget surpluses for structural deficits since Bush took office.
Yawn war September 11 deflation of Clinton bubble zzzzzz
Berkeley professor George Akerlof, another Nobel laureate, called Bush's tax cuts the worst fiscal policy in 200 years.
Really?

Worse than Lyndon Johnson's simultaneous attempts to fight cold, hot and poverty wars?

This wasn't one of those mail-order Nobel prizes, was it?
One might dismiss this critique as predictable sniping from partisan players -- except that these leading liberals now represent the responsible wing of economic thought in the United States.
WHOAH!

Re-read that statement; it's a non-sequitur. I do dismiss the partisan-hack critique, and the only way the liberals are responsible is if you completely pervert the meaning of the word to a degree that'd make Orwell cry "implausible!"
In a scathing report on U.S. fiscal policy, the IMF warns that continued government borrowing could undercut world confidence in the U.S. dollar and that tax and budget gimmicks approved by Congress this year mean that "fiscal transparency appears to have weakened in recent years."

That's the sort of language the IMF usually reserves for basket-case economies such as Brazil or Mexico.
The IMF is dominated by people who never met a tax they didn't like.
Every major forecast -- by the White House, by the Congressional Budget Office, by private economists -- shows federal deficits persisting long after the economic recovery takes hold.
"Every Major Forecast" in 1985 showed the defict lasting indefinitely, as well.

Major forecasts don't get a lot of credit these days. Justifiably so.
After conferring with his top economists in Crawford, Texas, last week, the president told reporters that the mini-summit had produced no new plans for an economic stimulus program. Perhaps his advisers are confident that the economy is on its way to a robust recovery. Or perhaps they recognize that there's no money left in Washington to give away.
Or maybe they realized we, the taxpayers, have no more money to "give away" to the type of wastrels who pay attention to the the ravings of the IMF, Laura Tyson and Robert Solow.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/18/2003 06:47:20 AM

Scheer Lunacy - The Strib editorial page was...an embarassment of riches? No, the Strib editorial page was rich with embarassment yesterday.

Of course, every time they print the execrable Robert Scheer, it's throwing chum to the fisk gallery. Yesterday's installment, "A bid to divert attention from GOP's record", was no exception.
However you feel about Gray Davis, the fact is, this recall has become a shell game, led and paid for by Republicans, that conveniently distracts from the alarming failures and frauds of the White House.
I think it'd be more accurate to say that Bush's alleged failures are a shell game for Scheer to draw attention away from Gray Davis.
That includes the Bush administration's blind eye to the energy sting that robbed the California government of a good chunk of its past budget surplus.
The "Energy Sting" was made possible by Clinton-era changes in accounting regulations, and California's loopy-left regulations on new power plant construction.
The giddy media spectacle of porn stars and action heroes seeking to lead the world's sixth-largest economy should not divert us from the fact that the key black marks on Davis' resume -- the energy crisis and the budget shortfall -- were both messes created by deregulating, tax-cutting Republicans.
Scheer is wrong. Both "black marks" - as if there are only two - were direct results of Democrat meddling: the hyperregulation of the power industry, which created vast regulation with no increase in available power, and the collapse of the Clinton bubble.
In dealing with both, Davis has not pulled any rabbits out of his hat, but he has been a competent leader who minimized the damage. The red ink in California is a mere needle prick compared with the hemorrhaging of trillions in future debt thanks to President Bush's tax cuts for the rich, the invasion of Iraq and other disasters.
Future debt?

"OK, so there's not so much of a problem now, but someday, boy oh boy, that Bush is gonna be in trouble...

OBLIGATORY CONSPIRACY THEORY:
Suddenly the Republicans care not a whit about those social values they have been prattling about, or anything else but defeating a prominent Democrat. They brook no opposition, even from a conservative Democrat; their goal is a one-party system.
Read: "Not only are they ickypoopy, they want to crush democracy".

Say what you will about the recall - and I think recalls for anything short of felonies are a lousy idea - but Scheer's response, "Oh, yeah, well, Republicans are worse!" isn't going to save Davis. Or make Scheer any less of a comic fisking extravaganza.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/18/2003 05:44:57 AM

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Steyn on Arianna - Via Instapundit, here's Steyn in the WSJ, in a (per usual) sidesplitting critique of the Huffington campaign:
"If I had a pair o' dime for every time she's disdained the old paradigm, I'd be rich enough to run for governor, too.

Instead it's Arianna who's standing up and fighting for the little man. He lives at Apartment D, 47 Elm Street. But other little men are bound to be joining the campaign any day now, just you wait, and, even if they don't, there's always Warren Beatty. Arianna is taking us beyond the old left/right, rich/poor, hugely popular/massively obscure paradigms to forge a top-down grassroots movement tapping into a vast dried-up reservoir of inactive activists giving voice to millions who feel disenfranchised--so totally disenfranchised they don't even show up in polling surveys, which is why her numbers are down around 4% with Larry Flynt. Following the success of her hybrid car, she's now experimenting with a bandwagon that runs on nothing"
Not that different from the post-Ventura Minnesota Independence Party...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/17/2003 10:01:27 PM

Trolling for Signficance - Interesting bit on the Fraters blog yesterday about what the City Pages collection of blogs calls "the first cybermooning":
"Apparently last week there was a coordinated effort among Left leaning blogs across the nation to protest the lawsuit filed by Fox News against Al Franken, his upcoming book, and his use of their trademarked phrase "
Or as the City Pages (in their blog edition, Twin Cities Babelogue, puts it:
Fair and balanced? Was it ever! Blah3 has the best list — over 500 participating blogs letting Fox News know how very, very much we love them. In conjunction with National Fair and Balanced Day, Bush Wars conducted a poll on Bill O'Reilly (more at the Couch Pundit), but the big news was the scope and success of the first-ever cyber-mooning. Exposing their ass cheeks to power, the online Left may have just come of age.
Seems trite and trivial? Maybe, but I think it points to something larger.

Blogs on both sides have gotten into big group activities like this. Let's compare them:
  • Right Blogs - Coordinated blogging on Iranian independence day, to draw attention to the anti-theocracy protesters and their suffering, and to support their yearning for freedom.
  • Left Blogs - Coordinated blogging on behalf of comic Al Franken, to support his yearning for relevance.
  • Right Blogs - Gang fact-checking the New York Times, eventually helping to lead to the exposure of a culture of PC and disregard for the truth at the Old Gray Lady.
  • Left Blogs - "Cyber-mooning" Fox News.
As a tribute to the brave efforts of our cyber freedom fighters of the left, I'm going to co-opt trademarks from both the City Pages and Al Franken, for purely satirical purposes (see the top-right side of the page).

I'll await their applause of my courageous stance for my beliefs.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/17/2003 11:36:29 AM

Injustice - So after all these years, I figured someone on the web, somewhere, had to have done a tribute site to the greatest band you never heard, the Iron City Houserockers. .

The Houserockers were led by a Pittsburgh special-ed teacher and Springsteen pal, Joe Grushecky. During their still-lean heyday in the late seventies and early eighties, they were as good, tight and powerful as any band in the world - and I include my favorites (Springsteen, Petty, the Clash). Have a Good Time But Get Out Alive (produced by Ian Hunter and an uncredited Steve Van Zandt) and Blood On The Bricks (a Steve Cropper joint) are two of my twenty favorite records, ever.

But not a single fan site anywhere.

Hm. I might have to change that.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/17/2003 01:46:35 AM

Friday, August 15, 2003

The Unbearable Heaviness of Waiting - I'm not a particularly analytical person, normally.

In most cases, I'm a far-right-brain, "goal" person. I focus on the big picture, and have a pretty high threshold for "the small stuff" ("Is it potentially lethal"? usually covers it).

Not with job interviews, though. There, I make Steven Hawking look like a sk8rboi, when it comes to analysis.

In short - I worry myself sick until I know better. And I don't mean "worry sick" in the rhetorical sense; many mornings I literally wake up with the dry heaves, until I get the word, "yay", "nay" or "...we'd like to see you next week..."

I had an interview yesterday - a first face-to-face meeting with a hiring manager and four of his team members.

I think it went well - I'm generally a good interview. But I don't know how it came across, and it drives me nuts. It's not all related to the intense difficulty of this particular seven-month job-hunting ordeal; even before, I drove myself and those around me crazy with my endless, recursive self-doubt and over-analysys, especially after important interviews.

What makes it worse? I'm usually wrong.

I've had three interviews in the past six months that I thought I'd knocked out of the park - but I didn't get to the final round. I've had one where I was told I was definitely a shoe-in - but the position never got funded, and the interviewer lost interest. I had one that I thought I completely cratered - but I made it to the "Final Three" (before the company lost a major client, and its nerve). And the biggest example of all - a day where I interviewed with four people, and thought one - the manager - hated me. And it turned out he was the one who recommended hiring me, after all was said and done.

So this is one area where my perceptions betray me more often than not.

Gaaah . I need a job.

Oh, wait - we knew that, didn't we?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/15/2003 12:23:11 PM

Those Seventies Shows - Dig up details about DFL players' actions regarding American Bankers? Kudos.

Rip on Garrison Keillor's hypocrisy? Raves from the whole blogosphere.

But slip in an offhanded dig about seventies TV? Now I've gone too far, as I seem to have hit a nerve with the Fraters, when I very mildly shunned the '70's Goldberg/Schwartz cop drama SWAT (now a major motion picture, despite the fact that it last aired 27 years ago after a season and a half):
"Maybe I was just a bit a younger, a bit more idealistic, and a little less cynical than Mitch when the show aired because S.W.A.T. was must see TV for me as a youth.
I watched the first few episodes of SWAT fairly eagerly as a fifth (sixth?) grader; my far-left Mom didn't allow toy guns or violent TV in the house, so it involved sneaking over to Mike Aylmer or "Radish" Widmer's house to watch.

And after the forbidden fruit thrill of watching a show with guns wore off, I realized - this show is so implausible! Their tactics made no sense! They did things no cop would ever do! Robert Urich's hair never moved!

I know the questions already: Why did you insist on tactical plausibility? Why were you doing it as a pre-adolescent?

Mea Culpa. I have no explanation. I just did.

Perhaps that's why I watch so little TV today; so much was so depressingly awful when I was a kid. It was the era of The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, Three's Company, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Love Boat, TJ Hooker, Fantasy Island... TV that was desperately un-musical, un-funny, un-sexy, un-suspenseful, un-affirming, un-interesting...depressingly un-watchable.

Worst of all, of course, were the sixties-dreck reruns in which most of the kids in my little North Dakota neighborhood marinaded their brains after school most days. Gilligan's Island. The Munsters. The Addams Family. I cordially detested each of these shows; thei crappy production values, cheezy laugh tracks, and most of all the fact that most of my friends would sit and park in front of them every moment after most school days, rather than coming out and actually doing something.

And yeah, I know there were exceptions. After Mom realized that MASH, despite the presence of uniforms and the occasional rifle, was actually anti-war, it was allowed on TV (an early-sixties Philco we'd inherited from Grandma, followed by a '75 Silvania GT-Matic that survived until the mid-nineties). Mel Brooks' sole TV outing, "When Things Were Rotten" (both episodes - it seemed like the show lasted much less than the official four months) was a stitch, and I snuck in the occasional "Rockford Files", and realized even then that it was great stuff. And yes, I was the only 11-year-old in town who really dug "Upstairs, Downstairs".

Elder continues:
What icon of my childhood will Mitch go after next? He best not even think about ripping Emergency! . You go after Johnny and Roy at your own peril my friend. "
Emergency? Now you're talking real TV! The theme song, the Jack Webb-induced moral absolutism - and a young Deirdre Hall - alone were worth stopping by every Friday night!

No, now you're talking!

posted by Mitch Berg 8/15/2003 12:05:44 PM

Broderick, Again - Last month, we discussed Richard Broderick, a Green Party candidate for the St. Paul School Board.

In his initial press release last month, Broderick said
In order for our society to adopt these values [Green ones, noted earlier in the press release]-- as it must, if we are to survive on this planet -- we need to nurture the instinctively Green consciousness of our young people through the comprehensive application of these principles to curriculum, instruction, administration, and district-wide decision-making processes.
In other words, he's for using the education system to indoctrinate a generation of little Greens.

He's back.

A little bird sent me this note from the St. Paul Green Party discussion group - from a recent post by Broderick:
No, of course not. So here's my suggestion. Let's cut the Gordian Knot and have all the Palestinians, both the 1.5 million or so living in the Territories and East Jerusalem, as well as the 5 million living in the global Palestinian diaspora, convert en masse to Judaism, then exercise their Right to Return as Jews and take up residence throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories. Why, the way things stand now, the new converts who wanted to "return" to the West Bank or Gaza could even get subsidized housing, courtesy of the Israeli government, which is to say, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Now wouldn't that be a sweet deal?

And, in the end, if the new Palestinian/Jewish majority decided to bag the Zionist project and create a truly democratic, secular, multiethnic nation along the lines of, say, the United States, who could stop them?

Of course, there will be pain involved on both sides. For Palestinian Muslims and Christians it will not only mean giving up the faith of their fathers, but, even more discomfiting, undergoing circumcision if they are males. On the other hand, mass conversion should be a big financial boost to those authorized to perform bris, the circumcision ceremony. Mahmoud! Stop wincing!
It's obviously satire. It also makes Al Franken look funny.

But I come not to critique anyone's sense of satire - if you've read my blog this past 18 months, you'll know I'm not really qualified to do that.

Here's the real question: what's this guy going to be like on the board of a large, extremely diverse school district?

I doubt his "satirical" sense is going to win him any discussions. Of course, having his foot in his mouth won't help much either.

By the way - requests from St. Paul Greens for information on Broderick's press release were never answered.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/15/2003 10:43:03 AM

Juiceless - Watching news coverage this morning, you'd think things were hunky-dory everywhere but New York.

The Canadian government is blaming the outage on a lightning strike - on a Lake Erie-area power plant, in an area that experienced no lightning yesterday.

From the "Anything to Take a Swipe at the President" Department - On the "Today" show, Katie Couric and Lance Earnest looked a little faded by the heat, sitting on the street in captain's chairs, Couric's hair drawn back in the tight, pony-tailed 'do that screams "didn't have time to do make-up properly".

But that didn't stop her intrinsic bias.

While Couric was talking with Campbell Brown, the topic turned to the Federal response to the regional blackout. Brown noted the President's comments on the blackout, and Couric closed the interview: "Some might accuse the President of being asleep at the switch, so to speak". She paused as if waiting for a laugh that never came.

So.

The President, who is not an electrical engineer but rather the head of state, was "asleep at the switch" for failing to...anticipate? Prevent? Solve while in progress? To do something about an infrastructural and engineering flub that took place over the course of three minutes, among a hundred separate control stations and power plants over millions of square miles, apparently.

I guess the President was too busy outrunning speeding bullets.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/15/2003 09:00:11 AM

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Deja Whaaaa? - So driving down County B2 in Roseville last night past the Pavilion theatre, I saw a marquee for the movie...

...S.W.A.T?

SWAT? One of the worst TV shows of the seventies, even to my action-crazy 10-year-old mind? The show that launched Robert Urich? The show with the lead named "Hondo Harrelson", who led a pack of five misfit SWAT cops in a rolling fortress?

Then I read :Ebert's review:
"In a S.W.A.T. team training scene, the trainees are running toward a target while shooting, and somebody asks, 'No rolls?' The veteran cop in charge replies: 'They only roll in John Woo movies--not in real life.'

That's the point with 'S.W.A.T.' This isn't a John Woo movie, or 'Bad Boys 2,' or any of the other countless movies with wall-to-wall action and cardboard characters. It isn't exactly real life, either, and I have to admit some of the stunts and action scenes are a shade unlikely, but the movie's ambition is essentially to be the same kind of police movie they used to make before special effects upstaged human beings."
Hmmm. Good review. Can't be descended from the TV show.

But then...
The plot begins with a hostage situation gone wrong. A S.W.A.T. team member (Brian Gamble) disobeys orders, enters a bank and wounds a hostage. He and his partner Jim Street (Farrell) are offered demotions. Street accepts; his partner leaves the force. But Street, a talented officer and a great shot, is spotted by the legendary veteran Hondo Harrelson (Jackson), and chosen for his hand-picked elite S.W.A.T. team.
Oy vey.

Expect the Fantasy Island and Love Boat movies next.

And when they do the Caribe movie (followed SWAT on Tuesday nights when I was in sixth grade, starred Ricardo Montalban), give me a holler.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/14/2003 05:57:22 PM

Firefight Etiquette - When on patrol or approaching an enemy position, soldiers use hand signals to communicate.

I've been bombarded with requests for information on patrol fieldcraft, so we can start here, with this combat hand signal reference.

(Via Boviosity)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/14/2003 04:05:03 PM

Off - Getting ready for the big interview.

Thanks for the prayers and best wishes (and those yet to be made). And if you have any friends in high places at a first person plural bank, please let me know...

More posting this evening.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/14/2003 10:20:07 AM

Magic - I love this story.

Try that at a hockey game.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/14/2003 09:21:53 AM

Duelling Investigations - The Attorney General is investigating the Administration. The Legislature is investigating the Attorney General at the behest of the Administration.

The Star Tribune sets the stage:
"House Republican leaders announced the creation of a committee to look into the role of Hatch, a DFLer, in an enforcement action against an insurance company this year and his relationship with Qwest Telecommunications in a separate regulatory matter.

Hatch, meanwhile, said the Republican interest in his roles in those cases is merely a smokescreen to divert attention away from Pawlenty and his ties to a different telecommunications company."
While Sviggum and the Legislative Committee investigate the Attorney General, the AGO will be investigating not only Pawlenty's (and Pat Awada's) connections with NewTel - but our old friend, the American Bankers story:
House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, said the House focus would be into the "potential illegal and unethical actions of Mike Hatch" on the American Bankers Insurance Co. settlement, which already has been scrutinized by the legislative auditor, and on an investigation of alleged anticompetitive practices by Qwest.
Looks like I may need to add a Part 6 to the American Bankers piece...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/14/2003 08:56:44 AM

All's Well that's Not Investigated Yet - I caught a few minutes of Hewitt last night, while station-surfing (and in the rare moments I could get the car radio away from "Radio Disney").

Hewitt was interviewing Joshua Micah Marshall, one of the tonier bloggers from the left.

Marshall said something that echoed what he'd written in an MSNBC piece, and on his blog, earlier in the day:
All the horrors of terrorism aside, that line really brought a smile to my face. There was no plot. So there really wasn't much of a way al Qaeda could have been involved, right?"
"WRONG", I yelled, to my kids' alarm. "We just don't know yet!".

I nearly pulled over to a pay phone - but I had to get somewhere fast, and I vowed to blog about it today.

Fortunately, Lileks beat me to the punch in the Bleat today:
When I read this, I summoned my inner Moe the Bartender: whaaaa? How the devil can you assume that, right off the bar? First of all: the arms dealer thought he was buying real missiles. And what would he do with the merch?

1. Give them to the United Way for their upcoming “Pledge Or Else” drive

2. Mount them on the wall, and impress his friends by reprising the “say hello to my leel fren” climax of “Scarface”

3. Sell them to someone who wanted to, oh, I don’t know, bring down a jet

I mean, the fact that it’s “not immediately clear” that there was a connection to al-Qaeda or any other collection of hot-eyed nutballs hardly means there was no connection; it means that the reporter asked his source if al-Qaeda et al was connected, and the source said “no idea.”
Exactly.

This is the mirror image of the Administration behavior that makes the left howl with glee, and makes some of us on the right cringe; publicizing claims before anyone is really, really sure. We have no idea yet who was behind the deal, and according to Instapundit this morning, we may never know, thanks to the BBC (link via Instapundit)
But those plans went awry late Tuesday afternoon when the Feds learned that the BBC was about to broadcast a sensational report on Lakhani’s arrest by one of its star correspondents, Tom Mangold. The BBC story, based on an apparent leak from a law-enforcement source, had some key details wrong. For one thing, it falsely claimed that the arms dealer’s attempted sale of a shoulder-fired SA-18 missile and launder was part of a plot by terrorists to shoot down Air Force One—a target that never actually came up in the discussions.
But even so, U.S. law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK, the damage was done. The FBI had to abort its plan to recruit Lakhani as an informant and instead charged him today in federal court in Newark, N.J., with weapons smuggling and with providing material support to terrorists. Also arrested in the case were two alleged confederates—a New York City jeweler and a Malaysian businessman—who were charged with conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transfer business.
So not only may we never find out who was really behind the sale - Al Quaeda or merely run of the mill terrorists who want to shoot down planes, presumably - but our best chance to really know was blown for a scoop.

UPDATE: Scrappleface has the better story.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/14/2003 08:08:45 AM

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Squashed - Still working on a big honkin' deliverable for a client that is paying me money for my boundless design savvy. Blogging will be light today.

No, I mean it this time.

My magnum opus about urban conservatism will probably be delayed a day or so.

Hang in there.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/13/2003 12:27:12 PM

Brooks - To me, Hockey has pretty much always been something that clogs up the space between the World Series and pitchers reporting for spring training. It's never really grabbed me. I'm from North Dakota, which, despite the presence of perennial power UND (whose team is perennially imported from out of state or Canada) and being coated in ice probably seven months a year, just isn't hockey country.

But Powerline quotes from a wonderful Wall Street Journal piece on the meaning of Herb Brooks' 1980 triumph in Lake Placid in the context of the Cold War:
"'The victory in Lake Placid in 1980 was an inspiring moment at a time when Americans needed it most. The game took place on February 22, two months after the Soviets' Christmas Day invasion of Afghanistan and just three months after Americans had been taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. With the U.S. setbacks in those proxy states, Cold War victory seemed more probable for Moscow.

'In hockey, the Soviets were the reigning world power and the college players Mr. Brooks coached weren't expected to have a chance against the older, more experienced Russian players, some of whom played for military teams. A week before the Games opened, the Soviets clobbered the home team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden. The Americans were 'boys being sent on a man's errand,' a Canadian sports writer opined.

'And then the Yanks won, thanks to a fast-paced style of play developed by Mr. Brooks. Lake Placid and the rest of the country erupted in flag-waving, song-singing celebration. Jimmy Carter called with an invitation to the White House. The U.S. went on to defeat Finland for the gold medal.

'Politics has been the backdrop for some of the most thrilling moments in Olympic history, and 1980 wasn't the first time that the competition between freedom and totalitarianism had been played out in the Games. In Berlin in 1936, Jesse Owens did something no European had been able to do: show up Hitler. In Melbourne in 1956, a month after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, the Hungarian team defeated the Russians in a bloody game of water polo.

'By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet empire had collapsed -- an event, we now know, was foreshadowed in the early weeks of that decade by Mr. Brooks's 'Miracle on Ice.''"
Pardon me, Powerguys, for quoting so liberally - but it's a great piece.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/13/2003 12:26:54 PM

Amnesia - Conservative eminimento and former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber has an excellent article in the WSJ (reprinted in Frontpage) about the amnesia of those criticizing the President's pace and motives in going to war with Iraq:
"The Bush case for going into Iraq was based largely on findings of U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspectors, as well as those of other governments. The case for war was nearly identical to the one made by Democrats like President Clinton and Sens. Daschle and Kerry. In case the critics suffer from amnesia, here are just a few of their judgments that pre-date the Bush administration:"
I'm bookmarking this one.

(Via Powerline)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/13/2003 12:20:13 PM

Circus - Someone is digging into the wackjob-left bag of tricks, as Ralph Nader gets a taste of classic Indymeat debating:
"Nader was speaking at an event to endorse fellow Green Peter Camejo for California governor when a man ran into the room where he was speaking, forced a pie in his face, and made a quick exit."
It just occurred to me - the Florida Chamber of Commerce should send Gray Davis a hearty "thank you" note. By the time this fracas is over, nobody will remember either of Florida's last two electoral debacles.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/13/2003 11:48:20 AM

Things Best Left Undiscovered - When my son, Sam, was about three years old, he started talking about a character, "Chickenstein".

Now, Sam has had this strange, quirky, dry sense of humor, combined with an outrageous imagination, since he was a tiny boy (very unlike his older sister, who is much more slapstick). He's always been the living incarnation of Calvin - complete with blond towhead, hyperactive fantasy and real lives, even the stuffed alter ego (a little frog named "Croakey" instead of the tiger).

And all these years, I'd figured Chickenstein was an early manifestation of what I'd come to know as his zany inner self.

But now, as I sit here working on that deliverable (due by close of biz today), and listen to the TV in the next room, I hear that in fact it was from a cartoon.

And to add insult to injury, it's from a cartoon I hated even as a ten year old - Scooby Doo.

Blah.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/13/2003 11:42:02 AM

Mittyism - Yesterday, I focused on a demi-literate rant site, Rush Limbaughtomy.

The Spoons Experience rang the site up for some particularly, egregiously lousy writing combined with some grossly wishful thinking. I linked to them specifically as an example of extremely crummy writing (you know - the type that TYPES IN ALL CAPS to connote emphasis. You hear me knockin', right?) and comical half-information (like this bit here, where they "reveal" that Arnold Schwartzenegger went AWOL from the Austrian Army - a fact that astounded me when I saw it on Biography, like five years ago).

Tonight, The King (over at SCSU Scholars) reports that they think they've scored a real coup;that the traffic they're getting from a short list of conservative sites is an indication that they're doing a great job.

You be the judge.

UPDATE: King Banaian of SCSU Scholars judged, and did it with style:
Your readers and you continue with your anger and your hate for those who disagree with your vision for America. It isn't enough for the likes of you to say "I disagree". You have to find your opponents morally inferior and reprobate.

In other words, you'd make a great academic. Lucky for you, intelligence isn't required. Your "Condi told Willie not to fly on 9/11" crowd can join the professor at UMD looking for the wrench in Wellstone's plane.
And with that, I'm done with them.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/13/2003 12:48:46 AM

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Swamped - Busy with a deliverable to a client right now.

That, and getting ready for an interview on Thursday. [insert usual pleas for prayers and best wishes here].

Tomorrow - Urban Conservatism.

Probably.

Condolences - to the family and friends of Herb Brooks, and to all fans of hockey in Minnesota.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/12/2003 01:03:55 PM

Two Tribes - Midwest Conservative Journal has an excellent piece on what the Gene Robinson matter means to the Episcopal Church - and liberal Christianity.
CBN reporter Wendy Griffith asked Robinson how he reconciles the gay lifestyle with the Bible.

Griffith asked, "How would you interpret Romans 1:26-'For even the women exchange the natural use for what is against nature, likewise also the men leaving the natural use of the women, burn in their lust for one another; man with man committing what is shameful.' How do you reconcile that?"

Robinson suggested that the Scriptures are out of date.

"Uh, when those Scriptures were written in both the Old and New Testaments, everyone was presumed to be heterosexual, so to act in any other manner would be against one's natural inclinations. The whole notion of sexual orientation is only about a hundred years old. So to take the concept of homosexuality as a sexual orientation and to read it back into an ancient text, uh-is very shaky ground to be on."

Rev. David Anderson of the American Anglican Council blasted that one out of the water:

"Yes, that's the argument they use, which conveniently overlooks the fact that people have had same-gender attractions and Scripture says don't act on them. It would presume that God didn't know about men and women that he created, and now God has somehow got his Masters' degree and now knows more. Both in the Old Testament, in the Book of Leviticus, for example, it's very clear that this is not something you're to do. So, how can someone be a leader in church and function as a bishop, and be living a lifestyle that the Old and the New Testament together say is not permissible?"
I'm not going to say I can't be convinced. I am going to say that while I still think there's a secular, legal case to be made for domestic partnerships, the case for full recognition of homosexuality by the church as a valid lifestyle for a Christian seems fuzzier and fuzzier.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/12/2003 01:02:16 PM

MoveOut - Jay Reding quotes Byron Yorkfrom National Review on MoveOn.org's disingenuous message:
Despite it all — its anti-Bush campaign, its contributions made only to Democrats, its ties with left-wing charities — MoveOn calls itself a "nonpartisan" organization. "MoveOn.org is an issue-oriented, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that gives people a voice in shaping the laws that affect their lives," says its website. "MoveOn.org engages people in the civic process, using the Internet to democratically determine a nonpartisan agenda . . ."

Of course, no one believes that. Nevertheless, MoveOn is being credited with changing the face of American politics. There's more than a little hype in that conclusion. Yes, the Internet has real potential as a fundraising tool. But so far MoveOn has not shown that it can expand its appeal beyond the hard-core, Bush-hating, antiwar Left. It can buy splashy advertisements and generate headlines. But there's nothing to suggest that it can win elections.
Read the whole NR piece, which includes an analysis of the group's online, financial and political history.

Reding notes:
"...if anything groups like MoveOn and others hurt the chances of mainstream Democrats. By placing the radical left's absolute and infantile hatred of the President front-and-center it only alienates the very swing voters needed to win. The smear tactics of MoveOn failed to produce change in 1998, 2000, and in 2002. If anything, the GOP should be thankful that the inmates at MoveOn are running the Democratic asylum - it could very well hand the 2004 election to the GOP."
Read 'em both.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/12/2003 09:43:28 AM

Ghastly - A white Republican student posts a poster for an event featuring a black Republican. A black, liberal student complains about the poster, and calls campus security.

The white Republican student is hauled before a kangaroo court, which threatens him with expulsion if he doesn't apologize for a disruption the "trial" transcript says he never caused:
[Student Accusor]: You’re talking about Steve’s demeanor? Was his demeanor threatening?

[Hearing Officer]: M-hmm, or abusive?

[Student Accusor]: No.
Joanne Jacobs is on the story.

Money graf? Cornel Morton, Cal Poly’s vice president of student affairs, from the transcript:
Well, it’s clear that we have an identifiably young white male who has been self-identified as a member of the College Republicans group. And although the College Republican group, I’m certain, is not exclusively white or male, there are some implications. And on the other side of this we had a group of students of color, at least identifiably, largely students of color, and the mix, unfortunately, and the collision of experience, that is, the collision of your experience with theirs, on that day at that time was placed inside a larger context, as you recall. And namely these fliers that were posted and the concern that some had about the nature of the speaker’s message and all the rest …. And then to learn later after some investigation that the College Republicans had sponsored the speaker. I think that chemistry, if you will, without question, had racial implications, not reduced solely or purely to a matter of race. But again, I think we would be naïve if we did not acknowledge at least that; we would have to acknowledge that.
"then to learn later after some investigation that the College Republicans had sponsored the speaker. I think that chemistry, if you will, without question, had racial implications".

I poke fun at the two-bit bigotry behind sides like this, or Democrats.com. Seeing it from the leadership of a main-line, prestigious public institution, though - it's not a surprise, but it's still a demoralizing surprise in 2003.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/12/2003 09:36:44 AM

Monday, August 11, 2003

Uh...Huh. Right. Well, Then... - I can't take this site all that seriously. It shows all the signs of being written by a guy stuck in a home office with too much time on his han...er...

...let's start over.

I really enjoy reading liberals who believe that, on the one hand, they are:
...intelligent literate compassionate liberal Democrats...
who then turn around and say things like:
The South needs another 25 years of evolution and education to reach a literacy and consciousness necessary to think outside the limited interests of the Christian Coalition and the NRA.
Anyway, the big quote is:
The early exit polls in FLORIDA were correct. Had all the votes counted as intended Gore would be President. We would be prosperous, people would be employed, the deficit would not exist, the Rich would have gotten richer, the poor would not be as poor, we would not be at war, soldiers would not be dying, Osama Bin Lauden would be dead, there would be no Dept. of Big Brother Security, there would be no Patriot Act and the World Trade Towers would still be standing.
I only put it all here to give you all the hilarity of this site, without having to actually go and read its tinfoil-hatted, overwrought glory.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 05:56:07 PM

Crossed Fingers, Part XXXIX - Just had a 20-minutes phone interview with a company I've been nagging for a job for five months.

Cool-sounding gig, the shortest commute I'll have had in ten years (if I get the job), and in an industry that's not going anywhere soon.

Waiting to hear if I get a "real" interview later this week.

Prayers, crossed fingers and deposits in the Karma bank eagerly solicited. Just as eagerly - if any of you have serious contacts in the financial services biz - drop me a line!

Speaking of finances - feel free to note my Amazon link, on the right. If you like the blog, I appreciate every single dollar I get - and every dime goes toward this site's hosting.

Thanks in advance for both!

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 03:28:55 PM

Cut Loose? - My dad took us out of the Lutheran Church when I was 11, and we joined the Presbyterian church. I always figured it was because my dad, a speech teacher, was bored stiff by the Lutheran minister's somnolent speaking style, and was interested by Reverend King's engaging, intellectually-satisfying sermons. The church was a big influence on me as a child and teenager; Reverend King, the pastor that confirmed me, had a huge impact on me, and the church's youth group influenced me greatly; one of the leaders, Mick Burns (now Reverend Burns) gave me more background on living a moral life than anyone I'd ever met. Another - Jim Jacobson (also a pastor, the last I heard) taught me how to play the blues on guitar. I learned that it was possible to enjoy being a musician, even a rocker, without turning my back on what I believed.

Faith was an important thing to me.

When I was in college, I made a considered effort to answer the question "What do I believe about G-d and religion? For starters, do I believe? If so, what? And in what sort of community, if any, do I want to practice any faith I have?"

The first parts were fairly easy. I've never found a reason not to believe in the divine. My faith has had its dips and swoops over the past twenty-odd years, but I have no doubt that G-d is out there and is watching over us. The evidence is in every corner of my daily life, even at this outwardly-lousy time of my life.

The second question? Well, it was fairly easy. I examined quite a few different religions, but never really seriously considered anything but Christianity. Buddhism - the refuge of many theologically-disjointed Americans - struck me as deeply nihilistic, selfish and hopeless (and most of its American, as opposed to Asian and Indian, practicioners as solipsistic and theologically lazy). Islam was never a choice - there was nothing about the post-Judaic theology that made any sense to me, and there's the little matter of exclusivity; all existence is sorted into the State of War or the State of Islam - with War covering everything or everyone that's not yet Moslem, that needs to be converted or otherwise dealt with. I looked at Judaism - and but everything that made sense to me about Judaism made more sense in Christianity. Atheism was never an option - I've never found any part of atheism either intellectually or morally tenable, nor personally reasonable.

Once I knew that (and it didn't take that long), the problem was finding a denomination (or deciding not to) in which to practice this faith. I ruled out some denominations fairly quickly. I think predestination removes all genuine reason for faith, so I rejected it (then and now) and all denominations that believe in it. And I've never found much common ground with denominations that focus on spirituality to the exclusion of all else - those that forget about the Father and the Son while awash in the Spirit. I had a number of friends who believed that the only faith that truly mattered was the loud, charismatic, spirit-focused faith; that a more internal, thoughful faith that balanced spirit with intellect was somehow a lesser thing. My ex-nephew-in-law, a sometimes Assemblies of G-d minister, said it in a sermon I once attended: "We see people who [don't speak in tongues], and we feel sorry for them; their faith is cold and dead". Which countervenes the Bible, of course; somewhere in Romans (I'm not going to look it up now), Christ notes that G-d calls people to faith, and gives people gifts in the faith appropriate to their calling. Some speak in tongues. Some find it in other ways - mentally, musically, through the work they do.

In the end, I settled in the Presbyterian Church, for mostly theological reasons. The core of Presbyterian theology is extremely basic; it's a shame "fundamentalist" has such a bad connotation in our society, because the big attraction for me was exactly the focus on the fundamentals of Christianity, without the extra, man-made dogma added on.

And for years, I was happy with the choice. But it's not so easy now.

While some American Catholics have for decades flirted with abandoning Roman control and softening their stance toward gays, abortion, divorce, annulment and married priests, it's the Episcopals that have taken the most visible, national plunge into either social egalitarianism or theological suicide, depending on who you ask.

But my own Presbyterian Church has been only a degree or two behind the more flamboyantly liberal churches - and probably more consistent about its political and social liberalism.

This is nothing new, of course. When my old pastor, Reverend Bill King, left North Dakota, he took over a congregation in Madison, Wisconsin, and got it heavily involved in the Sanctuary Movement back in the eighties (I used to call him and taunt him by saying I'd grown up to be a conservative talk show host - because of his teaching! It mortified him). Over the years, other ministers would use their sermons as an excuse to slip in bon mots of social liberalism (or sometimes great chunks of it). My current church sports an assistant pastor whose every sermon last winter included a ringing condemnation of the liberation of Iraq, and who continuously blames the US for the famine in North Korea.

But I've stayed the course with the Presbyterian Church - because I've long believed that John Knox' robust, simple approach to Christian theology was the one that provided the best framework for a group of different people to meet and worship.

Still, I'm starting to wonder. The latest news from the PCUSA:
The General Assembly on Friday deflected an overture that would have required the 173 presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to vote for a third time in six years on whether to delete the so-called “fidelity and chastity” provision from the Book of Order.

The Assembly’s Committee on Church Orders and Ministry had recommended that the Assembly again ask the denomination to delete the controversial section — G-6.0106b, which says candidates for ordination to church office must be “faithful in the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chaste in singleness.”
And extensive discussion about a paper that:
...documents the changing structure of family life in the United States — which now includes, for example, single-parent households, families in which children are raised by grandparents or other non-parent relatives, and domestic partnerships other than marriage. It discusses how families of a wide diversity of forms can raise children faithfully and responsibly.

The ACSWP report, compiled in response to directives from General Assemblies in 1997 and 1998, asks the church to commit itself to being an inclusive and caring community of faith in which many forms of family are valued, including “families with members of homosexual orientation.”
“I think the point was to describe all the various family forms that we have,” said Mount, “and then to say, ‘What makes one of these good or bad is the quality of the love, of the care and the mutuality and the nurturing and so on that occurs there.’”
As I've said many times in this forum, I think there is a legal case to be made for gay marriage. Maybe.

I don't believe there is a theological case for it, though.

The causes of famine in North Korea, or the morality of deposing Saddam Hussein, are things on which reasonable people can disagree. Sort of.

But tinkering with the definition of "family"? It's not an academic exercise anymore. There is a lot on the line right now. The Presbyterians, and some of the more liberal Lutheran synods, are flirting with following the Episcopals. The Presbyterians even cryptically note an insurrection on this issue:
The 215th General Assembly chose to gently remind synods, presbyteries and congregations of their obligations to correct governing bodies in their jurisdictions that ordain gays and lesbians in defiance of the Presbyterian Church (USA) constitution.
So - twenty years after I thought I'd finished my search, I'm looking at the possibility of starting again.

UPDATE: As a side note - reading the reports from the PCUSA's General Assembly for this posting, I've been heartened - and surprised, just a bit - by the extent of the conservative backlash even within the relatively liberal Presbyterian Church. I don't see much of it in the congregations I've attended lately, but perhaps there's hope...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 10:47:44 AM

No, Not That Peace - So, somehow or other, the countries most involved with and affected by the violence in Liberia - West African nations like Nigeria, Mali and Ghana - are responding to the crisis next door. Troops from those nations are on the way to Liberia, and have for the moment brought calm to the streets of Monrovia.

So naturally, it's time for an an anti-American swipe or two:
"Ever since the African peacekeepers landed this week, calm has blanketed the war-torn capital. Honking car horns and pattering feet have replaced the sounds of gunfire and mortars. Not a single shot has been fired at the peacekeepers.

For Liberians such as Colendo, it shows what could have happened had the international community acted faster, had U.S. troops been sent in weeks ago. Perhaps his eight friends who were killed when mortars rained down at Greystone, a U.S. compound turned refugee camp, might have lived, he said.

'We are so disappointed,' said Colendo, shaking his head. 'Unlike our West African brothers, America has abandoned us. Liberia is not like Somalia. They could get a warmer reception than the West Africans if they hit the ground.'"
Of course, as we learned from Somalia, the warm reception can quickly turn to warm lead, in nations with large, well-armed factions whose main interest is control, not achieving peace, justice and the rule of law.

How much coverage will that idea get in the local media?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 08:22:55 AM

Now It's A Problem - "Stacey" is a girl, pictured in the latest edition of Newsweekat the Mall of America.

She is, as the article (and this morning's "Today" show interview) says, 17, "Cute, blond and chatty". And she's a teenage prostitute:
THE ENCOUNTER TAUGHT Stacey a lesson: “Potentially good sex is a small price to pay for the freedom to spend money on what I want.” The easiest way, she discovered, was to offer her body in trade. Stacey, who lives with her parents in an upscale neighborhood, gets good grades in high school and plans to try out for the tennis team, began stripping for men in hotel rooms in exchange for money to buy clothes—then went on to more intimate activities. She placed ads on a local telephone personals service, offering “wealthy, generous” men “an evening of fun” for $400. All the while, she told her parents she was out with friends or at the mall, and was careful to be home before her midnight curfew.
Here's the part that nearly made me urp up my coffee; Suzanne Smalley (and Katie Couric) said:
And, while the vast majority of teen prostitutes today are runaways, illegal immigrants and children of poor urban areas, experts say a growing number now come from middle-class homes. “Compared to three years ago, we’ve seen a 70 percent increase in kids from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds, many of whom have not suffered mental, sexual or physical abuse,”
I know. It sounds like I'm dragging a quote out of context.

You had to hear the interview. I have to doubt that I'm the only one who listened, slack-jawed, and asked "...so was it a problem when it was teenage runaways and Mexican girls?"

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 07:53:12 AM

Hatch and the Qwest for 2006 - In March, Minnesota attorney general Mike Hatch made maximum hay from a "scandal" that, eventually, pointed back at him.

More followed - the "Gang Task Force" scandal, the "Sexual Predators" releases that weren't, Telegate. The pattern was always the same; about the time the previous "scandal" died down, the next one would break in the local media, as if on cue.

And, inevitably, in every story, Mike Hatch (as portrayed in the local media) was the scolding figure in the background, waving his finger at the new adminstration.

My theory - and I'm not alone - has been that Hatch was prepping the ground for a run at Pawlenty in 2006.

But maybe it was all a pre-emptive strike for when this story came out: Hatch is involved with Qwest Communications.
"The Communication Workers of America (CWA) found common cause with Qwest management in its fight last year to ward off the fines and a proposed breakup of the company. It contributed about $135,000 to the DFL Party and Hatch's reelection campaign and on behalf of DFL gubernatorial candidate Roger Moe. Most of that amount, $125,000, was given to the DFL Party by the national CWA unit.

Hatch has close personal associates at Qwest, as well. John Stanoch, who was Hatch's top deputy for the first two years of his first term, was hired by Qwest more than two years ago as president of Minnesota operations. He is a former district judge and was campaign manager for Gov. Rudy Perpich, a DFLer, in 1990."
Our old friend from the American Bankers story, Ron Jerich, makes an encore appearance; he is a lobbyist for Qwest.

Just as happened with the American Bankers story, Hatch is covering his alleged wrongdoing with populist bluster.
"I have a 25-year track record of fighting for the underdog and the consumer, and I take great pride in that," he said. "That's more important to me than political affiliation, more important to me than any labor organization. I represent the people of this state, and that's my trademark.

"By God, that's what I am all about, that's all I'm about. I don't sell out. I may get tricked but I don't sell out. . . . And I'm not going to have . . . Republicans accuse me otherwise," said Hatch, who is a top DFL prospect to run against Pawlenty in 2006.
He's not going to "have" Republicans accuse him otherwise?

Well, perhaps. But there are some questions to answer first.

Once the money changed hands, according to the Strib:
Shortly after the November election, at the final stage before the PUC was to render its decision on the anti-competitive question, the Commerce Department and Hatch's residential utilities division submitted sharply different proposals for penalizing Qwest.

The Commerce brief issued scathing critiques of the company, but the much shorter brief from the attorney general's office contained almost no editorializing on the company's conduct, calling instead for "a creative remedy" rather than "a traditional remedy which only really benefits the state treasury."

Commerce's Mendoza, in his brief, scoffed at the claims of possible bankruptcy and damage to employees and retirees, noting that executives had recently assured the media that the company was not in peril and that Qwest was so big and potentially profitable that it could "treat $50 million like loose pocket change." He stuck by his department's proposal to break the company into wholesale and retail operations.

Hatch said that he respects Mendoza as a tenacious regulator but that it was clear that a structural separation was a dead issue and would not succeed.
Sound an awful lot like Mike Hatch's version of Commerce's behavior in the American Bankers incident?

More to come.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 02:05:39 AM

Merle Was Right - The Strib devotes space to the most irritating fadlet of the century so far: Metrosexuality:
"A metrosexual, in case you've managed to avoid news of the fluffed-up and overextended variety in the last two months, is an urban straight guy who knows his way around a fashion magazine and likes to shop, go to salons and use fancy skin creams."
I guess that makes me a Metrophobe.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/11/2003 01:48:06 AM

Sunday, August 10, 2003

The Best They Can Do? - Cruz Bustamante, California's current Lieutenant Governor, declared his candidacy in the California Recallapalooza yesterday.

I almost drove off the road when I read what he'd said shortly after putting the last twist on the knife in Gray Davis' back.

California is verging on bankruptcy. Taxes are skyrocketing, the deficit is ballooning, the power situation is still tenuous (and that's not Enron's fault, and never was), and business is fleeing Cali like a strip club where Barbara Carlson has decided to make a guest appearance. So what is Bustamante running on?

According to Bustamante:
"people should vote for him “if you care about fair admissions to college education, if you care about protecting the coast, if you care about living wages, if you care about protecting privacy from those who would sell it for profit, if you think it ought to be a woman’s right to chose.”
Naturally.

And here we have further proof of the theorem that, in any given election, the credible candidate that is farthest to the right will inevitably be labeled the "right wing extremist". We saw it in Minnesota, where the socially moderate Tim Pawlenty was branded a "right wing extremist" (to no electoral avail).

Will we see it in California, against the pro-"choice", pro-gun-control, pro-gay-marriage Schwartzenegger?

What did Bustamante call Schwartzenegger during this speech?

An "Extremist".

Watch for this in the national and Cali media.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/10/2003 10:25:35 AM

Mirror Image - In the sixties, the anti-war movement started with small groups of dedicated radical organizers on the college campuses, and grew to eventually include thousands of fairly regular people.

Today's anti-war movement is the same thing.

Only completely backwards, shrinking from large, newsworthy demonstrations in February and March, down to...
SAN FRANCISCO -- A group of about 600 peace activists and veterans marched through the streets of San Francisco today demanding that the U.S. government pull all its troops out of Iraq immediately.

The protesters, sponsored by San Francisco's Global Exchange and the Bay Area chapter of the antiwar group Not in Our Name, started at Mission and 24th streets shortly before 1 p.m. Saturday and marched up to the intersection of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue in an hour."
Someone in "the movement" must be paying some attention to the polls. The tapdance is pretty obvious:
[Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange says] "We are rebuilding the anti-war movement into an anti-occupation movement. We've dissolved the whole issues of being for or against the troops. Now we are with the troops and we all want them to be brought home."
Ms. Benjamin also flirts with the heart of the issue:
Today's rally was smaller than pre-war rallies before the Iraq War started. Benjamin said the movement is still rebuilding. She said it will be difficult to draw attention to the anti-occupation movement in Iraq because the public is preoccupied with the recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

"But we still have 49 other states we can organize in," she said. "And once students are back in school it will be easier to organize."
Once students are back in school.

Once there are classes to be skipped, and professors nostalgic for the sixties to be mollified on school time, and middie-top wearin' college babes to draw the hackey-sack playin' guys, then we'll see that "anti-occupation movement" swinging into gear.

Count on it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/10/2003 10:13:02 AM

Advice - Jesse Ventura has some advice for Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Surprisingly, some of it is pretty good, and actually represents the bit of the "Ventura Legacy" that actually mattered:
"Now that you are a candidate, you will be getting advice from all corners. Some of it will have checks attached. Whatever you do, keep your distance from special-interest groups, powerful lobbyists and their dirty money. The fact is, Arnold, you don't need them. You can win this race by going straight to the people.

When you use commercials, don't be negative. Be Arnold. Let people get to know your sense of humor, your work ethic, your leadership and your genuine concern for the average Joe. Think about what you want to say, and talk from your heart. Scripts are for actors. When I was running in Minnesota, I saw my two opponents with stacks of briefing books and advisers galore giving them instructions. A debate organizer once came up to me and offered a pen and pad. I said, 'No, Ma'am, thanks anyway, but you see, if you tell the truth, you don't need a long memory.'"
Add one more bit of advice to this - one that Jesse won't be giving Ahnold; make sure you don't write any political checks you're not equipped to cash.

Don't run as a populist libertarian conservative, then turn your government over to a pack of stealth liberals (or whatever would be analogous for Arnold).

Other than that, though - worth a read.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/10/2003 10:03:21 AM

Saturday, August 09, 2003

The Slow Drip - The Melbourne Herald Sun reports yet another possible Iraq-Al Quaeda link.

Not the first we've seen:
"'Iraq agreed to provide chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda associates starting in December 2000,' the report said.

'Senior al-Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, along with approximately two dozen al-Qaeda terrorist associates.

'This group stayed in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq and plotted terrorist attacks around the world.'

The report, quoting the US State Department, also says the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein 'provided material assistance to Palestinian terrorist groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad'."
At some point, we'll have to be reaching the "preponderance of evidence" standard...

(Via Instapundit)

posted by Mitch Berg 8/9/2003 02:59:16 PM

Distant Connection - He has a band and a website...

...so why is that unusual?

The person behind the site - Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez - has exactly one claim to fame: Bruce Springsteen fired him from the E Street Band in 1974, replacing him with "Boom" Carter and then Max Weinberg. Listen to any of Bruce's old records, especially 1974's "The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" - Lopez is distinguished by having less natural sense of rhythm than any drummer in modern rock history.

"Steel Mill" is an old metal band of Springsteen's, from the late sixties. It played its last gig in 1971, if I remember correctly.

This may be a record for flogging a tenuous connection...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/9/2003 12:22:25 PM

Limbaugh on Blogs - Back in the early nineties - when email was still pretty exotic for most people, and the web was still a filing tool used in research labs - Rush Limbaugh emerged as the most computer-savvy person on the radio. He was the first major talk show host to pimp his email address on the air, and use email as part of his show. He was the first major syndie to have a website, and to drive a lot of traffic to the website as part of the program. And he was the first I'm aware of (I had stopped following talk radio on a semi-pro basis by this point) to try to turn his website into a revenue generator.

So to call Limbaugh an old-fashioned dinosaur is stretchy; Limbaugh has been a leader at incorporating the Internet into his program.

Instapundit has a series of excellent links on the topic of Limbaugh's dismissal of bloggers (part of which is quoted here from Instapundit, from Limbaugh's site):
"I treat you to my analysis of pollster Dr. David Hill's column headlined 'Bloggers Won't Match Limbaugh.' A blogger is a citizen who gets a website and just opines on various topics unrealted to politics. A friend of mine defined the term, derived from 'web log,' as 'a nerd with a journalist degree and no social life who spends most days and all nights writing e-mails to himself and his friends in hopes of attracting attention from traditional media outlets.' Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the best-known political blogger"
Leaving aside Limbaugh's friend's character analysis (as Reynolds notes, "I don't know if Sullivan has "no social life" -- seems to me I've heard some controversy about his having too much of one"), he's got a point.

Blogging is very self-referential. A lot of bloggers are descended, intellectually, from the people who used to sit up all night posting elaborate screeds on Usenet. Many of us are people who'd like to be columnists, but don't have the option of starting our careers over as copyboys; some of us would like to be talk show hosts (or, in the case of Lileks and, well, me, used to be talk show hosts) but can't start over as disk jockeys in Havre, Montana and begin the process of eternal relocation, butt-smooching and relentless self-dedication that it takes to become a major talkradio personality. Blogs provide that outlet, and they do it for free, from the comfort of your den.

From there, of course, natural selection is as tough as it is in radio; getting a blog out of the "30-hits a day, most of them friends and relatives" ghetto is nearly as hard as getting a shot at doing a talk show. The free market rules who succeeds on the blogosphere, every bit as much as in radio.

So how does this relate to Limbaugh, and especially his attitude about bloggers?

Reynolds says:
What's funny is that Limbaugh obviously feels the need to put down blogs, and to build himself up at their expense. What's he scared of? Blogs surely aren't cutting into his market share.
They're certainly not.

I can think of three possible answers to this:
  1. It's the Radio Law of the Jungle - Limbaugh started out as a disc jockey. When you work in music radio, you learn quickly; anything that siphons off listeners is something to jump on and extinguish. Music radio people endlessly analyze everything about their programming, looking not only to draw listeners, but eliminate anything that might cause them to tune out - how station jingles will segue into the intros of songs, or how many people tune out when DJs talk over song intros (versus the number that tune out when the DJ stops and the song intro takes time to pick up steam), or how many ratings book entries a DJ's air name will generate or lose - things so anal-retentive they'd make an IRS auditor shake her head and think "someone needs a laxative". They also think in terms of how they can counter their competition; "If WXYZ tends to play Christina Aguilera's new song coming out of the first commercial break in rush hour, maybe we need to end our break a minute earlier and play Christina first.

    Seems like a stretch? It does, even to me. But remember - this is part of Limbaugh's psyche. That's how radio is, and it's how Limbaugh earned his living during his formative years; it's not much different than how he earns it now.

    And while blogs don't siphon off listeners in any meaningful way (I've listened to Limbaugh while blogging, occasionally), if your outlook was formed in the music radio business, you regard any competition as bad.
  2. For Ten Years, He's Been the BMOC - For a decade now, when the media talks about "the conservative street", the account usually began or ended with a reference to Limbaugh. Whether Limbaugh had any intellectual reason to want to be regarded as the voice of "the conservative street" or not, there is certainly a commercial imperative; every mention in the press is a bit of free publicity, the kind of thing that promotions people and PR agents slave at getting.

    Now, a decade into the game, Limbaugh is getting competition; when the press talks about the "conservative street", names like Sullivan and Kaus and Reynolds and Lileks are popping up more often. Think the competition for mentions, or for the sort of mindshare that accompanies constant repetition doesn't matter to Limbaugh? See #1, above.
  3. Pre-Emptive Strike - And while you're seeing #1, above, remember this; there are talk hosts on the market now that do leverage blogs, and are in tune with how this medium works. Hugh Hewitt's show calls on bloggers (and blogosphere staples like Mark Steyn) for a very large part of his program's content. His show almost sounds like an audio blog; de-centralized, skipping about between issues during the course of an hour, as heavily oriented toward guests as any blog...

    ...which is very much in counterpoint to Limbaugh's style; Rush is the only voice on his show (barring the very rare interview). The genre of talk that's built up around Limbaugh, ranging from the sublime (Jason Lewis, Michael Medved) to the ridiculous (Michael Savage) focus on the topic and, even more so, the personality of the host. The format of a Limbaugh or a Lewis or to a lesser extent a Medved show owes a lot to television; the hour, or the show, is a self-contained unit, produced to present the host and the content (in that order) as attention-grabbing-and-keeping units. Blogs - and shows like Hewitt, or as Lileks mentioned the other day, NPR talk shows - meander about, at the whim of whomever writes the material or stacks the 'cast. It's up to the reader or listener to decide if what they're reading or hearing grabs them enough to make them want to stay.

    Is Limbaugh worried that Hewitt and the like are going to put him out of business? Of course not. Does he want to contest every listener who might find her loyalty divided? See #1, above.
Rush Limbaugh reminds me of Bill Kling, founder of Minnesota Public Radio. In a way, their stories are analogous; both started in the provinces, and through skill and an overdose of entrepreneurial talent (Rush's in the private sector, Kling's straddling the non-profit and public) built the most successful games in town.

And the similarities don't end there.

A few years ago, the FCC started proposing granting low-power FM radio licenses, to allow people to set up tiny radio stations for as little as $1,000. It's as close as radio gets to Blogging; these little stations would allow almost any community group or school or organization to start a radio station with a range of a few miles.

Who led the opposition? Even though such stations would do a lot to evangelize the notion of "public" radio? That's right - Bill Kling, who saw these stations as potentially taking listeners, and money, away from big established Public Radio.

Does Limbaugh see blogs as a threat? Of course not - no more than Bill Kling can feel low-power FM will drive Garrison Keillor off the air.

Will Limbaugh fight, tooth and nail, to keep blogs (and blog-like media) from picking away the ratings and fiscal crumbs scattered about the edge of his juggernaut?

See #1, above.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/9/2003 09:54:20 AM

Praising with Faint Damnation - The Fraters take a whack at Jim Walsh.

Walsh - probably the toniest music critic in the Twin Cities today - has been a critic about town for the better part of the last fifteen years. He started at the City Pages (where he seriously classed up the joint after the abysmal Michael Welch), before spending most of the past decade at the Pioneer Press, where he brought a level of savvy to their music reporting that had not only eluded the SPPPD, but that the Strib's John "I Kissed Prince's Butt!" Bream couldn't approach.

Are Walsh's politics way off to the dippy left? Oh, what do you think? The Fraters quote a Chris Riemsnschneider piece noting Walsh's recent move back to the City Pages:
Walsh sent out a mass e-mail earlier this week proposing a Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day (featuring all genres of music) on the anniversary of their deaths, Oct. 25.
Stop the presses - a music critic that trends left of center!

So let me be the first conservative blogger to say this: For a typicalliberalmediaflak, Jim Walsh is much less of a clueless disaster than most others (you hear me knocking, Brian Lambert?)

You can thank me later, Walsh.

As I do with musicians, I tend to ignore critics' politics; "Love the art, ignore the artist". If they steer me toward some good music, it's all a wash in my book, and if I wanted their political opinion, I'd grant them the right to have one.

No, Jim Walsh really only has one crime to answer for; the way he took the Gear Daddies - a wonderful, sparklingly fun live band with one of the best singers in the Twin Cities, Martin Zellar - and made their first album, "Let's Go Scare Al" such a dreary, aurally flat endurance test.

Other than that, he's not so bad.

Weekend Bloviation - I have a ton of work to do today and tomorrow, so I doubt I'll be posting much.

But it's one of those days when I'm noshing over a couple of big topics that could eat up a couple days' worth of space next week:
  • Urban Conservatism - Yesterday was just the latest of many jibes by the Star/Tribune at the Minnesota GOP's understanding of "urban issues". According to the Strib, the Pioneer Press and MPR, things like tax cuts, concealed carry reform, less-intrusive government and less-trivial law-enforcement are inimical to "urban" environments.

    It's untrue, of course. But conservatives in the Twin Cities have a bunch of tall hills to climb; our party is just one of them. In my district - the Fourth - the party is split between the powerful, well-funded, well-organized suburban interests in Roseville, Arden Hills and Shoreview, and the frazzled, benighted party in St. Paul itself.

    And yet it's here in the city that the GOP has the most work to do! And if you think about it, it's a place where by all rights we should be able to make a lot of headway. Who are the constituents? A minority group that dazzles the rest of the nation with their work ethic, commitment to education and free enterprise and family (the Asians), another that is traditionally tied to the nannystate that increasingly doesn't represent their generally socially-conservative Catholic views (Hispanics), and yet another that is just starting to make its disgust with the education system known, and favors limited privitization in the form of vouchers more than any other group (Afro-Americans).

    So I'd love to talk about this next week.
  • My potential church hunt. It's a big deal for me - and has been for two decades. I'll talk about why. Probably.
  • In his August 8, 7:45 AM, Pacific post (you'll have to scroll down to find it), Hugh Hewitt posited an interesting idea:
    When do you suppose it will strike some producer at Fox or MSNBC that they ought to launch "Blogweek," hosted by James, Glenn, and Virginia and featuring three minute segments with 10 different bloggers talking about their blogs? Instantly a cable show would have an audience with the complete attention of the web and the opinion class.

    Try watching weekend cable. This show would dominate the weekend ratings as surely as Arnold did the news cycle this week.
    The thought occurred to me a few weeks ago, although more as a radio show. I haven't had the time to pursue it, partly because I have been blessedly swamped with short-term contract work, and partly because I haven't done that sort of thing in years.

    I think a blog show in the format Hewitt tosses off - a series of 3-5 minute talks with bloggers who are onto a hot topic for the week (or day), similar to Hewitt's whirlwind of guest interviews with interspersed callers, would make sense.

    While Hugh suggests a weekend TV show, I have to wonder - would that make sense for bloggers? First of all, lots of bloggers have - let's be honest - good faces for radio. And the production involved in TV is the antithesis of the run 'n gun ethos of the blogs; the shooting schedules and just-plain-expense of doing a TV production would mix badly (I think) with the bloggers' style of doing things.

    But talk radio? A couple of people in a studio, mixing in other people via phone or VoIP? Almost as easy as putting up a blog, and probably fits everyone's style (and the listeners' style) better, to boot.

    Yeah, I've got some wheels turning.
  • Is Arnold a good thing? More next week.
Plenty to talk about. I'll see you then.

If not earlier, of course.

UPDATE: Natch - I start out the morning saying "No posting this weekend", and then I start posting like it's a hyperactive Tuesday. OK. NOW I'm gone. Have a great weekend.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/9/2003 07:34:06 AM

Friday, August 08, 2003

I Was Going To Say... - ...that I'm going to be busy working on finishing up the first of two projects for a large local company that's paying me actual MONEY MONEY MONEY today, and that posting will be light...

...but it occurs to me that it's too late for light posting - I've already got an awful lot today, haven't I?

I'm going to try to finish off a game of phone tag with one (actually two) of my seven new leads that popped up last week. Cross your fingers for me.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/8/2003 08:33:33 AM

Far Too Wierd - My daughter, Daryll, turns 12 today.

I'm too young to have a junior high kid.

Jeez. I remember this night, 12 years ago, as distinctly as if it were a year or two ago. 18 hours of hard labor (with an hour or two break in the middle, thanks to the wonders of morphine), ending with a salad-tong delivery when the little baby, worn out by 18 hours of pushing, showed a big dollop of her future style, yelling "Come and get me".

Today, my little snoozing bundle is a thoughtful, grindingly stubborn, incisively smart, tall-for-her-age girl who's her soccer team's star defense-girl with a kick like an NFL place-kicker, on her basketball team's starting five, and is learning highland drums, just because. And it's hard to believe she's only with me for six more years.

Happy birthday, Peanut. I'm very proud of you.

UPDATE: My daughter and the Instapundit blog have the same birthday.

Both are equally good at responding when I need the garbage taken out.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/8/2003 07:48:14 AM

How's That? - In todays Strib editorial, the writer also notes:
Residents of the Jordan neighborhood may be feeling slightly easier
Is this a racist comment on moral laxity in the inner city?

Or is it just sloopy etiding?

The world wonders.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/8/2003 07:23:44 AM

City Talk - The Strib, in an editorial today, seems to have the answer for blighted, gang-ridden inner-city neighborhoods; more programs!

The recipe for violence, to the Strib, is simple:
Gangs and drugs, unemployment and limited youth and family support programs set the stage for increased crime and violence.
I'm a conservative - and when it comes to urban crime, I'm usually loathe to parrot some of the conservative dogma on the subject (urban conservatism will be a topic on this blog in the very near future).

And yet the Strib is missing a few key nuances to this story; namely, the role that unlimited youth and family support programs, along with Minnesota's notoriously lenient criminal justice system, played in creating the Gang and Drug problems. We'll leave aside the rather utopio-Libertarian notion of calling a truce in the "war on drugs", which is the biggest root cause of all.

No, to the Strib it's about money.
Still, while it's welcome, the $200,000 commitment of state officers for a few weeks does not make up for millions in state cuts to local government. Minneapolis suffered a $33 million cut in state aid this year; $7 million of that total was trimmed from the Police Department. State cuts also reduced summer employment and recreation for teens, and training programs for young adults. That correlation is important: Low unemployment and ample activities translates into less crime.
I'm not among the conservatives who scoffed at the Clintons' "Midnight Basketball" program - it was less noxious than most of the rest of the 1994 Crime Bill - but I think it's naive to think the hard-core bangers that have been destroying places like Jordan, in North Minneapolis, and the south side's Phillips, are going to be showing up at the rec center to be converted. Yes, providing incentives to play nice would help.

But during the high-flying, cha cha years of the nineties, money wasn't lacking (not in the sense any of us would recognize - the urban bureaucracy always wants more). Did the problem subside?

No, indeed, it peaked in the mid-nineties, and was only quelled by:
then-Gov. Arne Carlson [sending] state officers and helicopters to Minneapolis after the city was dubbed "Murderapolis" for a year that saw nearly 100 murders.
The Strib writer meanders around and around the point; in between calls for money, he/she notes twice that the only thing that's actually reduced crime in Jordan, ever, is an expanded, constant police presence.

Again - of course that's simplistic. You can't arrest a neighborhood into peace. There's more to it - just as there is much more to it than more programs.

More on this in coming weeks. Much more. Because as a conservative living in the city, the whole notion of conservative solutions to urban problems is not only fascinating - it's important.


posted by Mitch Berg 8/8/2003 07:22:07 AM

Liberia - Don't the editors of the Star/Tribune ever read their history?

Or even go to the movies?

In a Wednesday editorial, the Strib renewed the left's curious call to send US troops to Liberia - a nation embroiled in a war in which there are no "good guys", where every one of the belligerent groups is just as noxious and depraved as the last. Naturally, it's also a war in which there is no impact or even compelling interest to US national security. Naturally, quips TalkRadio, because it's the only kind of war the left ever supports.

Still, does the Strib editorial board realize the deja vu some of us are feeling here?
At last, war-weary Liberians have a tangible glimmer of hope. The arrival of just a few hundred Nigerian peacekeepers brought a dramatic easing of gunfire and a renewed flow of humanitarian aid.

With 200 international troops on the ground and more to follow, controversial President Charles Taylor is now the major barrier to ending hostilities. He has promised to resign Monday and leave for exile in Nigeria. The sooner he goes, the better. When he is gone, his ragtag group of soldiers will have little left to defend. Reportedly he has threatened to stay unless he receives immunity from war crimes prosecution. Though he should be brought to justice, the immediate priority should be to get Taylor out of the country.
Sound familiar?

Somalia was a nation full of factions, each as despicable as the other. And we intervened with roughly the same initial results - the shooting stopped for a while - and the same initial goals (ie, really no clear ones at all).

Liberia is a mess. It'll take decades, say some experts, to develop the things Liberia needs to stop the plagues that have bedeviled it for the past century; self-sufficiency, literacy, the ability to live peacefully in a multi-tribal society. And I've seen no evidence that the US is ready for that, rather than another bump 'n run peacekeeping mission.

It's about facile symbols, to some on the left:
Reportedly, small groups of soldiers and rebels put down their weapons and embraced each other upon hearing about the presence of the international troops. Clearly, both sides welcome the peacekeepers and are ready to end this bloody war.
Any bets on how long that'll last?

The Ad - As I noted yesterday, the "Gray Davis" commercial I heard was a Limbaugh production (and a damn good one!).

Tim Graham, in the Corner, talks about the Katie Couric interview that spawned the bit.

Checklist - Vodkapundit is fond of writing these sorts of "Life's Little Checklist"-y kinds of things.

Today's list - "50 things to do before you die" - is perhaps titled a bit aggressively for a guy who's forty and whose daughter starts junior high in a few weeks, but it's worth a look, for purely amusement purposes (no wagering, please):

    50 Things To Do Before You Die
  1. Slum through Europe Twenty years ago this summer!
  2. Skydive solo without a static line - Someday.
  3. Drink your age in Jell-O shots - Vodkapundit must like to vomit a lot.
  4. Own a classic convertible - Had a Jeep CJ7 once. I think it counts.
  5. Total said convertible, walk away, and laugh - See #3, above
  6. Buy a bottle of the real Absinthe - Nope.
  7. Pilot an airplane - Not yet.
  8. Change careers - Several times, so far.
  9. Walk the Golden Gate Bridge - Nope.
  10. Have sex in public without getting caught - Mmmph Glrph
  11. Get caught Nope.
  12. Do something regrettable in Vegas - The only thing "regrettable" I'd do in Vegas is go there at all.
  13. Fail completely at something big - Oh, lordy, have I ever.
  14. Succeed at something even bigger - I'll let you know in a few years.
  15. Make a pass at a clergyman or woman - What if she wasn't ordained at the time?
  16. Have kids and love them to death - Check. But not literally to death.
  17. Change a stranger's flat tire - Check.
  18. Join an improv comedy troupe - Does the Don Vogel Show count?
  19. Build a fort - Many times.
  20. Ride in a hot air balloon - Not yet.
  21. Spend a day at a spa - Puh-leeeeeeze.
  22. Sneak into a movie - I can honestly say I've never stolen so much as a candy bar, much less a movie fare, in my life.
  23. Have a drink thrown in your face - Check
  24. Jump in a river/lake/ocean fully dressed - Hm. I think so.
  25. Win over a hostile crowd - Sorta.
  26. Spend a summer as a Renaissance Fair geek - I'd rather win the hostile crowd.
  27. Drive from coast to coast - Someday.
  28. Laugh because it hurts - Sounds like a koan to me. How about eating because I'm full?
  29. Eat at a diner called "Mom's" - Never even seen one.
  30. Look for buried treasure - Check.
  31. Learn how to paint - Houses? Check.
  32. Comfort someone who is dying - Not yet.
  33. Commit all seven deadly sins in one afternoon - Dude. I'm 40. If I have time for that, I have time to do laundry.
  34. Take ballroom dance lessons - I came very close, once.
  35. Smack Carson Daly with a brick - Bad karma.
  36. Buy a $500 bottle of wine - If we could split it 100 ways, sure!
  37. Drink a $500 bottle of wine - Yet another alcohol-related goal. This guy seems to have issues.
  38. Roll down a hill of freshly-cut grass - Check.
  39. As an adult Check
  40. Pilfer office supplies - Never on purpose.
  41. Get a pedicure - At the spa? Jeez, what sort of alternate-lifestyle hell have I dropped into?
  42. See a movie at a drive-in - Check.
  43. Get a tattoo in the Philippines - That sounds painful.
  44. 50 over the posted limit - Hm. Once, I think.
  45. Do something gentlemanly for a hooker - Er, yes, I believe I did. Long story.
  46. Eat all the green M&Ms - Check.
  47. Abuse your authority - Never.
  48. Be subpoenaed by Congress - Depends on the definition of the term "Congress".
  49. Try for four in one night after age 30 - Mmmph glrmph
  50. Sleep in until at least Tuesday - I'd settle for eight straight hours these days.
Read the original to see how Vodkapundit stacks up.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/8/2003 07:18:16 AM

Thursday, August 07, 2003

Excellent! - This morning's call for opinions from the Northern Alliance of Blogs from the Infinite Monkeys guys brought out some fascinating stuff - stuff I've never seen before, in some cases.

If you haven't yet, read 'em all: Lileks' Bleat, Powerline's excellent comparson, a look back in Fraters' history, and the SCSU Scholars' exhuming of some fascinating quotes. Naturally, I had a ball writing my own contribution.

These homework assignments are fun.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/7/2003 05:31:22 PM

Gored - I was going to try to find some way to tackle Algore's atrocious speech today.

Brian Carnell did it better.

Too many money quotes to even know where to start. Read it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/7/2003 05:18:52 PM

Dirty Pool - A rare listen to Limbaugh today nearly forced me off the road.

Rush played the new Gray Davis spot, targeted against Schwartzenegger.

The spot noted in grave tones that Schwartzenegger's father had been a Nazi Party member (although not a war criminal) and that he'd been cleared of charges of domestic abuse (When DID you stop beating Maria, Mr. Schwartzenegger?)

I'm not a huge fan of the recall - I think it's very, very bad policy in general. And I'm not a Californian (and I don't believe Minnesota has a recall provision), so my opinion is worth what you're paying for it.

But with an ad like that, I think recall is probably too good for Gray Davis and his campaign. They're clearly scraping the ground below the bottom of the barrel.

UPDATE: An email correspondent tells me the "ad" was actually a Limbaugh production - but that there is some sort of Davis "Arnold's a Nazi" spot in circulation in California.

Gack. Even when I'm wrong, I can't make it up fast enough.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/7/2003 02:50:00 PM

Krugman on Suicide Watch - Well, he might be if we keep getting news like this.(washingtonpost.com):
"Productivity - the amount that an employee produces per hour of work - grew at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the April to June quarter, the best showing since the third quarter of 2002, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That marked an improvement from the 2.1 percent growth rate in productivity posted in the first three months of this year.
Of course, until the Berg Consumer Confidence index rises above a 10, it's all just wind in sails.

(By the way - if you need a good GUI/Web Designer, GUI BA, Usabilty Analyst or any such...)

In a second report from the department, new applications for jobless benefits fell by a seasonally adjusted 3,000 to a six-month low of 390,000 for the work week ending Aug. 2. It marked the third week in a row that claims were below 400,000, a level associated with a weak job market. This suggest the pace of layoffs is stabilizing. Claims hit a high this year of 459,000 during the work week that ended April 19.

Both the productivity and jobless claims figures were better than economists were expecting."

posted by Mitch Berg 8/7/2003 11:22:43 AM

Ahnold Verzuz Za Body- Got an email this morning from one of an Infinite Number of Monkeys, asking the Northern Alliance about comparisons between a potential Schwartzenegger administration and the Ventura years.

Lileks beat everyone to the punch:
"If Arnold is the savior of California, I guess that means that Jesse Ventura was his John the Baptist. He was the first to show that large blunt men with muscle-centric showbiz careers could assume the governorship of a state - but that large blunt men with muscle-centric showbiz careers could assume the governorship of a state - but that’s where the similarity ends. Ventura was incapable of projecting an easy-going image; he was too suspicious, too prickly. He loathed the media. He hated the establishment in all its manifestations. He was, in essence, a biker-hippie. He never knew when to pick his fights, so he picked them all."
True, of course. Acquaintances among the press corps at the Capitol called Ventura one of the most difficult people to deal with in all of state government.

And, Lileks notes, that was a key difference between the two former musclebound actors:
Arnold is much smarter than that. It’s possible Ventura is brighter than Arnold, but Schwartzenegger instinctively grasps that simple truth Jesse could never accept: to win the game you have to play the game.
All true.

There are other key differences, though. And it's a good thing, because...
  • These days, Politics is Serious Business - Ventura was elected in 1998. Minnesota was riding high in the dotcom boom - we were no San Francisco, but the economy was thriving. We had had continuous state budget surpluses for most of the nineties, and there was no hint of leaner times ahead. Politics was a fairly trivial business at the time; the biggest problem the legislature had was whether to spend the gajillion dollar surpluses on new programs, or return half a gajillion dollars to the taxpayers. People had time for larks, for trivial political pursuits.

    It was into this ring that Ventura jumped. Why did he jump?

  • Because it was a Great PR Stunt - Everything Jesse Ventura ever did was for publicity. With his wrestling career over, acting was his meal ticket (it was for damn sure talk radio wasn't it); living in Minnesota, the only way to see and be seen was to create a splash. What better than to lead a quixotic campaign for governor?

    Of course, it was after election night that it got complicated, because...

  • There is No Way He Ever Expected To Win - Think about it; he was a former wrestler and actor, whose only political experience was a stint as mayor of Brooklyn Park (an older suburb of Minneapolis), running with the puzzled endorsement of the Reform Party with which he shared almost no common goals (and with which he broke in a huge spat right around his inauguration). He shot from the hip, because as an outsider he could.

    How do we know? Did you see him on election night, the night of the "...we shocked the WORLD!" speech? He had that deer in the headlights look about him; that "ooooooooh, sh___________t" look common to people who thought they were mooning their roommates, but turned around to notice their girlfriends and their parents watching. More telling - although he ran as a libertarian conservative (promising lower vehicle and jet-ski fees, concealed-carry reform, and the surplus refunded at the rate of "$1000 for every man, woman and child in your house"), the moment he was elected he appointed Dean Barkley and Tim Penny - former DFL moderates who'd been attracted by Ross Perot's Reform Party's "Liberal Lite". They served as the wizards behind the Ventura curtain; the libertarian conservative candidate governed like DFL Lite.

    And once the situation changed - the economy started tanking in 2000, halfway through the administration - and when it did, Ventura was only too happy to get out of the governor's office. It wasn't fun anymore, and it had the chance to turn into really bad PR for him.
So how is Scwartzenegger different?
  • Times are tough these days - and as far as being a governor goes, no place is tougher than California. Nobody's going to seriously run as a lark.

    Of course, lots of people are running as a lark, but they are unlikely to have the endorsement of the Republican Party.

  • It's Not Like Arnold Needs the Publicity to keep his acting career going. The man's film career is as indestructable as a Terminator. If he survived "Jingle All The Way", he doesn't need a chimeric political race to keep himself afloat.

  • He Could Win, and He Knows It - While Jesse Ventura - wild-card from an off-brand party - had to have known he was the darkest of dark horses, Schwartzenegger will be running under the banner of California's #2 party (although not every Republican is thrilled about it), is on the Hollywood "A" list, and has to have absorbed some political savvy from his inlaws (for better or worse). He's in a whole different league from Ventura. Personally, too - Schwartzenegger is by all accounts witty, urbane, polished, someone who can pass as a politician, who is wired in a way that might allow him to get some respect from the politicians he'll need to work with. He's the polar opposite of the loud, combative, just-not-that-politically-bright Ventura - closer to Ronald Reagan than to the Crusher.

    And...

  • If He Wins, It'll Matter. - Unlike Minnesota, 1998, the situation in California is beyond dire. Who'd volunteer for that job if he really, really didn't want to do something about it? The risks are huge - tackling the job and cratering would mean the end of any future political aspirations (Gray Davis stock is currently a strong "Sell For Pennies). Success, of course, would be another matter.

    Finally...

  • What You See is Fairly Likely What You'll Get - While Ventura the Outsider got to say pretty much anything he wanted (because he never expected to win!), and it all got retracted the moment he was elected, Schwartzenegger represents a party whose platform is fairly well-known. Granted, he's the far moderate wing of the California GOP, but it's less likely Arnold will be able to freestyle to anywhere near the extent Jesse got away with.
In Minnesota in 1998, a bunch of Minnesotans who rarely darkened a polling station came out to elect the class clown as homecoming king on a lark, at a time when larks were still funny.

In California in 2003, the situation is desperate, and Cali needs something neither Gray Davis nor Jesse Ventura ever were - a leader who can get a team into office that can sweep up Gray Davis' mess.

Jesse Ventura was a statewide practical joke that got out of hand. Whomever wins the recall will be in charge of keeping the world's fifth-largest economy from getting sold at a sheriff's auction.

NORTHERN ALLIANCE UPDATE: In addition to Lileks, we're currently awaiting Powerline's take on this. Fraters has yielded their time (it's the web, guys!), and the SCSU Scholars are still at their 8AM classes.

EMAIL UPDATE: Longtime Shot corresopondent JM writes
I agree with everything you wrote about Ventura's time as governor, but I think you and others discount how hard he tried to be a Good Governor.
A fair point. I think he tried his best to reconcile "being a good governor" with the image he chose to project - the "biker/hippie" (thanks, James) populist who was out to kick ass and take names.

And while I have no problem with on the job training, I think he picked the wrong teachers. Tim Penny and Dean Barkley made Reform-y noises, but when you scratched beneath the surface, they were Democrat pretty much to the core - as Penny showed us during his campaign to succeed Ventura last year.
I didn't care for certain positions he took because they reflected his belief that Good Governors are centrist technocrats. His de facto rejection of his supposed libertarian beliefs was my biggest complaint.

However, like Wellstone, I have to give the guy credit for trying to do a Good Job. The people he hired as advisors were good as centrist technocrats go. And as much as I disagree with his promotion of the Light Rail boondoggle, I really think he thought it was a Good Thing, something that Good Governors support.
The road to Hell is paved with...er, light rail, I guess.
Unlike Wellstone, however, Ventura was woefully underqualified for the position. He didn't and refused to understand how political decisions are made and that the participants see themselves and their jobs as important. With regards to the press, in particular, this was his downfall.
Ventura always thought he could lead with his chin, and his populist cachet would save him. With someone with a genuinely durable base, it might have worked. But I suspect most of the people who made their first and last visits to the polls to vote for Ventura probably weren't accustomed to calling or writing their representatives.

And you can't call people - like the press - "Jackals" too many times before they start to take it personally.

I think Schwartzenegger knows to dodge a lot of the bullets his pal Jesse tried to catch with his teeth.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/7/2003 07:18:08 AM

Graceless Under Pressure - Howard "The Duck" Dean thinks civil liberties are something to be negotiated on an case by case basis, as events warrant, as this 9-14-2001 article shows:
Dean said Wednesday he believed that the attacks and their aftermath would “require a re-evaluation of the importance of some of our specific civil liberties. I think there are going to be debates about what can be said where, what can be printed where, what kind of freedom of movement people have and whether it's OK for a policeman to ask for your ID just because you're walking down the street.”

Dean said he had not taken a position on these questions. Asked whether he meant that specific rights described in the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution — would have to be trimmed, the governor said:

“I haven't gotten that far yet. I think that's unlikely, but I frankly haven't gotten that far. Again, I think that's a debate that we will have.”
Now, Instapundit says that you have to give Dean a little slack - it was three days after 9/11, and lots of peole were saying stupid things.

Maybe. But this shows Dean's thought process when the pressure is on. That's important in a president.

Of course, had a Governor George (or Jeb) Bush said any such thing on 9/14/01, we'd be hearing about it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/7/2003 07:17:51 AM

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Grief, Inc. - This ties in nicely with the story on the Harvard study, below.

If you live in the Twin Cities, you can't go a day without encountering the extended orgy of mourning in which the late Senator Wellstone's supporters have been marinating themselves.

Now, as far as this blog is concerned, Senator Wellstone's death was an unmitigated tragedy. Like many conservatives, I have been just as up-front about my reasons for respecting the late Senator as I was about my differences with him.

But many of his supporters have been just awful. From the Paulapalooza, to the irresponsible conspiracy theories spread by everyone from run of the mill DFLers to Ted Rall and Barbra Streisand, to their endless, self-indulgent, self-righteous invocations of His name at every political turn, they're turning into the mirror images of the self-absorbed fundamentalists they themselves lampoon so mercilessly.

The trade in Wellstone memorial bumperstickers ("Never Park the Bus", "What Would Wellstone Do") is cloying and plays in cheap sentiment. Which is fine, but to display such melodramatic emotion and not expect a backlash, whether satiric or angry, is naive and just a tad solipsistic.

To get self-righteous about the backlash? Well, that's called "Laura Billings".

But did anyone expect any less from her? She plaintively asked in a column last week, "What happened to 'changing the tone' in politics?".

What, indeed?
Nine months ago, having a green 'Wellstone!' bumper sticker on your car was like wearing a black band on your arm. For a few days at least, before the ill-fated memorial service made people crazy with partisan feuding, people walked a respectful distance around your grief.
Interesting observation.

Yes, there is a time to grieve. But after a while, walking around clothed in black (unless one is a recent immigrant from, say, rural Mexico) is going to draw some comments. This is America. We move on, unless the deaths were a result of an attack on all of us ("Remember Pearl Harbor!", "Remember 9/11"), we tend to keep grief in its place.

But this isn't just your ordinary grief.

More on this below.
Now, nine months after that plane crash, a friend of mine finds that her bright green bumper sticker and lawn sign have a rather different effect.

Regularly, she finds the words 'commie,' 'socialist' and others I can't print here scratched into the dust that coats her car. Twice she's been flipped off, for no apparent reason, by drivers with competing 'Coleman for Senate' stickers on their tailgates. Neighbors have started to ask, some in rather tactless terms, when she intends to take down the lawn sign she staked in her front yard long before the election.
I'm not surprised. While I'm pretty laissez faire with my neighbors, I'd probably start rolling my eyes by now, too.

Picture a parent that loses a child. This engenders the most intense grief you can imagine (yes, Laura, worse even than the grief over Wellstone). Visible signs of that grief are inevitable, understandable, even healthy.

But if the parents are plastering the minivan with pictures of their dead child nine months later, people might be forgiven for mixing their sympathy with isolated thoughts that the bereaved parents might wanna get some counseling - right?

But people have a right to their feelings. They also have a right to their opinions.
According to the latest political bumper sticker, people like her — and there are many — should just face the fact that "it's time to park the bus," a reference to the green bus the former political science professor drove all the way to Washington.

Put more pointedly, as another bumper sticker spews, "He's dead. Get over it.''

In a recent Associated Press story about the advent of such anti-Wellstone advertising around town, state Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, called these messages "below the belt" and "highly insensitive.'' He's right, of course.
It'd be right - if and only if they were directed at the late Senator himself.

But you'd have to be dense - or awash in solipsistic self-pity - not to know that the stickers have nothing to do with the late Senator. They are aimed squarely at his disciples, who nine months after the funeral are still flogging the electorate with Wellstone's sainted corpse.

He's dead! Let him rest in peace! More importantly, to quote that most irritating Democrat artifact, move on! Wellstone's legacy may guide you - but it is time for you Democrats to find your next living inspiration to get behind!

Remember the movie Ordinary People, with Donald "Kiefer's Dad" Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton? The family's older son dies, and the parents keep beating the younger son over the head with the elder's blessed legacy, and the younger son eventually tries to off himself because there's just no way to live up to the legacy of the sainted departed...

See where this is going, DFL?

Of course, in Laura Billings' world, there's just no way this is a DFL problem. No, it's those icky, talk-radio listening, blog-reading Republicans:
And yet, I would also add, they're not all that surprising in a political culture that is increasingly characterized by its crudeness, rudeness and willful lack of respect for anyone who doesn't see things exactly as you do.
She's referring to Republicans, of course.

I'm sure she's not referring to DFLers who think concealed-carry supporters are compensating for some sort of sexual inadequacy, or that balancing the budget is a plot to starve children and the elderly, or that conservatism is a psychological problem, or that conservatives are something to be libeled and silenced.
This may explain the best-selling success of conservative bomb-thrower Ann Coulter, author of "Treason," a book with such a tediously black-and-white premise (liberals are to blame for everything) that even her supporters are starting to wonder if her ranting is getting dangerous. If you've seen her on television lately, and she's always on television, you may have been treated to a tirade about how Joseph McCarthy was, in fact, a fine American patriot cruelly slandered by liberals, or about how liberal pundits are actually mourning the deaths of their pals Odai and Qusai Hussein, since liberals always side with the enemy.
Ms. Billings - isn't it "crude, rude and disrespectful", and doesn't it lower the level of our political discourse, to associate all of your opponents' thought with the most comically extreme example of it?

That'd be like my saying "Laura Billings? Pffft. This explains the popularity of this Democrat hate site".

Right?

Of course, I'd be "crude, rude and disrespectful" not to note that Ms. Billings does have at least one even-handed bone in her journalistic body...
And no, it's not just Republicans or their supporters who aren't living up to their promises to "change the tone" in politics. Case in point: California Democrat Pete Stark. As Democrats filed out of the House during the recent pension bill fracas in Congress, Stark stayed behind, getting into a verbal feud with a Republican from Colorado who told Stark to shut up.

"You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp?" replied Stark. "Come on. Come over here and make me. I dare you. You little fruitcake. …" Though Stark should receive censure from both sides for such a moronic outburst, I've heard more than one observer praise him for "standing up" for himself.
Fair enough.

But it doesn't make up for the grating illogic or tortuously-derived conclusions at the root of this column.

Illogic?
In such a spew-loving environment, it may come as no surprise that former Ventura administration apologist John Wodele, who in his four years with the governor developed a gift for calm understatement, was recently let go by conservative talk radio station KSTP. "I needed to be more confrontational, with a harder edge. But that's not me,'' he told media critic Brian Lambert. "Some callers go well beyond having fun with a difference of opinion."
Woedele wasn't canned because he was polite and calm. He was canned because he was awful on the air,and got terrible ratings, and showed no signs of being able to improve as an air talent or ratings machine (which is what it's all about in radio). Perhaps Laura Billings can chalk Woedele's axing up to "crudity, rudity and disrespect"; it'd certainly fit her stereotype of KSTP's largely conservative audience.

But to tie it to the perceived disrespect for the sainted Wellstone is the sort of illogic that makes the worst of Ann Coulter seem pretty measured.

Did I say "tortuously-derived conclusions?"
No kidding. And when bumper stickers start "having fun" with the death of a senator, his wife, daughter and five other good people, it's clear we've crossed the line from mere incivility to simple-minded cruelty.
That people react incivilly and cruelly is part of human nature. It's a human trait that crosses all political boundaries.

But while Wellstone's true believers are entitled to their grief, and can suffer it as long and as tortuously as they want in their personal lives, their constant flogging of the Wellstone memory in public has long since turned maudlin and tasteless.

Billings comes perilously close to making my point:
Maybe that's one of the reasons so many of Wellstone's supporters seem reluctant to get rid of symbols that serve as reminders of him. Because rather than seeming enraged by his opposition, the late senator was one of a disappearing political breed who actually seemed engaged by his opposition — energized and up for a fair fight. And the more invective and incivility that is heaped on Wellstone's memory, the more his amiably argumentative style seems sadly missing from the public debate.
Right.

John F. Kennedy was a great influence on Paul Wellstone (and, indeed, on his opponent, Norm Coleman). Wellstone embodied much of what he himself admired about Kennedy. He even noted in interviews the impact that Kennedy's death had on him.

He didn't make Kennedy's death his entire reason to be. He didn't beat us over the head with the symbolism of the assassination. He didn't plaster that damn green bus with stickers saying What Would Kennedy Do? and Don't Moor the PT Boat.

He grieved, he learned, he moved on. He didn't roil with hatred over those whose grief ended earlier, or was confined to human rather than political grief.
As these hateful, hurtful bumper stickers are beginning to make clear, people who care about passionate but respectful debate may have more than Wellstone's passing left to mourn.
Yes. They need to mourn their own relevance.

And perhaps question the depths of their obsession.

It is time to park the bus. He is dead, may G-d keep his soul, and it is time to get over it.

Because, to answer the sticker's question "What Would Wellstone Do?", the answer is "put the grief where it belongs and move on".

posted by Mitch Berg 8/6/2003 09:41:19 AM

Luck of the Draw - There's going to be a very important drawing in California today, and it's not the Powerball:
The California Secretary of State's office will draw 26 letters out of a drum next week to decide the order of as many as 400 candidates on the Oct. 7 recall election ballot on whether to fire Governor Gray Davis.
With a ballot that long, name placement is crucial:
"During the 2000 election, George W. Bush received an average of 9 percent more votes in California districts where his name appeared first on the ballot, said Ohio State's Krosnick. And position on the ballot matters most, he said, in contests where voters know less about the contenders.
And the Cali ballot is truly shaping up to be a zoo:
Comedy writer Bill Prady may run for fun. Budding filmmaker Art Brown may campaign for the publicity. And Thomas Laughlin, the karate-kicking star of the ``Billy Jack'' films from the 1970s, said he would run just to pick a fight with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the action hero 16 years his junior who will announce today whether he is running. Columnist Arianna Huffington said yesterday she will run. Her ex-husband, the former Congressman Michael Huffington, may run too."
And on, and on.

Worth a read.

Your Tax Dollars In Action - Racism has held back African-Americans throughout history.

According to Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), the naming of Hurricanes is a vital part of this shameful legacy:
The congressional newspaper the Hill reported this week that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, feels that the current names are too "lily white," and is seeking to have better representation for names reflecting African-Americans and other ethnic groups.

"All racial groups should be represented," Lee said, according to the Hill. She hoped federal weather officials "would try to be inclusive of African-American names."

A sampling of popular names that could be used include Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn, according to the paper.
While we're at it, we'll wait for Hurricanes Na Xoua, Rajiv, Achmad and Nguyen.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/6/2003 09:40:06 AM

Media Bias? Meet Academic Bias! - Power Line has an excellent piece on a Harvard study that purports to prove that liberal editorial pages are more balanced and less overheated than conservative ones.

The article is long, excellent, thought-provoking, and raises some very good questions about the "data" used to create the study.

Some of the best are from this set of questions about the study's balanced, cool-calm-collected author:
"And what of Mr. Tomasky himself? If we are to give any credence to his paper, we must have confidence in his selection of 'comparable' issues and his subjective classification of 'positive,' 'negative' and 'mixed' editorials. Who, exactly, is this advocate of objective journalism, shorn of ad hominem attacks and strong language?

Well, for starters he is a columnist for the left-wing American Prospect magazine. Here is one of his recent columns, titled: 'Prevaricating President: Why Democrats Need to Seize on Bush's WMD Lies.' Here are just a few samples of Mr. Tomasky's non-partisan, ad hominen-free journalism:

'We're living in times that I don't even know how to describe....Under most normal circumstances...the Iraq War would have been a scandal. There are many reasons historically why war for a democracy should be a last resort....But when you bullied your way into office in obvious contravention of the will of the people, what difference does all that hoo-ha make?...And while Bush was in this serene state, he and his servants were out on the hustings selling the American people a story about an imminent threat that did not exist in order to gin up public support for sending young Americans off to risk death.'

So says our arbiter of what constitutes fair and balanced news coverage."
Hindrocket's conclusion is a great one:
Liberals who publish "studies" rely on the fact that virtually no one will ever read them. Liberal newspapers--that is, all major papers except the Washington Times and the editorial section (only) of the Wall Street Journal--will dutifully report the alleged results without questioning whether there are any data to support them. And so, who can deny that liberal papers are objective and measured while conservative papers are shrill and partisan? That's what a "Harvard study" has concluded. Just ask Howard Kurtz.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/6/2003 06:50:09 AM

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Altered Context - Courtesy of Frank Rich - Paleojudaica points out that Frank Rich has been having a field day altering context - in this case, Mel Gibson.

Here's the quote from Gibson, as it appeared in Rich's column:
Asked by Bill O'Reilly in January if his movie might upset "any Jewish people," Mr. Gibson responded: "It may. It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. . . . Anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability."
Sounds disturbingly anti-Semitic, right?

Here's the original, with the ellipsis above replaced with the omitted quote:
I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible. But, when you look at the reasons behind why Christ came, why he was crucified, he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind, so that, really, anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.
How long will the Times keep getting away with this?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/5/2003 12:18:02 PM

Satire? - Or not?

Only Scott Ott knows for sure.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/5/2003 08:05:04 AM

Call for Harold Stassen - Jesse Ventura says he juuuuuust might run for president:
"Visitors packed a room at the International Wrestling Institute and Museum in Newton, Iowa, on Saturday to see Ventura, who was Minnesota governor from 1999 to 2002. He received the Frank Gotch award for bringing professional wrestling to a higher level through his work as a politician, The Associated Press reported.

Ventura said he will never say never when it comes to getting back into politics, adding that he might be interested in running for president.

'Now, that doesn't mean I'm announcing today or anything, just that if I were to get into politics again, that would be the only office I'm interested in.'"
Hm. Talk show gig must be tanking again.

Note the section of the newspaper in which the article appears.

Trial Zeppelin - From Instapundit, this article in Opinion Journal by a former CIA director and a former USAF General has got to be giving Kim Jong Il indigestion:
"Unfortunately, the reflexive rejection in the public debate of the use of force against North Korea has begun to undermine U.S. ability both to influence China to act and to take the preparatory steps necessary for effectiveness if force should be needed. The U.S. and South Korea must instead come together and begin to assess realistically what it would take to conduct a successful military operation to change the North Korean regime."
That big just sets the stage for a forecast of what a military liberation of North Korea would take.

As Instapundit says, these are going to be interesting negotiations.

Remember - you can't give people just a little liberty. Kim is painted into a corner.

The "funny" part - and that's funny wierd, not funny ha ha - is that the left has been using the North Korean story to goad the administration from the beginning; "If you're invading Iraq because of WMDs, why aren't you doing the same for the DPRK?"

Watch for this on your favorite North Korean news source as things develop.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/5/2003 05:34:18 AM

What Give You The Right...? - Midwest Conservative Journal posts today on a subject much on my mind lately: The continued creep of many mainstream Christian churches into politics and away from theology.

MCJ's writer is an Episcopal. Or a soon-to-be ex-Episcopal, anyway. The writer points out a series of logical and theological inconsistencies in the Episcopal Church's views, and notes:
"[Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop] Frank Griswold demands multilateralism in the first situation and dismisses it in the second. George W. Bush must listen to and take the counsel of the rest of the world. Episcopalians, on the other hand, don't have to consider what the rest of the Anglican world thinks or says or does about anything. The Episcopal Church delights in pointing the mote in the eyes of others while denying the existence of the beam in its own.

The reason for this is simple. The liberal wing of the Episcopal Church has no abiding principles of any kind. None. It is certainly not motivated by the Bible. When the Scriptures get in its way, they are higher criticized out of its way. It is not motivated by any allegiance to tradition. And, given the decisive vote against it at the last Lambeth Conference, it is certainly not motivated by denominational loyalty.

The Episcopal Church has become an entirely political organization pursuing entirely political goals. It will say whatever it thinks it has to say, even if it flatly contradicts something it said a month ago. And it has about as much interest in the afterlife as the Unitarians."
I'm a Presbyterian, which is to Scotland what the Episcopals/Anglicans are to the English. They share certain traditions - and, in the US, they share an institutional leadership that is far to the left, and becoming more politicized by the day.

I was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church in ninth grade. In college, I took a solid two years to figure out exactly what I believed, and where and how I wanted to observe that belief - and ended up back in the Presbyterian Church. The church's beliefs are very simple, commonsensical, and tack no human dogma onto Christ's message; it is, in its way, the most fundamental of the denominations. Christ saved us. Go forth and live like you know it. What else is there?

But the church's General Assembly - the world governing body - is forever driving leftward. They heavily support the World Council of Churches. They're relentlessly PC; I can seen them following the Episcopals in recognizing gay marriage (for which I can find legal and civil, but no theological, justification, indicating to me it has no place in a church that actually practices critical theology).

My local congregation is actually worse. The pastor himself is a good enough guy (Presbyterians place a high value on good speaking - which I'm sure was one of the reasons that my speech-teacher father took us out of the dull, mumbling Lutheran congregation when I was 11), but there's a PC undertone that rankles me badly. And the assistant pastor uses her homilies and occasional sermons as a platform for anti-administration, America-last propaganda - and not just when there's something for an anti-American to talk about! No, she'll squeeze japes about the North Koreans we're starving into the call to communion!

So while I'm in the Presbyterian Church for reasons that are important enough to largely surpass human folly, I have my limits. I'm thinking about starting to look elsewhere.

So I may just blog about the Church Search as it goes along here.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/5/2003 05:33:45 AM

Dolt - From the excellent "California Republic", my discovery of the week Carol Platt-Liebau tackles the foreign-policy doltishness of Barbara Boxer:
"Senator Boxer seized one final chance to wax indignant – this time about the proposed Pentagon program to create a market to predict future events in the Middle East. Her opposition isn’t too surprising – she’s apparently never been an ardent fan of free markets of any kind (remember her statement that Communism in Cuba was dead? “I hate to say it, it’s dead.”). But last week, she went over the top in her condemnation, telling Wolfowitz “There is something very sick about [the program] . . . terrorists knowing they were planning an attack could have bet on the attack and collected a lot of money.”

Well, yes, they could – and inform us about the nature and plan of attack at the same time. In the end, it would amount to little more than paying terrorists for information about upcoming attacks . . . not a bad deal, even from Boxer’s perspective. Given her floridly stated concern about “low-intensity” conflict, it’s hardly likely that she’d welcome millions of deaths in a terrorist assault that could have been revealed and prevented – but, then again, it’s so much easier simply to denounce the program (and enjoy that frisson of self-righteousness) than to make the effort to understand its logic. Boxer rounded out her attack by calling for the dismissal of those responsible for proposing the futures market program – a fitting punishment, indeed, for any government employee who makes the mistake of trying to be creative and effective all at the same time.
But I can't feel superior. My congressional district is "represented" by Betty MacCollum - a woman who combines Boxer's dim-bulbitude with, if possible, an even more galloping sense of entitlement.

More to come. Read it all, OK?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/5/2003 05:33:13 AM

Monday, August 04, 2003

Tanks For The Memories! - This part of the NY Times article on how badly the Dems hate Bush caught my attention:
Tom Rusk, a state welfare worker who turned out this week to see Senator John Kerry in Fort Dodge, Iowa, describes himself as "pretty liberal." He says he likes what he hears from former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont and from Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, but he worries that both candidates could be "Dukakisized" in the general election.

What Mr. Rusk is looking for, he said, alluding to the infamous image that doomed that past Democratic nominee, is "someone who will look impressive enough at the helm of an M-1 tank."
Hmmmm.

How do the current generation stack up in the TC's hatch?

Let's see...
Carol Moseley-Braun cuts a pretty martial figure - if you're an entitlement warrior:


Bob Graham could be a French tank commander...


Dennis Kucinich would make a great major in the medical branch. I'm thinking Frank Burns...


Al Sharpton may be a tank, rhetorically speaking, but...


John Kerry was in Vietnam. Did you know that?


Joe Lieberman...


Edwards looks more like CIA material...


Dick Gephardt actually looks like a general. In procurement.


And finally, Howard Dean.

Blood and Guts? Or Bloody Nuts? You decide.



So, Tom Rusk of Iowa - whatddya think?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/4/2003 12:56:47 PM

The News is the News - Powerline is always a great read. This post, on the historical context of the press' current reporting of the situation in Iraq, is above and beyond their usual high standard.

They note, correctly, that even in peacetime our military loses servicemen and women to accidental causes at a rate double the combat casualty rate in Iraq:
"At the height of the Vietnam war, to which liberals longingly compare Iraq, an average of 40 American servicemen died each day--75 times the current rate in Iraq--and fatalities in World Wars I and II were far greater still. Yet in none of these conflicts was each casualty considered front-page news.
...
It has become a political commonplace to say that the continuing casualties in Iraq will, at some point, become a political problem for the Bush administration. I don't doubt that this is true, given the tone of the news coverage, which suggests on a daily or near-daily basis that every fatality is proof of the failure of our effort in Iraq.

If we ask why the minuscule combat casualty rate in Iraq receives such intense publicity, while the nearly-equal accidental death rate there is almost ignored, and accidental deaths of soldiers in other parts of the world are never reported, there can be only one answer: the focus by the American press on every combat fatality represents a conscious effort to undermine the war effort and the Bush administration. Why else this sudden concern for the well-being of the American G.I.? Why else the ritual incantation: “...the fifty-third combat death since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1”? Why else the studied refusal to put the minimal casualties in Iraq into any kind of historical context? Why else do the front-page stories on every casualty crowd out objective coverage of the great progress that has been made in Iraq in an astonishingly brief period of time?"
Well, we know the answer to that rhetorical question, right?

I have met very few media people who showed any signs of having enough interest in military history to have read a single book on the subject, much less evince any expertise in the field. If more had, more might have some means of knowing not only the historical context in which this operation has been so singular, but also the impotence (in the long term) and manipulation of the Iraqi resopnse:
The only hope of the desperate Baathists and other desperadoes loose in Iraq is that the American people will tire of the war and the reconstruction effort and go home. The withdrawal of American troops from Somalia after casualties were sustained in Mogadishu made a deep impression on the Arab world, and serves as a model for insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere. And the Baathists would like nothing better than for Iraq to be perceived as a second Vietnam.

So the Baathists kill not for military advantage but for headlines, and American reporters and editors oblige them. Is it unfair to suggest that these parties work together for a common purpose--to discredit the Iraq war and the Bush administration with the American public?
More to come.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/4/2003 11:31:00 AM

News Flash, Part II - Satire? Or curiously accurate?

You be the judge.

Stupid Freeware
- Squawkbox, my comment server, said I had until April to upgrade to a paid service. Then they cut off my comment service as of today.

Since I don't have the money to "upgrade" their service (and if I did, I'd switch to a different one), I guess comments are out for now.

Of course, the real solution is to install Movable Type. Gaaaah. The return of the install from hell.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/4/2003 10:32:28 AM

News Flash - Democrats hate George Bush!

This, of course, has been a key theme of this blog since the day I first figured out Blogger.

The article is pretty normal NYT political coverage, complete with the casual inaccurate swipe at the president:
There is a powerful disdain for the Bush administration, stoked by the aftermath of the war in Iraq [An aftermath that is only perceived as abnormally bad because of the slanted, biased media coverage, led by the Times!] and the continuing lag in the economy [which seems to be picking up steam, although don't expect that to make the story]. There is also a conviction that President Bush is eminently beatable and a hunger to hear their party's leaders and candidates make the case against him — straight up, from the heart rather than the polling data.
But they have been! They've been making whatever case they have, and the media's been putting it on the air and in print, straight up and neat with no ice from the day Bush announced his candidacy!

It's not working yet!

posted by Mitch Berg 8/4/2003 09:37:34 AM

Bloodbath, Part III - Someone asked me in another regional forum - why was I harping so hard about last week's stories about concealed carry (a St. Paul man caught the guy who kyped his car using his permitted pistol, and a number of local bars displaying "NO GUNS ON PREMISES" signs have been robbed at gunpoint).

Simple - the Minnesota Personal Protection Act's opponents predicted dire consequences for shall issue at every turn; every fender bender was supposed to be a potential shootout; people would be mowing themselves, and innocents, down over the sort of argument they now supposedly settle peacefully.

Of course, that's been wrong in every other state that's ratified shall-issue.

"Show us that the crime rate is dropping", this person (who has always opposed shall-issue) asked. Er, that'll take a while; stats take a while to build up (watch, the Brady Bunch will blame that on guns, too...).

Here's why I harped on the incidents last week, which in the great scheme of things don't amount to a whole lot in the long term, the main point is this; the left lied.

No, a prediction that doesn't come true ("There'll be blood in the streeeeets!") isn't a lie. But a prediction made with the intent to scare people into adopting your point of view, all the while knowing that in the 32 states that went before yours in adopting the law had pretty much the opposite experience?

I'll be charitable; it's the sort of grossly-misleading attack that only a weasel would even attempt.

Told you I'd be charitable.

Anyway - I highlighted the stories to show exactly how disjointed from reality the anti-concealed-carry side is in Minnesota. And there's more to come!

posted by Mitch Berg 8/4/2003 06:48:56 AM

Feeling Strangely OK - Spent the weekend out of town. I'm mildly sunburned, but feeling relatively relaxed (as relaxed as I ever do, anyway). However - dozens of great blogging topics crossed my mind over the weekend...

...and kept right on going. I left my little reporters notebook - where I usually scrawl ideas as I'm out and about town - at home, as part of my desire to get away from blogging, job hunting, and everything else for two days. Well, it worked; I barely remembered how to get to my blog this morning, and I'm at a complete loss (as you can see) about what to write about.

Last week was good in the "great hopes for the future" department; as soon as I wrote this depressing screed about the last of my decent job leads tanking, more leads started rolling in. Granted, they were just classifieds and ads on Monster, but everything starts somewhere; the real point is, this was the first time I'd seen more than one gig in my general area (GUI designer) in play at one time in the last six months. I sent the biggest single flurry of resumes for actual positions (as opposed to recruiters) of this whole job search:
  • Two to a couple of local institutions of higher education, for positions managing their websites. Not really up my alley, but I think I could deal with it for a bit
  • Two to a regional bank that needs a couple of "information architects", and whose IT office is about a five-minute commute (25 by bike) from my house
  • Two to a local healthcare conglomerate (that I used to work for - here's hoping)
. That's on top of the three long-term leads I already have
  • one with a local financial services company that interviewed me on Valentine's Day, and wants to hire me - as soon as the budget is approved, which we've been waiting on for 5.5 months now
  • A local consulting company where, as of early July, I was in the final three before they deferred filling the position until fall
  • Another local consulting company that may or may not be on the brink of tossing me a decent little pile of work.
The suspense, of course, is killing me...

...which is why the weekend felt so good.

Anyway - back to normal this. Or, hopefully, better than normal.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/4/2003 06:48:36 AM

Friday, August 01, 2003

Weekend - OK, nearly every weekend, I say I'm done posting until Monday.

This week, I mean it. I'll be out of town until Sunday-ish.

NOTE TO BURLGARS: My high school friend, Vince "Blowtorch" DiGrizio, will be here with his four rottweilers, putting he-man grips on his collection of large-frame pistols in my workshop.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 10:26:27 PM

Night Out - I don't listen to much daytime radio - but I was driving home from a client site Friday and heard a bit of "Garage Logic" on KSTP.

Usually when I listen to Joe Soucheray, I'll stay tuned while he's freestyling on whatever topic grabs him. He's good at that. Then, when someone calls in to get rulings on baby names, or talk about their garage, I flip over to Medved.

Friday, though, he had a great idea.

National Night Out aganist Crime is coming up on Tuesday. People around the country are supposed to go out, meet their neighbors, maybe serve some brats and koolaid, and show the criminal class that they're not afraid to go out in their own yards.

Which isn't saying much in my cozy little corner of the St. Paul Midway. Crime is extremely low here (anything north of Thomas Avenue is pretty tame), and there's just not much to be afraid of.

But over in North Minneapolis, things just keep getting worse and worse; gangbangers rule the streets, beating and robbing and occasionally killing more or less at will.

So why not have the "Night Out" crowd leave their secure enclaves in Burnsville and Woodbury, and drive in to Near North and Jordan and flood the streets with law-abiding civilians? Why not displace the bangers and human filth for an evening?

Thoughts?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 10:26:00 PM

Grim Anniversary - Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of one of history's greatest examples of pure, unadulterated, doomed courage.

On August 2, 1943, inmates at the Treblinka death camp, knowing their turn in the gas chambers was coming soon, rebelled, killing enough guards to force the fences and make a run for the neighboring forests.

85 Germans and nearly 900 prisoners were killed in the battle that followed. Dozens of prisoners made it to the woods, where they were mercilessly hunted by Germans - and Poles, many of whom, indoctrinated by the incredibly caustic anti-Semitic Catholic dogma of the day, hated Jews even worse than they did their German occupiers. The war still had nearly two years to go, and it is estimated fewer than two dozen Treblinka inmates survived the war (the inmates of the Sobibor death camp, who rebelled the following year, benefitted from nearby Russian lines, and hundreds survived).

One - Samuel Wilenburg - is still alive, and gave an interview with the BBC:
Fortunately, they had got their hands on a copy of the key to the weapons store. One night they stole in and removed some arms. Child prisoners hid hand grenades and rifles in baskets and prams.

The revolt began at 0400 on 2 August, after a German guard became suspicious and the prisoners had to kill him.

As the alarm sounded the prisoners had to act quickly. They set fire to the barracks and began to cut the fences. Many were picked off by sentries atop the guard towers.
The BBC story leaves out a lot. The prisoners had to destroy a German armored car, which decimated the fleeing prisoners. The guard towers, armed with machine guns, had to be picked off by starving prisoners armed with rifles, pistols, knives and their own hands.

Somehow, some made it:
Seeing a hole in the fence Samuel Wilenberg scrambled over the bodies of his dead friends through the barbed wire. His good friend fell beside him under the hail of bullets and pleaded with him to end his agony. Reluctantly, he did so.

"It was like flying on wings. I was shot in leg. My shoe was full of blood. I don't know how long I had to run for," he recalled.
The examples of people like Wilenberg - and the Iraqis who've survived nearly as bad, and the North Koreans who are doing the same today - should shame us, and inspire us at the same time.

They do for me, anyway.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 07:48:36 PM

The Poles - The Poles are sending a brigade of their troops to Iraq, according to the Washtimes:
[Polish President] Kwasniewski said he planned to visit Iraq himself once the force had settled in. 'I think that such a visit makes sense at a time we will already have gathered experience.'

...

Polish forces, including 370 officers, are to arrive in Iraq beginning Tuesday.
Stanislaw Boczkowski, in his 60s, who came to say goodbye to his son, said he spent six years in the 1980s in Iraq as a construction worker.
'It was a horrible dictatorship. Everyone was very poor, with the exception of a small elite of rich people. It is a very good thing that soldiers go there,' he said, looking proudly at his son.
The United States is footing most of the bill for the Polish-led division.
The soldiers, their uniforms marked with the Polish flag and the word Poland in Polish and Arabic, have also learned some basic Arabic and taken lessons in Iraqi customs and culture.
The coalition now has 13,400 non-U.S. troops deployed in Iraq, the bulk of them British, ground-forces commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said last week.
'There are 18 countries here right now,' Gen. Sanchez told reporters, adding that Britain was providing 8,300 troops and the Netherlands 800.
The United States said Monday that 30 nations have so far agreed to join it in an international stabilization force for Iraq even without a specific United Nations mandate demanded by some. "
Many other nations are contributing troops as well - and for a variety of reasons:
The Polish-led division will include 1,640 Ukrainian and 1,300 Spanish soldiers.
Bulgaria is sending about 500 troops; Hungary has pledged several hundred; Romania and Latvia each are deploying about 150, while Slovakia and Lithuania are dispatching 85 apiece.
The reasons why European countries have offered military support to coalition forces in Iraq vary.
Some, such as Britain, Poland and Spain, have done so because they genuinely believed in the justness of the war on Saddam's regime. Others have done so as a way of showing their loyalty to Washington.
All but Britain have experience in living with, or under, dictatorships.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 05:52:42 PM

Bloodbath, Part II - I said there'd be more to come - and I meant it!

Right Of Center - a Minnesota blog that's apparently been around a while, but I've only just found - notes that some armed robbers in St. Paul are smarter than their victims. He noted that KSTP-TV...:
...ran a story about a recent outbreak of robberies in St. Paul. Apparently two men are entering bars, which they have obviously staked out previously because they avoid all security cameras, and take money from the registers, pull tab booths and bar patrons.

I couldn't find the story at KSTP.com, but did find a story at the Pioneer Press. One point that KSTP made, and the Pioneer Press didn’t mention, was that all these robberies have taken place at bars that displayed signs banning guns on their premises.
Of course, people can learn from their mistakes:
In reaction to these robberies, the president of the St. Paul Hospitality Association is considering a recommendation to remove all signs from their establishments.
I wonder how long this fella is going to keep wearing that dopey shirt?

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 05:42:51 PM

Blaaaah - Feeling very ill at the moment - roaring headache, feeling very crummy.

Posting will be a tad light until I feel better.

Give me a couple hours...

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 01:50:44 PM

Bloodbath Rising! - Saint Paul's had its first crime involving a concealed carry permit holder since the Minnesota Personal Protection Act went into effect!

Here's the police blotter, passed to me by a source in City Hall:
Auto Theft: On 07/31/03 at 1521 hours [that's 3:21PM], officers were sent to 3XX Lexington on a stolen vehicle that was located, the owner (victim) was holding the suspect at gun point. The victim showed proof of Permit to Carry. One arrest was made.
But...wait; you mean to tell me the law-abiding permit-holder DIDN'T "blow" the perp "away", the way so many of the MPPA's detractors insisted would happen? No innocent bystanders mown down? No random gunfire?

Nope. Just another worthless car thief off the street, a car thief that would have gotten away to steal more cars - and G-d knows what else - had the law-abiding permit-holder not been able to react effectively. Just another would-be crime victim that isn't a crime victim after all.

One less Sandy Pappas voter on the street.

Will the media report this? And how?

More to come. Count on it.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/1/2003 01:49:54 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

Best Shots

American Bankers and the Media
Tanks for the Memories!
The Untouchables
Stand By Your List
The Class System
The DFL Deck of Cards
For The Children
Cost of Action, Inaction
The Pope of Bruce
The Blogosphere Blacklist
Keillor, Again
Open Letter to Keillor
More...

Articles
Links


Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay Learn More

Current Issue
Archives

Contact Me!

The Northern Alliance of Blogs
Fraters Libertas
Lileks
Powerline
SCSU Scholars

Blogs
 

Big Media
Frankfurter Allgemeine
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Minneapolis Star/Tribune
Jamestown Sun

Niche Media
Reason
Center for the American Experiment
National Review Online
Drudge
WSJ's OpinionJournal
Toquevillian

Other Blogs from my Kids and I
Daryll's "Horses and Orlando"
Sam's "Comic Post"
Rock's So Tough - the Iron City Houserockers

Mental Shrapnel
Curious/Furious
MN Concealed Carry Reform Now
The Onion
James Randi Educational Foundation
Backstreets
The Self-Made Critic
Book of Ratings

  
From Ropekid at .
Something Awful

Iraqi Democracy graphic

Support democracy and human rights in Iraq!

 

Everything on this site (c) Mitch Berg.  All non-quoted opinions are mine.

Site Meter