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

Saturday, November 15, 2003

"Mitch! Why Is Your Email Address So @#$#@% Hard To Use? - I've had a few emails asking why my email on this page is so cryptic (shotindark - (at) - mitchberg - (dot) - com). "Why don't you just post a link?"

Because spambots these days roam the web looking for valid email addresses (name@domain.com) to use for spam.

When I changed to the mitchberg.com domain, and revamped ALL my email, my spam count dropped to nearly zero. And it stayed there...

...until somebody crossposted my private email to a dozen or so email discussion groups. Some of them are apparently not spambot-proof. My spam count since October 24 has gone from "Roughly Zero" to "Dozens, maybe a hundred a day" on my main email account.

Thanks!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/15/2003 09:26:51 AM

Linked? - Jay Reding points us to this piece, originating in the Weekly Standard, purporting to show the Hussein/Al-Quaeda link:
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (search) gave terror lord Usama bin Laden's thugs financial and logistical support, offering Al Qaeda (search) money, training and haven for more than a decade, it was reported yesterday.

Their deadly collaboration — which may have included the bombing of the USS Cole (search) and the 9/11 attacks — is revealed in a 16-page memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee (search) that cites reports from a variety of domestic and foreign spy agencies compiled by multiple sources, The Weekly Standard (search) reports.
The memo documents the link:
Two men were involved with the collaboration almost from its start.

Mamdouh Mahmud Salim — who's described as the terror lord's "best friend" — was involved in planning the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Another terrorist, Hassan al-Turabi, was said by an Iraqi defector to be "instrumental" in the relationship.

Iraq "sought Al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided Al Qaeda with training and instructors," a top-level Iraqi defector has told U.S. intelligence.

The bombshell report says bin Laden visited Baghdad in January 1998 and met with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

"The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan," the memo says.
So let's recap - of the four justifications for the liberation of Iraq that the Bush Administration used:
Nobody on the left - at least on this side of the lunatic fringe - denies the endless string of resolutions the UN passed against the Hussein regime
Many on the left, including that leak in from the lunatic fringe, think that life under Hussein was better than life in Iraq today - but it doesn't come up often in arguments.
Weapons of Mass Destruction are still very much an open issue - and the Kay Report showed us just how open the issue is, not that you'd have known from the media reports on the subject.
And now, the "there was no link" canard may be on the ropes.
Let's see how this develops, of course.

But by the time of the election, I can see the left having to resort to "Bin Laden's been unaccounted for for 926 days"-sorts of statements, aiming for the demographic that thinks that sort of thing matters and also eats by slurping directly from the plate.

posted by Mitch Berg 11/15/2003 09:10:14 AM

Friday, November 14, 2003

Another Long Day - But the weekend looms.

This week has completely kicked my butt - new gigs will do that, of course. Needless to say, my NaNoWriMo output has gotten shredded, with not a single word of output all week long and a weekend of doing storyboards looming in front of me.

More posting later today, anyway. My NaNo novel might include a bunch of blog postings.

How to put a blog into a prehistoric universe...well, I'll work on that later, too.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/14/2003 05:50:31 AM

Jesse The Portrait - Powerline led us to the Jesse Ventura portrait.

Suggested caption: "Barkley! Get back behind the curtain!"

Is it just me, or does the terrain in the background - presumably Minnesota, with a capitol sitting in the middle of a huge open field - look like it's been laid waste?
posted by Mitch Berg 11/14/2003 05:40:22 AM

Berg's Law In Action - Berg's Law - my iron-clad law of liberal opinion about Iraq - is on garish display this week.

The law states:
No liberal commentator is capable of discussing more than one of the justifications for the liberation of Iraq at a time; doing so introduces a context in which their argument can not survive
Brian at Boviosity noticed it in this Sullivan piece yesterday, in re a NYTimes editorial:
"The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq."
Money quote from the editorial:
The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq. Mr. Bush would look breathtakingly cynical if he seemed to be rushing the preparation for real elections with an eye toward improving his own re-election chances.
"When did you stop beating the Iraqi people, Mr. President?

Then, today, Sullivan ran this post, which would seem to expand Berg's Law to coverage of the War on Terror in general - in this case, a spectacularly myopic Michael Kinsley editoral, of which Sullivan notes:
Mike Kinsley pulls off the astonishing feat of trying to tackle how president Bush went from being an anti-nation-building realist to a liberal internationalist in a few years without mentioning a certain incident that occurred, oh, say nine months or so into his presidency. Memo to Mike: some terorists attacked U.S. soil on September 11, 2001. 3,000 people or so were killed. It made a teensy little difference to U.S. foreign policy. Kinsley's gaffe, however, is revealing about certain strands in some liberals' thought these days. For them, 9/11 changed nothing important; it meant relatively little; it was a distraction from more important issues like Enron, as Paul Krugman opined, during the height of the Raines madness. These people don't just have blinders on; they've attached them with super-glue.
Which may actually be a whole new law: "The hard left's entire argument depends on ruthless, relentless control of the context of the argument".

I'm going to have to work on a book. Maybe I'll call it "Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned from Paul Begala".
posted by Mitch Berg 11/14/2003 05:38:57 AM

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Light Day, Again - Today's going to be a shredder at work. It's already a shredder at home.

More posting later today/tonight.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/13/2003 07:45:11 AM

Reputation - In 1993, after the "Black Hawk Down" debacle in Mogadishu, the US abandoned its mission in Somalia. That made a big impression on the world's terrorists, especially Osama Bin Laden.

The impression was deepened in incident after incident; the 1993 WTC bombing, the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole...

...and, so the theory goes, he expected no less from his September 11 attacks. If you were a Taliban supporter, it was a big mistake.

The theory continues that Hussein never expected the US to respond to any of his provocations - the 1991 conquest of Kuwait, his WMD programs during the nineties, the run-up to his overthrow.

And yet the fallout from our reputation in the 1990s continues. Most of the current terrorism in Iraq is being carried out against "soft targets" - convoys, NGO headquarters, police stations - targets with minimal risk and maximum exposure to the word media. This piece unwittingly spells it out:
"The Arabic language television station Al-Jazeera said eight Iraqis were also killed. It was the first such attack in this relatively quiet Shiite Muslim city since the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation and appeared aimed at sending a message to international organizations that they are not safe anywhere in Iraq."
Which is the entire message!

There is no military value in a Carabinieri station. A Polish or Ukrainian soldier won't have a huge impact on the actual prosecution of the war.

But if they put a chink in the armor of the Coalition of the Willing - many of whom are only barely willing - then hitting at targets like these will have an impact far out of proportion to even the ghastly cost of yesterday's attack on the Italians.

Nobody said terrorists were stupid.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/13/2003 07:44:51 AM

Going Mobile - Pl@#n L@&^e has moved her site.

Maybe that's what I need to do to create suspense and boost traffic; disappear, move, and change all references to proper names.

Hmmmm.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/13/2003 07:10:23 AM

Things You Never Hear Mitch Berg Say -"At one point I paused to consider the paper towel options.. We’re in that difficult time of the year where you want your paper towel to have a seasonal theme, but nothing explicitly Christmas. Turkeys would be nice, but they don’t go that far. "
posted by Mitch Berg 11/13/2003 06:00:19 AM

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Oops - I was going to say that posting is going to be light today, again...

...but I think I've already blown that.

Now if I could only find time for my NaNoWriMo project...
posted by Mitch Berg 11/12/2003 06:51:33 AM

Captain Hornbuckle - Everyone's linking to Powerline's piece on Capt. Harry Hornbuckle from yesterday.

And with good reason:
"Reader and Rocket Man colleague John Beukema directs our attention to a page-one story by Jonathan Eig in today's Wall Street Journal, 'Why you've heard of Jessica Lynch, not Zan Hornbukckle.'"
They - and the WSJ - then explain why Capt. Hornbuckle's story matters.

Read 'em both.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/12/2003 06:50:29 AM

Conservatism Kills! - I never liked Richard Broderick's Green Party candidacy for the Saint Paul School Board, which ended last week when he came in out of the top four in the city School Board elections.

I didn't like his proposals - to turn the school board into a lobbying body for Green political causes, and turn the schools into mechanisms for Green indoctrination. His snide, condescending responses to my questions (on an email discussion group) were another matter - but I'll leave that out of the discussion for a moment.

The fact that he lost - and that relatively conservative DFLer Randy Kelly beat ultraliberal DFLer Jay Benanav in the last mayoral election - isn't just the ebb and flow of politics.
From 1492 until today, the European settlement of the Western Hemisphere has been driven by a cultural dynamic of exploitation and domination.
Whoah! When the hard-left starts with talk of European dominationineeination of the indigineonistic poplulatrices, we know we're onto something really big, right?

We continue:
Though in the United States the overt expression of this dynamic came to an end with the "battle" of Wounded Knee, looking south it is clear that it still plays itself out in its old familiar form in Chiapas, Guatemala, Amazonia, and the Andes...
That Broderick ties Wounded Knee - a massacre in 1890 brought on by poor communication and panic - to Guatemala (a failed leftist insurgency) says more about Broderick than about history.
But simply because in the United States the last Hotchkiss shell in this ongoing struggle flew 113 years ago does not mean that the cultural dynamic that brought us here, to this time and place, simply disappeared along with Native American resistance. On the contrary. It went underground, and continues to haunt the political and class struggles of today.
So the stage is set. Whatever follows is comparable in significance with the massacre of 200 Natives in South Dakota, with the epochal struggles of indigenous peoples to survive (as frequently against the evils of the centralized planning that people like Broderick support as against racism and nationalism). Pretty big stuff, right?

So what is the epochal event that Broderick equates with massacre and epochal social upheaval?
In St. Paul, this cultural dynamic is clearly evident in the policies and administrative style of Mayor Randy Kelly,...
Spit Take

Whaaaa?

Randy Kelly? The moderate, Eastside DFL mayor who comes across as nothing so much as a luke-warmer version of Norm Coleman? Or as Broderick says:
...a politician who won office by only a few hundred votes but has governed as if he'd been granted a mandate from heaven
[Ed. - What? Because he won a narrow victory, he's supposed to cower in fear of his opposition?]
In his push for mixed zoning along the city's dynamic business strips like Grand Avenue and West 7th Street - mixed zoning that would open these thriving small business areas to exploitation and eventual ruin by big box franchises - or for a publicly financed stadium for the Minnesota Twins or his imperious, and possibly illegal, decision to connect Ayd Mill Road to 35-E, Kelly has demonstrated a high-handed manner worthy of a Conquistador.
And the deaths of hundreds of thousands of St. Paulites from smallpox and forced resettlement are truly shameful episodes in Western Civilization.
But in his eagerness to act on behalf of outsiders itching to get their hands on the human and economic resources of St. Paul, he more nearly resembles the stereotypical 19th Century Indian Agent, appointed to lull the natives into submission even as they are robbed blind and the meager rewards they have been promised in return for their cooperation withheld or replaced with shoddy trade goods and tainted meat.
So let's get this straight: Mayor Kelly's initiatives to:
Bring a Menards to St. Paul
Keep the Gopher States Ethanol plant on West Seventh open
Allow national franchises on Grand Avenue
Connect the Ayd Mill Road with I-35E (note to non-St. Paulites - Ayd Mill Road is a four-lane arterial that was built in the 1960's to - you got it, connect with I-35E!)
...are epochal tales of oppression equivalent, even symbolically, with the Wounded Knee massacre...?

Words fail.
Unfortunately for Kelly, his project received a major setback in the most recent citywide elections. Three of the four City Council candidates endorsed by Kelly - and by his masters at the Saint Paul Area Chamber of Commerce - went down to defeat, and the one candidate who did win, Debbie Montgomery, succeeded on the basis of her own merits as a long-time community figure - and not because of Kelly's support.
The Native American struggle to retain their cultural identity. The Maori battle to regain their cultural self-respect. The fight of the Chiapas peasants against the depredations of a leftist central government. The struggle to keep Chipotle from opening a franchise on Grand Avenue.

Which doesn't fit, here?

I know who not to ask:
Whether this outcome has legs or not, I'm not sure, though I'm inclined to think it portends the outcome of next fall's Presidential election. Kelly, the local Chamber of Commerce's Indian Agent, emerged from this election a de facto lame duck. George Bush, the nationwide Indian Agent of the same exploiting class that backs Kelly, will suffer a similar fate. Why? Because the big difference between middle class Americans and 19th century Plains Indians is that there are a lot more of us and, for the moment at least, we can still vote the bums out of office.
"For the moment at least". So which is it, Mr. Broderick - do we conservatives, especially conservatives aligned with that most vile of evil bodies, the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce, want to massacre our opponents in the fields (with Hotchkiss mountain guns, apparently), or merely revoke everyone's right to vote?

This will play among the ritualistically-guilty in Highland Park, of course - where people are still looking for hanging chads under their fair trade espresso cups.

Final question: Is this an example of the "instinctively Green worldview" that Mr. Broderick proposed using the St. Paul School District's resources to promote among our school children?

Just curious.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/12/2003 06:24:32 AM

Standard Cant - Katherine Kerstin had this editorial on the state's proposed, and contentious, new Social Studies standards for school kids, in the Sunday paper.

For those of you not from Minnesota - the question of how Minnesota will assess what its school children have learned has been a long, contentious one, which came glaringly to light five years ago with the adoption of the "Profiles In Learning", a set of standards that were flawed (although not as deeply as the more reactionary of its critics thought) and had the tang of "ideological wonkery" all over them.

Under the Pawlenty administration, there's a new proposal; a list of things (in this case, in Social Studies) that kids are suppose to be able to learn at each grade level.

Predictably, the standards have drawn fire - in this case, from the academic left:
"What would our children's history classrooms look like if the 'U' professors, and like-minded critics, got their way? One thing's sure: Every day, our kids would walk out of class hanging their heads for shame at being Americans. The professors' letter makes clear that they see America -- first and foremost -- as a nation that has oppressed women, enslaved blacks and exploited the poor. They want our children to see it that way, too. That's why their letter is full of recommendations like this: When Minnesota 8- and 9-year-olds study colonial America, they should focus on 'the genocidal impact of European incursions,'the extinction of numerous species and the destruction of whole environments.' When third-graders study the Pledge of Allegiance, they should learn that its author was 'forced by the political climate of Jim Crow and xenophobia' to omit the mention of equality, along with liberty and justice.

The professors reject the new standards' Government and Citizenship benchmarks along with its history benchmarks. They object, for example, to a first-grade standard that encourages 'good citizen traits' like 'honesty, courage, patriotism and individual responsibility.' Why? Portraying such traits as important components of citizenship is tantamount to teaching patriotism as a 'reflex action of blind obedience or conformity.'"
The whole thing is worth a read.

The academic left which controls the agenda for the "educational-industrial complex" seems to regard any and all observances of respect for the Nation (as opposed to Society) as propaganda - and there certainly are precedents for this belief. Education should not become propaganda.

The key phrase in the previous paragraph, of course, is "any and all". Some notion of the nation, at least our nation, America, as something with some admirable traits, is a good thing - as long as our schools can teach enough critical thinking skills to students to discern between information and propaganda.

The problem, of course, is that they don't do that today. Children get plenty of propaganda - "left-wing" cant on social issues, politics, and personality theories - today, all of which goes unanswered. If you've followed this blog for a while, you've heard some of the stories.

How to deal with education? More later.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/12/2003 05:14:11 AM

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Zzzzzz - Something about going back to work in an office always sucks the energy out of me for the first day or so. Posting was light yesterdy, and will be only a little heavier today (although I may actually be awake after 9PM tonight).

Content will be progressively less lame this week. Bear with me.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/11/2003 07:39:43 AM

Now He's Gone And Done It - Clayton Cramer carried through on last week's promise, and has started his Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog.

Note to all you CCRN guys and CCW supporters - read it early and often, and support him. I plan on it.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/11/2003 07:38:43 AM

The Celebrity Politician Fad Jumps the Shark - Al Franken is pondering running for Senate for the "Wellstone Seat" (as many Dems still call it) in '08:
"'It's a long way away, five years away,' Franken told the Star Tribune Monday night. 'It might be crazy. I might not be the best candidate. Part of this is seeing what happens next year and what direction things are going.'

He has previously dismissed talk of political office, but Newsweek this week first reported the story of his possible bid for the Senate.

Franken, a friend of the late Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone, says he's being encouraged by his friends to run. Driving him as well has been his distaste for the Bush presidency, he said."
There's the usual peek-a-boo involved; one source says he'll run, one says he won't.

Note to Franken: If you want to get anywhere, run against Mark Dayton in the primary.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/11/2003 07:17:15 AM

Imitation of Christ - I never liked any of the Matrix movies. They seemed to be soggy with pseudo-Buddhist platitudes, sort of like Jackie Chan with a huge dose of self-righteous wonkery thrown in.

But there's more, says Thomas Hibbs in National Review Online. The movies, he says, capstone a renaissance of Christian imagery in modern pop art.

Money quote:
The recent popularity of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and especially Lord of the Rings tells us much about the appetite of American audiences for grand mythic tales, with myth understood not in its derogatory sense but in the sense deployed by Lewis and Tolkien. The peculiar contribution of The Matrix was to focus on the dilemma of humanity or post-humanity in the age of machine intelligence. It began with a bold and crisp articulation of this dilemma. It could have ended as a powerful and compelling affirmation of the enduring vitality of classic myths. It could have sharpened our sense of the options: a debased, mechanized humanity, void of the aspirations characteristic of what is best and most noble in our traditions vs. a humanity that has recovered a sense of purpose, a sense of the goods for which we ought to be willing to fight and die for.
The Matrix ended no such way, of course. I'm waiting to if, and how, the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy abandons the message, after magnificent resurrection image in The Two Towers. This is Hollywood after all.

And yet if you'd have told me ten years ago, that, by 2002, the best movie of the year would feature a Resurrection scene paralelled on that of Christ's, and that the best album of the year would be solidly themed on faith, strength, hope, self-sacrifice and love, I'd have wondered if we were talking about the same show-biz and entertainment media.

I'm not nearly naive enough to assume that this indicates an interest in the subject of faith on the part of Hollywood (I fully expect the third part of the Rings trilogy to mangle Tolkein's original message beyond recognition - although I'll be as happy to be surprised as I was last year with Two Towers).

But while it doesn't mean Hollywood has discovered faith and socially-unifying myth for its own purposes, it might mean it's figured out the rest of the nation values them, anyway.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/11/2003 07:09:46 AM

Travesty? - A US Army colonel got tough with an Iraqi Fedayin prisoner - who gave up the names of a couple of fellow thugs who were about to attack the Colonel's unit.

Guess who got in trouble?

The Yankee Pirate has put up this new site, The case against Lt. Col. Allen B. West, to publicize LTColonel West's case:
"Despite all indications that Col. West's actions (firing his pistol AWAY from the dirtbag and scaring him into giving up two other Saddam Fedayeen thugs), thwarted what had been demostrated in previous enounters as being lethal engagements, the Army has seen fit to offer Col. West a 'broken sword' early out or face a courts martial."
Give it a visit. It's eye-opening.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/11/2003 07:07:50 AM

Veterans Day - Armed Liberal exhumes an old column of is in observance of Veteran's Day. I think It's a good one:
And worried that what I wrote kept coming out sounding either too qualified or would be interpreted as being too nationalistic.

And I realized something about my own thinking, a basic principle I'll set out as a guiding point for the Democrats and the Left in general as they try and figure out the next act in this drama we are in.

First, you have to love America.

I think it’s the best county; I've debated this with commenters before, and I'll point out that while people worldwide tend to vote with their feet, there may be other (economic) attractions that pull them. But there are virtues here which far outweigh any sins. And I'll start with the virtue of hope.

The hope of the immigrants, abandoning their farms and security for a new place here.

The hope of the settlers, walking across Death Valley, burying their dead as they went.

The hope of the ‘folks’ who moved to California after the war.

The hope of the two Latino kids doing their Computer Science homework at Starbucks’.

I love this country, my country, my people. And those who attack her...from guerilla cells, boardrooms, or their comfy chairs in expensive restaurants...better watch out.

I don't get a clear sense that my fellow liberals feel the same way. And if so, why should ‘the folks’ follow them? Why are we worthy of the support of a nation that we don't support?

So let me suggest an axiom for the New Model Democrats:

America is a great goddamn country, and we're both going to defend it from those who attack it and fight to make it better.

And for everyone who is going to comment and remind me that ‘all liberals already do that’…no they don't. Not when the chancellor has to intervene at U.C. Berkeley to get ‘permission’ for American flags to be flown and red-white-and-blue ribbons to be worn. Not when the strongest voices in liberalism give lip service to responding to an attack on our citizens on our soil.

Loving this country isn't the same thing as jingoism; it isn't the same thing as imperialism; it isn't the same thing as blind support of the worst traits of our government or our people.

It starts with recognizing the best traits, and there are a hell of a lot of them.

They were worth defending in my father's time, and they are worth defending today.

So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.
Read the whole piece - and yes, there were parts that I didn't paste in this post!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/11/2003 06:00:12 AM

Monday, November 10, 2003

I Don't Like Mondays... - ...unless there's money involved.

First day on a new engagement today, and it's going to be an "out of the frying pan..." day. My new client is going to have me in meetings with their customer most of the day - and I'm going to get my company and project "orientation" in the car on the way to the customer's place.

Just the way I like it, actually.

Posting will be fairly light until this evening. And after that? We'll see.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/10/2003 05:22:30 AM

Idea Whose Time Has Come - Clayton Cramer wants to create a blog just for defensive gun uses.

He apparently has plenty of material:
"I'm going to have to create a separate blog just for civilian defensive gun uses in the press--they are so common!"
Note to Clayton: Put it on. I'll link to it immediately.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/10/2003 05:21:40 AM

Arab Street, Redux - The Telegraph thinks the "Arab Street" might be repelled by the weekend's alleged Al Quaeda bombing in Riyadh:
"Al-Qa'eda appeared yesterday to have unwittingly alienated a vast spectrum of Arab opinion and helped America's war on terrorism by attacking Muslims it considers traitors to the faith, intelligence sources in Riyadh said.

Destroyed buildings at the housing compound in Riyadh after yesterday's explosion

Seventeen people, mostly of Arab descent, including four children, died in the suicide attack against a housing compound in Riyadh on Saturday night. The victims included four Egyptians, four Lebanese, and a Sudanese.

The attack has engendered unprecedented condemnation throughout the Middle East and will have damaged al-Qa'eda's appeal as anti-western and pro-Islamic."
So what does the "Arab Street" really think?

Given that the reactions to the US liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq were so short-lived and relatively mild, it'll bear watching. If the real "Arab Street" begins to shun Al-Quaeda, it might indicate the average Arab has more regard for democracy than many on the left - and among the Islamofascists - credit them for.

On the other hand, Lileks asks :
And it makes me wonder: They stick the shiv in the ribs of their richest and most enthusiastic backers.

What makes them this confident?
Good, sobering questions.

Maybe a twisted, hyper-hyperbolic version of the same thing that makes Howard Dean and John Kerry whiz on the liberation of Iraq - as we call it, "playing to their base?" It's not done for the poor saud in the "arab street", it's done to buff the morale of the people whose morality allows and encourages things like using airliners as cruise missiles.

If the people who provide the bling for Al Quaeda can justify that, what's a bomb in Riyadh?

I could, of course, be comically wrong.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/10/2003 05:20:08 AM

I Feel Robbed - Is it real, or is it Scrappleface?:
"Democrat presidential candidate Howard Dean today blasted President George Bush for fostering an economic recovery that deprives thousands of Americans of their leisure time. The attack comes on the day the Labor Department reported that payrolls grew by 126,000 last month, more than twice the number economists had predicted."
Now that I have some steady trade. I guess that makes me a Dean swing voter...
posted by Mitch Berg 11/10/2003 05:10:54 AM

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Somebody's Going To Hell... - But this piece may be the most sickly-funny, or funnily-sick, "separated at birth" I've ever read.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2003 12:50:20 PM

Quote Of the Day - I started writing a piece on John Edwards' appearance on the Russert show (underway as I write this). The original topic, of course, was his triviality on foreign policy - which makes him "about average" among Democratic candidates. I stopped writing when I realized that nobody cares about John Edwards.

But when Russert pointed out that Edwards' campaign has come under criticism for being "a wholly owned subsidiary of the tort bar" - Russert noted that 51% of his contributions have come from law firms and lawyers - Edwards responded:
Remember - nearly half of my contributions come from average, working Americans!
Nearly half!

Oh, the rest of his appearance was a highly-concentrated strain of idiocy. Russert set a beautiful trap, asking how Edwards felt about Howard Dean's support for civil unions for gays (which Edwards is on record against). Edwards responded "I think that's a matter for the states to decide". Russert responded "What if you were the governor of North Carolina?" Edwards responded "I'd oppose it".

Russert then pounced, noting that Edwards felt that gun control and abortion were both federal, not state issues. Edwards phumphered and harrumphed...

...in fact the only thing he didn't do is lose my vote. Granted, he never had it, but it's something.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2003 09:53:37 AM