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

Saturday, January 03, 2004

Miracle? - A nearly-100-year-old woman was pulled from the rubble in Bam, Iran today - nine days after the catastrophic earthquake:
"For nearly nine days after an earthquake demolished her city, 97-year-old Sharbanou Mazandarani lay trapped under furniture and crumbled masonry, passing fear-filled days and cold nights with death all around.

But with nearly a century of life behind her, Mazandarani was not ready to give up. And on Saturday, elated rescuers pulled her out of the rubble alive - and amazingly, unhurt.

'God kept me alive,' the petite, wrinkled Mazandarani said as she lay on a bed in a makeshift hospital in Bam, covered to her chin with a blue blanket and a brown print scarf tied around her head.

Rescuers said she asked for a cup of tea soon after her rescue - and then complained it was too hot to drink.
Of course, the official line is, this just isn't possible:
Normally people can survive up to three days in the rubble of an earthquake. It was unclear whether Mazandarani had food or water while she lay trapped under the ruins."
So - after every major disaster, the "authorities" officially give up hope of survivors, and switch to "Recovery" mode, after about three days. They always - invariably, after every earthquake - that it's impossible for anyone to have survived more than 72 hours.

And, it seems, after nearly every major earthquake, there is a story like this; an unlikely, miraculous life snatched from the jaws of death story.

And it happens so regularly - 5, 7, 9 days or even more after earthquakes - that one wonders why officials continue declaring life impossible after three piddly days.

The human body is a miraculous thing. The human spirit, moreso. Humans have survived the damnedest things; the examples are both many and inspiring. The ones I remember:
Poon Lim, a mechanic on a ship torpedoed in 1942, who survived for over four months on a life raft. Completely impossible, of course.
After the 1999 Turkish earthquakes, people - as in, groups of people - were being pulled alive from the rubble over four days later.
The Shackelton Expedition, which stayed alive for two years on the Antarctic ice, and then on two improbably successful over-ocean voyages in lifeboats
I could go on - and on.

The lesson? The authorities care less about life than process. Ignore them. Keep digging.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/3/2004 09:34:33 PM

Perspective - The media - and most left bloggers - have less sense of historical perspective than my 12 year old daughter does.

Victor Davis Hanson is here to provide it.
Going into the heart of Mesopotamia, American troops passed Iraqi palaces with historic and often ominous names: Cunaxa, whence Xenophon’s 10,000 began their arduous journey home; Gau gamela, where Alexander devastated the Persian imperial army; and, not far away in southeastern Turkey, Carrhae, where the Roman triumvir Crassus lost his 45,000-man army and his own head. Mesopotamia has long been a very dangerous place for Westerners. By any historical measure other than our own, it is nothing short of preposterous that, in less than a year’s time, American troops would plunge into such a cauldron, topple the world’s worst dictator, and then undertake to introduce the rudiments of a liberal society in the center of the ancient Islamic caliphate—all at a cost of a little over 400 lives.

Now, however, after one of the most miraculous victories in military history, we demand an almost instantaneous peace followed by the emergence of a sort of Iraqi Continental Congress. We demand the head of Saddam Hussein, forgetting that Adolf Eichmann disappeared for years in the post-Nazi archipelago abroad, and that neither Ratko Mladic nor Radovan Karadzic has yet been scooped from the swamp of the Balkans. Our journalists describe the chaos besetting a society allegedly traumatized by American war that in reality is struggling with the legacy of its own destructive past. In Iraq we are not trying to rebuild the equivalent of a flattened Hamburg or a Tokyo among the equivalents of shell-shocked and thoroughly confused Germans or Japanese. We are attempting something much more challenging: to impose a consensual system upon spared peoples, who in liberation did far more to destroy their own country (the losses to pillaging ran to about $12 billion) than we did in either the war or the ensuing occupation.
"But if the Iraqis really wanted to be "liberated", respond the Dowd/Ivins/Hesiod crowd, "this "peace" would be easier!".

Not so:
MOST OF the Baathists among our current enemies in Iraq chose to flee rather than stand and fight. The homes of Saddam’s henchmen were not all bombed. Their friends were not killed. Their pride was only temporarily lost—to be regained, evidently, upon their discovery that it is easier and safer to murder an American who is building a school and operating under strict rules of engagement than to take on Abrams tanks barreling into Baghdad under a sky of F-16’s.

Such are a few of the ironies entailed in our stunning military success, even if overlooked in analyses of the recent turmoil. And there are still more. Hard as it may be to accept, a rocky peace may well be the result of a spectacularly rapid victory. Imagine our war instead as a year-and-a-half continuum of active combat, stretching from the late-March 2003 invasion until the scheduled assumption of power of the Iraqi provisional government this coming July. Now suppose that over the course of this time frame, about 5,000 of Saddam’s hardcore killers had either to be killed, captured, or routed from the country if there were ever to be any chance for real peace to emerge. Somehow, under conditions of full-scale combat, one suspects the job would have been much easier.
As always, a must-read.

(Via Powerline)
posted by Mitch Berg 1/3/2004 07:42:44 AM

Feeling a Bit Defensive, Are We? - Barbra Streisand burns up "valuable" space on Page One of her ~~online screed site~~ website - a place where most artists hawk their wares, like her new album of ~~interminable formulaic ballads recycled from forty years of movies I generally hated~~ songs from movies, to take a swipe at Matt Drudge:
NARAS ISSUES STATEMENT VERIFYING STREISAND GRAMMY NOMINATION FOR "THE MOVIE ALBUM" AND REFUTING MATT DRUDGE AND CINDY ADAMS LIES

(Note: articles were run by columnists Matt Drudge [the Drudge Report] and Cindy Adams [the New York Post] stating that the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences was considering disqualifying the Grammy nomination of Barbra Streisand's "The Movie Album," the articles asserting it was released too late. Adams flat-out claimed that such disqualification had taken place. There was, of course, no truth to their stories, and their charges were refuted by the National Association of Recording Sciences, which issued the following statement:)

"We are diligent about protecting the integrity of our process, especially prior to announcing nominations. According to our records, all of this year's nominations have met the necessary criteria, and we wish all of our nominees the best of luck."
Well.

Glad we got that straightened out, aren't we?

The album's been out that long, and I still haven't bought it?

Go figure.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/3/2004 06:54:18 AM

Friday, January 02, 2004

Be Alarmed - Found on Infinite Monkeys today - VH1 will be reuniting The Alarm, the third-best British band of the eighties.

I'm happier already. That's enough to counterbalance the concomitant reunions of Kajagoogoo and Flock of Seagulls (Berlin will also put in an appearance - they were a fairly awful band, but "The Metro" was a cool enough song that I forgive them. Lileks' notes about Flock's place in the roots of Techno are noted in advance...)

And we'll go marching on...
posted by Mitch Berg 1/2/2004 04:41:13 PM

Someone Call the ACLU - I live in Saint Paul, and I genuinely love the place It's a major city with a small-town feel - one wag called it "Fifteen small towns with one mayor", and he's not far off. While Minneapolis is largely a bunch of bedroom neighborhoods built around a Downtown, Uptown, Dinkytown (the U) and increasingly Northeast, the real action in Saint Paul is in the neighborhoods.

Despite the city's relentless DFL slant, we have some genuinely good city services: the best urban fire department in the US, and an excellent police department as well.

This morning's Strib tells the story of the SPPD's "God Squad", a group of inner-city ministers that the police call upon to help mediate problems.
The ministers walk the streets, attend high school events and talk to everyone from gangbangers to school administrators looking for ways to stem or prevent violence.

The ministers aren't out proselytizing or trying to fill pews on Sunday mornings. They say they're trying to keep volatile situations from turning deadly on Saturday nights.

"We're not trying to 'save' folks," said the Rev. Devin Miller, who helped start the group. "We're trying to save folks."

Harrington and other police officials credit the God Squad with helping to keep St. Paul one of the safest cities in the country by talking to suspects, victims, relatives and residents on behalf of police.

"There are times when the police will call us out and say, 'Why don't you guys handle this,' " said the Rev. Divar Kemp of the Greater Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church on Dale Street in the Summit-University neighborhood.

Harrington [SPPD Commander John Harrington] thinks the group is unique because police call them, and because ministers coordinate with police on ways to keep the peace. The relationship became more formal in November when the police gave the ministers dark blue windbreakers (called "raid jackets") with "God Squad" written on them.
Mixing church and state! Let slip the dogs of political correctness!

How long do you suppose it's going to be?
posted by Mitch Berg 1/2/2004 07:14:17 AM

Open Letter to E-Democracy - If you're not interested in the inner workings of a petty squabble between a hack writer and a faded email discussion group, then move on to the next post.

In about 1995, brand new to the Internet, I got involved with "Minnesota Politics", and email discusson group run by "E-Democracy," a local non-profit dedicated to furthering democracy via the internet.

For a few years, it was very interesting. Some actual politicians read the list. You could write something and feel (probably wrongly, but still) that you were making some sort of impact. In those pre-blogger days, it was a forum for a lot of would-be pundits. The lists were moderated - and blessed with some wonderful moderators.

Today, the MN-Politics lists are a few steps above Indymedia or Democratic Underground - which is damnation by faint praise. They are playgrounds for the local Greens and DFLers. Not that that's a problem; there's something indisputably fun about being an underdog minority, on the mailing list as in a state. However, it doesn't take long to notice that conservative voices are actively squelched.

So I resigned:
Since program asked why I'm unsubbing from MN-Politics, here you go.

I'm unsubscribing because MN-Politics has become a completely irrelevant exercise, because [longtime list manager] Terrell Brown runs it in a completely, utterly biased manner (reinforced by the biases of its founders), and because it's not even a faint shadow of its former self. Brown suspended me for six months last September for making three posts in a day, and for daring to respond to one of [a local DFL poobah's] insults. We conservatives better not get uppity, y'see.

There was a time when I felt that participating in MN-Pol was a useful pursuit. I learned things, I was introduced to new people, it helped me evolve in understanding politics in Minnesota. That ended long ago. Today, it's just another rantserve.

A thoroughly left-of-center rantserve, as it happens. Not that it was any different, ever - but it doesn't take a statistical [name of list statistician removed] to observe that EVERY right-of-center voice on these lists finds themselves suspended in short order.

Back when I cared about trying to "improve" e-democracy, I compiled a list that tended to show the unequal treatment received by conservatives; the likes of [Shoreview area pundit and former representative famous for condescending insults] and [St. Paul DFL/Green activist famous for spittle-flecked ranting] insulted and ranted and violated rules all over the place and yet posted merrily away (especially [Mr. Shoreview], whom Terrell Brown allowed to get away with years of personal, degrading insults vastly worse than those for which he documentably disciplined conservative voices). Interested in getting involved wiht E-Democracy at the time, I asked to see E-Demoracy's "disciplinary" records - and received a threat from one of E-Democracy's founders to unilaterally ban me from all E-Democracy activity forever if I got uppity again.

It was about then that I realized a couple of things:

1) E-Democracy isn't about democracy. It's about a few people feeling like they're doing something.

2) MN-Politics is irrelevant - even Phyllis Kahn doesn't participate anymore, and that's saying something. And it's irrelevant for a reason; it's become, after four-five years of Terrell Brown's hack mismanagement, a playground for people who...agree with or have something to offer Terrell Brown!

Blogs are the future of grass-roots political communication. They are decentralized, "do it yourself", inherently democratic. They reward merit - if you're good, people will come. If you spew dreck or bore people stiff, people who don't like boring dreck will stay away in droves. And they work - in the last year, compare the number of articles in the major media about the political and media impact of blogs with that of the email issues listserve. Blogs are inherently rewarding - and I have gotten more genuine feedback from real politicians and media figures from a year on my blog than I did from seven years on E-Democracy. Being as they're decentralized and unregulated, I'm sure they don't fulfill the hive instinct of those who prefer the comfort of a moderated email list - but they matter, which is more than MN-Pol can say these days.

I contributed a lot to MNPol over the years. I wanted to contribute more - time, talent, effort. I was treated like shit. It's offensive. And it's the sort of thing that will render MNPol - and probably the rest of E-Democracy, over time, as the "good" volunteers, like [the moderators of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul discussion lists, which are still excellent], get burned out and are replaced with the likes of Brown - equally irrelevant.

Good luck, and happy new year.

Mitchell Berg
Mitch unleashes the sour grapes? Sure, I'll cop to it.

The points, to the extent that there are any, are in the second to the last graf; when was the last time anyone wrote a news article about political email listservers? Conservatives tend to dominate the blogosphere, while moderated exercises in the collection of groupthink like Indymedia, Democratic Underground and MN-Politics either are lefty activities from the beginning, or morph into them over time.

I used to write an awful lot at MN-Pol - look through the various archives. I was probably the one conservative who managed not to get suspended the longest. I've watched it morph from a fairly interesting, left-leaning but modestly ecumenical effort with some integrity into a snide little rantserve for local DFLers and Greens. Which is fine - they need their place to play - apparently someplace safe from all dissent and real discussion.

But I'm having a lot more fun here.

posted by Mitch Berg 1/2/2004 06:14:29 AM

Thursday, January 01, 2004

Nothing Happens. Dean and Democrat Underground Bereft - New Years, under tight security, came in like a lamb.

Powerline has film.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/1/2004 11:08:33 AM

I'll Take Rice With That - The Captain reaches the same conclusion I did a while ago; Condi Rice need to be on the ticket in '04, or at least before '08.

Read the Captain's reasoning. It's different than mine - that it'd gut the Democrats' traditional social monopoly - and a dadburn good idea.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/1/2004 08:53:24 AM

Where's the Beef? - Hewitt sounded off yesterday (scroll to is - his hyperlinks seem to be hosed) with an inspired defense of Jerry Falwell against Howard Dean. Read it - I share Hugh's reservations about Falwells' politicization of his church, and some of his gaffes are truly cringe-inducing, but Hewitt makes observations about Falwell the Minister that are not only dead-on - but are the sort of thing that the GOP needs to remember.

To wit:
"Dean is becoming a crank before our eyes. Democrats must recognize that personal attacks like the one on Falwell are a signal of things to come, and that nominating Dean will assure a steady diet of apologies and clarifications. They may nominate him anyway, but Dean's internal anger is on display, and it is a disqualifying character flaw in a candidate for the presidency.
But since Dean has attacked Falwell as a Pharisee, that makes it legit to ask to see Dean's own records of charitable giving and personal service to the poor and the sick --and bike path advocacy and doctors' hours for which he was paid don't count. Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised by the size of Dr. Dean's tithes and offerings and his uncompensated dedication to the imprisoned and the orphaned. But it is possible that Dean's attack on Falwell, and through him all ministers and even lay evangelicals who have been active in politics, will have set in motion some questions Dr. Dean doesn't want to answer."
Check it out - even if you're not a fundie, this is important stuff.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/1/2004 06:00:46 AM

2003 Wrapup - So - the war did NOT take six months.

The Battle of Baghdad didn't turn into Stalingrad.

Lack of UN support didn't render the liberation untenable.

Hussein didn't nuke or gas Israel when he was up against the wall (hee hee. Remember when that was the left's big bleat?)

Tens of thousands of Iraqis did not die.

The "Looting of Iraq's history" turned out to be about $500 worth of post-Babylonian equivelents of Happy Meal toys. Most of it took place before US troops were on the scene, at either the museum or the Ministry of Oil.

The entire Sunni Triangle didn't rise in revolt after the war ended.

The Shiites didn't rise en masse to install a pro-Iranian shadow government in the South.

The "Arab Street" didn't rise in anger. They did not troop to the nearest Al Quaeda recruiting office, raise the right arm, turn their head and cough, and ship out for the nearest AQ training camp. Many of those that did are currently pushing up Lilies of the Valley in Iraq, or hiding in mud huts fingering their bombs and awaiting same.

The Turks didn't invade the Kurdish sector.

The deposal of Hussein didn't set the Middle East afire. Quite the opposite - except for the Intifahda, some wars around the world have toned down or ended.

"Yellowcakes" wasn't a Bush lie after all.

Halliburton really isn't profiteering after all. Guess the NYT makes mistakes too, huh?

So here's the question: Is the left making any claims about Iraq that they actually think will stick?

Let us know. That's what the comments are for. Feel free.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/1/2004 04:45:21 AM

Drastic Oversight - In the craziness of the last two months, I notice some of my blog housekeeping has gone undone.

For starters, I see that I haven't added Captain's Quarters into my Northern Alliance Blogroll yet. Great stuff. Read it daily - as I do.

I also see that the Commissioner has inducted Spitbull to the Northern Alliance. OK. They're in!

Although - and I beg the indulgence of my fellow NAOB nabobs - I have to ask why Jay Reding, one of the more insightful Minnesota conservative bloggers, holding down our southwestern border in Mankato, hasn't been given the keys to the NAOB washroom yet? The guy is "Powerline Junior".

Give it a thought, OK, fellas?
posted by Mitch Berg 1/1/2004 03:16:29 AM

First! - Went to Landmark Square with the kids for the street-level fireworks - a new one on me.

I'll probably post some pictures tomorrow. Or today.

Happy New Year!
posted by Mitch Berg 1/1/2004 12:43:31 AM

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

The Hackey-Sack-Playing Chiba-Monkey Trivia Zombie Awards, 2004 Edition - This year's award goes to...

...the envelope, please...

This year's award goes to Fraters Libertas, for their award post!

We teed off with:
Blogger Whose Mouth Wrote Checks Their Ass Couldn't Cash

RUNNER UP: James Lileks, the Bleat. He gets cut some slack...

WINNER: Mitch Berg, Shot in the Dark. If Mitch did nothing for the next six months but blog he still wouldn't make up for all the promised material that never showed up.
I guess I should be flattered that anyone cares I "promise" things that I can't get around to.

And I DID spend six months doing almost nothing but blogging in 2003. But I'm thinking - besides my piece of "Urban Conservatives" (which still lurks in my "Drafts" on Blogger), what didn't I deliver?

But again, I shoudn't complain - it's the only time I'll ever beat Lileks for an award. As opposed to a game of one on one.

Then, there was:
Blogger Whose Unchecked Navel Gazing Reached Egomaniacal Levels

RUNNER UP: Mitch Berg, Shot in the Dark. For referring to himself in the third person while setting his personal tastes as the standard for cinematic excellence:

it's not easy to take books that Mitch Berg found completely unreadable (I made it through about 20 pages of "Fellowship" before I put it down for good), and turn them into movies that are not only monumental and epic, but genuinely touching on a human as well as philosophical level.
Jeez, fellas, pay attention: Mitch Berg wasn't using his tastes to set the standard for cinematic excellence. He did it to define literary tedium.

However, many of the awards were dead-on:
Worst Color Scheme in a Blog

WINNER: SCSU Scholars. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but that yellow background color looks like the phlegm a malaria victim might cough up.
Hear hear.

King - if you can't get a student to do it for extra credit, gimme a call. You're in the NAOB, and you need to join the big leagues in the design department. Like Fraters, with their current layout, "Tribute to the Italian Flag". Brava!

Finally:
Blogger Who Just Can't Decide To Stick Or Stay Away for Good

RUNNER UP: Sedalina. We love her and all and are very happy she's back, but all this dramatic departure and return stuff is killing us. However, it's not killing us as much as the fact that she's able to get more chicks in six weeks than Saint Paul has gotten in two years.
I'd laugh - but I'm too busy crying.

And then, the winner:
WINNER: Rachel Lucas - whose tortured, self-absorbed deliberations about whether or not to hang up her keyboard got old very fast. And continues to age with each passing week. Verne Gagne didn't quit and come back as many times as Lucas did this year. And he did it with much more dignity.
Careful. You might run afoul of the Knights Who Say Assclown.

Next year, I guarantee...

...er, no. I don't.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 09:36:32 PM

Happy New Year! - And may 2004 be much better than 2003 for all of us.

I'd say "It could hardly be worse", but I know better than to tempt fate than that.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 05:54:08 PM

Predictions - Everyone else is doing it, why not me? Here are my predictions for 2004:
By this time next year, the link between Al Quaeda and Iraq will be documented.
Most of the world will doubt that Bin Laden is alive - with evidence pointing toward his death in Tora Bora in December of 2001.
Since my political predictions are usually the kiss of death for a politician, I predict Dean will beat Bush by 30 electoral votes. Heh heh.
I will have a date that isn't an exercise in self-abnegation, or worse, black comedy. Maybe two.
I notice I was smart enough not to make any predictions at this time last year...
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 08:05:59 AM

Link? - US Troops find Al Quaeda literature in Iraqi arms cache:
"U.S. forces operating in the so-called Sunni Triangle -- the region of Iraq most loyal to captured former dictator Saddam Hussein -- found a significant weapons cache that included al Qaeda literature and videotapes, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
Members of Task Force Ironhorse 2nd Infantry's Arrowhead Brigade discovered the material Monday morning at a site in Samarra, about 65 miles north-northwest of Baghdad. Some of the items were found hidden in a false wall, the military said. "
See my predictions...
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 07:53:43 AM

Speaking Of Our Tired, Overcommitted Miltary - Drezner - in for Sullivan - has this piece on the 101st Airborne's evolving mission in Northern Iraq.

It quotes a NYTimes piece that should give the likes of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark pause:
military commanders here expressed frustration that most international aid organizations have not returned in force since the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last summer.

"The N.G.O.'s have been a disappointment," said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Division, speaking of nongovernmental organizations. "Don't get me wrong, the truck bomb at the U.N. headquarters was horrific. But they seemed as if they were very, very quick to bail out of here, compared to the risks they have run in a variety of other missions."
In other words, the organization that Dean and Clark would give rights of "first refusal" over our foreign policy - refuse to run one themselves?

Read both pieces - both are interesting.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 07:33:12 AM

The Clinton Military meets the Dean Foreign Policy - Some pundits on the left continue to point at the results in Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the sort of grin you see from toddlers who've just made really good pants, and yell "See! The 'Clinton Military' wasn't so bad after all, was it? Hmmmmmmm?"

Well, yes. It was.

I got another letter from a high school pal of mine, who's flown more fighter planes than I've owned cars in the last fifteen years, writes:
I'm not sure of the exponential increase defense spending has seen under the "Bush Administration" but, this is clearly another case of a biased reporter spinning an article while ignoring the fact that for eight years prior to the "Bush Administration" the military was gutted by an administration whose opinion of those whom chose to serve their country with honor was somewhat akin to the reaction of a high-society debutante faced with something ugly, slimy, and smelly.

Don't even get me started on paradigm shifts and the institutional resistance to change inherent in DOD. Let's just say it is difficult at best to focus some decision-makers upon future threats and the requirements to counter them.

Of course, if you quote me on this I would recommend a GPS jammer from Radio Shack that might give you a false sense of security when the JDAM is inbound!!!
He sends a piece from the NYTimes editorial page, "The Thinning of the Army".
Over a third of the Army's active-duty combat troops are now in Iraq, and by spring the Pentagon plans to let most of them come home for urgently needed rest. Many will have served longer than a normal overseas tour and under extremely harsh conditions. When the 130,000 Americans rotate out for home leave, nearly the same number will rotate in. At that point, should the country need to send additional fighters anywhere else in the world, it will have dangerously few of them to spare.

This is the clearest warning yet that the Bush administration is pushing America's peacetime armed forces toward their limits. Washington will not be able to sustain the mismatch between unrealistic White House ambitions and finite Pentagon means much longer without long-term damage to our military strength.
I'm confused.

Does this mean "The Clinton Military" was only suitable for winning quick, hit and run brushfire wars, and standing guard over quarreling factions in borscht republics?

The left needs to get its story straight.
The only solution is for the Bush administration to return to foreign policy sanity, starting with a more cooperative, less vindictive approach to European allies who could help share America's military burdens.
Let's stop right there.

First - No. It's not the "only solution". There are several others. We could mobilize the nation for war; we could start turning factories over from civilian to military production, call up more reserves, even consider the draft. We could get serious, like we did on the eve of World War II.

Is it advisable? Probably not; it'd gut the economy. Which is why another solution - focus our military on fighting wars rather than the Clinton-era focus on a Peace Corps with guns, and increasing their budget to give it the training and equipment that the Clinton administration scrimped on - is a better idea.

As to our allies "sharing our burdens": this is akin to the Howard Dean claim that we could generate 100,000 "moderate moslem" allies to take over in Iraq, always made without naming a "moderate moslem" country with 100,000 troops to spare. Which allies? What troops? The German military is a shadow of its Cold War self, and except for its elite forces (the HSK special forces and Fallschirmjaeger paratroopers that already served in Afghanistan) serves largely as a post-reunification make-work program, which is logistically, doctrinally, legally and politically incapable of operating outside German borders. The French military, aside from its tiny Marine Corps, Special Forces and Foreign Legion, is worse - an ill-equipped draftee army that has not trained to fight an actual enemy in nearly 20 years.

In fact, what allies do with militaries that are actually capable of doing something useful, and have troops to send? Let's see - the Brits, the Poles with their great military traditions, the South Koreans with their high training and motivation...

...oh, wait - they're already there. Never mind.
Meanwhile, if a sudden crisis were to erupt in North Korea, Afghanistan or elsewhere, the Pentagon might be hard pressed to respond. For a time, it could make do by sending tired troops back into action, mobilizing reserves and borrowing forces from areas that are quiet but still highly volatile. Such expedients have severe long-term costs. The White House must recognize the damage its unilateralism is inflicting on the Army and change course before the damage becomes harder to undo.
That, or spend less money on Medicaid pork-barrel schemes, and start rebuilding a military that can fight a long war.

During the Reagan years, the regular Army had 20 ground divisions, the Marines two more, and the National Guard and reserve added (as I recall) 10. Anticipating the "Peace Dividend", Bush Senior cut the Army to 16 ground divisions (and the Navy and Air Force were cut proportionally). Today the Army has 12 divisions, the Marines one and some change, and the Guard and Reserve contribute proportionally fewer combat units. In war, the math is fairly simple; a division can only fight so long before it needs to rest, refit, absorb new guys to replace the ones that have had too much action. You can't do it on the cheap and politically-expedient - which is what Clinton did - and expect to win a war.

Which is what we're in.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 06:50:34 AM

The Shorter Jeff Fecke - "Kos has this report that the sky was grey in Iraq today [A report that, often as not, will prove false in coming weeks - Ed.]."

"The Administration would never claim the sky was yellow."

"Noooo. Never happen."

(Buck up, Jeff - imitation is the sincerest form of...er, I guess in this case, retribution :-)
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 06:43:51 AM

Brain Food - This piece made me spit coffee on my monitor yesterday:
Sales of America's dietary staples--cow spinal fluid and brain tissue--dropped significantly last week after the discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or 'mad cow disease') in Mabton, Washington.

A quick survey of upscale cafes in the Seattle area showed a precipitous decrease in sales of spinal latte, a musky cocktail made from steamed spinal fluids and arabica beans.

Meanwhile, delicatessens throughout the city report declining demand for their formerly-popular brain-based foods.

"I used to love coming here for a cerebellum sandwich and a cSales of America's dietary staples--cow spinal fluid and brain tissue--dropped significantly last week after the discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or 'mad cow disease') in Mabton, Washington.

A quick survey of upscale cafes in the Seattle area showed a precipitous decrease in sales of spinal latte, a musky cocktail made from steamed spinal fluids and arabica beans.

Meanwhile, delicatessens throughout the city report declining demand for their formerly-popular brain-based foods.

"I used to love coming here for a cerebellum sandwich and a cup of spinal soup," said an unnamed deli customer, "But these news reports have got me spooked. I think I'm going to stick with tuna for a while, even though the mercury in tuna seems to make me unusually sensitive to temperature changes."
up of spinal soup," said an unnamed deli customer, "But these news reports have got me spooked. I think I'm going to stick with tuna for a while, even though the mercury in tuna seems to make me unusually sensitive to temperature changes."
Salad for lunch. Definitely.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 06:02:48 AM

Puritan Alert - With America's annual anti-alcohol witchhunt only hours away, it's worth visiting the DUI Gulag to poke a few holes in some of MADD's myths that are circulating today.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/31/2003 06:00:25 AM

Tuesday, December 30, 2003

So Much Material - So little time.

I have an immense backlog of stuff I'm trying to get written, here...

...and no time!

Hopefully tonight. For now it's off to work.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/30/2003 07:42:03 AM

The Fast Lane - Yesterday, Governor Pawlenty unveiled a new plan to create low-density toll lanes on some of the Twin Cities busier commuter routes.

Exactly one femtosecond later, the DFL claimed that the plan would starve children and kill Bambi.

The plan would create toll lanes, which would likely be faster for commuters that want to pay the price. This is a plan that is used in a lot of major metro areas; in Chicago, you can choose between toll and free routes to get between many of the higher-demand areas, with traffic distributed accordingly. In the case of the Pawlenty plan, which would put toll lanes along Interstate 35W (which cuts north/south through the metro via downtown Minneapolis), Interstate 94, Interstate 394 from downtown to the west burbs, a big chunk of the Interstate 494 and 694 ring road, I35E in to St. Paul to the north, and parts of major feeder roads U.S. 10, the dreaded 169 and the always-snagged MN36 to Stillwater.

The staff at the DFL data processing center in downtown Saint Paul fed the punched paper tape into their IBM mainframe with "HIGHWAY" "WAYZATA" "STILLWATER" "TOLL" on it. A few minutes later, the computer spit back:
UNFAIR ADVANTAGE TO WEALTHY
REQUIRES PROMPT SPIN
Which is what they did.
"You're starting to have private enterprise build it and rent it and lease it, where before, it's always been the general public involved in it,'' said Sen. Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, chairman of the Senate Transportation Policy and Budget Division. "I'm not saying it's a bad idea. It's a Band-Aid to what we really need to do — make a long-term financial investment in transportation and transit that many other states have done.''
While Johnson is the most relentlessly tedious speaker in a MN Senate crowded with snoozers, at least he makes the honest point that it is not the only answer - more on this later.

However, you know you're on to something when Alice Hausman - my "representative" from District 66B in the Midway of St. Paul, a woman who normally only appears in public when the teachers union lets her out for exercise periods - holds forth:
"This administration governs by gimmick,'' said Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, who sits on the House transportation committees. She said it is impossible to evaluate the plan without information on the amount of the tolls motorists would pay.
Read: "...before we can see exactly how to demigog this thing".

Hausman highlights the hypocrisy of the DFL on this issue: They attack the suburbs, and the subsidy they receive from the urban areas, endlessly and relentlessly - but when the GOP unveils a plan that would shift that subsidy to the consumers themselves (presumably in their H2 Hummers with country club stickers, in the DFL world...), it's suddenly an entitlement of wealth?

I have favored toll routes - lanes or entire roads - for years. They have the singular advantage of making road taxation voluntary, shifting the subsidy for the roads to the actual consumers. This is both a good thing and makes the DFL very angry.

But I also think we need commuter rail (as opposed to the Ventura Administration's dim-witted light rail line), similar to Chicago's Metra system of trains that run on full-gauge ("heavy") rail lines. They make economic sense, in that they dodge the main cost of rail trainsit (the right of way purchases that made the Ventura Trolley so hideously expensive, and will likely inflate the cost of the Minneapolis/St Paul line to ghastly proportion). The two main lines proposed so far - the North Star line from St. Cloud to Minneapolis, and the Red Rock line from Hastings to the Downtowns would both have serious potential to be self-supporting very quickly, especially if they're equipped with used rolling stock. Both of these ideas not only make good transit sense - they are economically sound (unlike every DFL-supported transit plan, or most of Governor Pawlenty's, for that matter).

Jason Lewis did the metro a great disservice with his one-size-fits-all dismissal of all commuter rail transit in favor of roads - and conversations with local Republicans show that the damage, in terms of common sense, was immense. This is an area where conservatives can beat the stuffing out of the DFL on one of their pet issues, and dramatically improve the quality of life in the metro, and do it while upholding conservative principles of free-market discipline and public frugality.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/30/2003 06:35:37 AM

The Year in Liberal Hate Speech - Jeff Jacoby, on Townhall, continues his annual series on liberal hate speech and the media double standard that coddles it.

Classic quote:
"MSNBC fired right-wing talk host Michael Savage in July, and rightly so, when he told a gay caller to 'get AIDS and die, you pig.' The liberal Nina Totenberg, on the other hand, suffered no ill effects for saying, during the flap over General Jerry Boykin's views of Islam and the war on terrorism, 'I hope he's not long for this world.' When the startled host asked if she were 'putting a hit out on this guy,' Totenberg backtracked and said she only wanted to see him expire 'in his job.'

But this isn't the first time the NPR diva has publicly wished death on a conservative. 'I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind,' she said of Senator Jesse Helms in 1995, 'because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.'"
Read it all, naturally.

Naturally, I need to start doing this sort of thing with Katherine Lanpher, Doug Grow and Brian Lambert.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/30/2003 05:00:48 AM

Monday, December 29, 2003

Foot In Mouth To Knee - I used to joke that in Saint Paul, the DFL could plaster a set of those wind-up chattering teeth with a DFL sticker, and it'd win an election. "It may just be a set of wind-up chattering teeth", would say the Volvo-driving, perpetually indignant Highland Parker or the teeth-gritted West End union snuffy, "but at least it's not Republican!" This explains some of the "representation" Saint Paul gets, locally and nationally - the insufferable Jay Benanav on the City Council, most of the School Board, the inaccessible Alice Hausman in the House, and the empty suit Betty McCollum in the US House.

So when George Will writes about Howard Dean...:
Arthur Goldberg was a fine public servant -- secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, ambassador to the United Nations -- but a dreadful candidate for governor of New York in 1970, when it was said that if he gave one more speech he would lose Canada, too. Howard Dean is becoming Goldbergean.

Regarding foreign policy, Dean recently said not only that America is no safer because Saddam Hussein is captured, but that America is "no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center." Well. He says he supported the war to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, although he thinks it made us no safer. And even though he says the war in Iraq made us no safer, he says he would "not have hesitated" to attack Iraq if the U.N. had given us "permission."

Because Dean's foreign policy pronouncements have been curiouser and curiouser, his recent domestic policy speech did not get the attention it deserved for its assertion that America is boiling with "anger and despair." Republicans are, Dean says, trying to "dismantle" the welfare state -- presumably when they are not enriching Medicare's entitlement menu -- and they aim "to end public education."
...I have to ask will "for whom would this be a problem on Dean's part?"

The swing voter? Among swing voters that pay attention to anything, perhaps.

Among the Democrat base? "Sure, he may be wackier than Ralph Nader on butane - hell, he may make Jim Stockdale look lucid by comparison - but at least he's not ~~Bush~~ Republican.

While Howard Dean is looking more and more like the lunatic fringe, so - I'm sorry to say - is the "base" of the Democrat party. Not the whole base - down, Jeff and Flash - but the part of the base that calls the shots.

The Dean candidacy is nationalizing a phenomenon that swept the Minnesota DFL in the past fifteen years or so; while the party (like all political parties) has always been the province of the activist, the activists have gotten more zealous, more fundamentalist - more polarized. The situation parallels that of 1972 - when the pragmatic, Kennedy/Scoop Jackson wing was crowded out by the dogmatic, statist, far left wing of the party. This year, the pramatic - some might say to the point of cynicism - Clinton/MacAuliffe wing is being pushed, maybe pushed aside, by a similar crowd. Maybe the same crowd - the Volvo-driving fiftysomething was probably driving to McGovern rallies in a VW Microbus back then. In recent years the DFL - invested as it is in a party nominating process that rewards relentless activism at the expense of consensus - has been endorsing candidates farther and farther from the mainstream, to the point where the DFL endorsement has been a kiss of death in many elections (vide Roger Moe and Skip Humphrey).

It's a process that gave us Paul Wellstone, at a time when Minnesota was susceptible to electing people like that. Dean is a symptom of the same dynamic - I wouldn't be surprised if he started tooling about the nation in a little green bus one of these days.

But I doubt Paul Wellstone would get elected in Minnesota today - which probably doesn't bode well for Dean or the Democrats, here or nationwide.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 05:46:43 AM

The Harder Hummer - Iraq Now, on the slow, bumpy ride to getting armored Hummers to Iraq.
Meanwhile, in the absence of guidance from echelons above reality, the units here on the ground have resorted to all manner of equally unauthorized Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to protect themselves on the road.
Most of our Hummers have thin canvas doors. “Hang your flak jackets over the windowsills,” the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment told us, helpfully.

Actually, when we got the new Kevlar body armor vests, we took the old Viet Nam era flak jackets, procured for us by the same farsighted geniuses who bought us the A3s, we strapped them like balustrades along the outsides of the truckbeds. You haven’t seen a finer sight since The Grapes of Wrath.

Other units contracted with Iraqi machine shops to make metal doors to replace the canvas doors with which the light infantry units had been so thoughtfully provided. (Did we really think that light infantry would not, sooner or later, get embroiled in a counterinsurgency campaign?).
Pentagon Intertia versus the troops needs in the field - read the whole thing.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 05:44:36 AM

My Only Comment... - ...on the Vikings is that now we only have to wait two months for pitchers to report for spring training.

Football - at least, if the Bears are out of the running - tends to bore me stiff.

So see you next season, Vikes. When you take the field, I'll do so with the little tang of regret that accompanies the season you announce - "Baseball is winding down yet again".

But the Vikes' annual ignominious exit from the season - especially this year's plummet from grace - means that spring, rebirth, life, baseball are all right around the corner again - and as the days get longer, the reports from the Grapefruit League will start filtering in with the birds, and life will be good, and warm, and free of John F@#$@#g Madden.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 05:19:08 AM

Polish Joke - Ralph Peters has this superb piece on Poland's long history of fighting for freedom:
"It's a mistake to over-idealize any nation. But if there's a land of heroes anywhere between the English Channel and the coast of California, it's Poland. Our Polish allies have taken a brave, costly, principled stand for freedom and democracy in Iraq. They desperately want to be seen by Washington as reliable friends in this treacherous world.
The least we could do is to treat them with respect. "
But we don't.

The West's history of shafting the Poles is so long and odious, it's a wonder they are pro-West at all:
As Peters noted, the Poles' contributions to saving the West from the Turks were immense. Polish cavalry in its day was the most feared instrument of war in Europe - for good reason.
After the Napoleonic Wars, the rest of Europe gave Poland back to the Russians without a fight.
After World War 1, Poland emerged as an independent country - but the west (largely the French) made certain it was toothless, ensuring that it had neither defensible borders nor a first-class port (Gdansk was accessible through a long, narrow, indefensible corrodor between Germany and East Prussia - and hence fell instantly when war began).
In 1939, while the Germany Army ravaged Poland with 100 divisions, precisely 12 German divisions faced the Poles' putative Allies, the French and British, who between them had over 100 ground divisions, as well as more and better tanks than the Germans had. They did nothing, allowing the Germans and Russians to swallow the country up.
In 1944, the Armija Krajowa - the underground Home Army - revolted against the Germans in Warsaw. The Russians halted their advance until the Germans mopped it up after weeks of brutal urban warfare - they figured the Germans would save them the trouble of sending the guerrillas to Siberia themselves, as most were democrats and monarchists.
During and after the war, the US and UK, in the interest of political expedience, ignored evidence of the Russian slaughter of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn Wood and elsewhere.
At the end of the day, we gave Poland up to the Soviets at Yalta. This agreement was no less than a rape of Polish society, which had suffered so grievously under centuries of Russian rule.
Read the rest of Peters' article. Get outraged. Write your congressperson - as I'm doing today. The way we're treating the Poles is a crime.

Again.

UPDATE: The Professor linked to this wonderful Friedman editorial on the same subject. Money graf:
After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: people here actually tell you they like America — without whispering. What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven't they gotten the word from Berlin and Paris? No, they haven't. In fact, Poland is the antidote to European anti-Americanism. Poland is to France what Advil is to a pain in the neck. Or as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs specialist, remarked after visiting Poland: "Poland is the most pro-American country in the world — including the United States."
So call your legislator again!
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 04:40:09 AM

Dean-Hatred? - Jonathon Chait returns.

A while ago, we met Chait when he was extolling the virtues of hating President Bush in the New Republic.

He's turned his apparently boundless supply of ire on Howard Dean now.

And it's pretty darn good.

In this piece, he assails the cloistered cluelessness exhibited by so many Dean supporters, including many pro-Dean bloggers:
One of the most disturbing things about Dean and his hard-core supporters is that they give the impression that they know nothing at all of why President Bush is successful, and therefore what it takes to beat him. Read the pro-Dean blogs, and the you come away with the view that Bush is strong because he's ruthless and has lots of money, and therefore if the Democrats are also ruthless and raise lots of money, they can beat him. This ignorance is compounded by the fact that many Deanies seem to exist in a isolated cultural milieu in which everybody is secular, socially liberal, and antiwar. They can't fathom why those things might hurt Dean in a general election because they don't ever talk to or read anybody who thinks differently. Dean's Internet networking--which has had lots of positive effects on American politics--has probably intensified this cloistering, by creating intellectual ghettos on the web where true believers can interact, undisturbed by those who don't share their faith.

A perfect example of this phenomenon comes from the liberal blogger Atrios, who attempts to rebut Frank Foer's blockbuster TNR cover story on why Dean's secularism would doom him in a general election. His own predisposition on this topic can be seen in his profession that he was embarrassed when Democrats gathered on the Capitol steps to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (I'm not saying this disqualifies him, only that it's a distinctly minority view.) Atrios's prescription on this is that, since "there's literally nothing [Democrats] can do overcome that image" of being secular, "Stop playing defense on these issues, and stop letting the other side write the script."
Atrios, of course, assumes that the majority of Americans will be interested in a "script" that is Aggressively Secular - that is, one that actively divorces faith not only from public life, but from all discourse related to it, one that cloisters not only the faithful but faith itself into a convenient hour block on Sunday morning that is conveniently isolate from the rest of life.

I'd like to see the Dems try that - it's accelerate the McGovernization of the party.

(Via Sully )
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 04:35:43 AM

Just...So...Wrong - Took the "Which Leader Are You?" test.

I got:

What Famous Leader Are You?

I may never live this down.

I was so shooting for Reagan...
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 04:30:20 AM

"Fair Trial" - Powerline discusses the ins and outs of giving "fair" trials to dictators.

They don't have a great precedent:
After World War II, Churchill opposed the idea of trying the Nazi leaders who were still alive, arguing that they should simply be shot. Trying a deposed tyrant to "prove" what is already known, with far more certainty than can ever be achieved in a courtroom, is likely to achieve little other than giving the tyrant a platform from which to proclaim his "innocence" and to confuse the historical record. A year or two ago, the Trunk and I wrote an article for the local bar journal about the cross-examination of Hermann Goering by the chief Nuremberg prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson; see the link on the left side of the page. Goering's cross-examination did not go well, to put it mildly.

The key issue, it seems to me, is that giving a deposed tyrant the equivalent of a criminal trial assumes that it is somehow necessary to prove that a dictator is responsible for the crimes committed by his regime. It also assumes that an Anglo-American type trial is the best (if not the only) means of establishing the "real" truth. I would reject both of those assumptions, and, if dissuaded from shooting Saddam when his usefulness as an information source has ended, I would impanel a tribunal to take testimony from Iraqi citizens for the purpose of preserving a record of Saddam's crimes, with no participation by representatives of Saddam or the Baathist regime. Following which, Saddam would be executed.
This is something that's going to put our cultural divide into very stark relief, with opinion ranging from Powerline on the one hand, to the idiotic editorials that wondered if Hussein's "arrest" was legit because there was no warrant.

Hindrocket's idea sounds better and better, the more I think about it.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/29/2003 04:00:25 AM

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Christmas Music - Warrior Monk over at Spitbull turns in a fairly capable list of Christmas classics for the holidayed-out.

Not a bad list...

...except that any such list that doesn't include "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues is invalid from the word go.

That is all.
posted by Mitch Berg 12/28/2003 10:56:47 AM

Kicked - Powerline "notes that the DNC's "blog" Kicking Ass is back on the air after a brief outage.

They noted correctly that it's not a blog at all - it's a message board. And they close by noting:
Kicking Ass provides a useful window into the soul of today's Democratic Party. And the astonishing thing is, it isn't just a bunch of loonies like IndyMedia; it's sponsored by the Democratic National Committee.
Very true.

Many leftblogs have a curious practice of posting "Open Threads" (like this example from the Daily Kos, who, if memory serves, has a hand in "Kicking Ass", which is essentially nothing but "Open Threads").

Why?

I don't recall ever seeing this practice on any conservative blog. Which, I think, highlights a key difference between conservative and liberal grassroots communication; liberals seem to need to carry out their conversations within some sort of hierarchy, with some higher authority vetting and authenticating it. The trend, online, started with the myriad email discussion groups, like the once-great, now-nearly-worthless Minnesota Politics mailing list, and seems to continue with the likes of Kicking Ass, Democratic Underground, Indymedia, Kos and the many other sites that ape the practice. It'd be inflammatory to call it "hive mentality", but I can't think of a better word...
posted by Mitch Berg 12/28/2003 09:45:53 AM