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

Saturday, February 14, 2004

Trying To Spin Defeat - A number of leftbloggers, overwhelmed by this week's avalanche of documentary evidence of Bush's service in the Air Guard, have resorted to punting to a screed by Calpundit that, supposedly, picks holes in the White House's doc dump.

I was going to fisk Calpundit within an inch of his life - and I still may, if time permits - but Baldilocks, a USAF Reservist herself, does it better.

Money quote, including a pull from Calpundit's Kevin Drum:
…..the mainstream media needs to at least understand what evidence is currently available and what its possible interpretations are.” [Bold mine]
Why am I not surprised to find out that the “mainstream media” cannot manage to dig up one of their number who is/was a Guardsman/Reservist? (I can help them: FoxNews reporter Greg Kelly is a Marine Reservist. Wonder if he’s been asked about this matter? Heh.)

Interpretation? What is there to interpret? The document shown isn’t some obscure scroll written in a long dead language, found during an archeological dig at the foot of the Himilayas. It’s an objective document showing the amount of attendance points that President Bush earned during the last part of his ANG stint--the part that a certain segment of the population just can’t get out of their minds.
Read it all, natch.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/14/2004 10:11:48 AM

Friday, February 13, 2004

Gack - Slept through alarm.

Blah.

More later.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/13/2004 07:45:49 AM

A Guy Thing...- I have a son. He, along with my daughter, is the center of my life.

How much the center are they? Well, y'know how Lileks goes on and on about Gnat? Well, picture that, only for a total of 22 kid-years (32 if you count the stepson).

That's a lot of centering, no?

I'm not so worried about my daughter. She's 12, and she takes after me, especially in terms of the stubbornness of rthe Scando-Scottish heritage we visibly and temperamentally share. She's like a little pit-bull. She'll do fine in this world - especially because, while the world is a tough place for a girl, I doubt there's ever been a better time to be a woman on this planet in terms of things that really matter, things like liberty and economic options and being able to follow one's dream (shut up about partial-birth abortion, already).

It's my son I worry about the most. He turned 11 last week. Soon comes the hormonal jungle of the teenage years. I've been through them before - I have a stepson from my ex-wife's first marriage (Note to Montel Williams' producers: I should be available for a day around mid-month). And it's lousy time to be a boy.

This is not a whine. Yeah, it's a wierd time to be a male of any age, but if you basically agree that all of humankind is created equal, then there's really not much about women's equality that fazes you. I've worked for female bosses as well as male - and both genders have equal claim on boundless idiocy and stupendous genius.

But it's different for boys these days. It's kind of scary. It should scare all of us.

A while ago - sometime after I got out of high school, and before I started raising kids in 1990 - the educational-industrial complex decided that "boyish" behavior was a bad thing. You've heard the horror stories; huge portions of what used to be called "normal boyhood behavior" has been declared politically incorrect by a feminized Educational-Industrial Complex.

Christina Hoff Summers first gave voice to the backlash, with her classic "The War Against Boys", a book you need to find and read and act on, if you value the sanity of your male children.

In a Boston Glob editorial, Ms. Hoff Summers summed up the way the world is turning:
The young boys are casualties of a movement that scapegoats men and boys and seeks to protect women and girls from what Gloria Steinem calls the ``jockocracy.'' Such feminists as Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem believe that ours is a sexist society that wages an ``undeclared war against women'' (Susan Faludi's subtitle to ``Backlash''). Such feminists think most adult males are incorrigibly sexist and that boys must be retrained - the earlier the better.

Nan Stein, a director at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, refers to boys who chase girls in the playground and flip their skirts as ``perpetrators'' and ``gender terrorists.'' Sue Satell, a sex equity expert in Minnesota, justifies strong harassment policies for children as young as 5 because ``serial killers tell interviewers they started sexually harassing at age 10 and got away with it.''

While the boys need reeducation, the girls need all the help they can get to survive in the ``patriarchy.'' Consider the girls-only holiday ``Take Our Daughters to Work Day,'' an annual event organized and run by the Ms. Foundation.

Reacting to growing protests over the boys' exclusion, the Ms. people decided to initiate ``Son's Day,'' an annual holiday for boys. Among the suggested activities for ``Son's Day'' are:

Take your son to an event that focuses on ... ending men's violence against women. Call the Family Violence Prevention fund at 800 END-ABUSE for information.

Make sure your son is involved in preparing the family for the work and school week ahead. This means: helping lay out clothes for siblings [and] making lunches ...''

In short, this punitive little holiday was contrived by women who are convinced that what our male children need most is indoctrination.
And assuming a boy survives this treatment after seeing his natural internal tendencies - competition, contact, rough play - are being nearly criminalized (from his four-foot-tall perspective), what does he have to look forward to?

A society where men are neutered and infantilized, where fatherhood is denigrated, where the value of everything he is programmed to be is rejected by the people who, after his parents, he spends the most time with - his teachers, his school system, and the media from which he probably gets his impressions of the world outside his family.

Marshall Poe sums it up:
From kindergarten on, the education system rewards self-control, obedience, and concentration?qualities that, any teacher can tell you, are much more common among girls than boys, particularly at young ages. Boys fidget, fool around, fight, and worse. Thirty years ago teachers may have accommodated and managed this behavior, in part by devoting more attention to boys than to girls. But as girls have come to attract equal attention, as an inability to sit still has been medicalized, and as the options for curbing student misbehavior have been ever more curtailed, boys may have suffered. Boys make up three quarters of all children categorized as learning disabled today, and they are put in special education at a much higher rate (special education is often misused as a place to stick "problem kids," and children seldom switch from there to the college track). Shorter recess times, less physical education, and more time spent on rote learning (in order to meet testing standards) may have exacerbated the problems that boys tend to experience in the classroom. It is no wonder, then, that many boys disengage academically. Boys are also subject to a range of extrinsic factors that hinder their academic performance and pull them out of school at greater rates than girls. First among these is the labor market. Young men, with or without high school diplomas, earn more than young women, so they are more likely to see work as an alternative to school. Employment gives many men immediate monetary gratification along with relief from the drudgery of the classroom.
And it works in a vicious cycle; as boys make up a smaller and smaller percentage of college students, they'll become a smaller percentage of teachers (among other things) and the professors that create them. The school system will become more and more feminized, and boys will become more and more marginalized.

The result? Kim DuToit thinks American society is getting wussified. Terrence Moore of the Claremont Institute thinks it's because men don't act like guys in 1930's movies.

Me? I think it's insane that our society that knows - knows - that it's wrong to make a gay kid suppress his or her true personality, does exactly that for half of the population.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/13/2004 05:00:42 AM

They Eat Their Own - Did a Democrat feed Kerrygate to Drudge?

The idea passes the smell test, says Limbaugh:
"The Drudge item on Kerry intern issue is something Chris Lehane (Clark press secy) has shopped around for a long time - it was one reason the Gore vetters in 2000 shied away from Kerry as a running mate choice - their conclusion that it wasn't bad enough to disqualify him, except for the fact that they couldn't risk it as they were trying so hard to distance themselves from Clinton's personal failings (note: Lehane worked for Gore at the time - and briefly advised Kerry during this campaign). The Kerry camp has long expected to deal with this, and have assured party leaders they can handle it...'
On the other hand, tompaine.com wonders:
friend who used to work in Democratic politics e-mailed me that "this has Chris Lehane's fingerprints all over it," referring to the Democratic hatchet man who worked for Kerry, then Wes Clark. Since Clark just ended his campaign, I'm not so sure. I wonder if the White House didn't just change the subject.

posted by Mitch Berg 2/13/2004 05:00:00 AM

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Old Baggage - Hugh Hewitt asked the Northern Alliance to comment on whether we think John Kerry's 30 year old actions and statements are relevant fodder for this presidential election.

As a matter of logic, and with full knowledge about how humans develop? Not really, no. I used to be a flaming liberal - the party platform I wrote for 1980 North Dakota Boys State was downright Trotskiite. Does that color my beliefs today? Hell no - I may be the most conservative member of the Northern Alliance.

The question is, has he developed at all from his nadir in the early seventies? Let's compare it with a piece of his likely rival's past.

The President, in his twenties and thirties, was by many accounts a drunken lout who could fit shopping bags full of coke up his nose. Does it make him a bad president? No, because he changed and became a better person.

Has John Kerry changed and become better than he was 30 years ago? How you answer that says a lot about how you see this election, I think.

Now - as a matter of political football, of course it matters. It matters exactly as much as the Democrats want to make George Bush's National Guard record.

Which, this week, seems to be "lots".
posted by Mitch Berg 2/12/2004 10:28:51 AM

A Penny Saved, A Spin Earned - So let's talk about the school closings in Minneapolis.

Enrollment is dropping in Minneapolis - dropping drastically. The
Pioneer Press notes that:
"Saying that another round of budget reductions this spring simply wouldn't get to the core of the district's problems, Interim Superintendent David Jennings released the plan that aims to respond to a steep enrollment decline and financial pressures. The district is currently set up to handle 50,000 students, Jennings said. But with a projected 3,000-student drop next year, the district will be down to 38,000 students in the fall."
The PiPress story also notes that:
mark the largest set of school closings in Minneapolis since the early 1980s — when the district shuttered 18 schools at once as baby boomers left the system. This time, the district is seeing more Minneapolis families choose to enroll their children outside the district or send them to charter schools.
Of course, if the baby boomers were leaving the system 20 years ago, it makes sense that their children would be beginning to leave now, right?

But that would be a lost opportunity for spin. More on that in a bit.

Check out the list of schools to be closed or merged. Notice the number of schools whose leases are up, and the number of small schools being merged into other schools.

Also notice the number of closing or merged schools in areas where real estate values are booming - downtown, around Northeast, along the Hiawatha Corridor, in the gentrifying parts of the North Side. This is prime real estate that's earning the city, and the school district, nothing right now.

So here's what you have:
Minneapolis has 12,000 seats more than it needs. It has to consolidate.
All of that prime underutilized real estate is a potential cash cow for the district.
Perhaps most importantly, publicising the pain of the school closings as a response to state budget cuts is a great way for the DFL-controlled Minneapolis school board to shift the blame to the Republican-dominated legislature (with the full connivance of professional guilt-mongers like Nick Coleman),even as the closings perfectly fit their need to consolidate.
It's a political attack on both the charter school systems - which are becoming vastly more popular as the MPS's academic record atrophies - and "white flight". Don't underestimate the connection the DFL will make using these two issues during the upcoming legislative session.
As Drudge says, "developing".
posted by Mitch Berg 2/12/2004 07:58:22 AM

Problem Student, Part II - An emailer - who will remain anonymous - wrote to comment about my piece on Nick Coleman's column about the Minneapolis Schools plan to shutter ten of their schools.

In Coleman's original piece, he lamented that the closing of Holland Elementary will force students to "transfer to Putnam School. Many will have to take buses for the first time. Most kids just walked to Holland, but Putnam is a mile to the east." My correspondent notes that Coleman:
...writes in his piece that some of the kids from Holland school will have to ride the bus a mile to Putnam, the implication being that this is somehow disruptive to the community. This struck me as odd because busing kids and disrupting neighborhoods has been a Minneapolis tradition for years...[when the correspondent had school-age kids] it came as quite a surprise to learn that our son wouldn't be able to attend the school half a block away. Under the plan at the time, he would have had to been bused to North Star Elementary in North Minneapolis in order to help the people at the lightbulb factory achieve racial balance district wide.
Yeah, I wonder if Nick's ever commented on that? Anyone with access to Lexis/Nexus out there? Or perhaps Nick Coleman himself could respond; he's been known to read this blog. Mr. Coleman; if you have a response to that question, I'll post it here in its full unedited glory. Please write.

Of course, Coleman would not be happy with the writer - he's part of the "white flight":
after living in the same neighborhood of Minneapolis for [many] years, I moved out...and never regretted it for a minute. We're in [a suburban] school district now. It's not perfect but it's small and small-towny we're able to keep involved with our kids' education much easier than if we were still in the Minneapolis morass.
That's a word that keeps popping up about the Minneapolis schools.

I guess the writer is just another talk-radio moron bent on destroying the school system. Right, Nick Coleman?

posted by Mitch Berg 2/12/2004 07:30:16 AM

The Big Refute - A squadron-mate of the former Lieutenant Bush, now a retired Colonel in the Air Guard, should by all right have finally disposed of the worst of the "Bush was a Deserter/AWOL/Draft-Dodger tropes with this WashTimes editorial.

It addresses every single element of the Great Deserter Myth:

Bush Used Guard "Service" to Avoid Vietnam - "The mission of the 147th Fighter Group and its subordinate 111th FIS, Texas ANG, and the airplane it possessed, the F-102, was air defense. It was focused on defending the continental United States from Soviet nuclear bombers. The F-102 could not drop bombs and would have been useless in Vietnam. A pilot program using ANG volunteer pilots in F-102s (called Palace Alert) was scrapped quickly after the airplane proved to be unsuitable to the war effort. Ironically, Lt. Bush did inquire about this program but was advised by an ANG supervisor (Maj. Maurice Udell, retired) that he did not have the desired experience (500 hours) at the time and that the program was winding down and not accepting more volunteers. " [Note to Fingers - I was wrong!]

The Guard was the same a dodging the draft - "The image of a reservist at that time is of one who joined, went off for six months' basic training, then came back and drilled weekly or monthly at home, with two weeks of "summer camp." With the knowledge that Mr. Johnson and Mr. McNamara were not going to call out the Reserves, it did become a place of refuge for many wanting to avoid Vietnam.
There was one big exception to this abusive use of the Guard to avoid the draft, and that was for those who wanted to fly, as pilots or crew members. Because of the training required, signing up for this duty meant up to 2½ years of active duty for training alone, plus a high probability of mobilization. A fighter-pilot candidate selected by the Guard (such as Lt. Bush and me) would be spending the next two years on active duty going through basic training (six weeks), flight training (one year), survival training (two weeks) and combat crew training for his aircraft (six to nine months), followed by local checkout (up to three more months) before he was even deemed combat-ready. Because the draft was just two years, you sure weren't getting out of duty being an Air Guard pilot. "

Bush was AWOL in Alabama - "Excusals for employment were common then and are now in the Air Guard, as pilots frequently are in career transitions, and most commanders (as I later was) are flexible in letting their charges take care of career affairs until they return or transfer to another unit near their new employment. Sometimes they will transfer temporarily to another unit to keep them on the active list until they can return home. The receiving unit often has little use for a transitory member, especially in a high-skills category like a pilot, because those slots usually are filled and, if not filled, would require extensive conversion training of up to six months, an unlikely option for a temporary hire. "
And so on. The whole letter is a must-read.

I got this, of course, from Power Line, who declare "Case Closed". In a rational world, that'd be true.

But we've never been dealing with the rational on this issue - we're dealing with Terry MacAuliffe and the moonbat left. Truth may not be a defense as far as the media is concerned.

Case in point; John Roberts, in the press converence on Tuesday when the records were released. I caught the audio on the Laura Ingraham show; it was almost like an SNL bit. He was extemporizing, trying to find SOME angle to spin the story against Bush.

Still, erasing the doubts among those for whom the actual truth matters is important. So here's hoping.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/12/2004 04:14:03 AM

Fair Game - John Kerry's remarks from 30 years ago are baaaack.
“I’m an internationalist,” Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”

Kerry said he wanted “to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care.”
Yet another flipflop, the Crimson notes:
As a candidate for president, Kerry has said he supports the autonomy of the U.S. military and has never called for a scale-back of CIA operations.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich defended Kerry’s 1970 statements as appropriate for their time.

“In the context of the Vietnam War, those comments are completely understandable,” said Reich, who has endorsed Kerry.
Er, possibly.

But in the "context" of one who would be leader of the free world, it's a very dangrous piece of background - especially given Kerry's obvious willingness to flipflop in what ever direction opportunity pushes him.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/12/2004 03:30:12 AM

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Good News? - Sullivan has this on the Edwards campaign:
In both primaries yesterday, Kerry won close to a half of the votes and Edwards won around a quarter. But more interestingly, as Will Saletan points out in a must-read, Edwards beat Kerry on the question of the issues and among those in the more moderate wing of the party, i.e. those who were less angry with Bush and more in the "satisfied but not enthusiastic" camp. Edwards wins more pro-war voters as well. I infer that most Dem voters so far have been conned into voting for the idea of Kerry, not the reality. And the idea is that he is more electable. And that has become almost self-fulfilling. Edwards is therefore absolutely right to stay in. More Democrats like his views than like Kerry's (whatever they are as of 1.25 am today), and more middle-of-the-roaders support him.
We on the right have been worried that conservative disaffection with Bush was going to cause enough conservatives to stay at home to hurt Bush this fall. It could happen - stay tuned for more.

But I wonder if we might not see the same on the left - a lot of moderate Dems will be as much or more disgusted with the party nominating Kerry to cause them to sit '04 out?

Because there's a lot more to disgust a moderate about Kerry than there is to tick off a conservative about Bush.

Discuss!
posted by Mitch Berg 2/11/2004 07:29:48 AM

Problem Student - Nick Coleman knows what we need to do for public education; keep all existing, failing schools open, no matter what!

I'm going to start with a bit at the end of today's column:
Many thousands of children -- including three of mine -- have been served well by the Minneapolis public schools.
Every morning in the Southwest, shamans of the Zuni tribe rise before the sun, and begin to pray. The Zuni believe that if they don't pray for the sun to rise in the morning, it won't. Since the sun rises in the morning, the prayers obviously work.

Correlation isn't necessarily causation.

Three of Coleman's children may have gone to Minneapolis schools, and turned out OK. Well, all right! A combination of good teachers and constant parental involvement (especially by hectoring, intrusive a**hole fathers, like Nick and, incidentially, me) got some results out of the system. Good. That fact - or the fact that any students learn anything at all - doesn't mean the system works in Minneapolis, or anywhere, any more than the Zuni prayers truly bring forth the sun.

But let's not get all bogged down in petty matters like reality. The public school system - the public school system! - in Minneapolis is crumbling!

And he knows who is really to blame:
It is a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding in a district beset by ongoing budget cuts, falling enrollment and constant attacks by wolves masquerading as legislators, not to mention ideologues, talk-show morons and think-tank geniuses.
He got one of them right. Enrollments are falling. We're entering a demographic dip now - there are just fewer kids out there. Fewer kids mean we need fewer schools.

The rest? Coleman's stock in trade - facile name-calling. It's how he seems to react to all difference of opinion - as I discovered in a charming if semi-literate email from him last year, responding to a post where I complimented him, but not properly. I may have to post that soon...

But I digress.
I wish the folks who would like to eradicate public schools would visit Holland Elementary, eight blocks from the old light-bulb factory, and see if they still feel like howling in delight.
Let's stop right there.

"Howling in delight?" "Eradicate public schools?"

It's not about stretching a "Thin" budget, or even about trying to a resuscitate a school district that has, to all intents and purposes, failed. No.

It's all about fun! "We" are doing this because "we" enjoy it!

Not, of course, because two generations of ultra-left administration and theory have left the district pathetically unable to function.

Not, of course, because a big part of the enrollment drop comes from parents voting with their feet, and with their dollars, taking their kids to suburban schools under the open-enrollment laws, or voting with their hard-earned dollars nd sending them to private, parochial, charter and alternative schools.
For almost 120 years, Holland School (the current building opened in 1969) has taken immigrant kids and made them into Americans.
And for the past twenty years, Holland, like the rest of the Minneapolis Schools, has been teaching them to be nonviolent, multicultural and, when time permits, students.
Ninety-three percent of the 250 kids (kindergarten through 5th grade) come from families who live below the poverty line. Forty-one percent speak Spanish at home. Many are special-education kids with cognitive developmental problems. And over a year's time, almost a quarter of the kids move into or out of the school, making it almost impossible to teach them much, especially if their English is not up to speed.

Despite the obstacles, the school has done OK, winning awards for how well it has overcome the handicaps thrown at it by a society where the middle class is disappearing, the rich are bailing out and the poor are left to fend for themselves.
And why is that, Nick Coleman?

The middle class isn't disappearing - it's moving to Roseville and Lakeville and New Prague. Why?

If you're Nick Coleman, it's because the middle class is a bunch of racists, talk radio morons and ideologues.

If you've ever lived in Minneapolis - and I have - it's because the DFL (and Green!) bloc that runs the city has given up on trying to make the city a better place for everyone to live, and has turned to concentrating on making dysfunction appear to be the standard. Poverty is virtuous, and we must subsidize it! Non-achievement is the norm - let's penalize and demonize those who achieve! Criminals are normal (and a DFL constituency!) - we must make life safer for them by getting them out of jail sooner, hiring a string of ineffective, ass-covering east-coast political hacks to run the police department, and disarming their victim pool! Our schools don't educate - let's make inadequate, agenda-riven education the inviolate norm; heck, let's make it a virtue!

Coleman illustrates part of the problem next:
"We can't select our students," says Principal Gertrude Flowers Barwick. "We have to take anyone who comes in that door. These are not the children who go to charter schools. But our country was founded on public education. We shouldn't do anything to erode that."
Ms. Flowers - and by extension, Nick Coleman - are apparently getting very desperate.

This nation was not founded on public education. Public education as we know it today didn't come about until the late 1800s. Before that, communities and groups of people - churches, towns, neighborhoods - built schools and hired teachers.

It was nothing like the unionized, dogmatic, sclerotic system we have today. Charter schools are an attempt to return to that model - communities and small groups using their resources (a small fraction of the resources they'd spend in a public school) to do the job right.

This, of course, is intolerable to Nick Coleman. We must all fail - together!
What is happening is worse than erosion. It is a mudslide.

Public schools are under unceasing attack, tax money is being channeled to competing schools --some of which operate with laughably little oversight -- and the best and the brightest are abandoning ship.
Note the odd juxtaposition of ideas: Charter schools (and their tax money!) have "laughably little oversight" - and yet our best and brightest (and their tax money!) are joining them!

Nick! Maybe the "oversight" is the problem!
Acting Superintendent David Jennings -- the former Republican speaker of the House who doesn't buy into conservative dogma that would run schools like businesses -- is boldly slashing spending to try to give the district some breathing room and some time to turn around. But in the meantime, he knows that foes of public education are closing in.

"The public, by and large, supports public education, but a number of the policymakers do not," he says. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've never been to Roswell, New Mexico [where those aliens crash-landed, in UFO mythology]. But the politicians who are beating up on us say we're failing. And, by their actions, they can set the system up to fail. Some of their decisions have done just that. That's what they have in mind."
So - it's not the system that's failing. It's the opposition's fault. The emperor is naked because we said he was.

Hm.
But until defenders of public education start fighting back, the lights will continue to go out, one by one.
If Nick is talking about protecting the institution of public education for its own sake? Sure.

If he's talking about the ability to actually teach children? I'd say the "defenders" are the problem, not the solution.

More on education later this week.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/11/2004 07:11:08 AM

Note to Dems - Drop It - The Dems asked for personnel records.

They got them.. Think it'll shut 'em up?:
"Lt. Col. Scott Gorske, a 23-year Guardsman with experience in personnel issues, said there is no requirement for National Guard members to drill every month. They are required to train a certain amount of time each year. It appears Bush met that requirement, said Gorske, who reviewed the documents.
A memo written by retired Lt. Col. Albert Lloyd Jr. at the request of the White House said a review of Bush's records showed that he had 'satisfactory years' for the period of 1972-73 and 1973-74 'which proves that he completed his military obligation in a satisfactory manner.' "
Suppose the Dems will drop it?

When I was on Hewitt's show today, I posited my theory - and I think I'll stand by it. The Dems are banking that there are enough people out there that don't listen to talk radio, watch C-SPAN or read blogs to leave a rich vein of potential, ignorant voters susceptible to believing...

...well, almost anything.

My prediction; Dems will spread the word that Bush voted against the 1964 Voting Rights Act.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/11/2004 05:00:37 AM

Kast Not Your Pearls Before Swyne - Fraters' JB Doubtless asks:
"When did the Grammys turn into the Teen Choice Awards? "
Shortly after they became the "sleazy industry insider awards".
Hipsters like the Strib's John Remenschneider have to know that Outkast is a joke, but I doubt he will make much of a stink out of their win.
One might as well make a stink out of the Mafia playing dirty, or Daunte Culpepper blowing the big play. There's as much point to it.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/11/2004 04:00:32 AM

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Mark Your Calendars - The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air Saturday, March 6, on AM1280 The Patriot, here in the Twin Cities.

The show will feature the members of the Northern Alliance of Blogs, and talk about politics, martinis, music, movies, TV, weekends...pretty much everything our blogs cover. Only on the radio.

Stay tuned for more info, coming soon to the various Northern Alliance weblogs.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 12:35:24 PM

Seek Help - Listening to Hewitt replaying the Gore speech yesterday, I desperately wanted to call in to observe - with no offense intended to those who suffer brain injury, or their loved ones - that Algore sounds like he's had a stroke.

Listen to the audio (if you can find it): extended periods where he sounds like he's nearly somnolent, followed by - there's no other word for it - bellowing. Yelling, too hamfisted to be theatrical, worlds away from oratorical.

I'm sure Algore is well and healthy, and God willing he'll stay that way. Hewitt's probably right - it's probably the lack of staff; Gore has always been a wretched orator, and I'm sure his speechwriting talents were both minimal and on full display during his speech.

But oy - this man could have been President?

posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 06:48:00 AM

Pawlenty in Iraq - Channel 11 is reporting that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is going to Iraq to visit Minnesota troops.

Nothing on Google News yet.

UPDATE: Again from Channel 11 - the Governor is apparently in Iraq, having left in secret with five other governors on Sunday.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 06:11:42 AM

Kerry On - John Kerry leads the president in some polls. It's troubling, but not entirely unexpected; Kerry's had the advantage of having Howard Dean to serve as his lightning rod, making Kerry look both responsible and moderate. His media coverage has been fawning and adoring. Of course he's racking up the numbers.

This week has seen the conservtive blogosphere respond with an avalanche of facts about Kerry - especially Northern Alliance brethren Captain Ed and the Commish. Someone needs to get all this information together.

Hmm. I'm going to work on this.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 06:08:07 AM

The Sounds of Heads Bashing Against Walls - As the session starts, the biggest non-story of the year - the attempt to repeal the Minnesota Personal Protection Act - is getting underway.

Note to opponents - lotsa luck. Notes from the PiPress story:
It's been nine months and more than 15,000 permits have been issued since the new law passed, and opponents can't point to widespread trouble because of it. Nor can supporters say that public safety has improved markedly.
This is an absurd paragraph; the improvements that Concealed Carry reform brings occur over time. It's hard to identify crimes that didn't happen...

...unless, of course, they are entirely conspicuous by their absence. Like, for exaple, illegal shootings by permit holders.

Of course, for the opposition, it's never been about empirical evidence, as noted by this statement (emphasis is mine):
Nevertheless, several lawmakers are introducing legislation to reverse the law, and activists like Kate Havelin, with the Twin Cities Million Mom March, hopes that her message now will echo into the future.

"We think that having more guns on our streets, at our places of worship, at the mall, will not be made safer with people with handguns. It's a way to put all of us at greater risk," Havelin said.
"We think".

Maybe this is a sign of improvement; at least the opponents are prefacing their statements with that telling "We Think". For those of you who've been under a rock for the past twenty years, "thought" is all it is. There are now 36 states that have some sort of "shall-issue" or another. None have ever reported problems, most have eventually reported some benefits, and none has made a serious move to repeal. That includes states that are just as blinkeredly liberal as Minnesota - Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.

The "repeal" "movement" - bolstered by their friends in the media - are making a lot more noise than their actual importance warrants, by the way. Our old friends at the "RepealConceal" website, after a year of maintaining the fiction of being an independent, grass roots group, have given up the ghost and rolled over to being a mirror for Citizens for a ~~Supine~~ "Safer" Minnesota (hat tip to Joel Rosenberg, whose excellent blog shows where the bodies are figuratively buried among Minnesota's repeal "movement"). And the "Southwest Minnesota Peacemakers" site - perhaps the most insipid of all - seems not to have been updated in nearly a year, and continues to quote the loathsome Nazi sympathizer Boake Carter on its main page.

I'll follow the story. Or, should I say, "story".
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 05:53:21 AM

Misplaced Priorities - When the President is offering amnesty and the benefits of near-citizenship to illegal aliens to sneak across our undefended border with our "friend" Mexico, and yet our Coast Guard is still intercepting Cubans who risk death, sharks, and a Cuban jail to cross to Florida and sending them back to Castro's worker's paradise, something's wrong.

Especially when they're this brave, ingenius and persistent.
Three Cuban families' hopes of puttering to South Florida in a green, 1959 propeller-powered Buick were dashed Wednesday when the tail-finned, floating car was sunk, just like their first ingeniously engineered amphibious vessel, a 1951 Chevy truck rigged to a pontoon of 55-gallon drums, an exile source said.
Our administration has done a stupendous job at calling a spade a spade and unravelling the Carter/Bush I/Clinton-era mania for referring to terrorists and thugs as "heads of state" and "participants in the world community". One hopes he'll do the same for Castro someday.

(Tip to Evangelical Outpost)

posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 05:00:54 AM

About Time - Twin Cities writer and activist Joel Rosenberg finally took the plunge and has a blog. Actually, it looks like it's been around for a while, but I'm finally aware of it.

Like much of Rosenberg's writing, it's a wealth of information about concealed carry, the Second Amendment, the absurdity of the "logic" and turpidity of so many reform opponents.

My favorite passage in his recent, deliciously sardonic post about an idiotic letter to the PiPress:
Anybody who followed the passage of the MCPPA with any attention at all knows that it wasn't the NRA or some sort of amorphous "gun lobby" that brought us this; it was a grass-roots effort, spearheaded in the legislature by Lynda Boudreau and Pat Pariseau, and in the public debate by a bunch of folks with not much in common but a desire to repeal Minnesota's antiquated, bureaucrats-know-best carry law: GOCRA/CCRN. It was people like Joe, Tim, David, Alfred, Lonn, John, Marilyn and hundreds of others -- even, to a much lesser extent, me -- writing letters, making phone calls, showing up to testify at hearings, and so forth. It's not a well-financed lobbying campaign like "Citzens for a Safer Minnesota"; the money that funded CCRN's mailings was contributed in ones and fives and tens by people stopping by at Alfred's table at, literally, hundreds of gun shows.

It was as classic a grass-roots organizing effort as ever there was. "Gun lobby," pfui. She might as well blame it on the boogeyman.
It's on my blogroll. If you care about the endless fight over victim disarmament, it should be on your frequent read list.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 05:00:23 AM

Report On the Media - Ranting Profs present an email from an Army officer : in charge of his unit's media relations. It explains a lot about the vaccuum of news about the reconstruction:
"The Fox News crew laid out what qualified as 'newsworthy: -- Women taking
an active leadership role in the new government, detainee/prisoner abuse
cases, any WMD news, and individual soldier contributions (such as one soldier
who bought school supplies and teddy bears for Iraqis out of his own pocket.)
These were the stories deemed airable and they wouldn't respond to anything
outside of that. The news crew wasn't bashful about its agenda and they made
it clear that they weren't going to respond to anything outside of those story
lines unless it was something really spectacular.
Fox stood out most as a network that knew what it was going to put out
before it even shot the footage. Other news organizations were more subtle
about what they wanted to cover but pretty much everyone had their stories
written before they showed up. To Al-Jazeera especially, the video footage was
merely a formality."
And that was Fox, the "conservative, pro-war" network!

Read it all - and remember it when you watch and read media coverage on Iraq today.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 05:00:19 AM

He Could Have Run the Budget - Where did all the money go?

Howard Dean's use of internet fundraising got a lot of attention last year. This year, it's another story:
As Howard Dean's presidential campaign tore through the millions it raised last year, nearly a quarter of it went to the company owned in part by his former campaign manager.
The campaign paid $7.2 million to Trippi, McMahon and Squier, the Virginia-based consulting and media firm - 23 percent of the $31 million it spent through Dec. 31, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks political spending.

Joe Trippi, one of the company's partners, was Dean's campaign manager for a year - until he was ousted last month and replaced by Roy Neel as chief executive. Dean asked Trippi to stay with the campaign as an adviser, but Trippi quit.

Instead of a salary, Trippi's company had been paid a commission of the campaign's television advertising buys - a percentage he and his company's partners said he never knew.
Remember his title - campaign manager?

Of course, given the results he got from the money, there are a lot of quesions about that title...
"I didn't want to know. I didn't do this for the money," Trippi said. "I was interested in beating [President] Bush. I was interested in building a campaign that could get Howard Dean in position. I'm proud of what I did. Anyone who knows me knows my personal money was never, ever on my mind, and it was nothing that motivated me."
That begs a couple of questions:
Does he think the American people are that stupid? If so, what does that say about the Dean campaign as a whole?
If "beating President Bush" was more important than keeping track of their contributors' money and making sure it was going where it was supposed to be going, what would that say about a Dean presidency?
Not that it's an issue anymore, of course.

BRIGHT IDEA: Maybe we should do a staging of "The Rainmaker", only change the title character's name to "Howard."

Just a thought...
posted by Mitch Berg 2/10/2004 05:00:08 AM

Monday, February 09, 2004

Thoughts on Listening to What My Daughter is Listening To - Speaking as someone who has had to get along in a foreign language, I have to admire Avril Lavigne, the Canadian pop-punk teen idol.

In the hands of a native english speaker, her lyrics and delivery might be considered comically stilted.

But as a young francophone singing in a new language, I think she delivers lines like:
He was a punk, she did ballet, what more can I say?
with the sort of goofy aplomb that made ABBA famous - her French patterns of pronunciation making for a lot of good-natured unintended comedy.

While it may not be my cup of musical tea, I have to tip my hat to a young foreigner who can sing even while wrestling so publicly with English, a very difficult language. Congrats, Avil Lavigne!

UPDATE: I'm informed that Ms. Lavigne is actually a native speaker of English.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 07:13:59 AM

The Manchurian Moonbat - For the benefit of those who thought the President did badly in his interview, Sullivan quotes the ever-less-lucid Wesley Clark, who admits Hussein was a "bad guy", but that we just don't invade nations because their leaders are "bad guys":
There simply aren't many national leaders who are also mass murderers who have used chemical weapons to commit genocide, who have invaded two countries, broken the conditions of a truce with the United States, violated any number of U.N. resolutions and tried to assassinate the president of the United States. Maybe Clark could tell me who else is in that category. No one claimed that Saddam was an "imminent threat" for the umpteenth time. And, most glaring of all, the United States did not "make" Saddam a villain, no more than the U.S. "made" Milosevic a villain. That kind of crap belongs at an ANSWER rally, not in a presidential candidate. Thank God he's losing this race badly.
No kidding.

The left thinks it has something on the President with this "misguided invasion" trope. For that trope to work, they must assume the majority of the nation is...well, as deluded as Wesley Clark (and John Kerry, for that matter).

Are they? 49% voted for Algore, which is troubling.

More tomorrow.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 06:52:03 AM

Boots Still On The Ground - I heard a rerun yesterday of Dennis Prager's interview with Karl Zinsmeister, author of Boots On The Ground, the story of the 82nd Airborne Division during the liberation of Iraq.

The good news? He's at work on a book about the aftermath.

Neither audio nor transcripts seem to be available for the interview, but it had some fascinating insights. Zinnmeister noted that in the Shi'ite south of Iraq, things seem to be going exceptionally well. The Kurdish north, he says, is doing even better - "the only part of Iraq I'd actually call downright attractive" is a pretty close quote.

Most impressively, says Zinsmeister, the Iraqi city councils are not only taking over the day to day operation of the cities from Baghdad to the provinces.

There's bad news: Fallujah, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, is still dangerous, thanks to the fedayeen.

There's worse news: Many of your fellow citizens have proven Goebbels' maxim; the big lie has apparently been repeated enough for it to have taken hold.

Zinsmeister notes in an article in the Christian Science Monitor a comment by Iowa's ultraliberal senator Tom Harkin:
'This may not be Vietnam, but boy, it sure smells like it," said Sen. Tom Harkin recently. The Iowa Democrat is but one of a host of critics in Washington politics and the media who claim that US troops and administrators are "bogged down" in Iraq.
This is accepted as fact throughou the left-wing blogosphere (never with actual evidence presented, of course), and yesterday on E-Democracy's Saint Paul discussion list, a commentator referred to Iraq and Afghanistan as "fiascoes". The commentator was one (of the few) that would not ordinarily be considered a mindless moonbat.

The good news again: I doubt that anyone that believes this bilge would have voted for Bush this fall anyway.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 05:58:12 AM

Kosgasm - Look for the Daily Kos and sites that accept his word as gospel to get in a lather over this story:
President George W. Bush's approval rating has slipped to 48 percent, the lowest level since February 2001, according to the Newsweek poll. Fifty percent of registered voters say they would not like to see Bush re-elected to a second term (45% say they would). And if the election were held today, Democratic frontrunner Sen. John Kerry would win over Bush by 50 percent to 45 percent among registered voters.
Note to all of you; it's a post convention high. They showed Walter Mondale beating Reagan at this point of the '84 campaign, too.

The story also notes:
However Bush would have clear wins over Democratic contenders Sen. John
Edwards (49% to 44%), former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (50% to 44%) and retired
General Wesley Clark (51% to 43%).
I'm sure Bush would beat up on Paul Tsongas, too.

Here's the part of the story I find intrigueing:
When deciding which presidential candidate to support, 67 percent say it
is either very important (25%) or somewhat important (42%) for them to learn about the candidate's spouse. Seventy-two percent say the relationship between a candidate and his spouse tells voters either a lot (40%) or something (32%) about how good a president he would be; 13 percent say it tells you not much and 12 percent say it tells you nothing.
By all accounts I've heard:
The President has a solid, functional, great relationship with Laura, whom he credits for helping him straighten up after his rounds of addiction.
On the other hand, John Kerry is Teresa Heinz' lapdog.
Not that it would change my vote at all...
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 05:00:46 AM

Snark Not - Last week, Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost noted the Pepsi Superbowl ad that highlighted a group of kids that the RIAA had prosecuted for downloading music.
Since the ethics of music downloading have always perplexed me, perhaps someone can explain it to me. If a teen steals music from a music store it’s considered shoplifting and can lead to a misdemeanor prosecution. Yet if a teen steals music via the Internet it “invigorates the democracy” and can land you a commercial during one of the most watched television events of the year. Am I the only one that is disturbed by this moral double standard?

Perhaps the RIAA should also produce a commercial. They could round up a group of teens who “fought the law” by stealing cases of Pepsi or Gatorade. No doubt Pepsico would find such a groundbreaking commercial invigorating.
Fair enough, so far. As someone who used to work as a musician, I agree.

But then he steers into the weeds:
(Link via: Mitch from Shot in the Dark, who disturbingly, doesn't seem to have a problem with online piracy. Shame on you, Mitch.)
Then you don't read my blog very much, Joe, do you?

Pirating is wrong, and it's stealing. Absolutely. No argument.

The RIAA are thieves, too - legal thieves, as it happens, a front for organizations that have been systematically cheating musicians for decades:
In January, the week before Peggy Lee died, she finally won a class- action suit against her former label. Lee and several hundred other artists and their heirs were awarded $4.75 million in unpaid royalties, miscalculated royalties and unauthorized deductions from royalties. Current acts, including Courtney Love and the Dixie Chicks, have lawsuits pending over accounting practices.

"It's bizarre in this day and age when you audit a record label, in 99.99 percent of the audits, the labels are found to have underpaid the artist," said Simon Renshaw, who manages the Dixie Chicks. "I asked an auditor who's been involved in 9,000 cases how many revealed an overpayment by the labels to the artist: the answer was one. Take that to a statistician." (Spokesmen for the major labels said they did not comment on their financial or contractual relationships with artists.)
So yeah, piracy is illegal. And the kids in the ad had gotten theirs, and then some, for it; they'd been hauled into court. Accountable enough?

In the meantime, though:
The Pepsi ad was advertising a legal service
If that legal service hastens the demise of the RIAA, and the day when artists can control their own business online, it's good for everyone - especially people who like music of whatever type.
...so I'm a bit inclined toward forgiveness.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 05:00:39 AM

Common? - I've heard this sort of thing from other Deaniacs lately - this one being "Bohemian Mama":
"Even worse than losing progressive voters and activists like myself, what about all the conservatives and republicans that Dean brought into the fold. Folks like my dad: a veteran who sees the hollow aspect of Kerry's claims regarding being a vet in that besides fighting in a war 20 years ago, what has he done in his entire political career to lead the way in helping veterans? What has he proposed in terms of concise policy for veterans and service members?"
And that's just talking about money! Let's not for get to mention the issue that's peeling a lot of responsible Democrats away from the likes of Kerry - protecting the country that the veterans protected in the first place!

By the way, in looking at Yahoo's list of Political Blogs (via Powerline), I have to wonder - how on earth to blogs like this get on the list, and Shot in the Dark doesn't? I get more visitors in a typical month than Bohemian Mama has gotten in the past year, and I'll bet dimes to dollars she gets a bigger spike out of this post than anything else she's done lately. For that matter, Fraters gets more visits in a typical week than this woman has gotten in the last ten months.

Where is the justice?

Yes, I'm snarking. Blah.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 05:00:36 AM

Got the Bug - Long time Shot in the Dark commenter (and neighborhood kegerator owner) Anoka Flash has a blog going again. He joins Jeff Fecke's ever-more-misnamed "Blog Of the Moderate Left" as the entire lineup of lefty blogs on my blogroll.

For a Democrat, Flash ain't so bad. I mean, I wouldn't let him babysit my kids...oh, wait - I do. Never mind.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Flash! A 21 bagpipe salute awaits!
posted by Mitch Berg 2/9/2004 04:59:56 AM