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

Friday, February 27, 2004

A Request - If you catch me taking blogging as seriously as these people, please send help.

The story? A bunch of liberal blogs got together to skew some elections.

Elections for what? A blogosphere popularity contest, essentially. Some of these guys put an awful lot of effort into driving up their hit counts; it's as if the characters in "Best In Show" were transplanted into a movie about bloggers.

Funny part is, the "scandal" centers around an old friend of the Northern Alliance.

It's a small world. Wear deodorant.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2004 07:45:10 PM

Simple Way To Filter Your Argument - Brian at Boviosity directs us to this Tim Blair bon mot:
Lately, I’ve taken to employing the Patrick Cook gambit:
He merely asks: "Do you believe we are at war?" An affirmative answer indicates that conversation may proceed at an adult level. A negative reply requires Cook to excise large words, and to explain any difficult concepts using puppetry and mime.

You know ... it actually works. Try it.
Take Brian's poll, while you're at it.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2004 09:08:43 AM

Radio Daze - One week until the Northern Alliance Radio Network debuts on AM1280 the Patriot.

The show website should be online next week.

This is going to be an interesting week.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2004 05:23:09 AM

Screed Alert - I have an inordinately large screed about education in the hopper. I'm trying to figure out whether to put it out next week in 2-4 parts, or just dump the whole thing on the blog this weekend and see if Steven DenBeste tells me to quit horning in on his megaposting turf.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2004 05:21:12 AM

Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back- I spent a good chunk of the day in downtown Saint Paul the other day.

Yaaagh. See what happens when I don't come downtown for a couple of years? Everything goes straight to hell.

Now, Saint Paul has always - and by "always", I mean "since the forties" - been a city where downtown was just another neighborhood, rather than the center of the city. Saint Paul has been called "Fifteen small towns with one mayor", and it sorta works. Each neighborhood has more than just a look, feel and identity - and a history, and at the moment, some sort of outlook.

Some of them are always carved in stone. Highland is prim, proper, the home of DFLers who have liberalism the way some people have halitosis. The East Side is like an assembly line; immigrants and the dirt-poor come in at the bottom, in Swede Hollow and the ramshackle , and as their prosperity and language skills evolve, they move up Payne Avenue, becoming blue-collar, working class Americans about the time they get north of Maryland, before sending their kids off to the U and moving to Battle Creek or Maplewood. The Midway echoes from the footsteps of generations of little kids, raised by sensible, frugal parents looking for good houses at bargain prices.

But downtown?

I love downtown Saint Paul's quirky charms; little shops tucked into odd corners, the feeling that little or nothing had changed since the Depression when you walked into the Endicott or Pioneer or Hamm buildings. I always preferred the look and feel of downtown Saint Paul - at least the old downtown Saint Paul, with its limestone and pre-depression landmarks and shards of art-deco - to Minneapolis. Downtown Minneapolis is a too-blond, perfectly-primped, cold, distant, thirty-something marketing exec from Edina who drives a Lexus and knows all the waiters at Chino; Saint Paul is an Irish-Italian redhead from the East Side who takes the bus to her gig at the courthouse and can (and after three drinks, will) sing "It's Raining Men" at karaoke night without looking at the monitor.

But downtown hasn't fared well lately - and by "lately", I mean "for the last couple decades". A lot of the decay predated me by several decades; architectural history buffs tell me that once, before Urban Renewal, Cedar Street was a bustling, thriving avenue with lots of storefronts, the kind of thing that makes wandering around downtown a pleasure. Today, of course, it's a cold, windswept series of backsides of buildings, and downright unpleasant.

Even during the time I've been here - 18 years and change - the changes have been marked, and mostly depressing. Galtier Plaza - born and reborn and reborn again since it first opened right about the time I came to the Twin Cities - used to be the center of a thriving little destination; you could take the kids, grab a bite, go to the Farmers Market, see a movie, check out Mears Park, and on and on. The area had stores, bars, viable businesses...

...and today, all that's missing seems to be the tumbleweeds. The streets feel desiccated, drab, lonely.

Except for a few little slivers around the X, the Ordway and City Hall/Lawson, most of downtown reminds me of downtown Fargo in the seventies; in transition, but into what, we don't yet know.

The place is a monument to the folly of too much government intervention, of course; during the seventies and eighties, the St. Paul Port Authority built huge office buildings like the World Trade Center, just in time to serve a market that was vanishing. They built or financed or promoted a couple of "Festival Malls" - Galtier and Carriage Hill - that did about as well as any other festival mall (remember Riverplace, Saint Anthony Main, the Conservatory...). During the Latimer and Scheibel years, the Port Authority rang up immense debts and ran through development plans faster than Kos runs through polls. The Norm Coleman years were focused on big developments, like the Xcel, Rivecenter, the Science Museum and Lawson Commons, which did wonders for the little knot running from West Seventh up to about the Hamm Building - and not much more. The fundamental problems - that icky, cold, Stalinistic corridor on Cedar Street, the huge, uninviting, empty shell of the WTC, the misbegotten, unfriendly Town Square - still remain.

This last three months, I've been working in downtown Minneaopolis; despite the cold, artificial frenetics of the place, it's got throb and hustle and bustle to it that I love - and after ten years of working in the 'burbs, needed.

I wandered around downtown for a few hours, looking for any of the old landmarks, the ones that used to be part of my personal geography. When I first moved to the Cities, there were places to go: Shannon Kelly's for a good beer and some fun company; the Oz for sleaze; the Park Tavern for a classy night out. Now, after dark, there's nothing going on east of Saint Peter.

Later - when my son was three and my daughter was almost five, and my then-wife went back to work, I used to stay home with them in the morning (my work schedule was that flexible, for a long time). We had a season ticket at the children's museum; the ritual was to get down to the Childrens' Museum, play for an hour or two, walk through the skyway to St. Paul Center for lunch as we watched the super-cool fountain in the three-story atrium, then meander through Daytons or wander about Mears Park on the way to their daycare, by their mom's office.

Most of it's gone; the Children's Museum is there, but the food court, the dazzling fountain and the daycare are long vanished, replaced by empty offices. Town Square is a shell of its old self. There used to be signs of commerce, of a private sector...of life down there.

I had a bagel at Brueggers and watched who went by; a couple of vagrants, a few knots of government workers (you can usually tell them from private sector workers; the tight, strained gait, the institutional casual dress, the discomfort around the rabble), a bunch of people waiting on connecting buses. Not the signs of a place that's thriving. A few blocks away from Rivercenter, the place reminded me of sitting on the wrong side of the tracks in a South Dakota tourist town, during the offseason; too much depends on the tourists who come for the ~~Reptile Garden~~ Wild games for things to really feel secure.

There's going to be a revival in downtown Saint Paul, someday. There's too much great, quirky, retro, solid, lovely real estate to not attract some activity, someday. Someday, when the last cool, funky, prewar building in Northeast Minneapolis is converted to a Panera and the rents finally zoom out of reach, perhaps it'll be the new, New Uptown. Maybe it'll be the cheap incubator space for the next technological boom to come from the Twin Cities, whatever it is.

For now, it's just sad.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2004 04:42:21 AM

Death Cult - While part of Hollywood (presumably the part that's not busy counting receipts) is busy yammering about the "gore" in the Passion of Christ, another part of Hollywood seems to be quite blind to bloodshed.

"Monster", starring Charlize Theron as the title character, female serial killer Aileen Wuornos, is technically an excellent movie. Theron is a wonderful actress, the last woman on earth I'd ever have expected to say that about.

But, as Michelle Malkin notes, the movies has a subtext. The movie is, and traffics in, a rather abusive set of fictions, treating Wuornos as a victim both of her targets and of the system. The movie portrays many of her victims as johns, but...:
As her biographer Sue Russell noted recently, Wuornos ruthlessly gunned down complete strangers, some in the back as they tried to escape. "I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again," Wuornos coldly bragged. She fantasized about a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style life of crime, cunningly covered her tracks, and nonchalantly made off with her victims' belongings to bring home to her lesbian lover. The entertainment media routinely lump Wuornos' victims together as her "johns." But Russell concluded that "it's just as likely that some were simply good Samaritans lending a helping hand, since Aileen's modus operandi was to hitch rides, claiming her car had broken down. These men have been demonized in a way in which we would rarely demonize female homicide victims. And that has brought incalculable pain to some of their families."

But focusing on the devastation that Wuornos caused to her victims' wives and children wouldn't play well in Berlin or Berkeley. Championing the crime victims instead of the criminal wouldn't have allowed a starlet such as Theron to bask in the spotlight and further the leftist agenda.

That is why Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for "Dead Man Walking," but Charles Bronson never got a nod for "Death Wish."

And why a grotesque musical drama on the life of serial killer Andrew Cunanan is in the works, but not on the life of his most prominent victim, fashion designer Gianni Versace.
The death penalty is at a bit of a low ebb in the US right now, and I'm not entirely broken up about it. I don't especially support the death penalty - partly on religious grounds, partly because people are inherently corrupt and stupid, and juries and prosecutors are no exception to that rule.

But when I see who is on my side, and why, I tread very lightly on the issue.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/27/2004 03:38:26 AM

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Suicide - The left has been gravely intoning the number of suicides among US troops stationed in Iraq. This German report is the latest. The suicide rate among GIs in Iraq is around 13.5 per 100,000 troops - higher than the 10.5/100,000 rate among stateside troops.

Tragic? Absolutely.

But to put it in perspective, David's Medienkritik notes that not only is the suicide in the peacetime German Army higher (at 17/100,000) than the US military's rate in theatre, but the suicide rates throughout society are vastly higher per capita in Germany (14/100,000), France (19/100,000) and Belgium (21/100,000) among many others.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/26/2004 07:09:12 AM

Fast Eddie - When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, just getting started in the radio business, a new sportscaster came to Fargo's Channel 4, to backstop the legendary Jim Adelson. He was "Fast" Eddie Schultz, former college ~~tackling dummy~~ quarterback (if memory serves) for Moorhead State.

Jeez, he was awful. He couldn't pronounce the alphabet, and his sportscasts were like parodies of Chris Berman done by "English as a Second Language" students. But he had something going for him; he married Maureen Zimmerman, Channel 4's hot-shot anchor and the most beautiful woman ever to come from Jamestown, ND (and that includes Peggy Lee at her peak), became "Sports Director" at Channel 6, and spent many years as a chronic joke in the local media.

The joke? He could guess which side was left with only three tries.

It seems it's true with his political talk hosting career, as Schultz, a former Limbaugh knockoff, is garnering headlines as a turncoat liberal host:
Schultz, 49, a former college quarterback and sports broadcaster, likes to be known as a fighter. He once bolted out of the broadcast booth while doing play-by-play for a college football game to chase down a fan who threw a whiskey bottle at him. He once threatened to "bop" a "bozo" who was harassing him during a broadcast of a college hockey game. [Which would have at least gotten him out of the booth long enough for viewers to enjoy the game without his inane prattle - Ed.]

Some listeners have accused him of opportunism, saying he made the right-to-left switch for the chance to make more money.

"You can't believe anything Schultz says because you don't know what his core beliefs are," said Larry Astrup of Fargo, a former listener who describes himself as "so conservative I'm mad at Bush."
Simple - finding a schtick that sets him apart from the rest of the market!

Oh, he has another explanation, of course:
said his transformation from Republican to Democrat was genuine, and started when his wife-to-be, Wendy, asked him to meet her for lunch at a Salvation Army cafeteria - an experience that made him feel guilty about poking fun at homeless people.
So he was a compassionless moron. It spans all politics. Duly noted.

Notify the media.

Of course, one thing rings true about Schultz' conversion; the paranoia. Always, the paranoia:
Schultz said many conservative talk show hosts have "this big political engine" buying advertising to get them onto stations, making it difficult for him to break into bigger markets.

"I know I'm climbing a pretty tall mountain," he said. "I also know the conservative hard-right attack is coming. I know they're going to go after me any way they possibly can. My feet are on the ground. I'm ready for it."
On the plus side - he makes Sean Hannity look nuanced.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/26/2004 05:04:16 AM

FMA, Part III - Jay Reding commented on my post from yesterday
In 2000, 2 million evangelicals stayed home on Election Day. That margin would have been enough for Bush to have easily captured the popular vote and would have cemented his lead in key states. With 20% of the electorate self-described evangelicals, this is a key voting bloc.

If Bush captures a majority of the evangelical vote, he will be reelected. The social conservative base of the GOP may be waning in direct influence and may be far more moderate now than in the past, but they still count for a lot.
Y'see, while I'm personally ambivalent about the FMA, this is what I'm wondering about; is this gambit more sly politics than plan for policy?

I like that idea better.

Bush's biggest achievement during the 2000 primary season was the neutralizaation of Pat Buchanan and his ultra-conservative wing of the party; when Buchanan left and took his (few) followers with him (briefly), he took the backbone of the hard-right with him. It was a safe bet; losing them wasn't like losing voters in the middle who would have voted for Gore - can you imagine a Buchanan supporter (at least, an informed one) switching to the Dems in 2000?

As Jay noted - many of them sat the election out. If Bush can get them to the polls, it's good news for him.

I suspect the FMA will serve its purpose...:
Get out the evangelicals
Mobilize the part of the base concerned more with judicial hyperactivity than with either evangelism or gay rights
Force Kerry and/or Edwards to pick a position - one that neither (especially Kerry) can afford to take...
...and then go away once the election is over.

I don't think it's merely as cynical as "just good politics" - but it is good politics, all the same.

In the comments section of yesterday's post, Jeff Fecke noted that polls show support of the FMA to be lagging behind opposition. Let's leave aside questions of polling methodology and context for a moment (which I'm loathe to do - I do this sort of thing for a living); I seriously doubt the issue will be about the FMA by the time it actually gets to the people, especially the people the Administration is aiming for with this proposal. It'll be about curbing the runaway bench and defining what marriage is - as far as Joe NASCARDad is concerned, anyway.

And that's the part that really matters.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/26/2004 05:02:41 AM

Obsessive Compulsion - I really must learn to resist internet lists like this - in this case, from ~~the unknown blogger~~ Mary at Fresh Bed Goodness.

But until I do:

1.Name as it appears on your birth certificate: Mitchell Paul

2. Nicknames: Mitch, Greb, and (at one company) "The Highlander", because I've been around forever and you can't kill me unless you cut my head off, as well as my penchant for bagpipe music.

3. Birth Parent's names? Bruce and Jan

4. Number of candles that appeared on your last birthday cake? I can't remember the last time I actually had a birthday cake. I think I actually had a Lemon Supreme Pie from Baker's Square. It was yummy. I think it had one candle.

5. Favorite animal: (Tie) Madeline and Nosemarie, the family cats.

6. Tattoo? Almost got an anchor on my forearm when I was in Seattle back in college - but nope. Never will, either.

7. How much do you love your job or jobs? My day job, designing software? I love it - and I would even if I hadn't been on the beach most of last year.

8. Birthplace? Rugby, ND

9. Favorite vacation spot you have been to? NYC.

10. Ever been to Africa? No.

11. Stolen any traffic signs? I have never stolen a thing in my life.

12. Ever been in a car accident? Ooof. Yeah. Two that came to me, and one that was my fault (and fortunately, caused the other person about $10 worth of damage, while totalling my car...)

13. Croutons or Bacon bits? Croutons, especially if they're garlic-y.

14. 2-door or 4-door car? 4-door, sensible car.

15. Coffee? One a day. But it's from Dunn Bros.

16. Salad Dressing? Italian.

17. Favorite dessert? Lemon Pie.

18. Favorite Number? 8. It's so...even.

19. Favorite movie? Casablanca. I've seen it 34 times.

20. Favorite color? Green.

21. Favorite Holiday? Depends. For me? Thanksgiving. For the family? Christmas. For everyone? Easter.

22. Favorite Foods? The Iskender Kebab at the Black Sea Turkish restaurant.

23. Favorite day of the week? Saturday.

24. Favorite TV Show(s)? Most Extreme Elimination Challenge!

25. Favorite Toothpaste? Colgate Jack Daniels.

26. Most recently read book/magazine? Ghost Soldiers/Maxim (blush)

27. Perfume/Cologne? Lime Speed Stick.

28. Favorite scent? Walking downwind from Kincaids.

29. Favorite Fast Food place? Chipotle.

30. When was your last hospital stay? I had a smashed finger operated on on December 31, 1989.

31. How many times did you fail your driver's test? Never.

32. Where do you see yourself in 10 Years? Telling "Kos" to supersize my order.

33. What do you do when you are bored? Pick up an instrument and play. Usually guitar, although lately bagpipes are fun.

34. Last Vacation? Chicago last April.

35. Next Vacation? Park Rapids this June

36. Last concert? Heh. Springsteen, September of '02.

37. First thing you would buy with a million dollars? Pay off my mortgage. Then guy a Gibson Les Paul.

posted by Mitch Berg 2/26/2004 05:01:58 AM

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

FMA, Part II; the Rope-a-Dope Continues - Just One Minute thinks the whole FMA fracas is a disposable part of the Bush rope-a-dope.
So, Bush is half right idea on process - we want to keep this away from the courts - but wrong to support an amendment, and wrong to think that today's opposition to gay marriage will stand the test of time.

What he should have done is say that he opposes gay marriage, is willing to support (or at least, will not oppose) civil unions, and thinks this issue highlights the importance of electing a President who will appoint responsible Federal judges.

Based on the reaction of Tom DeLay, my guess is that we are seeing a bit of a Texas Two-Step here - having enunciated his principles, Bush will retreat, Congress will not act, and the FMA will take its place alongside the Flag Burning Amendment in the conservative retirement home.

Let's remember that Rudy Giuliani will be a prominent speaker at the Republican convention in New York City. It's hard to imagine that a gay-bashing convention is what Bush and Rove are looking for, and Bush did conclude his statement with a call for "kindness and goodwill and decency".
Can't say as I disagree.

(Via The Professor)
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2004 10:19:16 PM

Big Day - Yesterday was a huge day for the president.

Leaving aside the moral rights and wrongs of the issue, I think the Marriage Amendment is a can't-lose for the President. Most Americans across the political spectrum oppose gay marriage - even California rejected it at refererendum by nearly 2-1. Even the front-running Democrat candidates, Kerry and Edwards, are at least silent on it - as Medved put it yesterday, Kerry will court the votes of gay marriage supporters, while winking and nodding and not being especially broken up if the issue goes nowhere. So in solidifying his base, I doubt Bush has lost the vote of a single person that would have voted for him.

For conservatives, the last few months have felt like sitting in a trench, sweating out an enemy artillery barrage, wondering where the hell the morons in Artillery are. Yesterday's speech to the Republican Governors answered that. Damn, it felt good to have the campaign finally begin.

I plan on asking Rocket Man from Powerline - do the events of the last few days affect his pessimism about Bush's chances at all?
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2004 05:24:05 AM

The Right Thing? - Gay Marriage is one of those things, like abortion; I have an opinion about it, but the issue intersects with my day-to-day life so rarely that it seems to be of only academic interest.

But of course, like abortion, the key issue isn't so much about whether gay people marry or get health benefits; it's about reining in the power of the Imperial Court.

The Times goes over the part that's, on the face of it, most controversial:
"The amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage," Mr. Bush said.

Determining whether the text of the proposed amendment would accomplish that, however, can require a close reading, to say the least. The amendment reads: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups...

..."Constitutions are interpreted over time," said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group opposed to the amendment. "You don't write a gamble like that into the Constitution."

Robert H. Bork, the conservative former judge and former Supreme Court nominee and a leading drafter of the amendment, called that argument "preposterous." He said that the text clearly restricted only courts, not legislatures. What is more, Mr. Bork said, the public debate over the amendment would determine how any court interpreted it. If voters approving the amendment believed it meant one thing, courts would be hard pressed to say it meant another.

Matt Daniels, a lawyer who founded the Alliance for Marriage and who is another drafter of the amendment, said the semantic debate was beside the point. "We, the group that drafted the text and introduced it into the House and Senate," Mr. Daniels said, "are fully open to minor changes to the wording to make it clear, explicit and unambiguous." "
This seems to be the major sticking point - some of my liberal friends believe (erroneously, I think, but I'm no lawyer) that this proposal would prevent civil unions; while the social conservative in me would applaud, the libertarian would not.

And I think the only case for gay marriage (as opposed to civil union) is purely libertarian. I've gone back and forth on this issue over the past two years, and while the likes of Andrew Sullivan make a few good arguments (not even the Catholic Church seriously treats marriage as procreative; most churches recognize divorce, which Christ condemned, dang the luck), nobody has yet attacked the idea, as old as civilization, that marriage is between a man and a woman and nothing else.

And as good as the arguments frequently are, they all seem to be filigrees around that one key, seemingly-immutable idea.

Make no mistake; I consider marriage a religious event. Civil "Marriage" is to me purely a contract - I object philosophically to the idea of a "marriage license", and think government should limit itself to enforcing contracts. I doubt I'd ever marry in a church that recognized the idea of gay marriage (on the off chance that I ever got married again anyway).

I also dislike the idea of noodling with the Constitution over trivial matters - but given the rampant, near-tyrranical activism of the courts, I can see the rationale for this amendment.

Politically? Well, that's fodder for a whole different post.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2004 05:07:48 AM

Uncommon Pusillanimity - We all remember the POW/MIA movement, back in the eighties and early nineties.

"Never forget", they exhorted us.

The evidence seemed, at the very least, interesting:
What was the body of evidence that prisoners were held back? A short list would include more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam, all labeled inconclusive by the Pentagon; multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence agencies, all ignored or declared unreliable; persistent complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials (some of them made publicly) that live-prisoner evidence was being suppressed; and clear proof that the Pentagon and other keepers of the "secret" destroyed a variety of files over the years to keep the P.O.W./M.I.A. families and the public from finding out and possibly setting off a major public outcry.
And then - nothing.

Why?

Sydney "Killing Fields" Schanberg ties the disappearance of the issue to Kerry. Long money quote:
In the committee's early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.
He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo?from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst?reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies?but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."

A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."

The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W. developments. It was a huge issue at that time.

Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their way home."
If true - and we'll see, although Schanberg's record of presenting stories that seem to horrible to be true is a good one - then this is a record of perfidy that the American people need to know about.

It needs to be followed up.

(Via Powerline)
posted by Mitch Berg 2/25/2004 05:05:54 AM

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Open Letter to the DNC - Please, please keep putting Terry MacAuliffe on talk shows against Ed Gillespie.

I'm watching Today right now, and Gillespie is making MacAuliffe look like the lying, sniveling little thug he is.

Good tactic. Keep it up.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/24/2004 07:13:32 AM

Heroism and Leadership - John Kerry and his supporters repeatedly insist that his stature as a Silver Star-winning war hero are positive proof that he's qualified to manage this nation's national security.

Let's leave everything aside for a moment - and by "everything" I mean the whole list, as Hugh recited it yesterday:
Kerry was wrong about the Viet Cong.

Kerry was wrong about the North Vietnamese.

Kerry was wrong about the Cubans in Grenada.

Kerry was wrong about the Sandanistas in Nicaragua.

Kerry was wrong about the Soviets and their reaction to Reagan's defense build-up.

Kerry was wrong about Saddam in 1991.

Kerry was wrong about Saddam in 2003.
Disregard it all, and ask yourself one simple question - is heroism itself a qualification for office, much less an assurance of competence at leadership?

About 15 years ago, I edited a draft manuscript of a WWII memoir by a local man who'd been an infantry platoon leader. He fought in the Hürtgen Forest - of six officers and 160 men in his company of 83rd Infantry Division that walked into the forest, he was one of two officers and 30-odd men that walked out. He was severely wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.

In the closing stages of the Hürtgen battle, the remains of his company was ordered to run across a couple hundred yards of open ground, under German fire, to seize a key objective. The author had dysentery - "Montezuma's Revenge" - so bad, and felt so sick, that he couldn't run. He walked across the open field, German fire snapping around him, too sick to really care if he got hit or not.

The colonel in command of the 330th Infantry Regiment saw this display from a nearby hill, and assumed that the author was exercising the most amazing coolness under fire and combat leadership he'd ever seen. The colonel wrote the author up for the Distinguished Service Cross, which came through channels as a Silver Star.

Because of a case of diarrhea.

If you're John Kerry, you'll call what I just said "an attack on veterans". Far from it. Heroism is, in many cases, a simple matter of guys plodding along and doing the right thing under unspeakable conditions, whether it's holding off an attack by oneself with a machine gun (like Audie Murphy), or walking into a blazing skyscraper, or cleaning out a Viet Cong position singlehanded (like Kerry) diving on a grenade to save the rest of one's squad, or walking forward under fire when your insides are turning to goo. Heroism is average people doing the unimaginable.

Does heroism itself make someone a leader?

Acts of heroism frequently involve people stepping far outside their own limitations to do things under the pressure of incredible, defining moments. It frequently involves the instant, irrevocable suspension of judgement to do things that no rational person would do, if rationality were called for.

Leadership requires qualities that may intersect with those of the hero on occasion - but are not the same thing. It requires both the ability to make tough, rational choices, and the ability to communicate those choices to people - even the choices that are counterintuitive. The great leaders are the ones that can convince the people to do the hard things; Churchill leading Britons to stand alone against a Germany that sought an armistice; Reagan leading the nation simultaneously from the disabling grind of stagflation and the lulling lie of detente; George HW Bush leading half a million men from dozens of non-involved nations to fight for a tiny principality halfway around the world; and his son, leading Western Civilization in a struggle that a good chunk of our own people stopped recognizing once the rubble was cleared from the Ground Zeros.

We need heros. Thank God for them.

A leader is a different thing altogether.

Kerry's heroism thirty-odd years ago didn't make him a leader. Far from it - he's the quintessential follower.

Bush may have never charged into enemy fire, silenced it, and lived to tell about it. But for three years he's stepped above and beyond himself and made the tough choices, and led this nation in a way that few people could - and convinced most of the people, rightly, that it is the right thing to do.

Or so we'll find out in about eight months...
posted by Mitch Berg 2/24/2004 06:35:55 AM

The New Era - In the mid-eighties, historian Edwin Luttwak - one of the world's foremost military historians - published "The Pentagon and the Art of War", a sweeping critique of the Pentagon of the era. Published in the wake of military failures in Vietnam, the Mayaguez incident), the Desert One fiasco in Iran and Lebanon, and the costly, clumsy success of the Grenada invasion, Luttwak's book questioned the structure and goals of the US military, up to and emphasizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The US military, from the JCS on down, had one overriding strategery; to preserve and protect the US military. The symptoms were everywhere, and they were awful, to the student of military history. Every military operation of any size was preceded by a protracted set of negotiations to ensure that all four services got their piece of the action; officers need combat time to ensure promotions, and officers of each service wanted their piece of the action, even when it was clearly inappropriate for their service to be involved.

As a result, operations like Grenada, Desert One and the Mayaguez incident became huge, bloated, combined-services operations, lumping units that had never trained together into task forces that were ill-suited to the mission; for example, there was no reason the Grenada mission needed the 82nd Airborne Division or the USAF; it was a mission tailor-made for the Marines.

This obsessive niggling over turf became a substitute for having a coherent national strategy; it became institutionalized in the form of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a group whose primary mission was more to negotiate the boundaries where military turf would be shared than to actually develop a coherent strategy.

Powerline points to an excerpt from Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Rumsfeld's War", and perhaps the best piece of evidence that that has changed under the Bush Administration:
Rumsfeld's instant declaration of war, previously unreported, took America from the Clinton administration's view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration's view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed.
This would be a global war, Rumsfeld said, and he planned to give Special Operations forces — Delta Force, SEALs and Green Berets — unprecedented powers to kill terrorists.

On July 22, [Rumsfeld] initialed a highly classified directive to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Rumsfeld directive is just one page, but its impact was historic: The defense secretary changed the nature of Special Operations forces — and the Pentagon — by giving commanders the authority to plan and execute missions on their own with a minimum of bureaucratic interference.
And with that, 56 years of bureacracy-centered direction was officially declared dead (if not actually buried in terms of day-to-day operation).

Powerline and others have talked at length about Bush's doctrine serving as a national Grand Strategy. This snapshot illustrates it.

Read it all, of course.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/24/2004 06:24:22 AM

Let Slip the Posts of School - Yesterday's post about David Rubenstein's op-ed in the Strib spawned a huuuuuge, somewhat dyspeptic piece on the reasons public education these days leaves me so - words fail me - depressed lately.

How huuuge? Since I'm not Steve Den Beste, I'm going to probably have to break it up over a few days.

The piece - or series, I haven't decided yet - will start tomorrow, if I can just make it sounds LITTLE less dyspeptic.

Which Begs The Question - If you make something less dyspeptic, are you merely making it more peptic?
posted by Mitch Berg 2/24/2004 06:14:13 AM

Profiles in Illegitimacy - Palestinians are demonstrating over the fence:
"Palestinians have challenged the legality of Israel's West Bank barrier before the World Court, telling the opening session that the vast network of walls and fences would deny them a viable independent state.

Israel stayed away from the U.N. forum's landmark foray into its conflict with the Palestinians, disputing the right of the court in The Hague to rule on the case.

Both Israelis and Palestinians tried to score propaganda points, staging demonstrations outside the court.

Israel says the barrier is just for security and cites a suicide bombing that killed eight people aboard a Jerusalem bus on Sunday as proof it needs it to keep out militants.

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip held protests in a 'Day of Rage' against what they call Israel's
Berlin Wall, separating many of them from their fields, schools and medical services."
Its the wall, of course - not the endless procession of suicide bombers.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/24/2004 05:00:57 AM

Monday, February 23, 2004

From The Fringe - The left-wing media is fond of one particular stereotype - the right-wing "Freeper" conspiracy theorist, tirelessly cranking out feverish theories about the liberal plots - conspiracies, dammit! - that make the world such an awful place.

I'd suspect they're fairly proud that they don't get much of a voice in their paper.

They'd be wrong - about everything but the politics, that is.

You'd think the Strib, equipped with the likes of Doug Grow, Nick Coleman, Lori Sturdevant and Syl Jones, wouldn't need to go outside the shop to hunt for paranoid, blinkered, insular opinions.

And yet, yesterday they did, with this op-ed by David Rubenstein, described as "a Minneapolis writer" whose article "is adapted from remarks he made at a public meeting on school closures last week", which begs the question, "if he's such a writer, why didn't they just make him write the thing, but I digress.

His perspective is not that of a parent:
I don't have a kid in the Minneapolis public schools,
...but merely that of the perpetual indignant
...but I don't like what's happening to them.

I'm angry at the district, too. But I do know that if school officials weren't talking about closing these schools, it would be other schools, or programs.

The reason is political. One political party now dominates, in this state and nationally. And that party basically wants to destroy the public schools. And in Minnesota it is succeeding. Closures speed the exodus and vice versa.
Now, we've been through this. Minneapolis is shrinking, and its school enrollment is shrinking even faster.

But to Mr. Rubenstein, it's not a matter of demographics. It's a conspiracy:
I can't say exactly why they want to do it. I believe it has to do with their idea of a free market, and their hatred of unions. But I do know how they are doing it.

They are destroying the schools by adding to their responsibilities but not likewise adding to their money.
It's about here you realize you're not dealing with a rational person.

Conservatives - the type even I lampoon - are all about taking away from the schools' responsibilities; if you listen to some of the duller specimens on "Garage Logic", the ideal is "Readin', Writin' and 'Rithmetic", a no-frills school just like the one room schoolhouses of the 1800s; no art, music or languages (although sports seem to get a pass with most of them).

It's the other side - the utopian, social activist left that took over the education academy in the past 40-odd years - that's added the extra mandates; sex ed, endless focus on diversity and multiculturalism, endless and unfunded mandates driven more by social agenda than by any educational goal.

To the conspiracy theorist, the most infuriating thing is that the truth is out there, and yet nobody will believe him!
I'm angry because the district is not saying it: Republicans are starving the school system. And leaving it up to the district to parcel out what's left and take the heat.

Why isn't the district saying it? Sometimes I think the district is like an abused woman who thinks that if she talks about what's happening, it will just make things worse. Maybe it's time to start talking.
So get this; the Minnesota Educational-Industrial Complex, after three decades of absolute free rein, and after decades of booming spending, finally had to go on a fiscal diet - not cuts, mind you, but smaller increases than they wanted - and they're crying "abuse?"

The Minneapolis Schools aren't an abused woman. They're a spoiled child, used to stomping its feet and getting its way.

Which might explain why drivel like this op-ed is being published.

Rubenstein hits on all the usual boogeymen:
If there are public school teachers who are not voting or are voting Republican, they should open their eyes and turn off their TVs and their AM radios. If there are parents who are not voting, it's time to start. And start talking about it. The Republicans are trying to destroy the public schools.
Mr. Rubenstein, unplug your MPR and throw away your Utne Reader. If you had any kids in school, you might realize that the system is doing a fine job of killing itself. This deathwish is both bigger than the Minneapolis public school system, and an integral part of the way the MPS runs itself.

More on this in a later post.
There are lots of these "overtaxed" rich people in Minnesota, and now they run it. And they are going to keep on running it unless everybody else gets real interested in politics.

More interested in politics than the Democratic Party or the Green Party are themselves. You have to wonder why they aren't outside these hearings signing people up.
Embarassment?
My message to the school system is: Maybe it is time to quit being shy when it comes to talking about what is going on. No more statements about "necessary cutbacks" without pointing out why they are necessary.
Right. Because if we really knew why the cutbacks were necessary - shrinking enrollment combined with - and in some ways, driven by - complete systemic failure, more people would recognize your post for what it is; a spittle-flecked rant with no bearing on reality.

I'll join Mr. Rubenstein in this sentiment, though. The public school are failing; that's pretty much the conservative cant. And no amount of money can save them, nor for that matter can endless DFL administrations or crazed focus on the Three Rs and reinstitution of corporal punishment, for that matter.

The public school system - and for that matter, most of the private school system - are failing because the very model they use for teaching is flawed from its very core, and is designed - whether intentionally or not - to leave the majority of kids out. It's failing because it not only ignores a number of key facts about human learning - it institutionalizes that ignorance, and even give people PhDs in the advanced practice of that ignorance. And - perhaps I'm being optimistic in a back-handed way - it's failing because its founding model is completely inimical to democracy. And when a system is that desperately flawed, you can no more "reform" it that you can polish a turd to a fine mirror sheen.

But that's not only a post for later this week - it's a digression.

As far as Mr. Rubenstein's op-ed is concerned - how many good, well-thought-out, well-written op-eds from the right were squeezed out to make way for the semi-literate, poorly-written (speech doesn't make good writing) rant of someone who's using the issue purely for political partisanship?

Rhetorical question, of course.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/23/2004 07:33:45 AM

It's Got A Beat - There was a time when music radio didn't bore me stiff.

That time passed long, long ago.

But just about the time I was ready to turn off all non-talk radio in town (and most of the talk shows are pretty awful these days, too), KQRS finally puts on something worth listening to.

"Little Steven's Underground Garage" - hosted by longtime E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt - is the most fun I've had listening to radio since KQWB in Fargo used to mix the Replacements and Judas Priest with gleeful abandon.

About time.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/23/2004 06:02:33 AM

Nader - Lots of Democrats are upset about Nader's entrance into the race.

Not all conservatives are happy either.

My biggest worry - in this election, Nader will serve the same role that Pat Buchanan did in 2000, once he left the GOP; he'll provide a safety valve for the Democrats. Without the resources of the mass of birkenstock-clad True Believers of the Green Party backing him, his candidacy will be merely a place for the left to store its lunatic fringe.

And, as Joe at the Outpost noted, he could make Kerry seem positively centrist right at the time when the departure of Dean would otherwise remove Kerry's cover on the left (and Clark's exit opened up room for "slimy and inconsistent" charges). Nader serves as such a perfect lightning rod for "excessive leftism" criticism, it's almost tempting to believe Kerry's supporters are behind Nader's entry.
posted by Mitch Berg 2/23/2004 06:00:57 AM

The Jobless Recovery - Now, as far as I'm concerned, the moment I got a long-term contract, the recovery was a jobful one.

Of course, I'm not the entire measure of the economy...

...well, actually, as far as life in the Berg household goes, yes, I am. The Clinton recession ended in November of '03. But for the rest of the households in this country, the mileage may vary. And the conventional wisdom is that this recovery is "jobless".

Fortunately, the Economist has the latest
...“offshoring” is certainly having an effect on some white-collar jobs that have hitherto been safe from foreign competition. But how big is it, really? The best-known report, by Forrester Research, a consultancy, guesses that 3.3m American service-industry jobs will have gone overseas by 2015—barely noticeable when you think about the 7m-8m lost every quarter through job-churning. And the bulk of these exports will not be the high-flying jobs of IT consultants, but the mind-numbing functions of code-writing.

Meanwhile, there is another side to the ledger. Instead of focusing on jobs lost to the globalisation of information technology, Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics in Washington looks at globalisation's power to reduce prices and so help spread new technology, new practices and job-creating investment through the economy.

She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production—all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance—was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.
Worth a read.

(Via Instapundit)

posted by Mitch Berg 2/23/2004 05:58:43 AM