The Problem with Hate Crime Legislation - When justice is equal - when we are all equal before the law - then there is no real reason to abuse the law. It's when inequalities are introduced into the mix that the problems arise. That's true if some are less equal - it was not only very hard for a black man to get a fair shake in court (and in some cases may still be), but it was eminently possible for the more equal class to use the law to abuse those less equal.
But today's news from Saint Cloud - a man has been caught falsely reporting a bias crime - shows that the opposite is true; when you create a more powerful class, abuse is also endemic.
And when laws make some people more equal than others - whether they be hate crime laws or domestic abuse laws that recognize only violence against women and ignore violence against men (which have led to an epidemic of false abuse charges against men, designed to win leverage in child custody trials) - it goes far beyond the academic legalistic objections that many have to hate crime laws. In short - not only do such laws erode the concept of equality before the law, they provide a direct, well-lighted four lane freeway to assist one in going down that road.
Time to rethink all such laws.
Break - It occured to me that I haven't had a vacation in 13 years that didn't involve either job-hunting, painting my house, or visiting my parents in North Dakota.
Not that there's anything wrong with any of those things, of course. But it's time for some new horizons.
So today, my kids and I are going to take off to Chicago for the first half of the week. There will be no new contributions to this blog 'til Thursday (or maybe Wednesday night at the earliest).
Hope you all have a good beginning of the week, and we'll see you on Thursday.
A Blessed Easter - Lest you forget amid the Hallmark (TM) hype that's nearly taken the day over, today's the observed anniversary of the day Christ died for your sins. (I'm not going to throw in any of the usual "...as Christians believe..."-type qualifiers. If you're Jewish or Moslem, you have my personal dispensation not to bow and scrape to my sensitivities on your holy days. If you're an atheist - find you own holiday!)
Easter is one of my favorite holidays mainly for the religious experience, which has become, if anything, vastly more profound for me over the years. Christmas is Christ's birth, and itself a deeply religious holiday for me, personally. But Christmas is so deeply associated with family (still the main time we're all together), the weather (I love the cold crispness of the air I always associate with Christmas) and, since I've had children, the joy of the whole gift-giving part of the holiday, as commercial as it is. Christmas is an overload of sensations, really - religious, familial, parental, gustatory, sensory - that it leaves me fatigued, needing the (otherwise inexplicable) New Years Day break more for relaxing from Chistmas than to recover from the drinking binge I haven't gone on in over a decade.
Easter, however, is rejuvenating in a mostly spiritual sense. The weather varies (often gorgeous, sometimes deep in snow, today gray and threatening rain), the only family involved is my own, and I'm free to focus much more on the meaning of the holiday than I am for Christmas, even though my approach to Christmas is still perhaps just a bit more spiritually-centered than that of most in our society.
At any rate - whatever your faith or approach to life, I hope you find today the sense of renewal and redemption that we all need, from whatever source. And for Christians - may you all have a blessed Easter.
Bring Out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch! - Attack Rabbits are now for real.
The Dull Sword swings Both Ways - The presidency of Bill Clinton may well have been saved by "scandal fatigue" - Americans' weariness with more and more news about scandals. Democrats crowed about it on the surface - and, I think, gave a muted sigh of relief about it when it finally worked.
But for those Dems pinning their hopes on Enron being the scandal to rock the Bush administration (which it's not, but work with me here), it seems the phenomenon didn't end when the administrations switched.
Blah - Started a new job the week before last. That and my home life have constricted some of my time available for this sort of thing.
Which really means I'll be doing more of this on the weekend than I'd heretofore figured...
Berry, Redux - Anne Coulter dissects Halle Berry's self-serving Oscar acceptance speech.
Deep Kimchi - The coddling and pacification of the Clinton years may have finally borne fruit; North Korea apparently has nuclear weapons.
Critics of the military, especially liberals, like to spout the simple bromide, "the military always trains to fight the last war". As we've seen in Afghanistan, our special forces are perfectly adept at fighting this war - but the pacifist left is pretty obsessed on the past. Suddenly, says the looney left, all future terrorist attacks will involve box cutters and airliners - as if the extemporization sIf the terrorists of September 11 added an insujlt to grave injury, it was that they gave ammunition (as it were) to those short-sighted liberals who believe the notion of missile defense is itself obsolete.
If the reports are correct, Pyongyang is one missile booster away from being able to cure that misconception. Wonder how many dead Angelenos or Seattleites it'll take before the left becomes obsessed with missile defense (and ignores unconventional warfare in turn)?
Dawkins Retires - Frogtown's ultraliberal senator Andy Dawkins is finally retiring from the Senate, and will finally officially live in the same house with his wife, ultraliberal Ellen Anderson.
I met Andy Dawkins on my old KSTP talk show in 1986. He was just back from a commie-coddling junket to Nicaragua for a leftist lawyers's group, and he spent two hours arguing Central American politics with me. He was a great, personable guy who was as easy to talk with as his and his wife's politics were noxious. It was an interview that ended up on my audition tape.
The best thing about Dawkins, though, was his infamous pledge to keep his ponytail until tax fairness was achieved. It lasted eighteen months, and he finally cut it off. The delicious irony? The ultraliberal crypto-Maoist Dawkins clipped off his 'tail because tax rates had fallen due to tax cuts and a surging economy - products of a free market that he and his wife have done their best to scuttle.
Start with the Baloney - DFL legislators began a short, painless "hunger strike" yesterday, over potential welfare cuts.
This is worse than those idiotic squatter camps that well-to-do college students set up to "draw attention to homelessness". Now, not only are special interests vying for the "most victimized" title, but it's now chichi to be an "honorary victim", as it were, at the Capitol.
This state embarasses me sometimes.
Zero Brain - As part of the "drug war" - and especially after the Columbine massacre - "zero tolerance" became the latest cliche in the nation's bottomless library of catch phrases.
My son was sent home from school last year - because he had five little soft-plastic pellets in his pocket. No problem - except that when asked, he told the principal that they were from a toy gun, ergo violating the schools' "zero tolerance policy" on "weapons". (Had he lied and told them they were from a "fill the holes" game, he'd have been just fine, of course)
Catherine Seipp writes an excellent article on how zero tolerance rules can be bad for kids' health. That may well be true - but I'd suggest that their main effect it to teach kids that authority is really just not that bright.
The Culture War, at your local Bookstore - Stanley Kurtz writes an excellent article about how the culture wars are reflected on the best-seller lists..
Whew - Eight people were killed by a mad gunman in Paris yesterday.
Good thing France has stiff gun control laws, huh? You never know WHAT might have happened!
Bush + Rice, 2004? - Andrew Sullivan speculates on a GOP ticket I've been dreaming about for 2004 - Bush with Condoleeza Rice.
Conservatives on Campus - I went to an exceedlingly sleepy little college out on the Great Plains, where students were generally too busy trying to learn how to earn a living that didn't involve repairing tractors to bother with politics too much. For what it was worth, I was a McGovern democrat until sometime my sophomore year, when a combination of Aleksandyr Solzhenitzyn, Fyodor Doestoyevskii and P. J. O'Rourke started me on the conservative path I'm on today.
As much as I love playing the underdog, I almost wish I were in college today, as a conservative. The odds conservatives on the campi of major universities seem almost melodramatically daunting. In other words, fun.
The Insanity Continues - The national abomination that is "the war on drugs" continues, with a Supreme Court case with some awful implications.
My grandfather, Don Hall, died Wednesday morning in Phoenix. He was 89.
Unlike a lot of Americans, I was blessed to grow up with my grandfather around an awful lot when I was a kid. He was a tall, gregarious guy. He attended Jamestown College, in Jamestown ND, during the height of the dust bowl, putting himself through school working a variety of odd summer jobs, even a WPA project. He was a hall of famer at JC - some of his records still stand, 67 years later.
He taught high school in many little towns in the Dakotas for probably fifteen years or so - even coached the last undefeated season, including post-season, in the history of North Dakota High School basketball (Grand Forks Central, 1940). After that, as I was giggly-delighted to tell my friends in high school, "grandpa sold drugs" - as a representative for Merck, Sharp and Dohm, of course. As a travelling salesman, it seemed he was always passing through town. I went on a trip with him once, and it felt like everyone in all the little towns knew him and said "hi".
I last saw him at my mother's house, nearly six years ago - he and my grandmother Pat moved to Phoenix in the seventies, after they both retired. Age was catching up with him, but even up to my last phone call with him he never sounded any different than he did in my earliest memories of him.
Back to more political talk on Monday. Hope you all have a great weekend.
Sara Brady, Hypocrite - According to this New York Daily News article, anti-gun zealot Sara Brady...seems to have broken a gun law.
Typical enough - it's par for the course for anti-gun activists. The list of anti-gun activists who themselves own and carry guns is long and damning. And it extends to the Twin Cities as well - anti-gun DFLer and former Minneapolis police chief Tony Bouza, who advocates gun confiscation, would exclude himself.
That's who we're dealing with, here, people.
Donald Hall, RIP - My grandfather passed away yesterday at 89. Had to catalog the influences he had on my life - but I'll try. Later today or this evening.
Today - First day at a new job, so it's going to be a light one (at least until later tonight, Thursday).
I'll leave you with this delightful screed from Lileks. Wish me luck!
Was this mentioned at Kyoto? - Beijing is being choked by dust storms.
The dust storms are the result of erosion in the farmland between Beijing and the Gobi desert. That, in turn, is the result of harebrained socialist agriculture policies.
Attention, Green Party members - this just another example of how big government kills.
Redistricting - The Special Judicial Panel released its final redistricting report yesterday.
With a big swath of Sixth District voters swapped into the Second (which Bill Luther barely held in 2000) looks like John Kline has a serious shot of making the third time the charm.
Meanwhile, a fairly conservative suburban Sixth District should be fairly friendly turf for old Second District congressman Mark Kennedy, who defeated David Minge in a squeaker in 2000.
It looks like things might be looking up for conservatives in Minnesota, after ten very frustrating years.
Peace Through Rhetoric- What are two things liberals always claim? a) That President Bush is an idiot, and that b) they don't want any wars with anyone anywhere (unless they're pro-life).
Amid the wailings of the professional hand-wringing class here and abroad, this article, in the New York Times, shows how Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech is disproving a) and achieving b). The Iranians, if the signs are to be believed, are talking about softening their line.
Victory through oratory, without a shot being fired? Gosh - that Dubya sure is a dummy, hyuck.
Geraldo - I've wanted to write a good flame of Geraldo Rivera for years. Other people always do it better. James Lileks, in this case.
The Iron Lady vs. The Continent - While Europeans sniff at America's foreign policy and leaders, it's worth noting what history shows us - that most of the harebrained-cum-evil ideas that made the last two centuries so utterly miserable had their genesis on the European continent, while most of what we in America hold dear about our own system started in what's now the UK. Your choice is Personal Liberty, a set of Common Laws worthy of being equal before, and the Sanctity of the Individual, versus guilt until proof of innocence, Communism, Naziism, Socialism - and now, the Uber-Bureacrat State, the European Union.
Margaret Thatcher's new book notes all of the above, asks why the UK should plight it's troth with such a pack of intellectual bankrupts - and calls for the UK to abandon the EU. Here's hoping the debate gets started - once the EU bureaucrats determines exact percentage of dairy content that qualifies "Cheese Food" to be considered "Cheese", anyway.
Ambling Into Balance - Andrew Sullivan posts a repeat of a great blog, in which he reassesses President Bush in light of Frank Bruni's new book, "Ambling Into History".
While Bruni's a moderate liberal who works for the very liberal Washington Post, even heat-seeking conservatives like Anne Coulter are raving about this book.
Russell Yates Redux - The Washington Post presents Russell Yates' side of the story.
I'll reiterate my theory of the other day - Yates was a guy in a lousy situation, dealing with a mentally-ill wife. He was ill-equipped to deal with the situation he was presented - and made a complete hash of it, as it happens. Was he partly responsible for his kids' deaths? Possibly - and the state is examining that possibility. Was he the monster deserving of the chorus of hatred being directed at him by feminists - and not-so-feminists, like the vacuous Andrea Peyser? If only such questions were as conveniently cut-and-dried as pundits make them, especially our feminist pundits.
I'll bet not one of his accusers has ever had to deal with living with a mentally-ill person. I've found one article, by Glenn Sacks, that seems to show some appreciation of the difficulties .
Black, Meet White - Oliver Willis is a black blogger with a few interesting ideas among all the rest. I stumbled on this one and found it interesting - noting the number of blacks who may or may not be actual conservatives who oppose the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and are looking for a realignment in the civil rights movement.
Ooops - A billing error with my ISP caused some service interruption. Believe it or not, they admitted it was their error.
Feel free to collect your extra viewing of Shot in the Dark, as part of the settlement!
More shots in the dark to come shortly.
Yates Guilty - The jury didn't buy the insanity defense, and Andrea Yates was convicted yesterday of murdering three of her five children.
Two thoughts come to mind: first, the ongoing infantilization of women has taken two big setbacks in the last two months, with the conviction of Kathleen Soliah, and now this. The feminists must be getting some serious grudges on.
And the husband; I'd love, in a perverse way, to know what's going on in his mind. Of course, to the zealot, it's purely a function of Mr. Yates being a "domineering man" and, of course, a "fundamentalist Christian".
This is not to say, by the way, that Mr. Yates doesn't have serious problems, and that he doesn't bear significant responsibility for the deaths of his children. However, in light of . ">the article I linked to last week on the differing standards of justice for men and women, I'm not surprised that Mr. Yates' sins of omission are being treated as more odious than Mrs. Yates' ghastly sins of commission.
But I think it's more complicated than that.
Was Russell Yates so beaten down by living with an insane woman all these years that his entire mind is geared to nothing but mindless support of the woman in his life, even after she's killed his family? I can see that. Or his he insane, himself? I'd suspect a little of both- at the risk of sounding like Stuart Smalley, that relationship had to have been built on thick slatherings of codependence, built around keeping the wife somehow emotionally afloat, at all costs.
People - especially my feminist friends - castigate Mr. Yates for having baby after baby after baby after her condition was diagnosed. But if the hormones of pregancy were the only islands of respite in their lives together - and they both recognized it - isn't that a normal (if sick) response? The instinct for self preservation is a strong one - those islands of relative sanity must have been very tempting to both of them.
American Jingoism - The current conflict has shown us a great example of blinkered American jingoism.
No, not from the government, or most of your average Americans, but from the media.
How many of you knew from the American media that special forces from Australia, Britain, Germany, Canada and Norway are fighting by the side of American troops in Afghanistan? Amid the publicity over the deaths of eight Americans last week, now many of you knew that an Australian Special Air Service trooper had died in action? (The SAS is the British, Australian and New Zealand equivalent of Delta Force). Or amid the furor over John the Taliban Walker, that three Australians had been captured after fighting for Al Quaeda?
It's a big world out there. And while we are bearing the lion's share of this action, we're not the only ones.
When Cicero Spoke- Full disclosure - my father was a speech teacher. I study oratory and its role in history.
I was talking with a friend about the relative merits of President Bush and former president Clinton, especially Bush's merits and failings as a public speaker - and his rising to the occasion since September 11. Because while Clinton was a great orator, and Bush's gaffes are amply-publicized (although Al Gore's equally-hilarious gaffes curiously went unreported in the national media), Bush has risen to the occasion, delivering some fantastic speeches at just the times the nation needed them.
"But Mitch", said my friend, a Democrat, "that was just a bunch of feel-good platitudes, designed to keep the nation's spirits up during the crisis!".
Yes, indeed. And Winston Churchill's classic "Dunkirk" and "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat", and "Battle of Britain" speeches never shot down a single German bomber. But they buffed up Britain's nerves for the struggle ahead - a struggle perhaps vastly greater and, at the time, more one-sided than the one we face now.
In this, Bush is doing very well.
He'll be taking the podium shortly. If I have comments, I'll put them here.
Shooting, Part II - Concealed-carry activists are frequently asked why we can't use pepper spray, or mace, or martial arts or stun guns instead of firearms.
Yesterday's shooting of the mentally-ill Somali man shows where non-lethal forms of resistance to violence fall short. If your attacker is on drugs, or severely mentally-impaired, non-lethal force is very frequently ineffective.
According to the FBI, not resisting a violent attack is seven times as likely to get you killed as resisting with a handgun (not necessarily killing the attacker). Non-lethal means? Four times as much.
Six-Month Anniversary - Hard to believe it was six months ago today that the world seemed to turn on its ear.
In many ways, life doesn't seem all that much different now. The day to day grind really isn't, honestly. Not here, not for me. And yet it's changed one of the most important things in my life.
Indulge me, here.
I grew up in rural North Dakota, not far from the vast fields of Minuteman III missiles, close to the glide paths of the B-52 bombers,. all of which were on alert for my entire cognitive life. I was keenly aware of the presence of all of those first strike targets, forty miles away. And while I may have been one of a minority, growing up around all of that did affect me - there was a long-standing anxiety that my life and the entire world around me could be incinerated in seconds, or irradiated away, without warning.
The Berlin Wall fell about the time my oldest child was born. It would be easy and melodramatic to tell you that knowing my daughter would grow up in a world without that tension hanging over her was a wonderful, liberating sensation - but it's the truth.
I was driving to work on September 11. I was on 394, by Xenia/Park Place. I'd just flipped over from KQRS' interview with PJ O'Rourke to MPR's live coverage of the attacks, without warning. And as the day wore on , and the shock sank in, that exhilaration - covered by the many other emotional layers of an adult's life - sank away. The threat is different - but it's still the same.
So my kids are growing up in the same world I did, now. The threat is less omnipresent - I dont' suspect the Twin Cities are high on any terrorist's hit list - but more visceral. Maybe that's a good thing - it's harder for this threat to fade into the background of daily life, like the insanity of the Cold War's "
And perhaps, knowing that history was not over in 1991, we were all fools to ever let our emotional guard down.
Back to the usual business of holding the "anti-war" left's feet in the fire tomorrow.
Accuse First, Ask Questions Later - The left in Minneapolis is crying foul over the weekend shooting of a machete-wielding, mentally-illy Somali man by the Police - apparently after the officers on the scene exhausted all of their non-lethal options. Interestingly, they were issuing press releases via email long before the story got out via any other media.
The police apparently tried to use a number of officers that were specially-trained last year to deal with the violent mentally-ill:
"More than 40 Minneapolis police officers have
been trained to respond to situations involving
people with mental illnesses. They make up the
city's Crisis Intervention Team, which was created
last year in response to police shootings of three
mentally ill people in 1999 and 2000.Crisis team members, who have undergone about 40
hours of training, carry Taser guns as a nonlethal
way to defuse a situation when police feel threatened.
Two members of the team attempted to subdue the man
Sunday before he was shot.
So - at risk to themselves and everyone around them, the police try to use non-lethal techniques to subdue him. Somalis attempted to talk him down. In the end, he took a swing at the cops and got shot - and that's unjustifiable?
What - is the life of a cop worth less than anyone else's?
The shooting is tragic. Does anyone have any solid evidence that it wasn't justifiable? The police aren't clairvoyant. If they did everything they could - and let's make sure they did - then what more was there to do?
I grew up near a State Hospital. The outpatients wandered the street, day in, day out. Some of them were severely schizophrenic, deeply dissociative. We were told they weren't dangerous - and they weren't. Until they were. There were killings, rapes, other crimes.
Do you suppose that saying "the perpetrator wasn't responsible for her actions" makes the victims feel any better? Or alive, for that matter?
This last year, with the shootings of the mentally-ill in Minneapolis and the Andrea Yates case, has seen a groundswell of support for the notion that the mentally-ill deserve a special dispensation for their actions, no matter now violent or homicidal. Yates, the logic goes, CAN'T be responsible for murdering her children; a mentally-ill man swinging a machete isn't a danger in his own mind, ergo he's no danger at all, and any damage he inflicts is just too bad.
This says "the life of the mentally-ill person is worth more than that of the rest of society". They are certainly worth no less than the rest of us. They can not be made worth more.
One Wonders what Alec Baldwin would do without President Bush and the fiasco of our last election. Granted, he has nothing to go on legally - he keeps repeating the Big Lie in hopes that the weak-minded and ill-informed will go along with his bizarre and partisan reading of current events.
Here, Baldwin begins to cement his reputation as one of our nation's great embarassments.
I can't wait for Barbra Streisand's next appearance in the public eye. I can't believe she's restrained herself this long.
Them Thar Yurpeens - This is actually a bit about writing.
I play guitar. By most standards, I'm pretty good at it. Now, Richard Thompson is the world's most amazing guitarist. I've seen him three times. And every time I see him, I walk out of the show thinking it's time for me to try needlepoint.
And every time I start to fancy myself a writer, I end up reading something by James Lileks, like this screed against DC city workers, Ted Rall and European pacifists, and think it's time perhaps to drop blogging and take up bowling.
The Return of the Anti-War Left - "Earth Times" talks about the resurgence of "The Nation".
I'll be looking for further signs of this at our host of leftie wacko Twin Cities campuses.
Garage Illogic - My friends assume that, because I am a conservative, pragmatic Republican, I must love Joe Soucheray's Garage Logic, on KSTP-AM. Well, I used to work with Joe, and his show is occasionally side-splittingly funny, and his skewering of Minnesota's obsessive political correctness is usually dead-on.
But I want to leap through the radio and swim back down the phone lines and throttle some of the so-called "garage logicians".
Many of them punctuate their phone calls with incessant calls for "personal responsibility", as Soucheray keeps finding "the Mystery" under more and more rocks. And I'd like to ask them this:
If a Garage Logician hears someone saying "We need to protect our communities from from angry European Males, who want to take away our handouts and oppress us", they're trained well enough to know who they're dealing with - a Euphorian! But ask yourself this: If you replace "our communities" with "Garage Logic", replace "Angry European Males" with "Euphorians", substitute "handouts" with "roads", and finally replace "oppress" with "inflict The Mystery on", who are you describing?
Different language, same whininess, same desire to fob their problems off on the actions of others.
Good luck.
King of the Roads- The never-ending war over the future of the Twin Cities traffic infrastructure just goes on and on, with the current word being that a referendum might be required.
For those of you not familiar with the story: On the left, we have the Metropolitan Council, a de facto unelected government body that "plans" the Metro area, who are calling for more rail tranit and less road building. On the other side, advocates for more highway construction point out that mass transit of this type has never been successful in an area with such low population density.
I'm a Republican, but I"m not sure I'm entirely behind more roads. The record of cities that try to build their way out of congestion is dismal, and the whole effort of building roads serves effectively as a subsidy for the suburbs. Nothing wrong with living in the 'burbs - but why is the taxpayer on the hook to support that lifestyle choice?
The Anti-War Left - There's been plenty of anger about the resurgence of the anti-war left in recent weeks. Some of it's been here. I've personally interpreted much of their stance as an opportunistic combination of opportunistic triangulation and pandering to the wacko left.
I'm both right and wrong, as we see in this fairly even-handed look by Stanley Kurtz.
Iraq and Roll - George Will profiles the leader of the Iraqi opposition, on whom some of our hopes of unseating the dictator Hussein rest.
Enronned, Part II - In the wake of the Enron crisis, the predictable cries arose from the predictable people - "We need government to make things safer/fairer/more stable".
Government oversight of passenger rail service has done us all wonders. Rail service between Chicago, St. Paul and Seattle is on the block now. Michael Lynch shows us what that attitude has done for America's once-usable passenger rail sytem.
Minnesota Caucuses - Minnesota went through its periodic "precinct caucus" ritual last night.
As predicted, conservative Brian Sullivan beat Tim Pawlenty by a wide margin in the GOP straw poll. This will be widely extolled by the left as a sign that the GOP in Minnesota is dominated by the "theocratic far right". The truth is, the caucuses are dominated by the theocratic far right. In fact, that is one of the more difficult things about going to the GOP caucuses; a group of well-meaning but utterly single-issue prolifers will spend most of the time introducing pre-printed resolutions from various prolife groups, all permutations of the same basic idea (no abortion, no stem cell research, no cloning, no euthanasia). Not such a bad thing (if you're even just opposed to the frivolous disregard for life that the extremes of teh "pro choice" movement espouse). However, all too many of these people are utterly illiterate about non-life issues; frequently, these people have no idea why tax cuts, tort reform, concealed-carry reform and preemption statutes and many other bedrock conservative issues are of any importance. If the "theocratic far right" has done the GOP any disservice, it's bringing this much illiteracy about the full spectrum of conservatism out in full force at caucus time.
In the meantime - I've been predicting since roughly about the time of Ventura's inauguration that he had no legs as a political force, and that the Independence Party would never elect a single candidate that wasn't already a major celebrity. Much of his support, at least in the Metro area, came from college students - further evidence that the voting age should be raised to thirty. However, the Minnesota Daily reports that attentance at the Dinkytown IP caucus was...well, about like sales of the Governor's last book.
Will the IP lose major party status? Maybe not this election - but if Ventura doesn't run, look for the IP to be somewhere down below the Libertarians again by 2004.
History Repeats All Over Again? - William F. Buckley writes on historical precedents in the Middle East.
Big Box - My liberal friends all bought "Nickeled and Dimed - on Not Getting By in America", by the generally-incoherent Barbara Ehrenreich, and acted like they'd caught all of us conservatives pilfing from the fridge at night. The book, of course, was a trite look at life in minimum-wage America - an upper-middle-class dilettante taking a year to try to live in the lower wage brackets, while exercising all of the lower-income survival and budgeting skills one might expect of...well, an upper-middle-class dilettante.
Now, Virginia Postrel has written an excellent article on how Wal-Mart has helped raise the American standard of living. That'd include everyone, mind you, not just Sam Walton.
Our Unbiased Media - Liberal pundits swear that if the media is biased at all, it's toward the right. My Green friends insist that the media is really utterly a great conservative cabal (and compared to most of my Green friends, Mao was something of a moderate).
Blogger Patrick Ruffini has done a fascinating analysis of the major media's use of the term "right-wing" in its coverage.
Diversity means Lots of People Like Us - A conservative student at Berkeley has been getting death threats for criticizing racist propaganda by a hispanic separatist group on campus.
The big surprise is that there is a conservative at Berkeley in the first place.
Doh! - Yes, I missed writing yesterday - and my hit count showed it. My life has re-acquired some of the chaos I was missing. More later.
But I'll be keeping a more regular schedule!
Raise the Voting Age to 30!- Years ago, I used to work at a software company with this pinhead kid. He'd just graduated from Macalester (aka "Berkeley on the Prairie"), and it showed; he had the same loopy-left retro-sixties naivete about the world around him that would have seemed mildly charming had it not been so aggressively, debasingly smug.
This guy's big ambition was to open the first internet service provider in Havana. He felt that Cuba was "already free", and probably a better place to live than the US.
This article, by David Wallis, talks about the attitude on the part of similar students.
I think the guy in my story ended up working for some el-floppo dotcom in San Francisco. So he nearly achieved his goal, after all!
President Visits - The Strib took note of some of the idiots who were out in Eden Prairie protesting President Bush's visit. The usual throng of handout-mongers and America-lasters were out in some force.
Many were waving pretzels - a reference to the President's near-miss in January. I love the qote from the Bloomington cop when asked about the charges to be filed against the two pretzel-waving snotnozzles that were arrested: "It's got to be a felony. You could have called it attempted murder."
Criminy. Why wasn't I out waving a big blue dress the last time Clinton came to town?
Daschle: Political Suicide? - Many of us on the right are wondering what's with Daschle's nascent anti-war slant. Andrew Sullivan sums up one view - nothing that Daschle's doing has anything to do with being a loyal opposition.
Duuuude, Where's the Sense? - The "War on Drugs" has just gotten too absurd.
Rumors of the end of the war are premature. The world just gets scarier and scarier.
In light of the gravity of the <">threats that we're only now beginning to comprehend, the "anti-war" faction in this country just seems more and more specious.
At the risk of sounding like a hawk - we need to kill terrorists before they kill us.
His Justice, Her Justice - The feminist left's usual rant is that "the system" is irredeemably slanted against women. Women earn drastically less (untrue with men and women of equal education), women are unfairly denied custody of "their" children (statistically absurd), and women face a glass ceiling (untrue with women of equal experience).
But the most jarring difference is in criminal court. The Yates case shines a light on the biggest, most victorian difference between the statuses of men and women; when a father kills his children, he's a criminal who needs to be punished; when a mother does it, she's someone who needs help.
Doug Saunders, of the Toronto Globe and Mail, illuminates the differences. Justice is not gender-blind in America.
Police On My Back(pack)- A few days ago, Tom Swift posted this item from the LA Times on the Minnesota Politics website. It seems famous Dakota County prosecutor Jim Backstrom is pressing to bring the full weight of the law to bear against...school bullies.
From LA Times:
February 27-28 -- Jail for schoolyard taunts?In Hastings, Minn., prosecutor James Backstrom has announced "one of the toughest juvenile-justice
policies in the nation: School bullies will go to jail." Subject to the policy are not only kids who
violently lay hands on classmates but also those who"intimidate, harass, pick a fight on the playground or the bus...Mr. Backstrom wants those who are at least 13 years old to hear a cell door click behind them. ... The jail-for-bullies policy has been in effect since last spring here in Dakota County."
Local prosecutors complain, however, that some judges are undercutting the policy's intent by taking into account such mitigating factors as whether a youngster's misbehavior was provoked.
("New plan to put bullies behind bars", Los Angeles Times )
Here's the real rub - from the earliest ages, "masculine" behavior is actively squelched in little boys. Playing "cops and robbers" and pantomiming guns is enough to earn a kid detention or a reprimand. So at the age when little boys are supposed to be learning to moderate their masculine behavior, it's squelched, bottled up. Now, every school psychologist knows you're not supposed to force people's real personalities into a closet. They'd never think of forcing, say, a gay kid to keep his true personality in the closet.
So - when the kids grow up, they're supposed to magically keep that behavior under control without actually being allowed to practice it - and if they don't, the full weight of county government is going to come crashing down on top of them.
Does any of this make sense?
Multiculturalism in Action - Liberals like the Vacuous Eleven, when talking about Education, stress the need for multiculturalism.
I won't say that this kind of thing is the inevitable end result of multiculturalism taught without the sort of cultural grounding of which the "pledge of allegiance" is the tiniest possible entree. But you know that's what I'm getting at, right?
The Vacuous Eleven's Idea of a Perfect School - U of California at Berkeley has reinstated their controversial, not-necessarily-for-credit sex ed classes.
Perhaps this is what
Karen Clark (S Central Mpls)
Steve Dehler (St Cloud)
Mindy Greiling (Roseville)
Phillis Kahn (U of M)
Mary Jo McGuire (Falcon Heights, SIGH)
Jean Wagenius (S. Mpls)
Andy Dawkins (St Paul Frogtown)
Scott Dibble (Mpls Kenwood/Lakes)
Alice Hausman (St Paul Como/St Anthony)
Rob Leighton (Austin ?!)
Tom Osthoff (St Paul Como/North End)
Waxy Sixties Buildup - Eleven of our Representatives (including mine, Alice "The Phantom" Hausman) voted against the Pledge of Allegiance bill in the House yesterday:
Karen Clark (S Central Mpls)
Steve Dehler (St Cloud)
Mindy Greiling (Roseville)
Phillis Kahn (U of M)
Mary Jo McGuire (Falcon Heights, SIGH)
Jean Wagenius (S. Mpls)
Andy Dawkins (St Paul Frogtown)
Scott Dibble (Mpls Kenwood/Lakes)
Alice Hausman (St Paul Como/St Anthony)
Rob Leighton (Austin ?!)
Tom Osthoff (St Paul Como/North End)
Most of these hamsters, I suspect, fully subscribe to the Buddhist/Taoist/Hindi notion of the mantra - a phrase one says to oneself to get into a desired frame of mind. So why is a ten second, voluntary mantra at the beginning of the day, one which affirms that we are "An indivisible nation" that stands for "liberty and justice" such a bad thing?
Because none of these hamsters supports any of these things.