Schwoops - Governor Ventura, whose animus toward religion is a matter of record...
...screwed up and proclaimed Oct. 13-19 "Christian Heritage Week".
Poetic justice?
I think I'll send him a velvet Jesus painting that week, just to rub it in.
Child Abduction Watch, Part II - A few days ago, we discussed the case of Bonnie Rubinstein, a Connecticut woman who abducted her and her ex-husband's child and fled to Belgium after custody of the boy was awarded to the father. She kidnapped the boy with the help of an international ring of child-snatchers.
I was planning on writing, eventually, a piece on how the media's perceptions of the issue color their coverage of child-abduction and, less dramatically, family court. Courts on their own are biased against fathers. When it comes to kidnapping, it's much, much worse.
Now, read this article in the Strib, about an Italian woman who lost her custody case, and ran off to Minnesota, thumbing her nose at the Italian court. Notice all the sympathy for her case inherent in the array of quotes the Strib chooses to include in this story:
Frank Concedda is described as bright and brave, a ballplayer, computer user and, at age 9, the center of an international custody dispute in northern Minnesota.Note the buttons being pushed:And so Frank -- Francisco, formally -- bade a tearful farewell to his mother in Bagley, Minn., on Tuesday and headed with his father for Italy, a country where his mother could face kidnapping charges if she were to follow.
Frank's journey is the result of a judge's decision that was based on international law, not on what was best for Frank or what he wanted. And that's the way the system is designed to work, a family law expert said.
Oh, wait - you don't have to imagine. It happened earlier this week, also in the Strib. Note the complete absence of the symbols of sympathy and bathos when it's the father who takes the child and runs.
What the Strib only hints at very obliquely in the Concedda story is that the mother kidnapped the child, and thumbed her nose at international law in so doing. In the meantime, we're subjected to all sorts of blandishments - by a writer in editorial mode, no less - about the "best interest of the child" (which is a legal standard, not a platitude). Ignored are the possibilities that:
Bash Bush Not, Lest Ye Be Bashed - Jonah Goldberg in a rather even-handed piece on those who are trying to tie the market correction to Bush.
The money quote, which I plan on adapting for some of my less-barnburningly-intelligent acquaintances:
Imagine that I've spent a decade bingeing on bacon, cigarettes, and Krispy Kremes (I know: It's hard to get your brain around the idea). My doctor doesn't do much to make me stop but he doesn't necessarily approve of my habits either. Then, my doctor retires. Not long thereafter, I start getting chest pains and gastrointestinal ickyness. I get a new doctor. He runs some tests and, lo' and behold, my insides look like the grease trap at a Wendy's. Maybe my old doctor should have done more when I was still feeling healthy. And, sure, maybe my new doctor doesn't care enough about me now. But, you can't blame the new doctor for anything that happened before I met him. No matter how delirious those bad clams made you.
Condit Implodes? - Gary Condit seems to have gone completely mad.
Call for Ron Eibensteiner - By the way, perhaps the more interesting article is the one below the piece on Condit. It's about Robert Evans - former clothing executive-turned-Hollywood Mogul, the producer behind "The Godfather" and "Rosemary's Baby".
When reading the quote below, remember - I said Hollywood Mogul, OK?:
Evans, who's producing films while writing a sequel to his autobiography (dealing with his recovery from the 1998 stroke), hasn't spent much time in the nation's capital since Kissinger was in power. "Almost all my friends are Democrats, but I am a Republican, for one reason: Ever since I was 12, I worked and paid Social Security and income taxes, and I always took home more money in my pocket during Republican administrations. They really are the party of the working man, but people don't know it. The Republicans just have the worst sales pitch."My jaw almost dropped. And what a great tag line.
Hah - Larry Miller on the reflexive equivocation of the State Department.
A Legal Excuse? - The Iraqi regime is looking for special steel - the kind used to build nukes.
In Defense of Mediocrity - Brett Stevens on one of the most overlooked reasons behind America's greatness - the chance we all have to jump between mediocrity and greatness - and, most importantly, the relative irrelevance of external "mediocre" labels.
Graduates of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale will in all likelihood do well in life, and in fields such as medicine and law, where high IQ and decent education are essential. Yet that does not mean the more poorly schooled are at too serious a disadvantage. H. Lee Scott, Jr., president and CEO of Wal Mart, is a graduate of Pittsburg State University; AT&T's Michael Armstrong attended Ohio's Miami University; GE's Jack Welch went to the University of Massachusetts. All three men are surely bright, but no less important is their immense drive, basic horse sense and willingness to take risks. Yet none of these virtues are easily acquired, and may in fact be discouraged, by attending a top-flight school.
The greatness of the United States lies in the fact that, over time, it has tended to place a higher value on ordinary decency than on extraordinary cleverness. The Soviet Union, after all, richly rewarded its greatest talents, as does Europe today. By contrast, America has thrived because it created an environment in which intellectual mediocrities could also prosper, in which their limited capacities for intellectual development would not stand in the way of their ambition so long as they were willing to play by the rules and cultivate the right habits of mind and heart.In his commencement speech at Yale last year, President George W. Bush offered graduates the following wisdom: "To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students - I say, you, too, can be president of the United States."
Media Bias Watch - The Jerusalem Post has a story on the lengths to which the New York Times will go to bowdlerlize any criticism of the UN or its other far-left sacred cows.
Carl Rowan Alert - A band of Malibu limo liberals are sudden converts to the concept of Property Rights.
As long as it's their property.
Spin Watch - Watch for the meathead press to start spinning the fact that the Bush campaign raised four times as much as the Gore campaign during the 2000 Florida Recount, and for speech rationing (campaign finance reform) advocates to relentlessly pimp this as grounds for speech rationing.
The devil is in the details, of course, if you read the story: Bush's contributions came in bit lots, as opposed to Gore's larger contributions. He didn't need to disclose as fully as he has.
Leave aside the fact that he needed to - to counteract the almost universally negative media coverage.
Any Liberal you Want - So Long As It's a Guy! - Smugly liberal New Yorker magazine has been caught cutting back the number of female bylines.
War! (Huh, good God, y'all) - Why Bush Junior is not the same as Bush Senior, and how the leftist press is playing the rumors of war.
Little Victory - One the most sordid of the cockroaches behind the abandoned fridge in America's basement is the so-called "Children of the Underground" - a group based in Georgia that helps women who've lost custody cases to abduct their children and flee the country. They do this by smearing the other parent (almost invariably the father) with trumped up accusations of child abuse. These charges are invariably false - but since such cases are in effect considered "guilty until proven innocent", the fathers involved generally spend all of their money and energy fighting the spurious allegations, and have nothing left with which to try to find their children, who disappear into a well-financed worldwide network of safe houses and covers.
This organization was featured in a 1998 episode of Dateline NBC - including footage of a woman, Bonnie Rubenstein, who had kidnapped her son after losing a custody case (because she was a demonstrable nutbar).
Good news from this vicious little front - the boy has been recovered, and the "mother" arrested, in Florida. The father was quite a wealthy guy - he spent over a quarter-million in lawyer's fees, to say nothing of investigators.
He still has enough money left to sue the group's organizer, Faye Yager.
More as events warrant.
Rising - Josh Tyrangiel interviewed Bruce Springsteen about The Rising, and its links to September 11, in the current Time magazine.
I've seen Springsteen twice - nothing compared to the dozens of times some of my friends have seen him.
But each of the dates came at turning points in my life. I saw the second night of the Born in the USA tour, in 1984 in St. Paul. I was just about to start my senior year of college, and I hadn't given one moment of thought as to where I fit into the world or what I was going to do in it. And it'd be melodramatic to say that I had an epiphany that night in June, 1984. Again, with the melodrama that comes from being an overly-imaginative post-adolescent of the type so perfectly satirized in Hi Fidelity, I felt the words to my favorite song of all time, "Darkness on the Edge of Town", deep in the pit of my heart:
Well, some folks are born into a good life,-...and I came back to North Dakota realizing that the bigger world out there was where I belonged, and that, somehow or another, I had to leave North Dakota, before I turned into just another bag of empty dreams smeared along the pavement. 18 years later, it's hard to say how it worked - but I'm glad I did what I did. I won't be bathetic enough to say it all started that night - but it played its little role, in the incremental way so much art does to so much of life.
other folks find it anyway, anyhow.
Well, I lost my money, and I lost my wife,
them things don't matter much to me now.
Tonight I'll be on that hill, 'cause I can't stop,
I'll be on that hill with everything that I've got.
With the lives on the line, where dreams are found and lost,
I'll be there on time, and I'll pay the cost,
for wanting things that can only be found,
in the Darkness on the Edge of Town...
I saw him again in 1999 - a few nights before my wife (at the time) moved out. My life was near rock bottom. I was entering the most gruelling adventure of my life - which over the following year led me to the extremes of joy and near-madness. And standing there, November 19, 1999, high in the nosebleed seats (one row from the top!) at Target Center, I heard all the old songs - feeling like the old Battle of the Bulge veterans hearing White Christmas at the opening chords of "The Ties that Bind". The threads of the evening and my life began intertwining way too early - and by the time the band closed with "Land of Hopes and Dreams"...
I will provide for you
And I'll stand by your side
You'll need a good companion for
This part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there'll be sunshine
And all this darkness pastBig wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreamsThis train - Carries saints and sinners
This train - Carries losers and winners
This Train - Carries whores and gamblers
This Train - Carries lost souls
This Train - Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train - Faith will be rewarded
This Train - Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train - Bells of freedom ring...
Like anything else in life, I don't know what'll happen - with this record, with this world, with the little chunk of it where I'm trying to raise two kids. Maybe September 11 was just the beginning of a deguello that will last until my grandkids' time. Maybe life will get better, maybe worse. Maybe there will be no earth-shattering revelations, no vital streams of thought kicked loose.
But Springsteen has (again with the High Infidelity-level specious associations which, as damnable luck would have it, seem just as credible as they are ridiculous) always caught my mood perfectly - the longing for deliverance in Darkness on the Edge of Town, the wary appraisal of The River, the weary acceptance of Tunnel of Love, the disconcertion of real life, and reconciliation with the ghosts of one's earlier life, from Human Touch and Lucky Town.
Now, The Rising - on one level, "about" September 11 (sometimes very directly). On another level...
...I almost wrote "It's about all of us", but I haven't heard the album, and that'd be a pretty pretentious thing to say anyway.
But five'll get you ten it's about me. Or that's how it'll feel, as I try to raise a couple of kids in a world that has nothing to do with the world I or my parents grew up in. To paraphrase one of his greatest moments - I'm 39, I've got a boy of my own now. I sat up with him the other night, and said this is your world, now.
I'll be waiting at midnight, tomrorow night, for the album to come out of the shipping box. I'm a fan.
I have my reasons.
Doug Grow - Kingmaker?- Strib columnist Doug Grow had this to say about the gubernatorial race - especially the Roger Moe stock car:
"...in a race that features DFLer Roger Moe, Republican Tim Pawlenty, the Independence Party's Tim Penny and the Green Party's Ken Pentel, one of the key issues is whose supporters still will be awake when the polls open in November."
Well, we know Moe is a snoozer. We know Tim Penny has an affable-enough public persona, but that he's a wonk who comes across with all the common-man bonhomie of a political science teachers' assistant. Ken Pentel...words fail me.
But Tim Pawlenty - as I've noted in this space on a few previous occasions - is perhaps the best public speaker in Minnesota politics today. He's sharp, has a quick wit, delivers well in front of a crowd of two to two thousand, is unflappable under pressure, can field the bad hops with style. I have a huge regard for good public speakers - Dad taught speech for 40 years, I worked in radio, and I'm a huge Churchill disciple - and Tim Pawlenty has the Berg Seal of Oratorical Approval.
Now - what's Grow doing with a paragraph like that above?
We know Roger Moe is a stiff in front of a crowd. Him posing with a stock car makes the tank-borne Michael Dukakis look pretty spontaneous and natural. Whatever his qualifications - and I'll debate those with anyone, too - Moe is a resounding dud at presenting himself.
Grow wants to do whatever he can to deliver the election to the DFL, without TOO obviously violating whatever pass for journalistic ethics for
op-ed hacks these days. So rather than make Moe something he's not, and can't be - he brings everyone down to Moe's level. Moe's a snoozer - so let's spin EVERYONE as a snoozer, too!
The real story is between the lines.
Wellstone on Defense, Again- Part IV - On the Minnesota Politics mailing list, a correspondent recently cited a remark by Paul Wellsone on the website for the Council for a Liveable World. This utopian-leftist organization has endorsed Minnesota's ultra-liberal senator. They particularly cited his stance on Missile Defense:
"The most important question we must ask ourselves is whether a missile shield will make us more or less secure. I think it is likely to make usLet's go into "left wing shibboleth" hunting mode:
less secure by encouraging Russia to retain more nuclear weapons than it had planned, including ICBM's on hair-trigger alert, thereby increasing the risk of accidental war. Deployment of a missile shield will also spur China to build up its limited nuclear strategic arsenal, which in turn would fuel the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan. These and other potential consequences of building NMD will make the U.S. less, not more secure."
Wrong.
I grew up among the missile silos of North Dakota. Half of them are gone, now, and good riddance to them. MAD was only a sane response to nuclear weapons as long as you were dealing with relatively rational opponents - and the Soviets were, in the context of their society, eminently rational. When your opponents are not rational, Mutually Assured Destruction is a lousy bet.
As is Paul Wellstone, if you have a nation to protect.
Biff Bang Pow - Andrew Sullivan nails the Rubin controversy - or, as it's referred to in the major media, "huh?"
Blahg - I'm going to be mighty busy today - lot of work, then going to North Dakota to pick up my kids from my parents'.
Hope you all have a great weekend, and I'll see you all on Monday.
Conservative?-Read thefollowing quote, and tell me which gubernatorial candidate it's from:
"The state may have to play a bigger role if the federal government doesn't go far enough," he said.Is this remark a quote from:
If you answered Pawlenty, you're apparently right.
Remember how Tim Pawlenty was supposed to be this arch-conservative? (As if that's a bad thing - if you haven't read that Krauthammer article, do it now...)
Now, he's released his economic development plan.
Two Sides of his Mouth - As I pointed out yesterday, former President Clinton is telling people how, had he been president, there'd have been no business scandal (depsite the fact that most of the shenanigans took place on his watch, and that his Treasury secretary was intimately involved not only in creating the bubble but in the Enron debacle).
As Andrew Sullivan says:
The man who pardoned Marc Rich is lecturing the president on corporate corruption? The worst that could be said about Bush is that he hasn't been tough enough. At least he didn't actively reward it, like the former president.
The Defame Game - Charles Krauthammer pegs that thing between conservatives and liberals.
In a nutshell; conservatives think liberals lack a brain, liberals think conservatives are short a heart.
It's true. Oh, I know some liberals who can burn some mental cycles, all right - but I have yet to meet a whole lot of liberals who don't think of conservatism as personality defect.
Speaking of Hypocrisy - GOP Senate candidate Norm Coleman criticized paleoliberal Senator Paul Wellstone's record on Defense.
The real news, and conversational beef, was in Wellstone's response. It illustrates the paleo-liberals' contempt for defense and the military.
It's really so unfortunate he's going down this road. I really mean it," he said. "None of us could have ever believed that we would have been attacked in our own country like we were.Sorry, Paul - some "of us" not only believed it, but have been warning the rest "of us" about it for years. Including military and security planners - the ones you and your party so derisively dismiss.
Wellstone's campaign is accusing Coleman of using the 9/11 tragedy to try to get votes and is calling Coleman's comments about American causalities in Afghanistan "low blow politics at its worst."That's right - criticizing your voting record is so much worse than accusing Republicans of wanting to throw children and old people out in the street.
Wellstone must go. Hopefully this site will help!
Yet Another Tale of Hypocrisy - The House expelled Rep. Traficant last night as predicted.
Here's the part I loved; I listened to "All Things Considered" talking about Traficant last night, and over the past week. What did they call the Ohio Democrat? "Colorful". That was the most pejorative thing they could work up about the bribe-accepting racketeer.
If he'd been a Republican? Any bets? I mean, they called Henry Hyde worse than that...
On the Lindh Trial - Linda Chavez on the more disturbing aspects of the Lindh plea-bargain.
More about Harken - and the liberal media's mania with smear by insinuation.
Ex-President - First, Clinton would have won the 2000 election. Or so he said.
Then - he would have reacted (according to him) better to September 11 than the President did.
Now - he tried, oh so hard, to reform the accounting industry!
Unacknowledged, by either him or the media that still does figuratively what Lewinski did literally, are the facts that the bubble (and the shady accounting that blew it up) occurred on his watch. Well, nothing he could do about that, right?
Well, yeah, except that his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, was integral to the Enron scandal that kicked this whole readjustment off in the first place.
Again - let me know if you see a single mention of this in the major media.
Making a Dog Sing Verdi - Following on the "success" of Paul "Richard Simmons" Wellstone's "Little Green Bus", Democrat consultant-at-large Pat Forceia has unleashed...
Pretty apt. I see a flaming crash this fall, spewing bits of DFL into the stands...
One Step Up, One Step Back - On the one hand, the Democrats' pharmaceutical plan - legalized theft - fell eight votes short in the Senate today, despite Paul "Richard Simmons" Wellstone's best efforts.
On the other hand, the Republicans' effort also tanked.
Witch Hunt in Blue- The civil liberties' fallout of the Abner Louima case, courtesy Nat Hentoff.
Overpowered by Gore, Part II - Jonah Goldberg on why Algore is the left's Bob Dole.
Although after Tipper and his' performance at the Democrat convention in 2000, I'm not sure Britney Spears will go near him...
Pot? Meet Kettle - Hillary blasts the "activist" Supreme Court.
As if activist court decisions weren't part and parcel of her entire career, and those of nearly every uber-liberal politician.
And she's busy marching to the official tune, of course: the "Supreme Court Usurped States' Rights" buncombe, as if she ever met a state's right she wouldn't shiv in the ribs. And the tune is a lie: the SCOTUS affirmed the right of the State of Florida's legislature to fulfil its constitutional duty, without being dragged through open-ended extra-legal recounts.
Wasn't it Sartre who said "Hell is politicians that won't go away?" No? Then Sartre was pretty overrated.
Media Bias Watch - So now, the media are finally twigging to the fact that Citibank floated Enron with a sweetheart, off the books loan. The word is, in fact, getting out.
OK - so in how many stories has the media - the same media that wastes not a moment to cast aspersions on the flimsiest pretexts against the Bush administration's alleged roles in these scandals - told you that the sweetheart loan from Citibank was arranged by the Secretary of the Treasury?
Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury?
Find me an example of this being reported in the mainstream media. Anyone.
Good Dog - The Pioneer Press acknowledges the existence of the Watchdog - a rough-n-tumble freebie tabloid that is a welcome addition to the Twin Cities' squalid, incestuous media scene.
Penny Stocks, Part II - In yesterday's bit about the Broder Op-ed, there was one idea I wanted to develop, but missed in my hurry to get to work.
As I said - the article is set, in the beginning, at the birthday party for John Anderson, the pseudo-Republican senator who ran as an independent in 1980. The parallel is interesting - and were it not utterly intentional, Broder would not have put it in. It's as if to say:
"The only good Republican is a Republican that acts like a Democrat"Which is how many on the left (and the "Center" that the Independence Party claims to be) seem to see it. See the spin against Pawlenty? Not only is he "not moderate enough", he - a rather moderate and ecumenical conservative at best - is portrayed as "one of the "Taliban".
Here's the part I love; on the one hand, Independence Party flacks say "there's no choice between the major parties". Then, when conservatives give you a choice between parties, with a coherent conservative approach...
See the pattern here?
Tale of Two Police Departments - Jack Dunphy on the Runnion and Jackson cases.
Counting the Hours - til September 30.
I'll do a big honking article soon to explain why I'm so jazzed about this Springsteen tour.
Grrrr, Part II - So I wrote this big piece yesterday...
...and the Blogger software didn't publish it! Making me look, in the process, like I'd taken another day off from Shot in the Dark.
Penny Stocks - David Broder in the Washington Post has issued a paeon to Minnesota Independence Party gubernatorial candidate Tim Penny.
It's fascinating to note that the article is set, initially, at the birthday party of John Anderson, the pseudoRepublican who ran for President as an "Independent" in 1980. Bear in mind, he was the same sort of Republican that Olympia Snowe or John McCain are today - Rockefeller Republicans, basically Democrats in GOP clothing.
The article illustrates, I think, a subtle media bias. The "Good Guys" are all Democrats who don't have to depart TOO much from their principles, or Republicans who completely abrogate those of their own party (principles that are subtly seen as ugly and base).
Broder says:
Penny will be a target of both parties, but his candidacy -- like King's -- is more proof that third parties can be more than protest movements built around charismatic figures.If he appears as plausible and persuasive in November as he does in July, he won't have to borrow Ventura's cape and tights to win.
But he's scuttled away from all of the positions where he showed any principled difference from the DFL - retreated on his stances on guns and abortion, and embraced Speech Rationing ("campaign finance reform") with both barrels.
Broder, like most of the national media, misses a crucial point: Jesse Ventura didn't campaign as a mushy moderate! IN 1998, he led with a mass of libertarian-conservative rhetoric (smaller government, more responsibility, concealed carry reform) that is still fooling people in the national media. Penny isn't running as a libertarian-conservative, he's running as a DFL-lite wonk.
Broder all but declares Penny the winner-to-be. I think he'll take a lot of DFLer votes away from Roger Moe, and be the spoiler Tim Pawlenty needs.
Grrrrrr! - So since the Enron scandal broke, every other headline in the major media has been:
Yep - "Is the Bush Administration Doing Enough to Restore Investor Confidence?"
You Live, you Learn - It's not a secret - I was Democrat until I was about twenty or so. I wrote a party platform for 1980 North Dakota Boy's State that reads like a Leninist call to action.
Reading Solzhenitzyn's "Gulag", Paul Johnson's "Modern Times", and PJ O'Rourke's various essays (and "Republican Party Reptile") started a short but intense swing to the right that I'm still living.
But I did manage to retain one vestige of my former left-wing self; in high school, I saw Phyllis Schlafly on TV several times, and read some of her stuff - and, as a knee-jerk leftist, hated her. I regarded her as a doddering old ninny, as Jerry Falwell without the jowls. That was, of course, the impression that was more or less foisted on me by my liberal friends, acquaintances and family members - and of course, the left is all about denigration rather than engagement.
And it only recently occurred to me to even try to change my own mind about Ms. Schlafly. I read some of her writing. And I finally realized - 20 years late - what Ann Coulter tells us today.
Overpowered By Gore - Jonah Goldberg on the near-inevitability of another Gore candidacy.
Penny-Wise, Pound Foolish - Tim Penny, along with Dean Barkley, has always been one of the wizards behind the curtain in the Emerald Palace of the Ventura Administration.
And once upon a time, his moderate-DFL ideas seemed intrigueing to me, as a conservative. His book seemed to indicate his mind was at least open to some common-sense conservative ideas - he was skeptical of the DFL Sacrament of Abortion, he said Gun Control was just plain ineffective, and he seemed to be a genuine "moderate" - whatever that is - on fiscal issues. At least his association with the Cato Institute on fiscal matters seemed mildly encouraging to some of us small-"L" libertarians.
So for those of us who've been calling the Independence Party "DFL Lite", seeing how the Penny candidacy would shake out has been an interesting waiting game.
But not any more. He's scuttled away from his relatively courageous and intelligent stances on many issues - away and to the left. He's still DFL Lite, but not all that Lite anymore. He'd probably fit into the DFL, still.
And people think he'll steal votes from Pawlenty? Only among people who don't think very hard about these things - in other words, among those who elected Ventura in the first place. Who weren't going to vote for Pawlenty, or Moe, or (I suspect) Tim Penny either.
Hillary! Blasts Off - Senator Hillary! Rodham-Clinton, authoritarian-Democrat from New York, seems to be touchy about the real-world implications of the Russ Feingold's Speech Rationing bill.
But Bush is Tainted... - Howard Kurtz, in the NY Post, on the NY Times' undisclosed interests in and involvement with Enron.
As Andrew Sullivan said about this piece:
Not only have New York Times columnists, like Paul Krugman, had sweet-heart consulting deals with Enron, but the Times itself is knee-deep in Enron collusion. Howie reveals that the Times has had a 5-year "newsprint swap" deal with Enron that it has never disclosed in all its hyper-ventilating editorials on the subject. He also reveals that - oh joy! - the Times has practised exactly the same stock options maneuver that it has so piously attacked others for. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the mega-rich kid who finances Howell Raines' diatribes against corporate executives, has almost $2 million worth of stock options that are not counted as expenses and Times president Russell Lewis says the Times has no plans to alter its policies. Don't you think the Times should practise what it preaches in this respect? Then there's this column in the New York Post, criticizing the Times' front-page denigration of the rival plans to rebuild the WTC site, without disclosing its own corporate interest in keeping office space limited in New York City, given its massive investment in new midtown offices. So let's check this out: president Bush is tainted because of corporate corruption scandals but the Times, which has been deeply involved with Enron and doesn't count stock options as expenses, is squeaky clean. Those guys on 43d Street are as self-righteous as they are full of it.
I remember at my first radio gig in North Dakota, in 1979 - a job that was 50% disk jockey and 50% news - when the station's owner and manager said "The official policy of this station is to support the Garrison Diversion Project [a '70's era project to divert Missouri River water to eastern North Dakota for irrigation - a pork-fest of the most immense proportions], and our news coverage will reflect that support." Of course, every businessman in my little hometown stood to benefit handsomely from the project's side-effects. But then, most people there did...
But if you scratch the surface of the NY TImes' coverage of Enron, or the Star/Trib's reportage on Light Rail, or the Pioneer Press' on the St. Paul Twins stadium, you'll find just such unstated self-interest behind the facade of detachment.
And those who do know this need to get busy teaching everyone else...
Summertime, and the Living is Off-Line - AT&T Broadband has screwed up my home connection. I'm a little reticent about blogging from work. And I'm going to be out of town until Friday.
Which is when this blog will next be updated.
See you then!
Is Phyllis Kahn Involved? - In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, you must get a license to prevent your bike from being stolen - or the police will steal it for you.
'It's a preventative measure," said Mayor Jim Naugle. "Instead of after crimes take place, it's something you can do to prevent the crime from taking place."So - to prevent the crime, you make the crime mandatory?
I'm waiting for Representative Kahn to extend this from bike theft to robbery, aggravated assault or murder.
Make sure Jay Benanav doesn't see this.
Is it Minnesota? Or is it Europe? Who can tell, sometimes?
The buro-wonks at the European Union continue their war on all that is wrong with the world with full frontal assault...
...on Happy Hour?
That's right. The US is wrong for attacking the terrorists, according to the EU, because the proposal to do so wasn't submitted in quintuplicate by the deadline of September 10, 2001. But Happy Hour? Mon Dieu!
Socialists in the European Parliament claim big bar chains lose money on happy hours simply to crush rival pubs that can’t afford discounts. The proposal has raised the ire of British conservatives, but the U.K.’s Labor government may back the measure. Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth said happy hours "encourage the wrong type of drinking."
Stick with the Greens, people - this could be us in a few years.
Harken Ye to the TV - Byron York on the very suspicious timing of the Harken allegations against the President.
Speaking of which - isn't it odd that, when Judicial Watch was launching lawsuits agaisnt President Clinton, they were minimized as part of a "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy", and never quite cracked the front page of the New York Times? And yet now that they're involved in the Harken action against Bush, suddenly they're front-page material?
Who'da thunk it?
European Morality - Victor Herbert on why the International Criminal Court is a just-plain-bad idea.
It's not just the third-world tinhorns. No, it's our European allies. The entire continent - or at least its entire ruling buro-wonk class - has a very topsy-turvy conception of right and wrong.
It'd be pretty standard mushy-moderate, PC fare at this point for me to say "Yeah, so do we, too, but...". But I'm not going to do that. Because in any meaningful sense, there is no comparison.
PC, Worldwide - The tendency of the PC Media to omit all reference to an offender's race or other information (unless the alleged offender is right-of-center politically) is irritating and dangerous.
But it's not just an American phenomenon.
In Sydney, Australia, a group of Lebanese immigrants were convicted (or confessed) to systematically gang-raping Australian women, in a manner that was nothing if not purely racist. And the Australian media airbrushed all reference to the racist elements of their acts, or their ethnicity, from the story.
Well - almost all of the Australian media...
Greens See Red - In another example of how the Green Party is beating itself into irrelevance everywhere but Minneapolis, the Finnish government has opted to open a new nuclear power plant. Some of you who are my age may recall nuclear power - clean, safe, relatively cheap...
The Greens in Finland left the government in a huff (it's a parliamentary thing) over the power plant. A majority of Finns seem to have said "dooon't leet the dooor hiiiit yyyyou on the buuut on the wayyy ouuut".
So the choice the Greens had was: Cheap power that doesn't have to be imported, to support the economic growth that is needed to create jobs (especially with a small and soon-to-be shrinking population), or: keep importing oil, while waiting for the vague promise of alternative energy, maybe, to become economically useful.
The Greens throughout Europe are imploding, bit by bit, as they encounter the real world.
OK, so... - I can admit when I'm wrong.
Yesterday, I asked, in effect, with "conservatives" like the President and Norm Coleman, who needed liberals? My initial take on the President's prescription drug plan, which he spelled out in yesterday's visit to Minneapolis, was...
...well, not wrong. It's typical of the President's brand of hybrid, triangulating, "compassionate" variety of conservatism, which means that while I, as a free-market conservative, can swallow it, it's got a bad aftertaste. It's also vastly better than Wellstone's plan.
Churchill may have stated the model for "compassionate conservative".social policy: "I propose not to level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but to put a safety net over the abyss".
The President's plan strings that net - a clumsy, bureaucratic net, to be sure, but one that leaves intact the peaks from with the world's finest health care emanate.
Wellstone's plan warms up the bulldozers - and on their way to push the peak into the valley, they're going to level the pharmaceutical companies, without which there'd be no medicine worth rationing.
Jason Lewis said it yesterday: Rationing medicine (which is what the Wellstone Plan involves) is pennywise and pound foolish. He cited a study in New Hampshire, where the state rationed anti-schizophrenia medication. The state saved an average of $43 a year in medication per patient, by basically scrimping on giving it to schizophrenics on Medical Assistance. Each patient, by the way, went on to incur on average over a thousand dollars' additional hospital costs.
If you're a conservative and you're not actively supporting Norm Coleman - you need to. We need to get Paul Wellstone out of here.
Mas Arifiq - So if I have a prejudice, it's that I tend to be more trusting - tend, mind you, not some absolute knee-jerk reaction, just a tendency - toward people of faith. Christians and Jews, obviously, but also Moslems, Hindus, and to some degree Buddhists.
I've had reason to stir that belief up a bit in the past ten months, of course. The Islam we see in the US, certainly, is a combination of the flaming-eyed zealots on the evening news, congratulating their children for blowing themselves up and demanding pyramids of Jewish skulls on the one hand, and the great tradition and, in many ways, beliefs similar to Christianity. Islam has been a great civilizing faith. It's also half Christianity's age - and remember what we were like a thousand years ago...
The temptation is there to try to read the Koran, to get the story direct from the horse's mouth, as it were.
Er, yeah. I'll get back to you on that. I'm as likely to do that as I am to memorize the Old Testament.
There are those better placed to analyze this - and John Derbyshire is one of them. This article is an excellent look at the subject. My favorite part:
A coherent and well-established religion like Islam is an asset to the human race, with the potential to soften the hearts and enlighten the minds of believers. It might be the instrument for lifting those believers out of the pit of lies, cruelty, intolerance and stagnation into which their tribal cultures seem have dragged them. If today Islam is showing an ugly face to the world, that is not a reason to give up on Islam. Christianity showed a pretty ugly face during the Thirty Years War (not to mention the Crusades). A few generations later it was ending the slave trade, providing spiritual fuel for a mighty commercial civilization, and bringing education and medicine to places that never had either.OK, I think the thought is right. OK, my only question: Precisely which Moslems who might be susceptible via Islam's "nobler and more generous texts" aren't already more or less on our side?Instead of mocking or dismissing Islam, we should appeal to believers to look to the nobler and more generous texts in their scriptures, the texts that emphasize a common humanity. We have nothing to gain from alienating honest Muslims, any more than they have anything to gain by being enemies of the West. If we can remember the first, and persuade them of the second, there might be some prospect of cutting off significant support to the legions of glittering-eyed Koran-waving murderers the world is currently infested with, and of averting the destructive clash that we are all, slowly but surely, coming to believe inevitable.
This debate'll go on a while, so I won't look for an answer just yet...
Food for a Bad Mood - Sometimes only an Ann Coulter column will do.
Bush Visit - So the President will visit the Cities today, to help Norm Coleman, by...
...talking about prescription drugs?
With "conservatives" like this, who needs Paul Wellstone?
Bud? BUD! BUD!!!!! - Major League baseball is in dire, maybe terminal trouble. The extortion racket they run against their host cities is running out of steam, maybe, slowly. The players union is out of control. The owners are too stupid and shortsighted to fix the league's systemic problems by instituting revenue-sharing to make a more competitive league...
...enh. "Whatever", says the league. The owners snooze on, the league president (sorry for the redundancy) saws on his fiddle.
But let there be one really silly overblown trainwreck at the league's annual all-star showcase, and suddenly Bud "The Bullet" Selig leaps into action like a fireman running to a four-alarm at a grade school.
By the way - I love Baseball too. But was I the only one cringing at the invective I was hearing yesterday on sports-and-talkradio? Fellas! It's just a game! And a show game at that!
No-Demigog Zone - The populist, big-tent conservative in me loves Bill O'Reilly.
The guy who loves it when people get their facts straight, and can do it without harangueing like a playground bully, doesn't.
Cathy Young on the two sides of Bill "Spinless" O'Reilly.
Bad Cop? - Nobody likes a bad cop - a "thumper"- less than I. It's one of the worst common examples of government power run amok. And the latest putative outragein LA certainly looks bad.
But former cop Jack Dunphy says there may be more there than meets the eye - usually is, in fact.
Bush and Harken - Just the facts, courtesy Byron York.
How to Apportion Blame Correctly - Last week, two America West pilots were arrested for attempting to fly a plane while intoxicated.
Now, a woman was thrown off a plane after questioning her own pilots' sobriety, and rerouted to a different airline after being given the fifth degree by America West's station chief and the flight crew.
I suppose if it weren't for those irritating passengers, pilots wouldn't need to show up for work bombed, would they?
Northwest Airlines' PR Department must be thanking its lucky stars for this story.
Is It Hilarious? Is It Scary? - The FBI is trying to figure out the LAX shooter's motive.
Or, as the author says:
That left the police with no leads. Nothing to go on. The trail's stone cold. All the FBI has is an Egyptian male, who'd complained to his apartment managers after his neighbours post-9/11 began displaying the American flag; who'd posted a banner saying "READ KORAN" on his own front door; who told his employees that he hated Israel, that the two biggest drug dealers in New York were Israelis, and that Israel was trying to wipe out the Egyptian population by flooding the country with AIDS-infected Jewess prostitutes.Good thing our security is in such good hands, huh?
Could even the most expert psychological profiler make sense of such confusing and contradictory signs? Beats me, Sherlock.
Politics Imitates Life Imitates Entertainment Imitates Art - It started as an SNL bit - one of few in the past five years that didn't get beaten immediately to death, turned into a lousy movie, or both.
Now - the Janet Reno Dance Party is for real.
Wonder if she wears boxers?
Brother, Can You Spare Me a Billion- As predicted during the height of the gloom and doom over Amtrak's incipient demise, several local/regional railroads are breaking away, .
But wait - wasn't rail transit supposed to dry up completely?
Words Fail Me, Part 4 - Louis Farrakhan travels to the Mideast to tell the tyrants that America's Moslems are praying...
Perhaps if Farrakhan and Arafat were in a boat, together...
Deja Vu, Part 4 - Adding commentary to this would be so painfully redundant.
Shots Fired - Three people were shot - apparently mistakenly - in a gang-related incident over the holiday on the West Side of St. Paul. Two of the victims (who were aged 14-17) are in critical condition.
The theory is that the shooting was gang-related.
It's worth noting that mass public shootings - like our incident on the West Side, and the LAX shooting - are exceedingly rare in states with non-discretionary concealed carry permit laws. Minnesota and California are two of 17 states without such laws.
No Fun Aloud - Australia - the home of AC/DC, Australian Rules Football and more terms for vomiting after binge-drinking than all of the combined legion of the world's party fraternities - has banned the computer game Grand Theft Auto 3.
It's a bad influence, y'see.
Was He, or Wasn't He? - The big question today is: was the LAX El-Al shooter a terrorist, or just a deranged nutbar off the street?
This Israeli site quotes an Arab newspaper indicating that Hadayet had ties to Al Quaeda.
Was he a terrorist? Was it even a "hate crime"? The FBI is waffling on both. As Jack Dunphy notes, if Hadayet just felt like shooting up an airport, he could have stopped at John Wayne Airport, just a few miles from his home.
But no. He went 35 extra miles, to LAX, and (says Dunphy):
...with nine passenger terminals to choose from, he parked near the Tom Bradley International Terminal and walked inside. There are ticket counters for more than 30 airlines in the Bradley Terminal, but Hadayet found his way to El Al's, at the far northwest corner of the building, and began shooting. He killed two people and wounded five others before being shot and killed by an El Al security guard.Depends on your definition of sentient. If it means "government bureaucrat anxious not to offend any special interest", then yes, there might be a few.Is there a sentient being on earth who, when presented with these facts, would not conclude that Hadayet left home that morning with no other intent but to kill as many Jews as possible?
VOA Out of Control - The Voice of America is supposed to "spread the gospel" about the USA to the rest of the world (note to the ACLU - in this case, "spread the gospel" is a metaphor. Hold the lawsuit). Call it "propaganda", call it bias, call it PR, but they are supposed to be presenting the US' side of things to a world that gets plenty of the other side.
So it's with slack jaw I find out that the VOA has had a policy of "equal time" - giving the terrorists' views equal credence as our own, apparently with the connivance of the State Department. Analogous to making sure a rapist gets equal time on the evening news with his victim.
Even stranger - in the article I link above (a William Safire Op-Ed from the Times) it appears that this is done with the blessing of Secretary of State Powell. At the bottom of this op-ed, Powell has told Safire that he does not approve of this phony equanimity.
Question: Just who is in charge?
Apologies - Late in the day, July 4, Blogger.com (the site that I use to publish Shot in the Dark) started having technical difficulties. This is the first time I've been able to publish since then.
This time, it's not my fault! Woo Hoo!
Call for Paul Ehrlich - When I was a kid, I was scared out of my little mind by what I heard about the doommongering of professional hysterics like Paul Ehrlich.
Remember Paul Ehrlich? In 1969, he wrote "the Population Bomb", in which he predicted that mankind would starve itself to near extinction, and the survivors would kill each other off searching for food - by about 1984. India, said Ehrlich, was going to be completely hopeless - he introduced the concept of "triage" in an article in 1974, which gave my little 11 year old mind its first big attack of angst.
Of course, he was wrong. Wrong on every count, absolutely and irredeemably. He was so wrong, only a place like Stanford could continue to employ him.
But the predictions keep coming. According to ultraliberal pressure group the World Wildlife Fund (and reported with breathless credulity by the UK's far-left mouthpiece The Guardian), we're going to need to colonize not one but two new, earth-sized planets in the next fifty years, because of all the damage we've done to Earth.
Hey - didn't Ted Danson tell us in 1989 that we had a ten year supply of oil left? You'll recall, of course, the great Indian Food War of 1984...
Why doesn't anyone in the media ever call groups like the World Wildlife Fund on their lousy record at predicting the future?
Bulletin! Bulletin! - Michael Jackson is wierd!
Update! - So is George Michael
Everyone Have This? Any Questions? - Remember the old SNL bit from during the Gulf War, when Mike Myers asks General Schwartzkopf "Please tell us the units involved in tomorrow's airstrikes, their targets, and the times they'll be attacking?".
Today's NY Times has about the same thing...
Now, here's the question: Given that the Bush Administration is as leak-phobic as the Military claims to be (and frequently succeeds at being), my question is: is this legit? Or is this disinformation intended to skew the public's perception? Or Iraq's?
Which begs all sorts of questions: Turkey's claimed at various times to support the War on Terrorism - but then said it doesn't support invading Iraq. Yet they've always wanted a less looney-tunes government on their southeast border, too. And they are the one army in place in the region that's allied with us (in NATO, remember?) and capable of mixing it up with the Iraqis (in addition to whomever we and the Brits haul into the region).
And we'll probably need that - Seven Divisions from the Army and two from the Marines fought in the Gulf War, while today the entire US Army is twelve divisions, in wildly-differing states of readiness.
Hm. Who do you believe...
Words Fail Me- Which is a rare thing indeed.
Peter Singer - the "bioethicist" at Princeton who says that we should allow parents to retroactively abort infants up to a year after birth - says that Christianity hurts animals.
I'm not going to say a thing.
At Least We're Independent From Them - "Legendary" foreign correspondent John Pilger eloquently states the Eurotrash case, showing why the Fourth of July is so very, very important.
Idiots like this are why it's so important for the US to act unilaterally and let those with any sort of moral grounding follow. The pusilanimity of the Euro wonk class stands in stark relief to the courage of those European leaders that have backed us, and that of the foreign troops, especially the special forces from Canada, Germany, Denmark, Australia, Norway and especially Britain that are in the mountains with our guys right now.
Oboy - When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, there was this guy, an unreconstructed hippie, that ran an organic farm (basically a weed research station) about 20 miles out of town. His name was Harley MacClain. And besides raising weeds and showing up at the local open-stage nights to play old Neil Young songs, what Harley did was run for President. Every election from 1976 to 1992, Harley ran for President, as the leader of the "Chemical Farming Banned" party.
In 1980, he reached the apogee of his fame. He lost the presidential election - he was only on the ballot in North Dakota, so he was kind of a dark horse. But he noticed that the ballots always put the Republican and Democrat candidates at the top, and then all the other candidates below, in order of size, basically. He thought that was unfair. So he did two things: He declared himself the winner of the election, and he took the North Dakota elections commission to court.
Well, declaring himself president didn't work so hot - you may recall Ronald Reagan served two terms without significant interruption. But the court case did work - today, North Dakota's ballots (and those of many other states that recognized the precedent) randomize their ballot order.
So these wild hair candidates occasionally do have an impact.
I just don't think that newly-minted Republican, former IP and DFLer Leslie Davis will be one of them.
One Standard for Him, One Standard for Her - Men who have sex with underage women are looking at hard time. Women who get jiggy with underage boys can expect perhaps probation, along with sympathy from the feminist establishment
Cathy Young writes about this imbalance.
Up in Smoke - The role of the big, urban, Green interest in the current forest fires in the west needs to be examined. The forests - like much of the government-owned west (the fed owns something like half of all land west of the Mississipi) is managed by diktat from politicized east-coast interests that are only marginally aware of how to deal with real-life, sometimes life-threatening, vicissitudes of nature.
All Worry, All the Time - CNN's woes in the face of Fox News' steady rise have been a matter of both record, sycophantic butt-smooching, and even an attempt to re-tool the liberal-leaning network's image, which met with at least some catcalling .
Open note to CNN execs - if it's not about "star power", it must be about...your blinkered bias?
Ray of Hope - 49% of Britons oppose adopting the Euro. How serious is it? Even Brit showbiz types are jumping on the lorry.
Including, it should be noted, the generally socialistic former Boomtown Rat, Sir Bob Geldof.
As a side note - how wierd to see the punk rock icons of my teenage years getting involved in politics - Geldof, Bono...
Gubernatorial Smackdown!- I think Tim Pawlenty can win this. Stop me if I'm wrong. Here's my theory:
Jesse Ventura won the governor's race on pure personality. I doubt that his political stances, except as related to car tabs and jet ski license fees, earned him enough votes to matter in '98.
Now - Tim Penny is a pretty interesting guy, for a DFLer. He has been the "wizard behind the curtain" of the Ventura administration, along with fellow DFL refugee Dean Barkley.
I should say - he was interesting. Until he declared his candidacy. Once he did that, he started scuttling to the left faster than Tyrel Ventura diving on a loose beer.
Now, before he did that, polls were showing him neck and neck with Moe and Pawlenty. But that was then. Now, Penny has gone "pro-choice", and has softened his once-truly-moderate, even vaguely acceptable stances on gun control and taxes. He's set himself up as the tax-'n-spend sycophant to the DFL that Ventura was under his and Barkley's direction.
So he's running center-left. Moe is just left, and Green endorsee Ken Pentel is running on the absurdly-far left. (Let's assume Christine Jax isn't in the mix here, just for simplicity's sake).
Let's assume that Pawlenty keeps the 34% Norm Coleman won in 1998. Assume that the three candidates on the left split, in some combination, the remaining 66 percent in some fashion. Figure Ken Pentel, buoyed by his urban-la-la-land base in Dinkytown and the Wedge and the various colleges, keeps major-party status with a 5% showing - which comes ENTIRELY from the left, largely the DFL uber-base. Assume Moe gets the same 28% of hardcore DFLers, union guys and the professionally enraged that Humhrey got four years ago. Then, assume Tim Penny can manage to come across as something other than just another political talking head, and can get EVERY SINGLE unaccounted-for vote - which he won't, because he's Tim Penny, a mild-mannered policy wonk talking head with a few interesting ideas and a lot of political baggage - not Jesse Ventura. That's 33%.
And that's Governor Pawlenty to you, sport!
Yes, that "analysis" is hamfisted. Got a better one? Write me. I'm always looking for material!
What's a Liberal? - The traditional definition of conservative is "concerned about preserving the best of the traditional way of doing things",while liberals tend to define themselves as "concerned about civil rights".
Now, those of us who've been working on Second Amendment issues know just now selective the left is about the rights they'll support. But we always figured that, while their depredations on the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments are a matter of record, we could at least count on them to fight like rabid wolverines for the First Amendment.
Right?
Er - according to George Will, no.
Swing to the Right, Part IV - Deroy Murdock writes about the Pink Pistols - an organization of gay Second Amendment activists.
The Pistols were formed for the same reason the Concealed Carry movement exists - to deter violence, in this case gay-bashing.
But in addition to what the Pistols teach us about the deterrent value of the handgun, they also teach us something about the true nature of tolerance in America today. To wit:
"I know of absolutely no conservatives who have attacked us," says [Washington lobbyist and gay man Austin] Fulk. "I've gotten a lot more grief from gay people for owning guns and supporting the Second Amendment than I ever have from gun owners for being gay."But whatever the political ramifications, it's the criminal ones we're most concerned about. And those are...?
According to Doug Krick, 31, the Boston-based dot.com engineer who founded Pink Pistols in July 2000: "While I can't say that we are completely responsible for it, I can say that there has not been a 'fag bashing' in any of the towns where we have chapters after our chapters were founded."
By the way - there is a Pink Pistols chapter in the Twin Cities. I'll need to follow up on that last claim...
What if Napoleon had a B52 at Waterloo? - Modern technology - like "writing" and "books" - have degraded human memory. Since we don't have to remember things, but can put them in our diaries or tape recorders or Palm Pilots, human memory has been on a downswing for centuries - except among societies that lack, say, alphabets.
So who says the same thing isnt' happening to speech? With our plethora of aids to giving speeches - from the microphone to the Powerpoint multimedia display - is it possible that we're just not capable of performing the public displays of oratory that we used to?
Speechless - Jay Nordlinger writes about the effect of the current round of Mideast brouhaha on American campuses. And the stories are simply insane. The reaction on some of our elite campuses in many cases is not only anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic.
This is what goes on on the major campuses?
I Just Don't Get It - During the nineties, every other week in Time magazine there'd be a feature about the current doings of Hollywood moguls Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz. The articles were long and involved, and obviously took some extensive reportage. And to some extent, the tradition continues.
And the end result was, the average Time reader probably knew more about Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz than about the upcoming conflicts in the Balkans, certainly more than we did about teh goings-on in the Arab world.
It's a sign that someone is disconnected from life in America. Is it the big news media, or is it me?
Anyone?
Paging Alec Baldwin - Yet another Hollywood condo-pink - this time it's Tom Cruise - decides America is worse than the alternatives.
Ever notice how many weasels are listing "corporate corruption" as one of America's big problems, as Cruise does in the article ? Hello, idiotic superstar or vapid pundit - they got caught! And every day brings news of a new comany being caught. In how many countries does this never happen?
Waiting on that earthquake...
Faith In Government - A quarter of simulated weapons are getting by airport screeners, in the latest round of tests of the new federalized recruits.
Into the Breach - One of the great stories of the Civil War is that of the First Minnesota Regiment, whose near-suicidal charge at the Battle of Gettysburg 139 years ago tomorrow may have saved the battle for the North, and potentially the entire war.
The new book on the subject is worth a look, as is the set of online excerpts, which will be running in the Strib all week.
Patriotic Conflict - I've always been queasy about the Patriot Act - the law ushering in a raft of anti-terror provisions. On the one hand, as a military historian, I know that government can not run exactly the same in wartime as in peacetime. As a conservative, I know that you often know a thing most truly by that thing's enemies - and the Patriot Act's first enemies were the same sort of retro-sixties fossils that oppose EVERYthing pro-American.
And yet the libertarian in me thought that some aspects of the Act rounded up excessive power for the government, too.
Cities around the country are passing resolutions - and sometimes meatier laws - against the Act. Many of them are the usual suspects: condo-pinko la-la lands like Amherst, Boulder, Berkeley and Portland. Others are creeping every so close to the mainstream, like heavily-Arab Ann Arbor.
Somewhere between the Attorney General's seeming cavalierness and the ACLU's detached absolutism, perhaps. is the truth. For example, this rant from Dennis Miller:
"You have to admit phone sex has gotten a lot hotter in recent months. There's just something spicy about knowing that John Ashcroft might be
listening in. As for what many are calling racial profiling in the aftermath of September 11th, well, get ready to be pissed off, you ACLU-F**king-Morons, we're dealing with a massive threat and limited manpower, so, you want them to check everybody out equally? Sure, fine okay, but let's at least compromise and put the Swedish dwarf a little
further down the list than the Iraqi explosives expert carrying a Belgian passport with more eraser marks on it than Kid Rock's trig final."
The SUV and We - In 1987, I bought a 1978 Jeep CJ7. It wasn't the best car I ever had - that'd be the Honda Accord I had next. But no car was ever more fun for me than that Jeep. Why?
This was before the term SUV existed. Nowadays, greens sniff at what the SUV implies about the US.
This guy has it figured out correctly, though.
Shapes of Things to Come? - Our military's base on Qatar is growing rapidly, even as we draw down our presence in Saudi Arabia.
Qatar is in easy striking distance of Iraq - and its leadership is four square behind us.