Shot In The Dark

Beneath Contempt - Democrat-affiliated hate

Beneath Contempt - Democrat-affiliated hate site Democrats.com sinks to a new low.

Look at the picture. Tell us what you think the odds are that Specialist Tanner either approves of the site's caption, or is thinking precisely what these people ascribe to him.

Despicable.

It's All About Me -

It's All About Me - Looking at the hit logs recently, I see that there are a lot more of you out there these days - I'm averaging about 30% more visitors now than I was last month.

Welcome! Feel free to drop me a line - I'd love know who it is that's reading me out there.

More job stuff going on; besides the big (BIG, as in almost eight hour long) interview on Friday, I had another last week, for a total of three serious job leads in the hopper now, and maybe one more developing as we speak - it's hard to say. So - if you're a hiring manager, by all means get on it!

If you're new, I'll direct your attention tactfully but directly to the "Amazon Honor System Click to Give" box on the right side of the page; I've been blessed with readers who've enabled this site to be self-supporting for the last six months, and I appreciate it a lot. If you like what you read, please consider an anonymous donation.

Again - thanks for your interest!

Embed This - Glenn Reynolds

Embed This - Glenn Reynolds (AKA Instapundit) has this excellent article about the performance of the media in the war so far in his TechCentral column today.

The "embedding" program has been a stroke of genius for the Pentagon... The embedded journalists have come to identify with their units, and have formed a bond with American soldiers and Marines that will likely last a lifetime and fundamentally alter the character of the press in terms of its relations with the military.

So as a conservative who's both been in the belly of the media beast (OK, in its duodenum anyway) and on the side that the media usually opposes, I'm thinking - stroke of genius! All we have to do is repeat this tactic a few more times, and the war for society will be won!

We just need to embed some reporters:

• at a Concealed Carry Reform meeting; actually encountering some real peoples' real-life self-defense stories, and seeing that "gun nuts" aren't the caricatures that the major media and Hollywood have made them out to be, will be a major coup.
• With the Taxpayer's League. It'd be nice to if these people'd see that the average low-tax activist is not some sort of cigar-chomping robber baron in training.
• A pro-life group. To see the real people behind the boogeyman scare stories, and the real complex moral analysis behind the ready-fed sneer quotes would be quite a service to society.
• Anywhere in the Red States. The major media have no more understanding of "flyover land" than they did about the military until the embedded reporters began travelling with the GIs, Diggers, Desert Rats, Paras and Lobsterbacks (Yes, I'm proud of my command of international military nicknames. What's it to ya?).

It could only improve things.

Best Laid Plans - There's

Best Laid Plans - There's been much heat, but little light, over Peter Arnett's claims to Iraqi TV that the US "plan" is off in the weeds - a failure - and needs to be re-drawn.

Blogger and veteran Sergeant Stryker comments on "The Plan", from - here's a rarity - an informed perspective:

There's also been much speculation concerning the failure of "The PLAN." Yes, that mysterious piece of paper we depend upon for Victory. The General's Plan has failed! The Plan failed to acount for Iraqi irregulars! The Plan relied too much on blitzkrieg warfare! Supplies are running out! The Plan has failed! Defeat is upon us! Run away! Run away!

I'm here to tell you: There is no "Plan," at least not in the way most people think of it. There is no paper sitting in the center of Gen. Franks' desk with objectives and the dates they should be accomplished, with certain sentences lined-out as they are accomplished. There's nothing anywhere that says, "Take Baghdad by end of week or all is lost." What exist are thousands of matrices, cross-indexed and used by commanders and planners as decision-making aids in conducting operations. Each matrix lists, in tabular format, conditions and recommendations for action. For example:

If Condition X exists, and conditions A, C, and F are present, then proceed with R.

These matrices have been formatted and indexed in the months leading up to Iraqi Freedom and they list just about every conceivable condition that one would find in addition to the courses of action one should take in response. I'm sure that most of you who work in the business world are familiar with matrices and how they function. They allow commanders to be flexible and highly adaptable to the fluid nature of warfare by presenting options figured out months in advance, rather than having to think of solutions on the spot. And matrices aren't a novel concept unique to Iraqi Freedom. We use them in our everyday operations. So when you hear Rumsfeld or Franks saying, "We're on Plan and we've factored-in all that's happened," they're telling the truth. The Plan does not feature time-specific objectives and it isn't a checklist. It's a combination of thousands of decision matrices used to conduct operations in support of achieving the expressed goal: The removal of Hussein's regime and nullification of his ability to resist. It's also important to note that this war does not feature an "exit strategy" common to our limited operations in the past, which allowed our foes to exploit the half-measures we employed. In this war, the only exit is through Baghdad and there is no end save Victory.

Very true. Military plans - at least, good ones - are not like film shooting schedules. They're almost like very robust computer programs - allowing for all sorts of friction and SNAFUage, including, yes, unexpected resistance. The difference, of course - they don't push 1s and 0s around, they affect people, battles and, today, nations.

Everyone take a deep breath. In one week our troops advanced nearly 350 miles - which is 40% faster than armored troops are supposed to advance in ideal conditions - to the suburbs of Baghdad. Think about it - if St. Paul were Baghdad and North Dakota were Kuwait, the lead US troops would be just west of Monticello. There'd be some stiff skirmishing in St. Cloud and Alexandria, but the guys near Montecello would be threatening to move into Albertville any moment, and the bad guys moving up through Maple Grove to reinforce the defenses would be learning firsthand what it feels like to be in an oil drum being pelted with bowling balls.

And the Latest Nominees Are...

And the Latest Nominees Are... - A correspondent writes:

I hope [my Blogosphere Blacklist] is still up and running, because it's damn near genius. And my nominations are:

• Michael Moore
• Sean Penn
• Clinton (who is much, much more of a celebrity than a former President)
• Madonna
• Susan Sarandon
• Tim Robbins (even though he's just following Suzy's directions, because puppets don't have opinions)
• George Clooney
• Fred Durst
• Adrien Brody
• Sheryl Crow
• Julianne Moore

Gosh, there are just too many to name in one sitting! I'll have to get back to you with more...

Feel perfectly free - the Blacklist never sleeps! Nominations are always welcome.

Coulda Been an Actor, but

Coulda Been an Actor, but I Wound Up Here - Controversy about the Embedded Reporter program - among the media:

As Slate's Jack Shafer puts it: "Embed reports from the front are mostly variations on the themes 'Hey, I'm still alive!' and 'Hey, those Iraqis are extremely dead! ' which must warm the hearts of the chain of command." Magazine columnist Roger Simon says the TV reports are all about star power, "celebrities like David Bloom riding in that M-88 tank recovery vehicle."

[Ironically, some military leaders are critical of the embedded journalist program because reports from the field don't always square with official assessments.]

There lies the rub; a good reporter draws flak from both sides. But it's not just the reporter in the field that's supposed to be doing the job - the staff back at the Network or Newspaper or Wire Service need to do their job as well.

Back in World War II, war correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Walter Cronkite lived among the troops - Cronkite parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne on D-Day. Pyle died among the soldiers he covered, shot by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima. Some of the best reporters - Andy Rooney and cartoonist Bill Mauldin - actually were soldiers, working for GI publications. Did their "objectiity" or detachment suffer in the process?

The article addresses this:

No one denies that journalists who eat and sleep with the people they cover tend to form bonds, not unlike those forged in the traveling bubble of a presidential campaign. The feelings are even more intense when unarmed journalists must depend on heavily armed soldiers to protect them from enemy fire. But they fervently maintain that they are there to do a job.

"I did not and still do not buy into the notion that proximity necessarily influences coverage," says ABC correspondent Ron Claiborne, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. "In all honesty, I do not believe I would in any sense 'let up' on a story on this ship because I may happen to like the admiral or the captain or anyone else.

"I do not deny that reporters sometimes go easy on someone they like -- or go hard on someone they don't. That's human nature. But I do not think that living among the people we are covering undermines our putative objectivity."

Glenn Reynolds led his piece on this story with with this quote - challenging the reader to guess who the speaker is:

"Let them try not showering for a week, sleeping out in the desert, living through sandstorms, being under fire -- I don't see these people out there. All they do is criticize."

A cranky GI? No - CBS' John Roberts, with the First Marine Division.

Buying Time - As the

Buying Time - As the fog of war descends over our view of the situation in Iraq, a conversation last night with a friend brought out this idea:

In 1945 - hopelessly late in World War II in Europe - the US and British militaries were rolling forward across a broad front. The end of the Battle of the Bulge had cut the heart out of much of the German army in the west. But the front was punctuated by short, sharp, fierce firefights and occasionally intense pockets of ferocious resistance.

It was demoralizing to GIs, and to some extent on the home front as well; everyone knew that the war was drawing to a close, that the Russians were closing in on Berlin, that someone would have the distinction of being the last GI to die in Europe.

So these small but intense pockets of resistance were troublesome. And eventually, we figured out that many of them happened for a reason. Sometimes the reason was simple; the rolling advance caught up with a hard-core SS or Hitler Youth unit.

Sometimes, though, the resistance stiffened because they were protecting something; a concentration camp where the guards hadn't finished off the inmates or burned the records; a V2 rocket plant whose staff hadn't evacuated yet; in the East, pockets of German refugees trying to escape from the Russians.

So if what we've heard is anywhere close to correct (my standard disclaimer to all things, these days), the situation looks like this:

• Most regular Iraqi units are dissolving into the general population, leaving stacks of unmanned equipment for the Coalition to roll past.
• Irregulars - Iraqis and foreigners - are putting up fierce resistance in certain locations - Karbala, An Nasiriah, An Najaf, Basra, Umm Qasr - and what I think is a particularly illustrative example, this battle in the town of Kifl

Read about the types of things the Iraqis are doing:

A crimson sunset painted the street red and visibility fell to less than 15 feet as a swirling sand and dust storm kicked up when the guerrilla units attacked.

U.S. officers said fighters in minivans, pick-up trucks and cars drove straight at the oncoming tanks. Others took to canoes, rowing down the river and trying to fix explosives to the main bridge.

But the guerrilla-style forces were vastly outgunned by the tanks of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, and hundreds of Iraqis have died in this town over the last four days.

The officers said the tank unit fired two 120 mm high velocity depleted uranium rounds straight down the main road, creating a powerful vacuum that literally sucked guerrillas out from their hideaways into the street, where they were shot down by small arms fire or run over by the tanks.

"It was mad chaos like you cannot imagine," said the tank unit's commander, who identified himself as "Cobra 6" as he did not want friends and neighbors back home to know what he had been through.

"We took a lot of fire, and we gave a lot of fire," he said.

So you had what we coudl call "spirited resistance" - but in the end:

Some U.S. soldiers estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqis were killed here since the fighting began at dusk on Wednesday, and everyone puts the number in the hundreds.

Officers say just one U.S. soldier has died...

Wave after wave of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitaries had set up mortar positions at an old brick factory on the edge of town, getting dropped off from civilian vehicles at a large tree that U.S. forces here now call the "Gateway to Hell."

U.S. officers said they had destroyed up to 50 vehicles making drop-offs there, adding the brick factory, like much of Kifl, was now virtually abandoned.

So we have fierce, nearly suicidal resistance - reminiscent of the SS or Hitler Youth's fanatical zeal - accompanied by horrendous, crippling casualties.

Is there a parallel between the desperate spasms of the final days of the Third Reich - or for that matter, Stalin's desperate thrashing at Stalingrad, where cadres of party fanatics "strengthened" the regular troops' resistance by firing machine guns at those trying to withdraw from attacks? It's too early to say.

But some parts of the pattern seem to be there.

What are they defending? WMD installations that they don't want Unblixed? Or buying time for Hussein to reinforce the defenses of Baghdad?

Time will tell, of course. But totalitarians historically display a limited range of tools, and I wonder if this isn't one to think about?

The Littlest Mujahedin - Peter

The Littlest Mujahedin - Peter Arnett is working for the other side:

Journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV in an interview aired Sunday that the American-led coalition's first war plan had failed because of Iraq's resistance and said strategists are "trying to write another war plan."

Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting in Vietnam for The Associated Press, garnered much of his prominence from covering the 1991 Gulf War for CNN. He is reporting from the Iraqi capital now for NBC and its cable stations.

If you remember this vile little man from 1991, you're not surprised.

Moore's Logic - Michael Moore

Moore's Logic - Michael Moore on geopolitics:

“Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator,” he added, “and I hope he’s removed as soon as possible. But nonviolently.”

I'd like to learn more about this concept of removing dictators "non-violently".

I can think of the following:

• Dictators Removed Violently: Romania, Grenada, Germany, Italy, Japan
• Dictators Removed When Their Implied Threat of Violence Backfired: USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, et al
• Dictators Removed Without Reference to Violence: Er...help me? Anyone?

I'd suspect Mr. Moore doesn't know, either.

UPDATE: An email correspondent suggests Slobodan Milosevich for the "Dictators Removed Without Reference to Violence" category. But I'd say the NATO bombing campaign had a lot to do with that - as sloppily-done as it was, it went a long way toward showing the dictator that the west had had enough.

Happy to Bend Over for

Happy to Bend Over for a Bigger Budget - The lawn sign wars are slipping the bounds of rationality and flittering off into zoopdieland.

A group called A Better Minnesota is distributing "Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota" lawn signs. They're something like this:

I think it's high time we started distributing our own signs:

Let's get going!

Footsteps of Giants - One

Footsteps of Giants - One of my favorite recent discoveries in the blogosphere is David Warren, who's been on my blogroll for quite a while, and on my "at least weekly" reading list since then.

Here,he talks about Canada's most yawning generation gap:

If any American, or Briton, or Australian, or free man or woman, should happen to be reading this, I want you to know that I am not speaking only for myself. I am speaking on behalf, quite literally, of millions of Canadians, who are every bit as disgusted as you are with our country. You have the same kind of people -- you will know perfectly well -- within your own countries. The difference is, in Canada they are in charge.

In this particular moment of truth, and for all time, America had a Bush, Britain had a Blair, Australia had a Howard -- each one of them willing to stand, and face the music; each one a politician, but also a man. In this same moment of truth, and in the histories forever, Canada had the scuttling Chrétien.

The whole thing is fascinating. Read it.

In My Name - I've

In My Name - I've long detested the preening self-righteousness of Not In Our Name, the group for whom Susan Sarandon is currently flacking.

Their cause isn't so much anti-war...er, anti-Bush as it is salving the righteous egoes of its adherents. I've long wanted to figure out exactly what to write about these people.

But Julie Burchill, at the Guardian (far from a right-wing tool), did it first and best.

I've always thought that the last place you'd see the vanity of depression in action would be on a protest march, especially one against war in a foreign country, but I do believe that many of the anti-war antics currently taking place are totally egotistical. Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less. But does the most hardened peacenik really believe that Iraqis currently enjoy more liberty and delight than they would if Saddam were brought down? If so, fair enough; if not, then they are marching about one thing - themselves. That's why so many luvvies are involved; this is simply showing off on a grand scale.

I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?

Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? See how they write them so solemnly in a list on the bottom of the letters they send to the papers. And the ones that add their brats' names are the worst - a grotesque spin on Baby On Board, except they think that this gives them extra humanity points not just on the motorway, but in the whole wide weeping, striving, yearning world. We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside.

But for these people, it's not about anyone else's freedom - as, indeed, "Freedom" in Hollywood is usually about the half of the First Amendment that's about speech and press rights. I'd have to wonder how many Hollywood liberals know anything about the other half of the amendment?

Burchill also does the magnificent service of comparing the relative contributions of the principals on both sides of this conflict:

Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here? And is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously "difficult"and vain - Streisand, Albarn, Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn? And Robin Cook! [Don't forget Michael Moore!] Why might anyone believe world peace can be secured by this motley bunch?

Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too...Similarly, there are the human shields - now limping homewards after being shocked to discover, bless 'em, that Saddam wanted to stick them in front of military installations as opposed to the hospitals and petting zoos that they'd fondly imagined they were going to defend.

What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people...

How embarrassing it will be for the peaceniks to have to explain to the celebrants how much better it would have been for them never to have been troubled by such joy!

Read, of course, the whole thing.

We know what the likes of Madonna, Sarandon and Penn want "in their names" or not. But the actions of those whose names we'll never know are usually more interesting. And telling.

Three More Years! - Twin

Three More Years! - Twin Cities bloggers Fraters Libertas discuss the latest manifestation of our "senior" senator Mark Dayton's attempts to slalom about both sides of an issue - and crash in the attempt:

Dayton declined to speak at the anti-war event because he said he wouldn’t be in town that day. Then he agreed to speak at a support the troops rally that same day. Then he later agreed to also speak at the anti-war rally (and was turned down). Then he didn’t show up at either of them.

Now that’s what I call getting out in front of an issue! (And then falling under it and getting flattened.)

Here's the part I think is so utterly ironic: the left savaged the man Dayton replaced, Rod Grams for reasons that had little to nothing to do with his legislative accomplishments; his marital problems, his son's hijinx (never mentioning that Grams' ex-wife had had full custody of Morgan Grams for quite some time) - never actually bothering to assail his legislative record, except over high-level stances like abortion and gun control.

Now, we have a "senator" whose personal life is a bigger disaster than Grams', whose legislative record is negligible, and who unlike Grams hasn't even bothered to stake out an actual position on much of anything.

As the Fraters say, we may be approaching a rare moment of agreement in Minnesota politics - left and right agreeing on needing to dump Dayton.

Protesters Paying Piper, Part II

Protesters Paying Piper, Part II - I got an email from a lawyer in California:

Love Governor Pawlenty's idea. Probably too much to hope my wonderful Governor (Gray Davis) would propose something like that. In the past I have advocated ignoring protestors as much as possible. Direct traffic around them. Pick them up and move them aside, etc. Anything BUT arresting them. Like I am sure you may have handled your kids' throwing a temper tantrum. They want the reward of the arrest, so deny it to them. But the anti-American protestors now are too extreme, and ignoring them would only escalate to violence. ("Peace" protestors)

In general, I agree - as long as they're not blatantly breaking laws against tresspass, disorderly conduct and vandalism. Many of these people think they're above the law in this regard; the "penalties" they currently receive wouldn't make any rational person think differently. Go out to Alliant and trespass on your own, with no political motive? There will be consequences. Do it under the aegis of a politically-correct "cause"? Token plastic handcuffs, ride downtown, a brief spell in the holding tank, mob booking, group hearing, mass release on own recognizance. We effctively subsidize protest with all that police time to no rational purpose.

And if Governor Pawlenty needs a lawyer to collect these protestor costs, I'd be glad to relocate to Minnesota. I'd even submit to a 7 hour 45 minute interview.

I'll pass it along to the powers that be.

Bleagh - Interview today -

Bleagh - Interview today - seven hours and 45 minutes.

They're being very selective.

Paying the Piper - I'm

Paying the Piper - I'm so deliriously happy with Tim Pawlenty today.

His current proposal would allow local courts to charge court costs to those arrested in "civil disobedience" protests. The Strib described it like this:

Following through on a provocative proposal that is garnering him some national media attention, Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Friday issued a letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz, asking that judges seek restitution from protesters who are arrested.

"I suggest judges consider imposing restitution of court costs upon individuals who are arrested for unlawful protests or acts of civil disobedience," Pawlenty said in the letter.

On Thursday, officials with the Pawlenty administration said the governor had grown "frustrated" by war protesters who were getting themselves arrested and, in his opinion, squandering limited law-enforcement resources.

"While people have the right to free speech, they do not have the right to a free arrest," Pawlenty said in Friday's letter. "Protesters have openly admitted they are using the arrest process as a public relations initiative. In those instances, some restitution to the courts for processing costs seems fair and appropriate."

Back in the eighties, there was a commune in Luck, Wisconsin comprised of a bunch of, essentially, professional protesters. They freely admitted they exploited both arrest system, and the fact that the arrests they recieved were fully symbolic - token fines, no real jail time, essentially token charges given by a system run by people fundamentally sympathetic to their cause.

I think these people basically pervert the real American tradition of civil disobedience; Martin Luther King faced real consequences in his civil disobedience, which is what made it meaningful.

These people, on the other hand...

Boogeyman alert!

By Friday the proposal had become the buzz of local talk radio, with many listeners calling in to praise Pawlenty's proposal.

And with states across the nation trying to deal with anti-war rallies that attract tens of thousands, Pawlenty's proposal also quickly drew the attention of conservative media outlets.

By late Friday afternoon, he had penciled into his schedule an evening spot as a live call-in guest on the Hugh Hewitt Show, a nationally syndicated radio talk show.

Media shorthand for "the barbarians are at the gates".

Leave it to the far left, in the form of Ramsey County's Attorney, to stand up for such frivolity:

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner on Friday said she believes the practice actually is uncommon. "Most of the offenders going through the criminal justice system are poor," she said. "So as a practical matter, you don't get costs from them."

Antiwar protestors? Poor?

Gaertner knows as well as I do - most Anti-Bush protestors are about as poor as Sarah Jane Olson.

Gaertner said she also was concerned about applying recovery of arrest costs to a particular type of offense.

"The question we have to ask is why are we targeting this group of offenders? Is it about keeping up with public safety costs or stifling political expression?

So charge every protester who is arrested for illegal disorderly conduct for restitution, regardless of what side of whatever issue they're on. How hard is that?

If people genuinely value civil disobedience, they should support this.

Of course, that would take much of the motivation away for much of the left...

Busier Day - Light blogging

Busier Day - Light blogging until tonight, probably.

I have a job interview. Actually, this will be to interviews what Stalingrad was to gang rumbles. The company wants me to talk with eight people, over the course of six hours. I have to hope that's a good sign.

It's also across the Twin Cities from my home in the St. Paul Midway - and with a purported snowstorm coming in, I want to give myself 2-3 hours to get there. There is nothing worse than trying to get into or out of the southwest corner of the Twin Cities, Eden Prairie and Minnetonka and Edina and Bloomington, during major snow.

Well, short of actual warfare, of course.

Not In Our Schedule -

Not In Our Schedule - TV discovers that covering protests is ratings suicide, according to this WaPo article:

The influential television-news consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates recently put it in even starker terms: Covering war protests may be harmful to a station's bottom line.

In a survey released last week on the eve of war, the firm found that war protests were the topic that tested lowest among 6,400 viewers across the nation. Magid said only 14 percent of respondents said TV news wasn't paying enough attention to "anti-war demonstrations and peace activities"; just 13 percent thought that in the event of war, the news should pay more attention to dissent.

I'm biased - I'd be a fool not to admit it. But I think the networks and the Twin Cities' local stations have spent plenty of time covering the protests. There seems to be some sort of segment on the protesters during every newscast, network and local: "While the fighting seems to have stalled, the protests on the home front are heating up...".

I also think the protests themselves verge on non-newsworthy; it's the same people every time, they do the same things, say the same canned lines. It's as newsworthy as the #7 Bus arriving on time.

Magid, whose representatives did not return phone calls, offers no direct advice about what stations should do. However, the research's implied message reinforces antiwar activists' assertion that media outlets have marginalized opposing voices.

WHOAH!

There's a jump-cut for you, huh?

I'd say the implied message is "the antiwar activists have marginalized their own message to the point where Americans are phenomenally uninterested in hearing what they have to say".

The activists respond:

"The antiwar movement in this country is far bigger than it was during the first few years of the Vietnam War, but you wouldn't know it from the coverage," said Adam Eidinger, a Washington activist. "I think the media has been completely biased. You don't hear dissenting voices; you see people marching in the streets, but you rarely hear what they have to say in the media."

Because the marching in the street pretty much IS what they have to say, from what I've seen; the typical anti-Bush protester rarely speaks much beyond the slogans they yell. Sure, there are exceptions.

And as an aside: Mr. Eidinger complains that the media ignore a large percentage of Americans. Mr. Eidinger; welcome to the life of a firearms rights activist!

Al Quaeda Link? - as

Al Quaeda Link? - as mentioned in this space, there seems to be not only a link between Iraq and Al Quaeda - the terror network is apparently leading the fight against the Coalition:

At least a dozen members of Osama bin Laden's network are in the town of Az Zubayr where they are coordinating grenade and gun attacks on coalition positions, according to the Iraqi prisoners of war.

It was believed that last night (Thursday) British forces were preparing a military strike on the base where the al-Qaeda unit was understood to be holed up.

A senior British military source inside Iraq said: "The information we have received from PoWs today is that an al-Qaeda cell may be operating in Az Zubayr. There are possibly around a dozen of them and that is obviously a matter of concern to us."

If terrorists are found, it would be the first proof of a direct link between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington.

The connection would give credibility to the argument that Tony Blair used to justify war against Saddam - a "nightmare scenario" in which he might eventually pass weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

On Wednesday Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, said the coalition had solid evidence that senior al-Qaeda operatives have visited Baghdad in the past.

Rumsfeld said Saddam had an "evolving" relationship with the terror network.

The presence of fanatical al-Qaeda terrorists would go some way to explaining the continued resistance to US and British forces in southern Iraq, an area dominated by Shi'ite Muslims traditionally hostile to Saddam's regime.

All together now: We told you so.

View from Warsaw - As

View from Warsaw - As has been noted here and elsewhere, Poland's in a strange position - they're our major ally on the continent both on the government and social level. But the majority of Poles oppose the war - even though Polish troops have been in action in Iraq.

Some interesting background in this article in the English-language edition of the Warsaw Voice.

Poland has deployed 200 troops to the scene of the conflict. The Polish contingent includes a 36-man decontamination platoon from the 4th Chemical Regiment in Brodnica, Kujawy-Pomerania province; the special commando unit GROM; and the logistic support ship Rear Admiral Xawery Czernicki, with a crew of 53...

...On March 24 the world saw photos taken by Reuters news-agency showing Polish commandos from the GROM unit after an operation in the port of Umm Qasr. According to unofficial information, GROM has prevented the destruction of oil supply installations in the port.
Col. Roman Polko, GROM commander in Iraq, has been consulting with the Polish General Staff regarding each order from U.S. commanding officers, says Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdziński. Top officials at the Polish Ministry of Defense also disclosed that there were commandos on board the Xawery Czernicki-divers from the Formoza special navy unit.

The disclosed GROM operation has raised disputes over whether Poland is in a state of war with Iraq and whether Polish involvement in the conflict should be interpreted as active participation in the war or merely as earlier announced logistic support for allied forces.

In other words, the situation isn't as simplistic as either the anti-Bush or pro-liberation people want to think it is...

Oz and Poland - Jacob

Oz and Poland - Jacob Levy on why Australia and Poland have joined us in Iraq, but the Europeans don't:

There is, perhaps, something to be said for a modified version of Robert Kagan's "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" explanation. This argument begins with the fact that Western Europe, Canada, and New Zealand all inhabit zones of peace. Since they face no credible military threat, or at least no threat that wouldn't first strike a vastly more powerful neighbor (the United States for Canada, Australia for New Zealand) these countries allow their military capabilities to atrophy, which, according to Kagan, encourages a certain willful blindness to threats to the world order. If that's the case, one could easily reverse Kagan's normative thrust, saying that states that do feel compelled to maintain their armed forces become trigger-happy, too ready to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. In either event, a state's security needs drive its military capabilities, which in turn drive its reactions to the world...

...Notice, too, the similarity to Poland, another medium-sized power in a dangerous neighborhood, and the only other country fighting alongside the United States and Britain.

The whole article is great, of course - as usual, read it.

Diplomacy - The left has

Diplomacy - The left has been portraying Turkey's refusal to allow US troops to pass through to attack Northern Iraq as a failure of US - no, Bush Administration - diplomacy.

It seems there's an ulterior motive, courtesy our old friends, the French, says Mike Ledeen at the NYSun:

The Turkish government, which for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire is based on an Islamic party, fully expected that Parliament would approve its proposal that America be given the use of Turkish air bases in the Iraqi war.The government was so confident that the party failed to demand internal discipline, and thus several deputies voted against the resolution.

But that does not account for the failure to approve the government’s proposal.

Primary blame for the defeat of the measure lies with the opposition — the secular, Kemalist parties that have governed the country since Ataturk.

Contrary to expectations, the opposition, responding to orders from party leaders, voted unanimously against the government’s position.

The leaders insisted on a disciplined "no" vote because of pressure — some would call it blackmail — from France and Germany.

The French and German governments informed the Turkish opposition parties that if they voted to help the Coalition war effort, Turkey would be locked out of Europe for a generation. As one Turkish leader put it, "there were no promises, only threats."

One can describe this behavior on the part of our erstwhile Old Europe allies only as a deliberate act of sabotage against America in time of war.

It's "Old Europe" fighting for it's piece of the pie. But it seems likely that this move will cost American lives.

Once we've dealt with terrorism, we have another war to fight. A diplomatic one of course - but I think it could eventually rival the Cold War.

Da Cubs? - I'm not

Da Cubs? - I'm not from Chicago. I don't play a Chicagoan on TV. But I've been a lifelong Bears fan - and when the topic turns to National League ball, I'm a foursquare Cubs fan, too.

I almost hate to hope; us Cubs fans are almost too comfortable in our little niche; it'd almost be a letdown to jeopardize our endless championship-free record.

But Jayson Stark makes the case that the Cubs could be to '03 what the Angels were in '02:

They have to get a boomerang year from Moises Alou (who drove in fewer runs than Melvin Mora). They have to get more plate discipline out of Corey Patterson (142 strikeouts, 19 walks?). With rookies Hee Seop Choi and Bobby Hill on the right side of the infield, Baker has to disprove his rep as a manager who doesn't trust young players.

But they still have Sammy Sosa, the first player in history to have five straight seasons of at least 49 homers and 100 RBI. And most of all, they have the one commodity that puts World Series rings on anybody's fingers: "Dominating starting pitching," said one scout, "when they're healthy."

We've heard too many people rave about their parade of arms -- from Wood, Prior and Clement down through Juan Cruz and Carlos Zambrano -- not to think this team at least has a chance to be something special.

So who cares how many day games they play. Who cares if they haven't won a World Series since the invention of the light bulb. Who cares if they lost 95 last year.

We had to pick somebody as this year's Angels. Well, you want a feel-good story? It doesn't get much more feel-good than the Cubs.

If it could happen to the '91 Twins...

Wonder if Stark predicted that one?

(via Jeff Fecke

From Our Corporate Office in

From Our Corporate Office in An Najaf - StrategyPage is out with couple of excellent Top Ten lists about the war. My favorites:

4-The United States armed Saddam. This one grew over time, but when Iraq was on it's weapons spending spree from 1972 (when its oil revenue quadrupled) to 1990, the purchases were quite public and listed over $40 billion worth of arms sales. Russia was the largest supplier, with $25 billion. The US was the smallest, with $200,000. A similar myth, that the U.S. provided Iraq with chemical and biological weapons is equally off base. Iraq requested Anthrax samples from the US government, as do nations the world over, for the purpose of developing animal and human vaccines for local versions of Anthrax. Nerve gas doesn't require technical help, it's a variant of common insecticides. European nations sold Iraq the equipment to make poison gas.

...and this one:

8-The U.S. strategy for invading Iraq is a colossal failure. Hard to say, as it's less than a week since the war began and the strategy is decapitation (eliminating Saddam), not fighting thousands of Saddams thugs before getting to the Big Guy himself. Come back in a few weeks and the truth will be revealed.

The whole thing, as usual, is worth a read.

Paging Ralph Nader - The nine Marines that were killed last weekend were apparently killed when an Iraqi rocket-propelled grenade hit an AAVP7A1 "Amtrac" Ampibious Armored Personnel Carrier. This vehicle was built to carry Marines ashore and across the beach under cover of the vehicle's armor; anyone who saw Saving Private Ryan can see how dangerous crossing a beach can be.

The AAVP7 is the Marines' only armored personnel carrier (APC) - they don't use the M2 Bradley, which has given Army mechanized infantry such mobility and firepower. But in order to give the First Marine Division a level of mobility comparable to the Third Infantry Division (which has M1 tanks and M2 Bradley Infantry vehicles) the Marines pressed their AAVP7s into service.

And it's all wrong for use as an APC for any reason but amphibious attack; it's armor is much lighter than the Bradley (designed to protect it from small-arms fire and artillery shrapnel, not from heavier fire), while its silhouette is extremely high, making it easier than any other APC to see and hit.

And once it's hit by a modern anti-tank weapon, or even plain old-fashioned artillery or tank rounds, it's all over.

If the reports are true, it's almost good news in a perverse way - if nine Marines were killed in one action while deployed and able to maneuver and take cover and shoot back against the Fedayeen, it'd be more than just casualties, it'd be a sign that the Fedayeen could take it to the Marines with authority. In this case, it was most likely an unlucky ambush by a crafty RPG gunner.

Unfortunately, when our Marines are "winging it" with obsolescent, mis-applied vehicles like the AAVP, things like this are more likely.

Paging Hans Blix - An Iraqi commando battalion apparently managed to destroy a couple of M1 Abrams main battle tanks over the weekend - using French hardware:

Some Pentagon officials said Wednesday that this marked the first time Abrams tanks had been destroyed on the battlefield. An Army official disputed that, saying the tanks "were not blown to bits, they were rendered immobile. They're going to be evacuated, and repaired."

On the battlefield, it was not immediately clear what kind of weapon the Iraqis used to knock out the tanks. But a senior defense official said that it was a French-made Coronet antitank missile.

Thanks, France.

Both tanks will probably be repaired and returned to action. Both crews escaped, a testament to the Abrams design.

According to the reoprt on the subject, quite a number of Iraqis were killed in the effort.

The Column - My original

The Column - My original question was: since the media coverage of this whole thing is being manipulated to the administration and military's best effect - both for internal and external consumption - I have to wonder - what's with the Thousand Vehicle Column of Republican Guards purported to be headed on a collision course for the advancing Coalition troops?

It seems that now a better question might be - does the "column" exist? the CNN main page says no - but the article to which it links, as well as most other news websites, are still running the story.

I figure - no way. The Iraqis won't risk that much armor (whatever "1,000 vehicles" means) out in the open against crushing air superiority and - the media never tells you this - easily several times that many Coalition vehicles, including (by my count) nearly 400 Abrams tanks alone.

The Story - Instapundit has

The Story - Instapundit has this rather illuminating quote from Israeli sources:

Most of those interviewed agree that, paradoxically, despite the unprecedented media coverage of the war, including the many correspondents who are embedded in fighting units, nobody knows what is really happening in Iraq. Yossi Peled, former GOC Northern Command, thinks the U.S. has shown great skill in its control of the media. "You have lots of television crews in the field, yet as someone watching TV you have no overall picture."

Military historian Prof. Martin van Creveld goes further: "Everyone is lying about everything all the time, and it is difficult to say what is happening. I've stopped listening. All the pictures shown on TV are color pieces which have no significance."

"There is a lot of disinformation," he concludes. "Every word that is spoken is suspect."

Shahak says that until now the Americans have managed to conceal their true battle plan. "Do you know what the Americans have planned? I don't. They also never said (what they were planning to do). How do you topple a regime in 48 hours? In a week? Seventeen days? If we don't want to make fools of ourselves, we should wait patiently. It would just be arrogant to judge from what we see on TV."

So in other words - everything you hear, pro and con, is pretty much suspect at this point.

Airborne - In what Wolf

Airborne - In what Wolf Blitzer called the largest combat airdrop since World War II, a battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade (an independent unit based in Foggia, Italy, not actually part of the famous 82nd Airborne Division) apparently has taken an airfield in Northern Iraq, opening the lately-lamented Northern Front against Hussein.

The troops jumped in after delays caused by weather and complications with Turkey over using its airspace for attacks against Iraq. Another 1,000 paratroopers are expected to come from 173rd U.S. Airborne Brigade, which is based in Italy.

Let me indulge in some facile guessing here: there's been no evidence of the 101st Air Assault division in action yet. This division - completely heliborne, and with attached light armor and attack helicopter units - is designed to fly deep into enemy territory to establish an "airhead" (analogous to "beachhead", not dizzy person) far behind their lines.

Now, remember - on the opening day of the campaign, US and Australian special forces seized a couple of airfields in western Iraq (H2 and H3). These airfields would be very useful as intermediate staging points for the 101st (and a British air assault brigade that is also in country right now).

Well, that's what jumps out at me, anyway...

Speech - I have an

Speech - I have an unexpected break in the day's schedule, and I'm listening to the President's speech at CENTCOM.

He summed up the biggest, best reason for this whole intervention: "We will not wait to meet the challenge with fire fighters and policemen and doctors in our cities. We're meeting the challenge now."

Bingo.

I think this part is for military consumption - and of course, the media:

And "In the ranks of that regime are men whose idea of coursage is brutalizing prisoners...who use civilians as human shields...who pretend to surrender, then fire on those who show them mercy. This band of war criminals has been put on notice; the day of Iraq's liberation will also be a day of justice."

Here's the part I love:

"Freedom is God's gift to humanity...we have no ambition of Iraq except the liberation of the people. There is no goal to war except a durable peace."

The key words in this address were everywhere: Freedom. Liberation. Liberty. ...the Special forces motto is 'to free the oppressed'. Freedom is God's Gift to Mankind. .

This, people, is perhaps the key meaning of this war; it's an end to the politics of stability practiced by most American presidents since World War II. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all erred on the side of stability over freedom; we backed some real sons-of-bitches for reasons no more or less important than pure realpolitik. Carter supported Hussein while Khomeini held our hostages in 1979-'80. Clinton was all about keeping stability at the expense of freedom.

Even Reagan - who was all about freedom and liberty in fighting the Cold War, and is regarded in some parts of eastern Europe as a great liberator - backed the likes of Pik Botha and Ferdinand Marcos (until it was expedient not to do so).

This is not about stability - about settling for a bad status quo out of fear of something worse. This is about freedom.

And freedom works.

Support - Great piece on

Support - Great piece on Fraters Libertas this morning on the DFL Caucus' attempt to play both sides of the fence.

The Fraters note that the MN House DFL caucus is pushing a "Support the Troops" resolution that says all the right things - except, of course, support for the liberation of Iraq, but we digress.

The Fraters pick up the story, with a series of photos of MN House Minority Leader Matt Entenza at last weekend's "anti-war" rally at Macalester:

I suppose these images aren't 100% damning, in that Entenza's not pictured lighting up Old Glory with the business end of a spliff or something. However, it is entirely damning by association. As shown below, the anti-war rally at Macalester on Saturday was nothing but an attack on the Bush Administration, the armed forces and the good old US of A.

And who was there in attendance? Smiling, laughing it up, glad-handing like it was the happiest day of his life? None other than Matt Entenza. That is, he was smiling until the paparazzi arrived, at which point he was hustled away by his handlers, as if he had something to be ashamed of.

People holding signs proclaiming Bush is the butcher of Baghdad, Bush is the real terrorist, Bush is a Nazi lunatic. And Matt Entenza is fraternizing and celebrating with them?!

Slandering the Commander-in-Chief? Eroding popular support for the perilous mission assigned to our brave soldiers? Is this what you mean, Matt Entenza by doing "everything possible to support the troops"? Well, Matt, is it!?

The DFL leadership's disingenuity is astounding - but not in the "unexpected" sense of that term.

Link? - In Somalia, the

Link? - In Somalia, the local militias - trained by Al Quaeda - hid among civilians, even ginned up civilian mobs as cover to advance on the Rangers.

According to Terry Sanders, an NBC reporter embedded with First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment, the "irregular" Iraqis are...hiding among civilians, driving civilians in front of their advances to shield them from attack.

No known Al Quaeda link, right?

Numbers - I like this

Numbers - I like this one:

• Last Saturday's pro-liberation rally: 20,000 attendees. 0 arrests.
• Yesterday's Anti-Bush rally in downtown Minneapolis: a couple hundred attendees. 67 arrests.

Need I say more?

The Usual Suspects - Part

The Usual Suspects - Part II - KARE11's Molly MacMillen made two great observations during her report from the anti-Bush protest in Edina this morning:

• "It's a small group of protestors - including some of the same protestors we met yesterday [at the protests downtown]"
• "...there are as many police as protesters here today"

McMillen still looks marvelous.

Leno on Hollywood - "Don't

Leno on Hollywood - "Don't you love this town? You drug an underage girl, you rape her, you flee the country, you get an Oscar. You build a church, and it's 'What are you, nuts?!"
-- Jay Leno, last night.

No, I didn't watch - a pal sent it...

Busy! - Starting one little

Busy! - Starting one little freelance contract gig today, and hopefully finishing another one. Will post later.

The Revolution - Katherine Kersten

The Revolution - Katherine Kersten on something I've been discussing with friends lately: the real reason for the gulf between the US and Europe:

At a deeper level, however, the gulf that separates Europeans from Americans is philosophical. Not surprisingly, Europe and America hold fundamentally different views of what it means for a nation to be a liberal democracy.

In a recent issue of the New Republic, political commentator Paul Berman explores these divergent views. Berman points out that, from the beginning, America's experiment in self-government was radical and unique. In an age of monarchies, our founders saw freedom and equality as universal aspirations -- the birthright of all men. Over the years, American presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan have perpetuated this vision. They have viewed liberal democracy as "a revolutionary project for universal liberation," and America as experimenting with a possible future for the entire world.

Americans find it natural to see Chinese students marching with a model of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square. We believe that America's power and example have helped to spread democracy throughout the world, and can continue to do so in the future.

Europeans have a very different idea of liberal democracy. Their national self-concepts are not rooted in democracy, nor do they see their nations as prototypes in a universal democratic experiment. Indeed, as the inhabitants of former imperial powers, they find it hard to understand how a democracy can wield power for liberal aims. For many Europeans, power is imperial or nothing -- the power of brutal empires.

Here's what I think; many on the left (and a few on the near-right, like George HW Bush) still see the world in the terms that were "frozen" in place at the end of World War II; the "good guys" at that point codified their relationship (the Security Council with its five anachronistic permanent members), and that's the way it's been.

But all relationships change; remember, Japan and Italy were both allies in WWII, bitter enemies a generation later. Of the five permanent, vetoing members of the Security Council, France is now pretty much irrelevant except for its vestigial veto, Russia saved from irrelevance by its nuclear arsenal, and China is still singing the "internationale". Stretched between such poles, its ideology morphed from its postwar mission to a pseudo-EU-ish stew of recursive national interests, nothing much useful happens.

In the meantime, the construct that Andrew Sullivan calls the Anglosphere - the informal group of nations that embrace liberal democracy in the sense that Ms. Kerstin describe - are getting things done. The US, UK and Oz - with the nations that admire them, including most of Eastern Europe - have a clear goal and mission. And it shows.

The Usual Suspects - There's

The Usual Suspects - There's another anti-Bush protest going on in Minneapolis today. While KARE11 says the protest is "big", the pictures show a rather small group.

They're blocking entrances to parking ramps and office buildings.

My open note to all of you: keep up the good work. Hassle working people. Make people late for work. Clutter up the sidewalks and intrude on peoples' spaces with your insipid chanting. Parade through the city in all your scraggly-goateed, tie-died, counter-social contempt for those around you; stand and croak your facile slogans in your alpaca sweaters and Volvo skirts and correctly-grayed Lutheran helmet hair. Piss off the people who are already leaning toward supporting this war - give them one more reason to go over the edge, to actually think about what's going on.

You make life so much easier.

Incidentally - Molly McMillen looks fabulous.

Tim Robbins - Peace Activist - WaPo gossip columnist Lloyd Grove on his post-Oscars encounter with "peace" activist Tim Robbins:

we said hello to him in a crush of partygoers that included his life partner, Susan Sarandon (both of them had displayed their deep commitment to nonviolence by holding up the two-fingered sign of peace at the Academy Awards). Robbins flashed a smile and jovially shook our hand -- Bob Roberts at a campaign stop. But when we mentioned that we'd had the pleasure of talking recently with 79-year-old Lenora Tomalin -- conservative Republican, George W. Bush supporter and wry observer of her daughter Sarandon -- his expression turned cold.

"Wait. You're the one who wrote about Susan's mother?"

Robbins narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips -- the secretly murderous neighbor in "Arlington Road."

"You wanted to be divisive and you caused trouble in my family," he went on -- the unjustly imprisoned banker in "The Shawshank Redemption." He added that it was especially low to have quoted Tomalin's speculation that he and Sarandon had politically "brainwashed" her grandson Jack Henry.

"At least you got Jeb Bush to call her -- that was great," Robbins spat -- the bitterly cynical studio executive in "The Player." He moved within inches and said into our ear: "If you ever write about my family again, I will [bleeping] find you and I will [bleeping] hurt you."

The War We War, Part

The War We War, Part II - Ralph Peters in the NYPost about the conduct of the war. The money quote? This bit, about the "New Stalingrad" fervor in the media:

Once our forces are ringing Baghdad, Saddam isn't going anywhere. There's no deadline on giving that bad boy the big Indian rub. If necessary - if the regime doesn't implode beforehand - the world is going to witness the first post-modern siege.

Historically, sieges could last over a year, while the population inside the city starved and died of plague. Not our style. We haven't even turned off the lights or shut off the water in Baghdad yet, and we may not do so in the future, except for limited periods and purposes.

Once the last die-hard Saddamites are corralled in Baghdad (and, perhaps, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a city that just brings out the nuclear side of my character), we're going to work 'em like history's biggest cat batting around a blind, three-legged mouse.

And what is Saddam going to do about it? We can even send in food supplies, if the population needs to be fed. Let even our enemies eat as they wait to be killed. Saddam's birthday is coming up in April. I'll pay for the cake and FedEx it myself.

Meanwhile, our national intelligence assets will be focused on one city. Saddam had better renew his subscription to "Bunker Living," because he's not coming out to play stickball. Allied special operations forces - already in Baghdad - will be prowling the hallways and alleys, taking direct action against the regime's remaining supporters, collecting information for precision strikes and working with the growing Iraqi resistance.

When the right opportunities present themselves, our forces will swoop in on pinpoint raids. And no, we're not talking about "Black Hawk Down II." Anyway, people tend to forget that, in Mogadishu, we actually won the tactical battle overwhelmingly - 20 dead Americans, a thousand dead Somali militiamen.

And he tosses in this key part, which everyone needs to remember:

Why on earth would Gen. Tommy Franks do exactly what Saddam wants, and send our forces charging into the streets of Baghdad?

We're not stupid - or Russian - for God's sake. We're not going to slug down a couple of bottles of vodka apiece and drive straight into Grozniy while Chechens pick off our tanks and troops at their leisure.

We are going to make the rules in Baghdad, not Saddam.

That's not only the most important quote of the piece - it's the most important lesson the US military learned in the last thirty years; never let the enemy pick the terms of th battle. You hear the embedded media using this scrap of military jargon, without quite understanding it: "Shaping the Battlefield". It means exactly that - using your mobility to pick the battlefield, and your firepower (especially air and helicopter) to drive the enemy into the position you want.

Rules of War - David

Rules of War - David Warren has this piece on the progress of the war so far. It's all excellent - but here's the must-read:

More, still, could have been achieved, in this very short time, had the Americans and their allies not been playing to the most exacting moral rules ever devised for warfare. They are restricted by, for instance, a general order not to engage any target at all -- including snipers and saboteurs within towns -- unless they have a clear sight of it. They allowed, for instance, a dozen Republican Guard to fire rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at Apache helicopters from the roof of a building in one location south of Baghdad, entirely unmolested, because the helicopter pilots, who could have taken them out in a few quick keystrokes, couldn't be sure of avoiding "collateral damage" to civilians who might be lurking in the building below. Giving the benefit of the doubt to surrendering soldiers cost most of the U.S. Marine casualties so far, in a single incident near Nasiriyah, as a suicide ambush was mounted under cover of white flags.

But these are details, and while the media dwell dotingly upon every individual allied casualty, in furtherance of the defeatist instincts they inherited from the 'sixties generation in Vietnam, the real issue lies in the heart of Baghdad.

There, about 20 obvious and significant targets remain untouched because of "human shields". The most effective of these shields is the Western news reporters, well over 100 of whom are exploited by what remains of Saddam's regime, often with their complicity in buying safety for themselves. These targets include even the Defence Ministry (which is used as a press briefing centre), Iraq TV (still broadcasting Saddam's propaganda stunts and messages, picked up by Al-Jazeera and distributed through the Arab and Muslim world to whip up anti-American sentiment), and the Rashid Hotel (under which the Iraqis have built their most secure bunker. There may be another under the more humble Palestine Hotel in which the lower-paid hacks are sleeping).

In the meantime, some bloggers are noting the similarities between Hussein's Saddam Fedayeen and Al Quaeda:

"We are not fighting Iraqis. We are fighting Al Qaeda now armed with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The continued operation of the Baghdad International Airport and other undisturbed egress has allowed Al Qaeda who want to leave with WMD to do so.

The ones who are left don't intend to leave. They intend to stay, fight and die. And they don't give a rip for Iraqi civilian casualties."

I'm inclined to think that:

• The Fedayeen aren't necessarily Al Quaeda, but they certainly fight from the same playbook; none of their tactics are proprietary.
• I wouldn't doubt that there are Al Quaeda, Hamas, Jamiyat-e-Islami and many other terrorists among the native Iraqis on the ground in Iraq today.

The investigation should be interesting. I'll be watching for it.

The Coalition Expands - With

The Coalition Expands - With no fanfare that I"ve heard, the US, UK and Australian Special Forces have been joined...

...by Polish Special Forces.

Oh, stop laughing. The "polish soldier" joke came from a complete misunderstanding of Poland's record in WWII, and from some ethnic bickering (mostly on the part of Germans) against Polish immigrants 100 years ago.

Poland has a long and distinguished military tradition. Even the supposed "charging tanks with lances" trope from WWII was really German propaganda, designed to cover for what was in fact a small German defeat; in fact, two companies of Polish cavalry (under Major Julian Filipowicz, as colorful a character as exists in military history) routed a battalion of German infantry, and were driven off by German armored cars. A few polish dead were posed, with ceremonial lances, next to a passing tank for propaganda purposes - and the legend was born.

Poland's army in exile fought brilliantly in WWII.

Poland is America's staunchest ally on the European continent today. We should be proud they're joining us.

Self-Aggrandizing Douchebag

Someone who's inhaled so much of their own hot air that they've started to believe their own bullshit.

Busy Day - As I

Busy Day - As I mentioned last week; the word on the Twin Cities' employment street has been "once the war starts, assuming it's not a disaster, people will start hiring again".

And as I said on Friday, I got two job-related phone calls - and today, an interview at a job I'd written off, plus a meeting for a little freelance contract that'll at least make my mortgage payment for a couple of months.

Is there a link between the stock market's biggest jump since Reagan's first term and my slightly rosier fortunes this week and the progress we're making in Iraq?

Let's hope some Green Beret made the money contact in Baghdad with the Republican Guard general at the city's back door - then we'll see.

More Moore - Michael Moore is walking talkradio/blogosphere fodder.

What's new? Too much for me to cover on my own.

Fortunately, Moorewatch does it for us. And as an added attraction - Moore himself has apparently taken to corresponding with them, and the Moorewatch folks are mixing it up with him pretty well.

Always good for a laugh.

Liberation - The New York

Liberation - The New York Post's Jonathan Foreman writes from the road to Baghdad, in a piece titled "Liberation".

Lots of fascinating slice of life shots, if the life you're living involves liberating a long-brutalized people.

During the run-up to the war, the peace movement never engaged with Iraqi exiles from here in the south or from Kurdistan in the north (where a fierce U.S.-backed uprising is again under way). Nor did it talk with any seriousness or conviction about political conditions in Saddam's Iraq, preferring instead to focus on the supposedly evil motivation of the Bush administration, the criminal "carpet bombing" that would accompany any invasion, or past mistakes in U.S. foreign policy.

The "war for oil" argument has been exploded ad nauseam, and the French and Germans have made it all too clear what a foreign policy based on cynical financial interest really looks like.

There has been no "carpet bombing," and isn't likely to be any. If anything, the U.S. Air Force will be even more discriminate in its choice of targets than it was in Desert Storm - arguably a campaign in which humanitarian considerations played a larger part than in any major war in all of human history.

(As I write on the roof of my stopped APC, I can see an allied aircraft attacking targets in the town of Samaweh - and it certainly doesn't look anything like "carpet bombing.")

Yes, America has indeed made terrible mistakes in the past, including the support provided to vicious Latin American tyrannies like the Argentine junta (though its record of torture and murder is dwarfed by that of the Saddam regime). But the liberation of Iraq is a chance to make belated good on those mistakes and more.

Read the whole thing.

Keystone Inspectors - Hans Blix

Keystone Inspectors - Hans Blix missed this one, according to the Guardian:

But the most disturbing find was two Russian-made Harith cruise missiles, each six metres (20ft) long, and nine warheads hidden in two enormous, reinforced-concrete bunkers.

Another missile, as yet unidentified, was found still in its crate.

The scale and possible implications of the weapons find took British forces by surprise and raised fresh questions about the extent of the Iraqi war machine and the ability of weapons inspectors to cope with the task of scouring such a vast country for prohibited ordnance.

The discovery of the missiles - which were stamped with the year 2002 - came as British troops from the Black Watch regiment fought to secure the area around Iraqi's second city, Basra, in preparation for the capture of the city.

Just the thing to put nerve gas over an oil terminal?

And, from the same story, in the Weapons of Mass Persuasion department:

Lieutenant Angus Watson said soldiers had found the haul when they arrived on Saturday night. "The complex is massive and we were surprised to find a lot of the kit intact, easily enough for a whole brigade," he said.

They also discovered hundreds of leaflets lying on the floor, dropped by coalition planes, urging the defenders to surrender. The leaflets, and evidence of a bombardment from the air or by artillery, appeared to have persuaded the defenders to abandon their posts without a fight.

That, or the Black Watch's bagpipes...

(Via Volokh)

Billings, Facts - Laura Billings

Billings, Facts - Laura Billings tries to chide the right about its grasp of the facts on gun control and sex education.

Perhaps the Pioneer Press should find someone who's qualified to lecture about facts, first.

One of the constant criticisms lobbed at liberals is that they base their politics on softheaded emotions rather than hard-nosed facts. So judging from two conservative initiatives introduced at the Capitol this week — a concealed carry weapons bill and another stressing abstinence-only sex ed — one has to wonder why Republican legislators have entirely overlooked all the empirical evidence against them.

One might wonder that. But one would not get any alternative from Ms. Billings, who cites no empirical evidence whatsoever.

The concealed carry weapons bill introduced on Monday by Sen. Pat Pariseau should be familiar to most of us, since it comes up nearly every session. Two years ago, it gained a bit of momentum, thanks in part to former Gov. Jesse Ventura's interest in firearms, the support of groups such as Minnesota Concealed Carry Reform Now, and letters to the editor citing the research of John Lott, author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime.''

Billings is mistaken. The bill has been gaining votes steadily for seven years, and it had very little to do with Ventura.

Lott even came to visit the members of MCCRN. You can see his picture on their Web site.

Lott's research suggesting that relaxed gun laws actually reduce crime has been a boon to the National Rifle Association and its efforts to pass "shall-issue" laws around the country, even though his methods have been called into question by criminologists from Georgetown, Emory, Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins universities.

What Ms. Billings ignores is that the "questions" from the "Criminologists" have themselves been pretty roundly trashed. Empirically.

For instance, critics of his have long wondered where he came across a "national survey" cited in his book claiming that "98 percent of the time people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.''

That's easy. It's a conclusion reached by Gary Kleck in his seminal "Point Blank", the biggest and most thorough survey of firearms use in the United States.

When Lott was asked to produce the survey, he said he'd done it himself. When Lott was asked to produce the data, he said he'd lost it in his hard drive. When critics began to question his entire methodology, confusing correlation with causation, a woman named "Mary Rosh" rose to his defense calling him "the best professor I ever had.'' Lott later revealed to the Washington Post, that Rosh was, in fact, his own alternate Internet ego.

The left's been crowing about this for the last two months, pretending that this invalidates the entire body of Lott's work.

Unfortunately for Ms. Billings' thesis, nobody's actually managed to attack Mr. Lott's conclusions, or any of the data that actually matter.

Since Lott has been largely discredited as a reliable source of information on gun policy, what do other studies say? Well, the FBI says the violent crime rate fell 25 percent between 1992 and 1998, but it dropped even more significantly — by 30 percent — in states with strict gun control laws. According to the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the violent crime rate fell by only 15 percent in states that relaxed gun control laws before 1992.

Which is true - but only because crime was already lower in "Shall Issue" states. Crime didn't have as far to fall.

And what about those claims that law-abiding citizens need guns to protect themselves from criminals? An analysis of the Texas Department of Public Safety records by the Violence Policy Center found concealed-carry permit holders were arrested for 3,370 crimes — including murder, rape, sexual assault and weapons-related charges — between January 1996 and April 2000. These "good guys" were arrested at rates 66 percent higher than the general population. But why let facts get in the way of firepower?

Indeed, Ms. Billings.

These figures are hogwash. For starters, it counts arrests, not convictions. In cases of armed self-defense, it's usually standard procedure to arrest a shooter, even though he or she is perfectly innocent. The Violence Policy Center's figures don't include the large number of "arrests" that never proceed to an indictment, much less a conviction, because the "crimes" involved are in fact justifiable uses of force.

here's some more attacks on the VPC study

Now, I love a good difference of opinion as much as anyone. Reasonable people can disagree reasonably about things.

The question: Is Laura Billings reasonable?

Exhibit A:

The same sort of thinking (or lack thereof)

"Or Lack Thereof"?

This was part of the attitude that originally started souring me on liberalism 20 years ago; "we're smart, they're dumb". The notion that anyone who disagrees with you, if you're a liberal like Laura Billings, would seem to be too comical to be worth contempt.

...is at work in the bill that passed the House Education Policy Committee on Tuesday calling for an emphasis in sex education on abstinence until marriage. Proponents of the bill fear it would confuse kids to teach them that abstinence is the preferred way to prevent pregnancy and STDs while also educating them about contraception and the like. (Or as Rep. Mark Olson, R-Big Lake, put it, the latter method may destroy "young ladies' modesty.'')

Too bad these concerned legislators didn't consult the Minnesota Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Prevention and Parenting, whose survey in 2000 found that 78 percent of Minnesota parents don't believe a comprehensive approach to sex ed — teaching both abstinence and contraception — sends a mixed message. In fact, 93 percent of them agree it gives kids the information they need to make responsible choices.

Reading their survey begs the question: how did these parents get their opinions? What parents were they? Why do they believe what they do? How were they selected?

But why bother finding out what parents think? Abstinence-only education is hot these days, and 86 percent of school districts with policies to teach sex ed require abstinence to be promoted. It's so popular, in fact, there are now three federal programs dedicated to funding restrictive abstinence-only education, and no federal programs dedicated to supporting comprehensive sex ed, even though that's the curriculum favored by three-quarters of parents in the U.S. and in Minnesota.

Which begs too many questions to even list: Why is sex ed a public school issue? Since it's rightfully the parents' job, why is the public school system endorsing any view of sex ed, much less a "comprehensive" view?

Does the abstinence-only approach actually work? After years of study, a 2001 Surgeon General report and the sources from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy say such programs have not been shown to delay teenage sexual activity. They simply make it more likely that kids will neglect to use condoms or other contraceptives when they become sexually active, putting them at greater risk for STDs, HIV and unplanned pregnancy.

Question: Did the Surgeon General's report and the "National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy" control for the messages the teens were presented about sexuality from the media and Hollywood?

Because I'd have to wonder if any form of sex education would have an effect against the glamorization of sex that our kids are exposed to.

Given how emotional both of these issues have been in the Legislature in the past, it's unlikely we'll hear much logical discussion on the topics this session.

After all, why let the cold hard facts get in the way of a really hot argument?

Ask us when you've presented any "Cold Hard Facts", Ms. Billings. In this column, you've presented references to debunked criminologists, a Violence Policy Center study that's been pretty thoroughly trashed, and a glorified opinion poll.

The Way We War -

The Way We War - Elder at Fraters Libertas asks:

Where are the massive B-52 strikes? If our troops are encountering resistance we should not hesitate to use any and all force available to us. To do otherwise and expose our forces to unnecessary danger is not acceptable.

Let's assume for a moment that we're hearing a significant part of the truth from CENTCOM's briefings.

From what the UK's general Wall said today, the actual spearhead of the advance is meeting mainly empty positions and abandoned equipment - one of the reasons we're not taking the hordes of prisoners we did in '91 is that the troops, in their own country rather than cut off in Kuwait, are simply deserting rather than surrendering.

Also according to Wall, the troops that ARE resisting are doing it in populated areas, thoroughly intermingled with civilians. I have to wonder if the Saddam Fedayeen didn't watch Blackhawk Down, and note the public relations nightmare that accompanied that brutal streetfight. In any case - loosing the BUFFs against enemy troops holed up among civilians is a war crimes fiasco waiting to happen.

On the other hand, Elder says:

We should also distribute the video of our POWs and dead soldiers to all coalition forces as a sobering reminder of the consequences of losing and the intentions of the enemy.

I think you can count on two things:

• The military will make this an object lesson in navigation and convoy security, among other things, and
• the military's rumor mill, especially among enlisted troops, will get the word around faster than CNN could.

First it was another Brit officer - and now, the networks are predicting we'll be on the outskirts of Baghdad in two days.

Amazing, if true.

Malmédy - In December of

Malmédy - In December of 1944, Hitler launched his "last gasp" attack, the Battle of the Bulge. The attack was spearheaded by the SS - the Nazi Party's private army. The point of the spearhead was Kampfgruppe Peiper, a specially-trained brigade of SS stormtroopers led by SS Colonel Joachim Peiper, like many of his men a grizzled veteran of the Russian Front and its horridly brutal combat. The elite of Germany's armored elite, they were a ruthless bunch of soldiers. In "A Time of Trumpets", Charles MacDonald quoted one of Peiper's company commanders: "I am not giving you orders to shoot prisoners of war, but you are all well-trained SS soldiers."

On December 17, 1944, the second day of the Bulge offensive, Peiper's troops had broken through the American front lines, and were overrunning American rear-area units. Near the village of Malmédy, Belgium, they captured a mixed bag of US supply soldiers, truck drivers and others. Their mission - charge through the American rear area, destroying all in their path and raising havoc - didn't include caring for prisoners of war. They rounded the American troops up in an open field and machine-gunned them. At least 80 were confirmed killed, although many Americans managed to escape by running or playing dead as SS troopers wandered among the bodies shooting those showing signs of life.

Word got out, of course. Americans stopped surrendering. They slipped into the woods rather than give up to the SS, and continued the fight. And American units facing Peiper stiffened their resolve, slowing him down at every turn in the dense Ardennes woods, even with a roadblock of blazing fuel (the fuel Peiper had counted on to keep his diesel-starved unit moving), until Peiper's unit ran out of fuel at the high-water mark of the Bulge.

Today's atrocities, apparently commited by Hussein's version of SS, the Saddam Fedayeen, may have the same effect on US and UK resolve. I suspect you'll see a lot of "Remember Nasiriyeh" signs out on the front.

And I have to wonder - maybe that was the Iraqis' whole purpose. Their leadership - whatever there is of it - can't be liking the images that are getting out in the Western media - Iraqi children cadging food off advancing Marines, old men thanking Allah for our arrival...

What better than to make us suspicious of all Iraqis? It's a desperate act - and these are desperate men.

I think these atrocities - expected as they are in this sort of fluid situation - will backfire on the Iraqi military. The challenge (in my utterly unqualified opinion) is to keep it from backfiring even worse on the Iraqi people, with the political costs that'd accompany it.

Comparison - The media took

Comparison - The media took note of the incident at yesterday's pro liberation rally - the one I noted yesterday, where a small number of meatheads in the crowd booed the Moslem woman who broached the subject of US relations with the Arab world.

The only speaker who received a hostile reception was N. Ruby Zigrino, a Muslim from Minneapolis. She was initially cheered when she said she supports "ousting a tyrant regime."

But she then read passages from the Qur'an, suggested that a new Marshall Plan will be needed in Iraq, and said administration officials should study foreign-policy failures to avoid repeating them.

Her listeners responded with boos and shouts of "Screw Muslims!" "Screw the Qur'an!" and "Go home!"

Yep - I, as a pro-liberation conservative - was ashamed of that part (maybe 10%, at the very most) of the crowd, and condemn their meatheaded mobthink.

But there's something good to chew on here, too: the organizers of the pro-liberation rally had the cojones to book a speaker that did color outside the lines, that did challenge the crowd's groupthink.

The same could not be said of the rally at MacAlester. None of the speakers that I heard urged any though on behalf of the tortured and butchered Iraqi people, Hussein's biggest victims. Had anyone done so, I doubt that they'd have been able to continue. That crowd knew what it wanted to hear, too - and unlike Col. Reppya (organizer of the capitol rally), they gave it to them with no challenges or embellishments.

Blinding Flash - of Epipany!

Blinding Flash - of Epipany! - An American "peace protester", in Iraq on Human Shield duty, saw the light before he fled to Jordan today:

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

This may be my single favorite paragraph from this war so far. I wish I could have pasted it on a sign at the rallies today.

Next week for sure.

The Other Protest

I figure there were about 1/4 as many people at the MacAlester protest. As I arrived, they were marching west down Grand Avenue toward the MacAlester quadrangle. The march was led by a loudspeaker truck at the front of a group of a couple hundred Peace Youth. A doughy fella with a very grating voice was leading the Peace Youth in the usual chants - some of them very ornate, of the type that bespeaks lots of prep time. They filed into the Quad to sit and listen to scads of folk musicians who looked as if they'd been transplanted from the '60s - and at least one speaker who actually had been, Jerry Rachleff from MacAlester College.

I wish I'd had either a digital camera or a notepad with me.

• I've observed for the last few weeks that this movement is more about Bush than the war. Looking at the signs in the march, I'd say I was pretty close to the truth.
• Worst sign of the day (with many honorable mentions): "An Imposed Democracy is Dictatorship". Hmm. Please someone tell the Germans, Japanese and Italians.
• Open note to the group of "Native American" Dancers; please do try to learn to dance less like whitebread college kids. It's culturally unbecoming.
• Again, nobody took of their clothes, or defecated. On the other hand, when I got back to my car (on residential Lincoln Avenue), someone had spat on the back seat window, above my little trove of "Liberate Iraq" signs. Classy.
• I was standing in front of Dunn Brothers Coffee when a group of pro-liberation protesters marched by at the tail end of the parade. I heard one Mac student say to the other "they deserve to get beaten up!". Peace, indeed.
• One protester - a college kid who seemed to need Vitamin D - carried a placard with a picture of Paul Wellstone, with a one-word caption: "Accident?"
• Wellstone was very much in evidence at the rally; old green Wellstone campaign posters were all over the place. There was also a table where a woman handed out sheets of photocopied paper with various Wellstone sayings on them. "They're Free!" she told passersby. The backdrop for the table, and one of the handouts, read:

  Paul Wellstone:
  "May your strength give us strength,
  may your faith give us faith,
  may your hope give us hope,
  may your love give us love"
  Bruce Springsteen, "Into The Fire".

  I stood there for a moment, dumfounded, trying to figure what, if anything, to say to the woman; the song (a very important one to me lately) is an elegy to the NYC firemen who died in the World Trade Center. I opened my mouth, but the words just didn't come out.

I'd welcome your observations from either rally.

Protest - They were saying

Protest - They were saying 20,000 people attended the rally at the capitol today.

I wandered through the crowd. During the course of the beautiful afternoon, I must have cased the entire Capitol Mall. I stood up under the dais, and back across Constitution Avenue talking with a very outnumbered band of protesters.

It was a beautiful sight.

And unlike the Anti-Bush demonstrations plagueing so many cities, nobody took their clothes off; nobody pooped on the Capitol steps; nobody blocked traffic or spit on anyone; nobody threw eggs or fake blood or generally disgraced their parents.

No, it was pretty workadaddy, huggamommy Minnesota polite. Mostly. More on that later.

But not all was perfect. A Moslem woman - who, according to one event volunteer, was as pro-intervention as any ex-Marine in attendance - was booed for trying to bring a little moral and political nuance to the proceedings. Talking about trying to mend fences with the Arab world earned her a round of catcalls and "U.S.A, U.S.A"s that nearly drove her from the stage, bringing the MC to the mic to calm the crowd (or at least a rather loud part of it) into order. Not a great moment for Minnesota Nice, or Minnesota Smart for that matter.

On the other hand, the tiny pack of anti-Bush protesters didn't do a whole lot better. About of dozen of them - college kids and some fiftyish ones - stood across Constitution Avenue from the Mall, carrying signs and, occasionally, heckling. As I got to the demonstration, the Moslem woman had just begun speaking. She said something in support of the war, and one of the students barked out, taking her voice, "...a war that's killing my Moslem Brothers".

Coming back at the end of the rally, the police and Highway Patrol were keeping the anti-Bush protesters apart from a small gaggle of pro-liberation demonstrators (which grew rapidly). The "conversation" degenerated rapidly into slogans on both sides before either side could get to the essential illogic of the other. You can't win 'em all.

I'm on my way to MacAlester now, where rumor had it there's an Anti-Bush protest going on. A group of pro-liberation protesters wanted to put in an appearance. We'll see.

Rally - I'm on my

Rally - I'm on my way to the big rally at the Capitol. Noon to 2PM.

Hope to see you there.

Quote Of the Day - Yesterday Edition - Sullivan from yesterday's Daily Dish:

It's really wonderful to watch apologists for inaction now have to watch as action defeats evil. They will change the subject; they will attack those who got this entire story right while they got it entirely wrong. But they will never reconsider... The forces of evil are being dealt a terrible blow on the battle-field. But their chattering enablers are about to be politically annihilated.

Site of the Apocalypse?

Perhaps the most interesting feedback I've gotten on the redesign came from Plain Layne:

Once upon a time life was comprised of three certainties -- death, taxes, and the unremittingly earth-toned palette of Shot in the Dark. Except it's not unremittingly earth-toned anymore. Mitch has implemented a custom masthead graphic and enough touchy-feely blue to make Kofi Annan proud. What next, product placements for Martha Stewart? This must be the beginning of the end...

Hey, what's wrong with earth tones? My old site design reminded me of every apartment I had when i was single the first time.

But seriously, thanks to everyone for the very kind feedback!

Another Quote Of The Day

Another Quote Of The Day - "“Oh no. They’re surrendering at us from all sides.” -- British Royal Marine Commando, quoted in The Times as the Al Faw garrison performed a human wave surrender..

Catholics - I rarely get

Catholics - I rarely get as much feedback as I did when I tackled the Catholic notion of the just war, and the Catholic Bishops' and Pope's positions on war, the the catholic concept of the Just War.

It's clear the most American catholics disagree with the Pope - as Jason Lewis said the other night, "even if you are a Catholic, the Pope is not infallible on matters of politics".

So this article, in The Tablet (a British theological magazine) on catholic Americans' dual loyalties, is interesting:

Many of those outside St Perpetua’s [the pseudonym chosen for the Long Island parish the magazine visited] wore little metal lapel pins of the stars and stripes, and they told me they were prouder to be Americans now than for many years. No one I spoke to doubted the justice of the American cause, although some worried about the consequences; all seemed braced by churchgoing for the fight. “If it’s a crusade, then it’s got be our crusade”, said one youngish mother. And a thoughtful middle-aged man told me: “You know, throughout history, standing up to evil has been the Catholic way.”

But it is not a way endorsed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which recently pronounced that this war did not and “would not meet the strict conditions of Catholic teaching for the use of military force”. It is a way forbidden by the Vatican, which calls the war “a crime against peace”, and which sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to warn Bush off. The cardinal issued a statement boasting that there is “great unity on this grave matter on the part of the Holy See, the bishops in the United States, and the Church throughout the world”; the White House riposte was that the war “would make the world better”, and that the President’s first duty was to protect his people.

Still, a quarter of his people are Catholics. Must not the enmity of their Communion to the President’s great enterprise impede it, or at least threaten his hold on half the Catholic vote?

Well, no. Dan Bartlett, Bush’s communications director, shrugs off the Church’s condemnation of the war: “There are many Catholics who support it; I am one of them.” Polls showed American Catholics in favour of a unilateral assault on Iraq by two to one: much the same proportion as non-Catholics. Laghi is right that the Pope and his bishops stand united against the war. But this episcopal unity does not matter. For most American Catholics the dilemma of divided loyalty is simply not much of a dilemma.

I love this next part:

ohn Paul, despite his approval of forcible intervention in East Timor and Bosnia, is widely perceived as a pacifist, and therefore not a serious commentator. “It’s the Pope’s job to shake his head over the wicked way of the world”, I was told by another white-haired, loyal worshipper at another parish, forthright and cheerful in sensible shoes and medal of Lourdes. “And it’s our job to do something about it.”

And with that remark we come to the core of the matter.

It has often been observed that American Catholics sound more like American Baptists or Presbyterians than like Old World Catholics. They share with their Protestant compatriots an intensely privatised religiosity, an intensely privatised conscience. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, has given an amazing interview to the National Catholic Reporter explaining that, despite her views on women priests and abortion, she remains a conservative Catholic because she enjoyed a “strict upbringing in a Catholic home where the fundamental belief was that God gave us all a free will and we were accountable for that, each of us”. In the United States, that does not seem an eccentric definition of Catholicism.

I'm not in the least bit Catholic - although the main governing body of my church, the Presbyterians, may be farther to the left than the American Bishops, and unlike the Catholics, may have a congregation to match. Which is interesting - mainstream Catholics in the US are probably more unabashedly pro-liberation as a group than are most mainstream Presbyterians and Methodists, whose leaderships aren't as irredeemably anti-war as the Pope and the Bishops.

It's a never-ending conflict.

(Via Sullivan)

Attention, Anti-Bush Protestors - This,

Attention, Anti-Bush Protestors - This, from today's Sullivan:

"You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious... I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave.

Welcome to the world.

Allies - Australian forces are

Allies - Australian forces are in action in Iraq:

General Cosgrove (an Australian Military spokesman said RAAF F-18) Hornets were continuing to escort coalition planes, including airborne early warning aircraft and air-to-air refuellers above Iraq.

General Cosgrove said they were currently flying 12 sorties a day.

"And while they have had some close encounters with enemy anti-aircraft artillery ... none of our aircraft have been hit and they've all completed their missions," he said.

Gen Cosgrove also said a contingent of SAS [Australian Special Air Service - their special forces] troopers had engaged in a firefight with Iraqi soldiers in a command post which they discovered deep inside Iraq.

He said the SAS soldiers had been on a reconaissance mission when they came across the concealed command and control post.

"I'm delighted - relieved - to report that there were no Australian casualties," Gen Cosgrove said.

SAS troops gave first aid to Iraqi soldiers injured in a skirmish in the opening stages of the war, Gen Cosgrove said.

He said Australia's special forces had been involved in four battles since the war began and there had been no Australian casualties.

Some people on the left sneer that we only have two allies. When you remind them that we actually have 45 allies, they sneer a little harder "well, only two are supplying troops".

Hm. During the Cold War, at times it was just us.

With allies like the UK and Oz, I don't feel so bad at all. Andrew Sullivan calls this new axis the "Anglosphere" - a loose union of people based not on the English language, but on the English legal and political traditions of rule of law and due process.

More on the war tomorrow.

Benefits of War? - I've

Benefits of War? - I've been job-hunting since early January.

Since Tuesday, I've come across more job leads than I found in all of February together.

And since the attack on Iraq started, something that's not happened in over a year - a potential employer actually called me.

Two of them.

Hmmm... - Word has it

Hmmm... - Word has it that an entire Iraqi division, the 51st, has surrendered en masse in the Basra area.

On CNN, one talking head was commenting on the processing of these huge groups of prisoners. According to the head, the officers will be allowed to keep their sidearms after the grunts are disarmed. They're allowed to stay in their barracks, with a small group of Americans/Brits/whomever to watch over them. The US is trying, the talking head says, to avoid having camps full of POWs to clothe, feed and secure.

Before the war, many pundits said it'd take hundreds of thousands of workers to rebuild Iraq. So here's what I'm wondering; might the US be keeping the Iraqi regular army (as opposed to the Repubican Guards and Special Guards) in some state of being?

Think about it - in Iraq today, there are no institutions other than the Ba'ath Party and the military. The Ba'ath's days are rather strictly numbered, of course - but I'm wondering if there might be a benefit to keeping the one, solitary nationwide non-Ba'ath institution going as both a coherent, relatively disciplined labor force on the on hand, and a unifying piece of psychological and social infrastructure on the other?

Goodman - Ellen Goodman's latest

Goodman - Ellen Goodman's latest column from the Boston Glob is a keeper.

For all the wrong reasons, of course.

In this column, she covers new territory - attacking conservativetalkradio. The funniest quote of the lot is at the end:

We go into this war carrying the casualties of the prewar season: a kitbag of half-truths. What medium is now black and white and yellow all over? Stay tuned.

That, of course, after this column:

BOSTON -- This is how I spent the week before the war. Driving across the Florida landscape, locked in the alternate universe of talk radio.

I tuned in as an act of professional penance, and I'm sorry now that I didn't take my hands off the wheel to make notes.

Some straight lines are just. Too. Easy.

But I took away lasting memories of propaganda, a souvenir list of fact-free opinions delivered by a cast of angry baritones.

But since Ellen didn't take notes, we don't know what facts they lacked, or indeed what voices they were. We'll just have to take her word for it.

Somewhere between Orlando and Tampa, a host spent the morning touting the discovery of an Iraqi drone as the smoking gun in the case against Iraq. Reporters on the scene would describe this drone as a "weed whacker with wings."

Ellen Goodman's world is much like ours except that conservative stances never have any context.

There was another host, somewhere between Tampa and Fort Myers, who took antiwar women's groups angrily to task on the grounds that the women of Iraq were bitterly oppressed. He didn't seem to know that Iraq -- which surely oppresses both genders -- is a secular state where women are more equal than among our friends the Saudis.

Good thing I'm not driving.

That's right, Ms. Goodman - within the context of a society that has killed a million of its own citizens, imprisons political prisoners by the tens of thousands,where the secret police feed dissidents into plastic shredders as their families look on in mute horror, where wives and daughters are systematically raped by the secret police as their husbands and fathers are forced to watch (and as all wait to be murdered), where the government starves the peasantry to pay for rebuilding the military he squandered in 1991 - yes, Ellen, within that context, women are equal. In the same manner that men and women on a deflating life raft are equal.

On the last lap between Fort Myers and Naples, there was the assertion, repeated again and again, that Saddam was somewhere behind the terrorism of Sept. 11. Never mind that the CIA disagrees.

Never mind that it's irrelevant.

I am normally protected from talk radio by my day job, but it was no surprise that the hosts were all right-wing. That is, by now, a given. Some venture capitalists are trying to start a left-leaning network, but today it's as if one medium has been thoroughly ceded to the right, and in this case pro-war, wing.

Why is it that the left never analyses that fact beyond its most facile level? Why has an entire subdivision of the American media swung to the right?

It's worth a whole 'nother post to explain to the likes of Ellen Goodman why conservative voices came to revitalize an entirely moribund band of the radio dial; it'll take me hours to write up all the reasons. But one big one is this: to have a place free of Ellen Goodman!.

And her ilk, of course.

Remember reading about the Spanish-American War in 1898? Publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer built a war constituency and circulation in symbiotic frenzy with headlines like "The Country Thrilled with War Fever." According to legend, William Randolph Hearst sent a telegram to his reporter that said, "You supply the pictures and I'll supply the war."

EXACTLY, Ellen Goodman!

The news media of 100 years ago was intrinsically biased, in the pockets of a small number of influential interests. They were unchecked by any independen media - even an opposing, equally-yellow one.

Had they had a "liberal talk-broadsheet" 100 years ago, perhaps the influence of the Hearsts and Pulitzers would have been ameliorated!

Today newspapers fret over ethics and hire ombudsmen and run correction boxes. The New York Post may blast the French and Germans with the headline "Axis of Weasel." But most of us have a "one hand" and "the other hand" and often wring them.

And after a day of hand-wringing and ombudsing, the mainstream media still considers Nina Totenberg and the New York Times "objective" and "mainstream", but labels John Stossel and Fox News "conservative".

See the problem, here?

I am not saying that this is Talk Radio's War. It's not. It's this administration's war and will be, like it or not, this country's war. There has been enough reason for knowledgeable people with strong moral sensibilities to disagree about the short-term and long-run gains, about the risks of war and the risks of delay.

But talk radio has followed the leader. That leader, George W. Bush, has openly rejected nuance, embraced simplicity, applied spin when facts were enough. He has stayed "on message," unembarrassed to tell us that "I don't see many shades of gray in this world." So too talk radio, a medium that is equally black and white, us and them, good and evil. Talk radio has become the Bush National Radio Network, a support system for the pro-war movement.

Absent, of course, is that the mainstream media were unabashedly pro-Clinton, when he was in office. Absent, of course, the vacuous illogic the "mainstream" media tossed at Ronald Reagan - unsuccessfully - during his presidency.

Present, however, is all of the numbing arrogance that led to the rise of conservativetalkradio in the first place.

McCain - The National Review

McCain - The National Review (via Reding and Sgt. Stryker) has this wonderful speech by Senator McCain, responding to Robert Byrd's (Klan, WV) anti-Bush speech:

Madam President, there is one thing I am sure of, that we will find the Iraqi people have been the victims of an incredible level of brutalization, terror, murder, and every other kind of disgraceful and distasteful oppression on the part of Saddam Hussein's regime. And contrary to the assertion of the senator from West Virginia, when the people of Iraq are liberated, we will again have written another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America, that we will fight for the freedom of other citizens of the world, and we again assert the most glorious phrase, in my view, ever written in the English language; and that is: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The people of Iraq , for the first time, will be able to realize those inalienable rights. I am proud of the United States of America. I am proud of the leadership of the president of the United States.

It is not an easy decision to send America's young men and women into harm's way. As I said before, some of them will not be returning. But to somehow assert, as some do, that the people of Iraq and the Middle East are not entitled to those same God-given rights that Americans and people all over the country are, that they do not have those same hopes and dreams and aspirations our own citizens do, to me, is a degree of condescension. I might even use stronger language than that to describe it. So I respectfully disagree with the remarks of the senator from West Virginia. I believe the president of the United States has done everything necessary and has exercised every option short of war, which has led us to the point we are today.

I believe that, obviously, we will remove a threat to America's national security because we will find there are still massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Although Theodore Roosevelt is my hero and role model, I also, in many ways, am Wilsonian in the respect that America, this great nation of ours, will again contribute to the freedom and liberty of an oppressed people who otherwise never might enjoy those freedoms.

So perhaps the senator from West Virginia is right. I do not think so. Events will prove one of us correct in the next few days. But I rely on history as my guide to the future, and history shows us, unequivocally, that this nation has stood for freedom and democracy, even at the risk and loss of American lives, so that all might enjoy the same privileges or have the opportunity to someday enjoy the same privileges as we do in this noble experiment called the United States of America.

A commentator on Reding's site asked Jay "So all it takes for McCain to get back on your good side is one war-mongering remark? After running his name through the mud for his clearly unacceptable 10-15% annual rating of dissent from the ranks of the GOP leadership, you're willing to forgive him just for one blast of Robert Byrd?"

On this issue, on this day? Yes.

Victory - No, not in

Victory - No, not in Iraq, but for me, almost as much fun to announce.

"AntiSmoking Youth"...er, I mean, Target Market", is shutting down.

"I think there's a very strong feeling of resignation among staff members," said Toni Wehman, the group's press secretary.

The future of the group has been uncertain since February, when Gov. Tim Pawlenty proposed draining the state's $446 million tobacco endowment to help fix the state's $4.2 billion budget deficit.

The endowment is the group's sole funding source. The Legislature must still approve Pawlenty's plan, but Health Department officials have decided it's a foregone conclusion.

"Even if the endowment isn't used in its entirety, there still won't be money to fund a statewide youth program," said John Stieger, department spokesman.

As a Minnesota taxpayer for whom the Tobacco Lawsuit was ostensibly intended to refund excessive healthcare costs, and who saw millions poured down black holes like "Target Market", all I can say is "Thanks, Governor Pawlenty".

Banner Day - Thanks for

Banner Day - Thanks for all the kind comments so far on the redesign. It's encouraging!

A few people did ask me what are all those pictures, and why are they there? Happy to oblige:

• The Missing Man formation. Symbolizes loss - but also vengeance. Those aren't white doves flying in formation.
• The Minnesota State Capitol. I love politics here in Minnesota, and I love Saint Paul, even though Saint Paul tends not to love Republicans.
• The Replacements. Because if you ever played in a garage band (and oh, lordy, did I play in garage bands) they were the great sign of hope. Plus Tim is one of my favorite records ever.
• A Hawker Hurricane. Or, as one correspondent asked, "A Hawker Hurricane"? OK, it's obscure; I'm a huge Winston Churchill buff. And the Hawker Hurricane was 2/3 of the Royal Air Force in 1940, and scored 2/3 of the air-to-air kills in the Battle of Britain - a battle that arguably saved western civilization. It was the unsung underdog, not only the the battles of that summer 63 years ago - but of the whole war. Paul Gallico wrote a classic book on the subject that made the case - read it if you can find it.
• Me and the kids. It's an old picture - I don't look that bad anymore. (Do I?)
• The Flag.

You ask, I answer!

Pro-America, Pro-Liberation Rally- Saturday, noon

Pro-America, Pro-Liberation Rally- Saturday, noon to 2PM at the Capitol.

I will be there, in the crowd with, I hope, the rest of you.

Fellow MN Bloggers - anyone planning on attending? It'd be fun to have a blog corner, maybe get some pictures.

Write Me, let's talk.

Decapitation? - Reports are bouncing

Decapitation? - Reports are bouncing about the 'net that Hussein may have bought it,, or at least be incommunicado and not directing his military.

UPDATE: OK, maybe not.

Payoff - For two months,

Payoff - For two months, Israel's Debka, the "Drudge Report of the Defense world", has been reporting that US, UK, Australian and Jordanian special and psyops forces have been engaged in trying to get Iraqi units primed to surrender en masse when the balloon goes up.

Today - according to NPR via Jay Reding, it may be working. The report is uncomfirmed, of course, but gives us hope that we can avoid some of the bloodletting that happened 12 years ago.

Some Dare Call It High

Some Dare Call It High Drama - Do you remember the good ol' days of the Clinton Administration, when some that even we Republicans called "people with issues" circulated lists of involved conspiracies involving the Clinton Administration? It spawned a sub-genre of comedy for a while - the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy of Dittoheaded Diggers after Skullduggerous Plots. Vince Foster and Ron Brown were exhumed - rhetorically, anyway - enough times to cast a thousand "Nights of the Living Dead".

But the beginning of the war has brought out the real experts.

Bill Berkowitz is a writer for "Working For Change". which describes him as "Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right."

A simple search gives a more complete picture; Berkowitz is a fulltime purveyor of conspiracy theories about conservatives.

This article's been making the rounds among some of my left-of-center friends:

War with Iraq opens door for accusations that continuing protests are anti-American and un-patriotic

ABCNEWS reported on March 18 that "the government will begin detaining dozens of suspected Saddam Hussein sympathizers in at least five U.S. cities this week.

According to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, "Iraqi state agents, Iraqi surrogate groups, other regional extremist organizations and ad hoc groups, and disgruntled individuals may use this time period to conduct terrorist attacks against the United States and our interests either here or abroad."

Note the context: Berkowitz mentions perfectly legitimate counter-terror investigation of potential Iraqi agents in the US, to link it later in the article to the anti-war movement - trying to buy martyrdom by association.

What will happen to the US anti-war movement when the bombs start falling on Iraq?

As Paul Loeb and Geov Parrish recently wrote on this site, before the 1991 Gulf War "major protests surged through American and European cities, hoping to stop the war before it started. But once the war began, mainstream debate over the wisdom of war quickly became supplanted by the insistence that anything other than relentless cheerleading was disloyal to the troops -- and to the country."

Berkowitz's memory is both selective and defective.

Yes, the mainstream opinion turned against the protestors - because Americans supported the war! Absolutely nothing guarantees the protestor an easy time or instant acceptance by the majority!

If massive protests continue after U.S. bombs start pounding Iraq, expect the anti-war movement to be lambasted by President Bush's pro-war minions. Radio and television pundits will crank up the volume, labeling protests un-patriotic and anti-American. Some may equate dissent with treason. Expect long-winded one-sided debates on the Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNN focusing on the nature of treason.

Because debating is what they do! Especially when they can't fill their schedules with actual news - as we're seeing now.

With even the mildest Congressional condemnation of war with Iraq stifled, the Bush Administration will take advantage of a jingoist climate and try and rush through the Justice Department's newly drafted "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," aka PATRIOT Act II. This draconian measure would expand the government's powers to gather intelligence on the home front; increased surveillance and the prosecution of American citizens could become the order of the day.

And herein lies Berkowitz' only legitimate point - we do have to be vigilant about our civil liberties.

Over the past few months, as the US moved closer to war, pro-war columnists and radio and television gas bags began a campaign to demonize protesters, labeling them anti-American, Communists, or apologists for Hussein.

Berkowitz is being incredibly disingenous. The "gas bags" (name-calling does wonders for your credibilty, Berkster!) did a lot more than "label" the organizers of the protests. They did what any good journalist does - they traced the paper trail. They followed the money.

In the case of the Anti-Bush protest movement, they linked the organizers of the biggest wave of protests - A.N.S.W.E.R. - had their pro-dictatorship records fairly clearly exposed, and their links to the Stalinist "World Workers' Party" exposed. This is not "Labelling", this is "prosecution"!

Berkowitz is wrapping the protestors in a mantle of victimhood. It doesn't go with the blood on their shoes.

Religious people and groups speaking out against the war, Hollywood celebrities, dissenting academics, "human shields" in Iraq, people committed to non-violent civil disobedience, and the all-too-few-but-gutsy politicians have all come under fire from pro-Bush critics.

Yes, indeed - they have.

Critics - on talk radio, the blogosphere, and all over - have criticized these groups for their faulty logic, the hypocrisies of their stances, and the skeletons in their respective closets. It's a "target rich environment", in the parlance of the day.

# For quite some time, the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly has been saying that dissent reflects America's freedom of expression before the advent of hostilities -- but after the war starts, anti-war protesters should take their signs and go home.

Yes. It's one man's opinion. O'Reilly is an entertainer, whose medium is yammering about the news. Neither he nor any of the other convenient conservative boogeymen - Limbaugh, Hannity, Jason Lewis - has any more mindshare than the public is willing to give them. Just like Mr. Berkowitz. People vote with their feet - and remotes. And they are speaking, today.

On a recent edition of his nightly program, O'Reilly said that "Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can't do that, just shut up. Americans, and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me.

"Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand and others who see the world as you do. I don't want to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this, well, let's just say you will be spotlighted. Talking points invites all points of view and believes vigorous debate strengthens the country, but once decisions have been made and lives are on the line, patriotism must be factored in."

OK, Mr. Berkowitz - so what?

It's an opinion, in a medium that thrives on controversy. Turn the channel!

# In early March, Fox News reported that Senator Lindsay Graham had asked Attorney General John Ashcroft "to provide him with a legal assessment of those Americans headed to or already in Iraq to offer themselves as 'human shields.'" Graham compared Americans acting as human shields with John Walker Lindh.

"It is my opinion that any American who voluntarily engages in conduct to impede a potential American military operation, and who thereby endangers the lives of our nation's men and women in uniform, is participating in a program designed to weaken the power of the United States to wage war successfully. I strongly believe efforts to impede a potential military operation against Iraq should be strongly dealt with and I am seeking your assistance in this matter."

Yep. There are laws against giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Don't like them? Get them changed. It's a free country.

A recent column by conservative columnist Michelle Malkin echoed Senator Graham's sentiments: "What color is a human shield?" Malkin writes. "Crayola needs to invent a new hue weaker than lemonade and paler than jaundice: Traitor Yellow." Malkin says that the human shields are as "willfully treacherous as American al Qaeda enemy combatant John Walker Lindh. The only place that's fit for these stateless turncoats to call home is a detainee bunk bed at Guantanamo Bay."

Mr. Berkowitz - the last I checked, the lovely and talented Michelle Malkin's writings do not, as yet, have the force of law.

We're still allowed opinions.

Right?

# In "An Open Letter To The Hollywood Bunch" dated March 4, the Nashville-based country western singer Charlie Daniels wrote: "Sean Penn, you're a traitor to the United States of America. You gave aid and comfort to the enemy. How many American lives will your little, 'fact finding trip' to Iraq cost? You encouraged Saddam to think that we didn't have the stomach for war."

And...?

So Charlie Daniels disapproves of your side. So burn his albums in a furor of righteous indignation, and sin no more!

# As demonstrators were preparing for the February 15th anti-war rally march in New York City, the conservative New York Sun ran an editorial referring readers to Article III in the Constitution which says, "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." The editorial suggested that "'anti-war' protesters -- we prefer to call them protesters against freeing Iraq -- are giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein."

Indeed they are. But you, I, and the Sun all know that it's not actionable as Treason. So relax.

# The Web site of Michael Savage, host of a popular daily talk-radio show and a weekly television program on MSNBC, features a banner headline: "The Sedition Act -- Time to Act. Time to Arrest the Leaders of the Anti-War Movement, Once we Go To War? We Must Protect Our Troops! Sponsor The Paul Revere Society!"

Yep. Michael "Weiner" Savage is another entertainer. He earns his keep by provoking people. That's what he's doing.

Although right wing hectoring has not deterred the anti-war movement, you can bet that folks like Richard Perle, who recently labeled journalist Seymour Hersh "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist"; Ann Coulter, whose new book -- set to be published sometime this spring -- is called "Treason"; and talk-radio's Rush Limbaugh and Savage will crank out the vitriol. In the name of "patriotism," their goal will be to silence dissent.

Really?

Because I think their goal is to get ratings and sell books, by simultaneously provoking and givng voice to the opinions of their listeners and readers.

And again - none of it has the force of law!

And while the Bush administration has repeatedly portrayed anti-war protests as evidence of our very freedom, the US has in equal measure a history of suppression of dissent. Between 1917 and 1919, Congress passed legislation aimed at suppressing all forms of dissent....According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001, these laws were "vaguely worded and broadly interpreted, [and] they resulted in over 2,000 prosecutions, mostly against radicals and the radical press."

Indeed. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were grave mistakes. They were also 85 years ago, and at a time when the media was thoroughly pro-government, and only sporadically performed its function as a counterbalance to government excesses.

Can you say that's true today?

A mid-March report by United Press International pointed out that "The most contentious provisions in the draft [of Patriot Act II] would allow the government to collect DNA from suspected terrorists or other individuals involved in terror investigations, and the power to revoke the citizenship of, and deport, naturalized citizens suspected of terror activities or of providing 'material support' to terrorist groups."

Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Oakland, Ca-based Independent Institute told UPI, "In my mind, if that doesn't absolutely epitomize totalitarianism I would like to know what does. They can categorize the most innocent action -- from signing a petition or making a charitable contribution -- as an act of terrorism."

Americans who care about democracy and civil liberties need to make sure Higg's nightmarish vision does not become reality.

Indeed. And those same Americans need to make sure that the rhetoric of the Anti-Bush left doesn't go unscrutinized.

Silence will be our biggest enemy.

Although at times it might be your greatest asset.

Feedback is welcomed.

Bigger News - I've been

Bigger News - I've been wanting to redesign this site since...well, ever since it went live, pretty much.

I'm actually sort of happy with it now.

Let me know what you think!

Now, on to the news of the day.

Big News - Back to

Big News - Back to the drawing board on my redesign - there's work to do.

Oh yeah - and that war thing, too.

I'll be catching up on that, plus a couple days' reader email, after I get the kids on the bus.

The Value of Life -

The Value of Life - Left-Style - I just read this quote from an Anti-Bush protester, who was busy blocking commuter traffic:

"The civilians in Iraq are losing their lives and one day of work is worth a thousand lives," said Leone Reinbold, an anti-war activist in San Francisco.

Figure the average worker in San Francisco earns about $60,000 a year - roughly $28 an hour. That means a typical day's work earns $230.77.

A thousand lives in exchange for a day at work, therefore, makes the value of one human life $0.23, according to Leone Reinhold, San Francisco leftist and, presumably, the rest of them as well.

Pro-Next-War Rally? - Iranians in

Pro-Next-War Rally? - Iranians in the Bay Area apparently want their country to be next in line:

"I think most everybody here is for it," said San Rafael resident Iraj Zolnasr, 40, who left Iran in 1975 to study accounting at San Francisco State University, of the nearly 1,000 attending the festivities on a crisp night under a full moon.

Upon graduation, and after the Islamic Revolution overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979, Zolnasr stayed in the United States because men his age were drafted to fight Saddam Hussein in a war from 1980 to 1988. Many Iranians at the celebration, he said, likely still harbor resentment toward Hussein because of the war - during which chemical weapons were used. But he said the main reason they support an American invasion of Iraq is because it could lead to the liberation of Iran.

Even though he still has family living in Iran, he said he supports a U.S. war because that part of the world desperately needs democracy. The militant administration ruling the country fosters suicide bombers by not providing decent homes and jobs, he said, and does not represent how the majority of Iranians feel.

"Most people don't like them," he said, referring to the Iranian government.

And this quote, from another woman at the event, who supports the invasion of Iraq, ""if there's a glimmer of hope that they might overthrow the government of Iran."

The phrase she used was "Glimmer of hope".

Iranians? Meet A.N.S.W.E.R. Discuss amongst yourselves.

The Waiting Is The Hardest

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part - ...and all I have involved are some high-school friends.

More isolated reports; air raids, commando actions, defections, bluster from Iraq...

Almost surreal. The way the media's playing this, the actual war should be an anti-climax, almost.

It is 2AM in the Gulf right now. Things should start happening soon.

First Casualty - Protester falls

First Casualty - Protester falls from Golden Gate Bridge.

Last words: "No Blood For Patchouli!"

Cruel? Hey, I could have just called the post "Culling the Herd". I'm not a complete animal, you know.

Morality Reform - I had

Morality Reform - I had a big, long article written this morning about the status of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act - the "concealed carry reform" bill.

The DFL is playing some serious back-room politics here - and you all need to not only know about it, but make sure you tell any of your friends that are involved.

The Strib reported the story this way, yesterday:

...leaders of the DFL majority switched their strategy for countering the Republican proposal that already is moving through the GOP-controlled House.

Like the Republican proposal, a bill introduced by Sen. Jim Vickerman, DFL-Tracy, would strip police chiefs and sheriffs of most discretion they now have in issuing permits to carry handguns to law-abiding, mentally competent adults. This is a key provision as well of the rival Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington.

The DFL in the Senate has had two approaches to this issue so far this session.

• The Metro DFLers want to kill the bill, whatever it takes.
• Outstate and suburban DFLers want to make sure that a DFLer is author of the bill. They don't want to be forever known as the disarmament party; they remember what happened to the last several candidates who came out anti-gun in statewide elections (Ann Wynia in '94, Skip Humphrey in '98, Roger Moe in '02).

Outstate DFLers, and even some Metro area Democrats, know that being a gun grabber is a long walk off a short pier in Minnesota these days.

But Vickerman's bill, modeled after Texas law, also would tighten eligibility rules and mark certain places off-limits to guns far beyond anything Pariseau has offered.

In other words, it riddles the bill with so many exceptions that the law-abiding citizen would be doing well to carry a firearm any more legally than they do today. After seven years of blocking Senate action on handguns, DFL leaders "decided to go in a different direction," Murphy said. "Something has to pass, and they figure the Vickerman bill is better than Pariseau's.Murphy's being disingenuous. Vickerman (who got drafted to author the proposal because he's retiring, ergo will take no political flak for it) has given us a poison pill bill, designed to screw up public perception of the bill and dilute and distract support for concealed carry.

I see one legislator who will be on the wrong end of the gun lobby's wrath next election:

But with at least one Republican member -- Sen. Mike McGinn of Eagan, a former St. Paul police commander -- voicing opposition to the Pariseau bill, it appeared unlikely to pass the panel.

McGinn is wrong, of course, as are the following:

More than two hours of testimony Monday was dominated by criticism from school, police, business, medical, church and local government groups.

"We cannot conceive of any situations where our employees, visitors, customers or patrons would feel safer knowing guns were prevalent in our marketplace," said Sam Grabarski, president of the Minneapolis Downtown Council. "How would the Holidazzle Parades be safer for families with concealed handguns present?"

Grabarski! People with concealed guns are already present; they're just all criminals now.

And ask the citizens of Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, and 24 other states what effect "shall issue" laws have had on their social lives, while we're at it.

The Rev. Stan Sledz said the state's Roman Catholic bishops oppose the bill because it would endorse the idea that "it's OK to use a gun to resolve conflicts" and "feed the fear that paralyzes our communities."

The whole subject of the social views of American and Minnesota Catholic Bishops is subject for another whole post. Suffice to say, "Catholic Bishops" have no credibility with me when it comes to moral lecturing. LIke my Scottish Presbyterian forebears, I've heard about enough from them.

So somebody might ask, "why do you oppose Vickerman's bill?"

Vickerman proposes prohibiting permit holders from bringing their guns to bars, churches, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, government meetings and polling places. The Pariseau-Boudreau bill would specifically bar guns only from schools.

For good reason! Creating "gun free zones" is no different, in terms of deterring crime, than posting a "Mass Murderers Start Right Here" sign.

The point of concealed carry reform is not to "put guns in the street". It's to deter crime. If criminals know where guns aren't, we're no better off than we are today.

John Caile of Concealed Carry Reform Now, Minnesota's leading handgun-rights group, said the Vickerman bill rated "an F-minus." .

And the Senate DFL caucus gets a D - for devious, or maybe despicable.

Here's where all of you come in; Pariseau's bill, despite the best efforts of the DFL and some turncoat Republicans, has the votes to pass in both houses. But bills like Vickerman and Murphy's are attempting to split the voter's attention span. It must not work! So if you're a carry reform supporter, please:

• Get your friends to call their legislators, especially the waffley ones
• Make sure they know the difference between the bills
• Contact Concealed Carry Reform Now and sign up, and when CCRN says they need a big turnout at the Legislature for one hearing or an other, be there. The fact that the good guys routinely outnumber the bad guys 30-1 at these meetings has a lot to do with the fact that we're here talking about potential victory at all today.

Two-minutes drill, hogs. Let's put this one away.

Posted by Mitch at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

London Calling - Fighting has

London Calling - Fighting has begun, according to This Is London:

British and American troops were involved in fierce fighting near Iraq's main port today as the war to topple Saddam Hussein began.

The firefight broke out near Basra as men of the Special Boat Service [the British equivalent of the SEALS] targeted the strategically vital city and the oilfields in southern Iraq.

At the same time allied troops were flooding into the demilitarised zone on the Iraqi border with Kuwait 40 miles away to take up positions for an all-out invasion.

Cruise missiles were also loaded onto B52 bombers at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, a clear sign that the bombardment of Baghdad could be only hours away.

British troops taking up "forward battle positions" were ordered to switch off satellite phones and allied warplanes bombed targets in Iraq after coming under fire in the no-fly zone.

By lunchtime, allied forces were in position to strike from the moment the 48-hour deadline set by President Bush for Saddam to quit Iraq expires at 1am British time tomorrow. But the White House had refused to rule out a strike before that.

In other words, troops are moving into jumping-off positions well ahead of the Kuwaiti border.

New Looks - A bunch

New Looks - A bunch of Minnesota blogs - Powerline, Fraters Libertas, and Jeff Fecke's Blog of the Moderate Left to name three - are sporting new looks these days.

It must be a Minnesota thing - spring is springing, new life, casting off the winter blahs...

Ironic, really, since I'm just about to change "Shot"'s look, too.

And I'm still thinking real hard about having a MNBlog get-together, one of these days. Stay tuned.

Grrrr... - A crash this

Grrrr... - A crash this morning ate a series of posts, all of which disappeared without a trace.

A zillion errands to run, but I'll reconstruct this morning's posts this afternoon.

And They Shall Call Him

And They Shall Call Him Nancy - Charges were filed today against Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping.

I predict an early date with a shiv for Brian Mitchell. That, or 20 years as the Aryan Brotherhood's party favor.

Belgian Orphans - There's this

Belgian Orphans - There's this notion among the Anti-Bush left that most of us who support the war are guileless dittoheads, ripe sucks who've just fallen off the intellectual turnip truck; people who are just not sophisticated enough to read between the lines of what they consider callow propaganda.

I, for one, am an inveterate "show me" skeptic, especially on matters of war, and wartime propaganda. I recall the "Belgian Orphans" atrocity stories in World War I, where German soldiers in Belgium were reputed to have burned and bayonetted orphanages full of children while advancing toward France. All untrue, of course, and object lessons in the power of wartime propaganda.

So it's hard to read things like this, and while not particularly doubting their veracity, certainly wonder about their timing (this from Ann Clwyd of the Times of London, via Andrew Sullivan this morning:

“There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders.”

So there's the thinking person's conundrum; World War I showed us the folly of guileless belief; the Holocaust showed us the danger of dogmatic skepticism.

No answer, here, really. Just hoping we, as a nation, are both critical enough consumers of information to discern truth from manipulation.

I wonder if there's enough crossover between "endemic post-ironic cynicism" - which we have in spades in our society - and "healthy skepticism" to do the job?

What's In A Name -

What's In A Name - For the last several months, I've been trying to come up with a snide, pithy yet apt moniker for the "Anti-War" movement.

I've been through "Pro-Dictator", "Pro-Genocide" and "Pro-Oppression", but none of them exactly rolls off the tongue. And putting "anti-war" in sneer quotes certainly works on my end, but I'm not sure it gets the whole idea across.

But it occurs to me that the appellation that best sums up the full breadth of the "movement", from the flea-bitten college "students" to the plush-bottom, correctly-grayed, properly-organic Mac-Groveland matrons in their Volvo 740s with their pre-printed signs and dogma to match, is the "Anti-Bush" movement.

Quid Pro Quo - It's not only illogical for the anti-Bush movement to distinguish between wars on Hussein - it misses a key point. Twelve years of failed, misguided "containment" are integrally related to the rise of Bin Laden and Al Quaeda:

We know that if nothing else Saddam and al Qaeda share the common goal of punishing the U.S. and driving us from the Mideast. In his famous 1998 fatwa endorsing the murder of Americans, "civilian and military alike," Osama bin Laden mentioned two main complaints: First, that U.S. troops were deployed on the Islamic holy land of Arabia, and second that U.S. planes continued to bomb Iraq while enforcing the U.N.'s no-fly zones.

Osama's jihad--and therefore September 11 itself--is in other words one direct consequence of the past 12 years of U.S. "containment" of Saddam. Without his continuing threat, American troops would not need to be stationed in Saudi Arabia and U.S. fighters would not still patrol the skies over Iraq. While fretting about the costs of going to Baghdad, those who favor a policy of sanctions and diplomacy have never been honest about the real costs of containment.

Such honesty would rattle the complacency of many on the Anti-Bush left.

Blogalanche - Holy cow -

Blogalanche - Holy cow - did I really write that much today?

Hm. Maybe that's an idea; I'll hold a Blogajobathon. I'll blog nonstop until someone gives me a gig.

OK, I'm seeing a flaw in the plan, but...

Linked? - Here's another Al

Linked? - Here's another Al Quaeda/Iraq link, courtesy of the Spaniards.

An alleged terrorist accused of helping the 11 September conspirators was invited to a party by the Iraqi ambassador to Spain under his al-Qaeda nom de guerre, according to documents seized by Spanish investigators.

Yusuf Galan, who was photographed being trained at a camp run by Osama bin Laden, is now in jail, awaiting trial in Madrid. The indictment against him, drawn up by investigating judge Baltasar Garzon, claims he was 'directly involved with the preparation and carrying out of the attacks ... by the suicide pilots on 11 September'.

Evidence of Galan's links with Iraqi government officials came to light only recently, as investigators pored through more than 40,000 pages of documents seized in raids at the homes of Galan and seven alleged co-conspirators.

More ammo to toss at the skeptics around the water cooler tomorrow.

It's becoming a carpet bombing.

Hosed - My prediction, that

Hosed - My prediction, that is.

Bush is giving Hussein two days to get out of Dodge.

Tale of Two Democrats - To wit:

• The Bad One, Tom Daschle, playing this solemn moment for all the political gain he can: "I'm saddened," Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, said in a speech to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

  "Saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country. But we will work, and we will do all we can to get through this crisis like we've gotten through so many." .

• The Good One, or at least the pragmatic one, Joe Lieberman: "It's time to come together and support our great American men and women in uniform and their commander-in-chief"

Take your pick.

Dizzizzixie Chissixizzle, Pizzart Two -

Dizzizzixie Chissixizzle, Pizzart Two - An email correspondent wrote to a couple of local country western stations - one in the Twin Cities, the other in Saint Cloud.

Without naming any names, two of the stations responded to the emailer, who was kind enough to send me the responses.

The first response - from a Twin Cities C'nW station - was pretty bland. But I liked the one from the St. Cloud station:

Thank you for your thoughtful letter.

Requests for the Dixie Chicks have been at about the same level as before.

I can't answer whther or not Traveln' Soldier would have been released without 9/11. I imagine we have all changed our plans a little since then.

Her company has been couseling Natalie to be less outspoken, since long before 9/11. She believes it is her right as an American to express herself, as I believe it is my right, and apparently you believe it is your right.

You and I live secure in the knowledge that no one will try to destroy us economically for our opinions. Natalie expresses herself, knowing full well that some people will try to hurt her.

We do not endorse Natalie's views. We do not endorse her decision to go public with those views. However, we do believe that our freedoms are the very thing that our President, our nation, and our armed forces are trying to defend. Osama bin Laden awakens every day plotting to destroy those freedoms.

We do not intend to undermine our freedoms at home while our troops prepare to fight and die to preserve them.

Patriotism is not measured by which President or policy we agree with or disagree with. Patriotism is measured by our committment to the constitution and to what America stands for, including the right to express unpopular opinions. That means your rights and mine and yes, even the Dixie Chicks'.

The guy put well (and, presumably, is bucking for a career in talk radio someday). Nice to know someone's thinking, out there.

Turkey Update - As I

Turkey Update - As I guardedly predicted a few weeks ago, Turkey will probably allow US troops to use Turkey as a base, even a jumping-off point, against Iraq.

Turkey's top political and military leaders called on the government to take urgent action to allow in U.S. troops.

The announcement came at the end of a meeting that included the leaders of Turkey's new government, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, and top generals.

The United States has repeatedly called on Turkey's government to quickly resubmit to parliament a resolution that would let thousands of U.S. soldiers deploy at Turkish bases. Washington had sought Ankara's approval for the deployment in order that U.S. troops could open a northern front against Saddam Hussein's forces in an Iraq war.

"Our government will make the necessary evaluation urgently," presidential spokesman Tacan Ildem said.

How to read between those lines? Let me count the ways:

• The presence of the "top generals" implies the Turkish military is mutedly threatening to exercise its constitutional prerogative to intervene in the Turkish government.
• Yesterday's threat to remove $15 billion in aid from the table got the result it intended
• The Turks are confronting the realization that, if they're not with us on Iraq, a new Kurdistan will form, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Look for a vote shortly - followed by a couple 72-hour days of unloading transports, and some serious traffic jams in eastern Turkey.

Blame Canada - Prime Minister Jean Chretien says Canadian forces in the Persian Gulf will not participate in any upcoming invasion.

I'm sure all 30 of them will be sorely missed in coming days.

Whew - Long day, both

Whew - Long day, both of job-hunting and blogging.

Tomorrow may be a light day - I have a rather important job interview in the morning. Prayers/wishes/good karmic vibes, as always, eagerly solicited.

Off to try to enjoy the day - MPCA willing - and get some exercise. Lord knows I need it after nine hours in this @#@#% chair.

Bias - NPR's ombudsman on

Bias - NPR's ombudsman on the perceived anti-war bias in NPR's coverage.

The article compares - accurately - the relative tentativeness of the pro-liberation voices heard on NPR with the relative stridency of the anti-war views

Even the tone of pro-war voices on NPR seems to be filled with self-doubt and subtle if anxious reasoning.

Recently, All Things Considered aired an essay by commentator Kelli Kirwan. The program described her as "the wife of a Marine and the mother of five children." Ms. Kirwan spoke of her doubts about the war, her anxieties about domestic terrorism and her concerns for her husband's safety...But what seems to be missing from other NPR's commentaries/interviews is the unabashed and unconditional support (and there is lot of it) for the administration.

And it adds this rather frank call to action on NPR's part

Whenever that opinion is heard on NPR as it did when NPR interviewed Secretary of State Colin Powell, NPR receives e-mails by the score, all asking: "NPR! How could you?"

Part of the problem for NPR and for many listeners who look to us to reinforce their opinions is the range of "acceptable" opinion. Radio is a unique and intensely personal medium. People listen, in my opinion, in order to recognize an aural landscape that they know and feel is theirs. When they hear ideas or voices with which they disagree, they can feel a sense of betrayal.

That puts NPR in an awkward position. As an audio companion, NPR needs to remain recognizable to its listeners; but as a news service, it needs to present a range of opinions that reflects reality -- no matter how uncomfortable that reality may be.

The gullible midwesterner who grew up liberal thinks "Hey - all right! They're figuring it out!" The cynical city guy I've become wonders if their last pledge drive didn't include a few pointed reminders in the pocketbook.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Dixizzie Chizzle - From a

Dixizzie Chizzle - From a friend on one of my email discussion groups:

"Pssst. Natalie. You do realize you named yourselves to the record buying public - without an iota of irony, I might add - as the *Dixie* Chicks, right? Take a moment to reflect on that hon, while I grab your tap shoes."

News from France - First: this story was apparently translated from the original French by some sort of automatic translation utility, possibly designed by the people who do the voice-dubbing for bad Hong Kong Kung Fu movies.

Aix-en-Provence (AP) - Three cagoulés criminals engraved a star of David with a cutting metal object on the wrist of 21 years a Jewish coed after to have attacked it Tuesday evening in its residence of Aix-en-Provence (Rhone delta), one learned Wednesday from legal source.

The tracks of a racist act or a personal conflict are evoked by the investigators of the police station of Aix-en-Provence.

Still, reading through the atrocious translation, one wonders; these are the people who we're supposed to suck up to in the UN?

Not In My Name -

Not In My Name - Bloggers Asymmetrical Information have an excellent article on the differences between Martin Sheen, and fake president Bartlett.

Bartlett (proceeding to his desk): Mr. Ambassador, sorry to keep you waiting, I was just in the White House situation room.

Amb. Tiki: The U.S. is trampling on the sovereignty of my country, and on behalf of President Nzili -

Bartlett: I've just taken your airport

(A pause. The ambassador looks as if the President has extracted a large reptile from his posterior and is mounting it for display in the Rose Garden)

Bartlett:...clearing the way for the 101st air assault to take the capital. 7000 troops, 25 battle tanks, 15 Apache attack helicopters and 3 destroyers. Strictly speaking, I've conquered your country without the paperwork.

Without the paperwork? Not in my name, Marty!

Note the hypocrisy; Clinton-era policies (at least at the make-believe level), combine with Bush-era execution...on TV. But not in real-life, not in Aaaaron "Shroom!" Sorkin's world.

An aside for all the military-history geeks: Sorkin's illiteracy about militaria never ceases to amuse.

Aaron! Destroyers are Navy vessels, not normally assigned to Air Assault divisions! And, being water-borne, they are not normally employed in "taking capitals", especially land-locked ones.

Also - "battle tanks" are neither employed by "Air Assault" divisions, nor do they travel in groups of 25 (4, 14 or 54? Sure. 25? Nuh uh).

But keep 'em coming!

Noblesse Oblige - Just when

Noblesse Oblige - Just when I was about to give up on the dailies' editorial pages as sources of good blog-fodder, the Strib steps into the breach. As usual, they don't disappoint.

These are troubling days in Minnesota for many reasons, but the Citizens League has produced a report that crystalizes the most important deficit now facing the state. It's not a financial shortage, but a shortage of belief in the common good.

We've been through this before -Laurie Studevant had a long, atrocious article on the subject right after the New Year.

Now, it seems the Strib editorial board has taken up the cause for themselves.

"Doing the Common Good Better" is the product of 56 diverse minds from across political, economic and cultural lines, each with an unsettled feeling, according to the report's authors, that there's something terribly wrong in this once-special place. They've put their collective finger, we think, on the primary reason: Citizens who were once informed and engaged are now acting more as an audience, one that has either disengaged from politics, or been captured by the half-truths and simplistic sound bites of political extremists.

When you read the Citizen's League's actual report, the usual boogeymen are trotted out on cue - Talk Radio, "polarization", and the usual code phrases that, deciphered, mean "conservatives", or anyone who doesn't believe government is the fount of all wisdom.

The report itself is long, and deserves its own separate fisking - whichn I'll try to get to later this week.

Indeed, the report begins with a dangerous assumption that there still exists a "public life" and a "public good" in this state. You'd never know it by listening to talk radio's unrelenting assault on government as the enemy of a people whose only hope resides in the private sphere.

Strib Editorialists: Why do you suppose talk radio has quadrupled its audience in ten years? Because people just aren't bright enough to know they're being manipulated?

No. Because people - real people - are sick to death of being treated as afterthoughts by Minnesota's "public class", the people with the boundless time, energy and, yes, money, to get their "communal" civic vision imposed on the rest of the state; a vision that is usually imposed in the most condescending terms. Like:

Minnesota's complex problems cannot be solved by libertarian "garage logic," or by the narrow interests of DFL subcaucuses. These unfortunate forces have filled a vacuum created by important social changes: a decline of noblesse oblige, greater demands on work and family time, a sprawled suburban landscape, marginalized political parties, globalized corporations, a "personalized" media and a decline of civic organizations.

Note the condescension: Noblesse Oblige? Indeed - we have a nobility in Minnesota?

Sprawl is a problem? Although you couldn't make me live in a suburb, Jason Lewis has one thing right - "sprawl" is a reaction to the sort of "civic society" that the Citizen's League, and the Strib editorialist, pines for.

And the "personalized" media - what could the Strib be talking about?

Such downward trends place Minnesota in particular jeopardy, the report rightly argues.

"Downward trends" - indeed.

As we've said many times, this is a cold, remote place made special only by the collective endeavor of energized citizens, without whom there would be no cultural assets, no big-time sports, no exceptional schools, universities and public services, all of which have made Minnesota a Midwestern magnet for economic success. California and Colorado have the climate and geography to compete and prosper with ordinary public assets. Minnesota does not.

But the Strib - and the Citizens League - make the fatal leap, linking all these good things to an overweening, suffocating public sector, which they seem to equate with "common good", as if that noble confluence of public spirited activism must be managed by the government, or it doesn't count.

That's why the current Republican drive to cut Minnesota down to the level of its neighbors, to make it more like every place else, is so risky.

And so enters the traditional Minnesota superiority complex. Some of "our neighbors" do some very good things; North Dakota weathered the recession vastly better than Minnesota did; by all rational measures, North Dakota's public schools are the equal of Minnesota's, on a fraction of the budget.

The Citizens League report, of course, doesn't get partisan on these matters.

It doesn't need to - it has the Strib to cover that watch.

What it does propose is a statewide summit on citizenship. Among the topics: Find a way to change the caucus system so that politics invites the participation of moderates as well as extremists.

Read: transfer political power from those who show up, to those who don't.

For all my criticism, the report is worth a read. I'll blog about it tomorrow, maybe Wednesday. But no good idea can pass, unspun, through the Strib editorial board.

Ratzen Fratzen Inspectors - So

Ratzen Fratzen Inspectors - So Bush says he'll give the UN Weapons "Inspectors" three days to get out of Baghdad.

So maybe my prediction (March 18, Baghdad time) is hosed.

CCW Rolls On - On

CCW Rolls On - On top of last week's news that Ohio's Concealed Carry reform law is progressing nicely (albeit possibly doomed to a veto that the legislature may not opt to override), Colorado's law should be moving to the Governor (possibly after one more trip to the Senate), according to Coyote at the Dog Show.

How long until Minnesota joins them?

Sigh.

The problem, of course, is getting through the DFL-controlled Senate. The DFL wants to be listed as the author of every bill going through the Senate - and Senator Pat Parisau (GOP, Farmington) is understandably reticent about letting a DFLer take over (and potentially hijack) the bill she's shepherded through the legislature this past seven years.

Worse? The DFL has floated its own, terrible, version of a concealed carry reform bill. A group of anti-gun DFL legislators have written a bill that is so bad, it could only count as a "poison pill" bill. Sen. Jim Vickerman is listed as the author - the only author (very unusual). The reason, of course, is that he's retiring after this term - and any legislator attaching his/her name to this piece of bilge will be getting a solid F- from every gun rights organizations in the next round of elections.

To quote a Concealed Carry Reform Now bulletin on the bill:

the bill is about 25% MPPA, 25% the worst of Texas law, 25% the worst of Michigan law, and 25% Sen. Sheila Kiscaden. The legislation is full of internal conflicts and contradictions, contains items that even MN law enforcement don’t want, is, once you start to read the fine print, discretionary, and requires applicants to relinquish their constitutional rights for the opportunity to commit a Felony just by standing in the wrong place!

We all knew that the DFL-controlled Senate would pull out the stops in attacking the Personal Protection Act, and the very idea of concealed carry reform. We'll still probably come out of this session with a concealed carry reform law - but nobody said it'd be easy.

The Bush Plan - The

The Bush Plan - The first priority, obviously, is winning the war. The second part, the left reminds us ad nauseum, is "winning the peace" (which some on the left remind us we've already lost, but I digress).

Two points:

1. Bush has big plans for Iraq, and
2. The UN isn't in them

The WSJ said this:

The Bush plan, as detailed in more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents, would sideline United Nations development agencies and other multilateral organizations that have long directed reconstruction efforts in places such as Afghanistan and Kosovo. The plan also would leave big nongovernmental organizations largely in the lurch: With more than $1.5 billion in Iraq work being offered to private U.S. companies under the plan, just $50 million is so far earmarked for a small number of groups such as CARE and Save the Children.

Watch for the "non-profit community" to squeal like stuck cats over this.

And yet doesn't it make sense? This war is partly being waged over the UN's dead administrative body - why include them? Why would they want to be included?

And since part of the aim of this war is to create a free-market democracy, what sense would it make to entrust the rebuilding of the nation to people who hold free-market democracy in contempt?

Washington is under international pressure to broaden a postwar rebuilding effort, even as it continues to do battle with traditional allies over the merits of launching a war on Iraq. The administration recently has signaled it may seek down the road to give the U.N. and other countries a larger role.

Indeed.

I'd suspect as much. The President's entire approach has been to play good cop/bad cop with the UN and our pricklier "allies".

And the UN can't afford to lose this fight. They have to know how perilously close to irrelevance their opposition to Bush on this war has made them; being counted out of the rebuilding of Iraq might just seal the UN's irrelevance for good.

President Bush, after a one-hour summit in the Azores Islands, said yesterday that if it comes to war he plans to "quickly seek new Security Council resolutions to encourage broad participation in the process of helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq."

But U.N. officials said they still have no clear indication how the administration might involve the international body, especially if many of the large rebuilding tasks are already farmed out to U.S. companies directly answerable to Washington.

Hm.

Note to the UN - if you hadn't spent the last six months Blixing up, you might have been able to work on that...

Bloggered - Blogger.com - the

Bloggered - Blogger.com - the site I use to publish this blog - has been hinky again. Hopefully this post will go live eventually...

Deja Vu? - Rachel Lucas makes an interesting point:

I was thinking of something the other day, regarding the French. Don't correct me if I'm wrong, because this is just a vague idea, but it seems to me that the Iraqi people of today are like the French from 1940-1944. Held prisoner by a hated leader, etc. And yes, I am fully aware that the situations are different in some key ways (Saddam is not a foreigner who invaded and occupied Iraq and most of the rest of the neighborhood), but if anyone out there can prove to me that the Iraqi people are less miserable/oppressed/abused than the French were under the Nazis, I'll be impressed.

So I was just thinking, what if Britain and the United States had viewed the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940s the same way the French view the current situation in Iraq? What if we'd insisted on diplomacy rather than defeating Hitler and his regime? What if we'd passed some resolutions, ordered "inspectors" into France to see if Hitler was lying about...whatever, passed some more resolutions, run away sheepishly when Hitler kicked us out of France, sat around for a few years, and then passed some more resolutions and held "talks"?

What if, 12 years and 17 resolutions into this fiasco (around 1952), some countries like, say, Australia and Switzerland wanted us to help them (or even just allow them) to bust into France to liberate the people and oust Hitler from power, but the United States and Britain insisted they not do so, because we just hadn't had enough diplomacy yet? And that gosh, we wouldn't want to make all the Nazis mad at us because it might create more little Hitlers?

Of course, what Rachel misses is that there was such an opposition in the US; they figured we had no business intervening in a foreign country like that. Some even thought Hitler wasn't all that bad!

Of course, unlike today, that crowd was basically regarded as a pack of nutbars, rather than in control of the media and Hollywood.

The Air Out There - An email correspondent wrote about my Friday post about the weather:

...you made some comment about going outside to enjoy the weather.

Then, this AM as I am up writing my Sunday School lesson, I see the Star Tribune is telling us that the MPCA is saying: "Hey, it might be nice but don't be out there too long, it's polluted air people. Too much exhaust from vehicles (like SUV's) and power plants (hey, what are you using energy for anyway) and fireplaces and other fine things that all you people need and use."

Something stinks, Mitch. The nicest day in the last 120 days or something, and we have to wear our 3M dust filter masks when we go outside for the first time without our Eddie Bauer Sub-Antarctic Polar Fleece Down Lined Thermalite Flannel Snowsuit?

I think it was Nietzche who said "If a crappy day didn't exist, mankind would have to create one".

Tomorrow - Dinner time. Just

Tomorrow - Dinner time. Just like the last Gulf War.

Baghdad is nine hours ahead of US Central time. Word is the President wants to address the nation tomorrow night. I have a hunch that'll happen as the Tomohawks are landing all over Iraq.

I could be wrong - I have been many times. But if it's not tomorrow, it'll be Tuesday, right around dinner time here in the Twin Cities.

As the guys from Fraters Libertas say in quoting Churchill, may we indeed deserve victory.

Manifesto - Dexter Van Zile

Manifesto - Dexter Van Zile writes as able a Western, anti-Islamofascist manifesto as I've seen, in the Washington Dispatch.

You've blamed the United States, Israel and the West in general for the inability of Muslims to create a place for themselves in the modern world. The poverty from which the Muslim world suffers has nothing to do with the existence of the state of Israel, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia or the alleged Godlessness of the West, but has everything to do with the contempt you and those like you have for knowledge, ideas and the free expression of the human spirit.

Your people are poor not because of what the West has done to them, but because their leaders have squandered the opportunity to build just and vibrant countries afforded to them by the presence of oil in their region. Consequently, the Muslim communities that have the highest standard of living reside in that part of the world you most despise -- the West. Just as our wealth is the consequence of our values, the poverty of the Muslim world is the consequence of the fatalism that underpins your thinking.

You've mistaken our secular system of governance for Godlessness and to cure us of this, you would force us, through violence to embrace a system of belief contrary to our traditions, temperament and long-held beliefs. You will not succeed.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Costs of Action/Inaction -

Costs of Action/Inaction - Yesterday on the Minnesota National Issues discussion list, , someone posted a link to this website. It's one of those things that tries to show all the (inevitably social) programs we could afford if we weren't paying for (inevitably military) programs.

Some of the math is hilarious; I'm sure North Dakota elementary school teachers are amused to see they're averaging nearly $42,000 a year in salary. And California's share of a war with Iraq would pay for 5 million California kids to go on state-paid healthcare. That is, of course, more kids than there are in California, bidding one to wonder where these people are getting their numbers from.

But let's briefly suspend disbelief, and take their numbers at face value. According to the website, Minnesota's share of the tax costs of a war in Iraq would pay for:

• hiring 28,216 Elementary School Teachers
  
• buying 6,636 Fire Trucks
  
• 222,603 Head Start Places for Children
  
• 459,612 Children Receiving Health Care
  

That, of course, doesn't cover the cost of building the 1,000 schools it'd take to put them al the teachers in - not to mention the 677,184 students (at 24 per class) we'd need to import to keep them working. Or the 1,000 firehouses we'd need to build, and the 24,000 firefighters we'd need to hire - many more than exist in the entire state already. As to the numbers of children in Head Start or on government medical assistance...

But OK, that's one take on the costs we'll face if we go to war. Fair enough. Now, the costs we'll face if we don't depose Hussein.

SCENARIO 1: 2006.
Uday Hussein decides to avenge his late father's humiliation in 1991. He moves into the Northern and Southern No-Fly Zones, and begins brutal subjugation of the Marsh Arabs and Kurds, again.

The "world community" responds to the armed advances with a withering fusillade of UN resolutions and "strong statements". After three months of dithering at the behest of the French and Swedes, the UN passes a slightly stricter set of sanctions - and Hussein makes his move.

He tells the world to sod off - or he'll launch a barrage of long-range missiles over the immense oil terminals at Ras Tanura, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Gulf, loaded with Sarin and VX gas, and aerosol Anthrax cultures.

Instantly, world oil markets panic. Oil prices spike immediately over $100 a barrel. World markets react accordingly, diving into an immense, worldwide panic.

Liberals in the US chuckle as their hated nemeses, the nation's SUV drivers, are shortly paying gas prices of over $7 a gallon (sometimes more) - but the chuckling stops as companies slash their capital investments, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. Tax revenues plummet, as the most productive citizens (the private sector) clamps down on all spending (voluntarily or otherwise), leading state governments to slash social programs and lay off so many state workers that people recall the relatively piddling state layoffs of '03 as "the good ol' days".

And it's worse elsewhere. The European economy crashes. The crash sweeps in xenophobic "populist" governments - which combine rabid socialization with the worst anti-immigrant measures seen since the thirties. In France and Germany, the fight is legal; in other countries, bloodshed is widespread.

Israel, of course, is inundated with further terror attacks; the Palestinians, bankrolled as ever by their Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi benefactors, pin the blame for their burgeoning misery on the Israelis, and launch a wave of terror attacks that strain the fabric of Israeli society.

And the Third World? Deprived of oil AND export markets, the third world economies are eradicated. Many nations fall to extremist, authoritarian coups, which creates immense food panics similar to the 1942 Bengal Famine (in which there was plenty of food, yet hundreds of thousands died). Around the world millions starve or die in economy-driven conflicts. Islamofascist governments rise in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, while India and Indonesia are riven by the bloodiest civil wars in history.

In Minnesota, a total of 28,216 Elementary School Teachers were laid off, 6,636 Fire Trucks decommissioned, 222,603 Head Start Places for Children removed, and 459,612 Children ejected from various Health Care programs.

Millions of lives lost. Hundreds of millions plunged into even worse misery than they'd had before.

No missiles were ever launched.

SCENARIO 2: 2005
A group of Saudi, Quatari and Chechen Islamofascists, enraged at what they consider Al Quaeda's "excessive moderation" and "willingness to sell out to the West, in comparison to us", makes back-channel contacts with Iraqi intelligence. Flying underneath the radar (because the US left has forced the nation's intelligence and military services into an artificial focus on Al Quaeda to the exclusion of other terrorist groups), the group drives the parts of a tactical nuclear device out through Saudi Arabia, load it into a container ship in Aden, Yemen, and assembles it in time to load it onto a truck in Biloxi, Mississippi.

The terrorists know that it'd be great to blow up some immense landmark, like the Capitol or the Empire State Building. But the security in these places is too tight to risk, these days (albeit at immense cost to American civil liberties, the Islamofascists chuckle). And there'd be a huge advantage to hitting America in the Heartland, too - creating the "if I'm not safe HERE..." effect.

They pick a spot deep in the heartland on their map - and, a week later, on a bright summer evening, set off their bomb in downtown Minneapolis, during a Twins game. Intantly, everything within a third of a mile of the van is vaporized or pulverized into nothing; most everything within 1.5 miles is pummeled flat. People five miles away get flashburns from the thermal pulse, while buildings are severely damaged and people terribly injured out to seven miles away.

The bomb, a groundburst, left a plume of radioactive fallout starting in downtown Saint Paul, and stretching a hundred miles into Wisconsin. The radiation takes years to completely clean up.

Probably 100,000 die instantly; tens of thousands more die of injuries and radiation sickness downwind from the burst. Long-term health effects are nearly incalculable. Downtown Minneapolis is mostly destroyed; the bomb was placed blocks from the Metrodome, which was obliterated (drawing a "glass is half full" editorial from Joe Soucheray), along with most of the east edge of Downtown, Cedar-Riverside, and most of the U of M. The IDS is a denuded steel skeleton; the Norwest (Wells Fargo?) tower sheds its top 25 floors. Downtown is a mass of wreckage - no actual street plan is still visible above Franklin Avenue..

The Twin Cities are evacuated, causing untold human misery and dislocation. 28,216 Elementary School Teachers are laid off or killed, 6,636 Fire Trucks decommissioned or destroyed, 222,603 Head Start Places for Children lost or vaporized, and 459,612 kids put in health care plans for acute injuries or radiation poisoning.

The national and world economies, of course, crash (see Scenario 1). Civil liberties in the US are suspended to a degree that makes people think of even the worst caricature of John Ashcroft as "not so bad, really".

Noam Chomsky cheers, as do certain Green politicians. Sean Penn declares that "it's really our fault".

Sound fanciful? Of course. And in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain led his era's version of the world's Alec Baldwins and Phyllis Kahns to grovel at the altar of appeasement, people like Winston Churchill and Hector Bywater were popularly regarded as "paranoid" and "warmongers".

History proved them right, of course - it usually does.

There is, however, no way to calculate the costs of our being right this time. The stakes are higher now.

Your feedback is appreciated, as always.

Ace See Hell You -

Ace See Hell You - Doug Grow, sanctimonious as ever, held forth on the Lindner flap last week in the Strib, expressing muffled indignance that the ACLU would take Lindner's side in the debate (as well they should):

Tigue, a First Amendment lawyer best known for defending adult bookstores, strip clubs and pornographers, not only is willing to defend Lindner ("if he pays me"), he stands firmly for the rights of Lindner's constituents.

"It was more than a year ago that he called the Dalai Lama a cult leader," Tigue said. "That means the people in the last election elected him knowing full well he'd made such an idiotic remark. It's clear [that] the majority in his district don't mind being represented by an ignorant bigot."

Writing is rewriting; I have to wonder what Tigue said before Grow selected the quotes that best reflected his own thesis.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Lindner flap lately. Yes, he's ignorant. But let's look at some of the claims the left is making, via Grow:

There is no question that Lindner's remarks are absurd, even hateful.

Hateful? Please, Doug - where does ignorance become "hateful?"

But why are DFL House members seeking to drag Lindner's sorry mind before the House Ethics Committee? Why not let him choke on his own free speech?

According to Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, one of the things that motivated the DFL caucus to push for an ethics hearing and a censure was the behavior of Republican representatives.

"The silence Monday is what most concerned us," said Hornstein, the grandson of Nazi concentration camp survivors. "What really struck me is that he is saying that his beliefs are common to the beliefs of the majority." Hornstein said he has not heard Republican House members repudiate that notion.

So you get in trouble for what you don't say? Let's look at the very likely case, that the GOP wants to move on to the many important issues facing our state and let the whole stupid Lindner flap fade with time (as such things always do) - that means "his beliefs" are "common to the beliefs of the majority?"

Mr. Hornstein: What an incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid thing to say.

Here's what Lindner said, and what it means:

• "Gays and Lesbians were not persecuted during the Holocaust". Untrue, obviously, and based on a faulty conclusion drawn from the dust-flap of a book about the homoerotic aspects of Naziism. And yet DFLer after DFLer has queued up to call the statement "homophobic". Homophobia (an etymologically suspect word - "Homosexual" means "attraction to those who are the same as you" in the original Greek". Homophobia would be "Fear of those who are the same as you...") should mean "genuine hatred of gays". But according to many gay activists, the very act of being "uncomfortable" around gays is, itself, homophobic.
• "We don't want the US to turn into Africa". To hear the Afro-American DFL's response, you'd think Lindner was wearing a pointy hood and a white sheet.Yet read his comment carefully; he didn't criticize africans, he pointed out that Africa is beridden with AIDS. Now, does that mean gays should be removed from the Human Right Act? That's another argument. But the fact that the Minneapolis DFL contingent are piling on Lindner as a "racist" for pointing out something that happens, inconveniently, to be true (Africa is plagued with AIDS!) is doublespeak of the lowest order.

I think I've changed my mind since the last time I posted about Lindner. While he doesn't represent the Republican Party I want to see, I'll support him; he may be ignorant and ill-informed, but he's no less so than many of those who oppose him for the most specious political reasons.

And the good news from all this; the main reason the DFL is piling on Lindner with such aplomb is that they really have nothing else going on. Quick - name a DFL legislative initiative. Any initiative. "Harping on GOP initiatives" doesn't count as an initiative, by the way. Throw those out, and there really is no answer, is there?

So the good news is that the DFL has no game. The bad news is that they're taking it out on the First Amendment.

Martin Sheen - Fundamentalist Minister-

Martin Sheen - Fundamentalist Minister- It's easy to forget, amid the protests and pronouncements and publicity, that Martin Sheen was once an excellent actor.

Andrew Stuttaford has a fascinating profile of the guy, his beliefs, and why he became what he is, in the National Review:

His authority reinforced by the fact that he portrays a president on an upscale soap opera, Sheen uses celebrity status to push his causes (fair enough — it's our fault, not his, if we take an actor seriously just because of the roles he plays). But "Jed Bartlet" has not been his only taste of office, either on screen (he has played other presidents and at least two Kennedy brothers) or off. In 1989, Sheen was named honorary mayor of Malibu. Naturally, His Honor marked his appointment with a decree proclaiming the area "a nuclear-free zone, a sanctuary for [illegal] aliens and the homeless, and a protected environment for all life, wild and tame." Interviewed more than a decade later by Hispanic magazine, Sheen relived the moment with obvious pleasure: "The reaction was what I kind of half-expected, and it wasn't favorable. I was considered a radical who sold out the city. It just shows you the power of words and the power of someone's convictions. It just scared the hell out of them."

Well, not really — it just shows that people don't like having a loopy mayor. But no matter: If Sheen had become a St. Paul, the rest of us were, to him, like so many Galatians, an errant people to be hectored, lectured, and generally harangued.

And there's more - about the "liberation theology" religious roots to his politics.

And, also, this telling bit:

One of the hallmarks of Sheen's activism is the number of times he has been arrested, around 70 at the latest count, often carefully choreographed for photogenic spectacle, which might include, say, prayer (yet another Nagasaki protest, this one at Los Alamos in 1999) or, for real excitement, fake blood (Fort Benning, same year).

There is another way in which these martyrdoms have been a touch theatrical. None were likely to have serious consequences. Now that there's a chance that they might, Sheen has seemed to shy away. Following a conviction for trespass at a demonstration at Vandenberg Air Force Base, he is on three years' probation and is taking care to avoid the police, handcuffs, and the judiciary. As he explained to Newsday last fall, "If I get arrested for anything now, I go right in the slammer." The actor's taste for martyrdom clearly includes neither the big house nor the loss of hundreds of thousands in dollars from his appearances in Aaron Sorkin's fake White House (Sheen reportedly earns around $300,000 for each episode of The West Wing, not so much less than the $400,000 that George W. Bush makes for a year in the real thing), but it's telling that it has taken this, rather than any change of heart, to stop — at least until his probation expires — the seemingly endless run of arrests.

Sounds like a lot of our local high-profile demonstratchiks. Anyone remember the "Honeywell Project"? The eighties/nineties era protest group, largely peopled by a pacifistic cult from Luck, Wisconin, racked up hundreds of arrests among them - all of them the sort of plastic-cuffed, in-and-out "arrests" that scarcely puts a dent in anyone's day, much less the day of someone who has no day job.

And I can't help but see the Soliah parallels here:

Most people accept that they have, at least temporarily, to live under some laws with which they may profoundly disagree. In his repeated recourse to (let's be euphemistic) "direct action," Sheen appears not to — an approach that is, at its core, undeniably undemocratic...Revealingly, when the law and his own notions of what is right coincide, Sheen is only too happy to don the jackboots. For example, driven in part, doubtless, by one son's painful battle with substance abuse, he was a leading opponent of a California ballot initiative designed to allow certain low-level drug users to receive treatment rather than jail. That shouldn't be a surprise. Sheen is a zealot: a man so convinced of his own rectitude that, for him, any compromise becomes a sin. Needless to say, such moral absolutism usually comes with a profound disdain for the points of view of those who disagree — to Sheen, I suspect, their opinions count for no more than their votes.

Now, some of you are going to ask "why are you doing a profile of an actor when you have such disdain for most of their opinions in the first place?"

Simple: Sheen's story illustrates that of many of our more workaday opponents. Whether the Highland Park marm who drives her Volvo to the WAMM rallies, or the Macalester brats who seem to be majoring in "social activism", there's an element in the fundamentalist left that sees itself as exceptionalistic, not only smarter than the rest of us, but whose agendas are so righteous they naturally trump everyone else's.

Pressure - After ten weeks

Pressure - After ten weeks unemployed, the stress is flowing through me in waves. Every part of my body hurts.

I'm going to get out and enjoy the weather tonight, and concentrate on breathing.

Blogging is good for my stress level as well. I'll be catching up from this relatively lame week over the weekend.

The Good Actor, Part II

The Good Actor, Part II - A rather highly placed corresonded wrote me today regarding my post yesterday re: Ron Silver's performance on the Blitzer show:

In reference to your post on actor Ron Silver, I saw him the other night on CNN and wasn't too impressed. Personally I don't want to hear from Hollywood on Iraq anymore whether it's from the left or the right.

I basically agree - but we're going to hear from them. And it's somewhat heartening to hear some relative rationality coming from Hollywood - especially given that Silver's not even a conservative.

The writer's point - who cares what Hollywood thinks - is well taken. But since they're talking anyway:

It is a change to see a conservative actor speak out but that doesn't mean that I care what he thinks. If you criticize the Hollywood left for being out of their element when they comment on politics you can hardly praise the Hollywood right when they do the same.

Of course I can!

I criticize actors for being out of their element when they comment on issues they've never paid one iota of dues in studying the issue. On the other hand, when an actor - or any citizen, really - spends some time actually paying his/her dues and really learning about the issue, whether I regard actors as competent commentators in general or not, I think it's worthy of at least muted praise.

And it doesn't get much more muted than my little 300-hit-per-day blog!

Anyway - Silver is just an actor. He's also an actor with the brains to actually learn the issue beyond the soundbites, and the cojones to face down the majority of his colleagues.

I'm not calling for canonization. Just expressing wonder.

STILL Busy - Gaaa. Job

STILL Busy - Gaaa. Job stuff, wall to wall. The news ain't all bad - it's good to be busy. Still no steady paycheck, but keep your fingers crossed.

More later today - plus I'll probably do my usual big weekend post-o-lanche...

Iron Fist - No, it's

Iron Fist - No, it's not a new gay practice. It's the nickname of one of the brigades of the Third Infantry (Mech) Division.

I've seen CNN, NBC, CBS, and heard NPR doing standups from the Division's laager, somewhere in Kuwait. And it's been interesting, hearing the same basic line from all of them; "It's this brigade's job to punch a hole straight through to Baghdad". So I have to wonder - is it the brigade's job at all? I suspect disinformation.

They also go to great pains to explain that it's the army's "Only Tank Brigade" in Kuwait. More disinformation? The Third Infantry has three brigades, only one of them "Tank" - but the other two are almost as heavily armed. It's a distinction that means little to journalists, of course.

Testing - Blogger's sure acting

Testing - Blogger's sure acting wierd today.

The Good Actor- Just finished

The Good Actor- Just finished watching Ron Silver and Bill Maher debate the war on "Wolf Blitzer". All of Hollywood is not lost.

The worst thing about Maher's late "Politically Incorrect" was that it gave a wide-open forum to, primarily, celebrities to discuss current events. It was generally a throat-clenchingly frustrating exercise, watching (Rush drummer) Neal Peart, Janeane Garofalo, and someone from the Weather Channel squabble with Bill Maher about the issues of the day.

Maher's a sharp guy, albeit wrong about most things (including labelling himself as a "libertarian"). Like most comics, he has good timing - and a way with distracting audiences from lousy logic with the glib, usually ignorant, but catchy one-liner.

But Silver didn't give up a single point. Maher came on with the usual fare - Hussein didn't attack us on 9/11, you know! - but Silver threw it all right back at him.

My favorite line of the segment? Silver: "Robert Frost once said a Liberal is someone who's so open-minded he won't even take his own side in an argument".

Silver's hosting Crossfire tomorrow. I may watch it, for the first time in over a decade.

Concealed Carry Update - While Minnesota's Personal Protection Act has moved to the "backroom machination" phase of the process, Ohio is rapidly vying with us to to be the 34th state to adopt a "Shall Issue" law.

The issues are exactly the opposite of those in MInnesota, of course - Ohio's legislature has the votes in both houses to not only pass the bill, but probably override a veto by liberal Governor Bob Taft. However, the big question is "Will they do it if it comes to that"? It'd expend a lot of political capital - and with their budget battle raging, capital isn't cheap.

Foremath - Parapundit is an

Foremath - Parapundit is an excellent foreign policy blog. This article - on plans for the restoration of democracy to Iraq - is fascinating reading. It's very long, but links a bunch of interesting sources for a great read.

Woe Betide Blogger - So

Woe Betide Blogger - So I got up, as usual, at 5:30AM, ready to loose a fusillade of blogging...

...and blogger.com was down again.

It came back up a few minutes ago - just in time for me to begin my morning scramble to get the kids up and on the bus. Then, another morning of job-related scrambling (pray/cross your fingers/meditate/send good vibes for me); well, roll it all together, and it'll probably be this afternoon before I can get any serious posts up.

UPDATE: And Blogger's problems seem to be getting worse...

Oh, lordy - as soon as I get a new job, I'm switching to Movable Type...

One For The Good Guys

One For The Good Guys - They found Elizabeth Smart. Alive.

I'm stunned. While they say that most kids who are abducted are eventually returned relatively safely, and last summer's "epidemic of stranger abductions" was largely a media creation (stranger abduction is actually the statistical wane), I also remember icy ball that formed in the pit of my stomach last summer when Danielle Van Dam and Samantha Runnion were kidnapped and murdered at the same time as Smart's abduction.

So her return today - safe and relatively sound - struck me as a major miracle, even though objectively speaking it's more the rule than the exception; a fact that I"m sure means nothing to the parents involved.

They say people that kidnap and/or molest children have a particularly bad time in prison. Shucks.

Busy - Job talk this

Busy - Job talk this morning. Will post more later.

If you need something to tide you over, re-read my rather prolific weekend...

Precipitous Rush to Action -

Precipitous Rush to Action - UN debate on Iraq passes six-month mark.

Lotta Moments - Of course,

Lotta Moments - Of course, here in Minnesota we have Arlon Lindner.

Lindner, a Republican representing Corcoran in the northwest exurban metro, is - to be charitable - perhaps not the brightest light on the Lord's Christmas Tree. The man has a long record of saying just plain stupid things in the House - his remark about Nazi persecution of gays and lesbians could only come from someone with no clue abuot history. Worse, like Lott, he says a lot of things that may have not-stupid ideas at their base, but are stated in such a way as to guarantee trouble - handing shiploads of ammunition to the DFL, who needs all the ammo it can get in the absence of any legislative initiative.

Yes, there might be an idea worth exploring at the core of some of the statements for which Lindner is being condemned:

• "Buddhism is a Cult". Of course it's not. But remember the context of the event; the University of Minnesota, which rigorously separates Christianity from any of its official functions, had just rolled out the red carpet for the Dalai Lama. This irritated a lot of people - including, understandably, the fundamentalist Lindner. Was his reaction appropriate? Of course not. And I personally would welcome the chance to debate theology with a Buddhist adherent - but that's another issue. Question: If Lindner's critics were to be intellectually honest, wouldn't they also have condemned, or at least questioned, the Dalai Lama's visit?
• "If We Extend Rights to Gays and Lesbians, We'll Become Another Africa". Can I understand why Afro-Americans would take umbrage at this? Sure. I'd suspect that there's a valid idea buried in there somewhere. Lindner links legally-enumerated rights for gays with the excesses of big government. He's wrong to do it, but work with me here. Africa, the continent, has been turned into a social, medical and economic disaster area at the cost of millions of lives by the most extreme excesses of big government - big-state socialism and authoritarianism combined with the petty hatreds of intense tribalism. Question: If Lindner's critics were intellectually honest, wouldn't they allow for the fact that Africa is a mess?

Of course, most of Lindner's critics in the House are not intellectually honest:

Rep. Neva Walker, DFL-Minneapolis, the other black House member, said she considered Lindner's statement "a slap of racism directed towards me and Keith."

Question for Rep. Walker: If someone criticizes the government of Norway, or that nation's social and medical problems that devolve from that government's policies, does that "slap" me, as an American of Norwegian descent? I'd think not.

Steve Sviggum, the Speaker of the House, got in a great point, according to today's Strib article:

said he wouldn't force him out, although he called many of Lindner's statements "inappropriate."

If he did so, Sviggum added, he would have had to censure Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, for referring recently to Republican State Auditor Pat Awada as "Osama bin Awada."

"I won't remove Arlon for using wrong words," Sviggum said. "Arlon is not a mean-spirited person at all. But it almost seems every time Arlon says something, it gets worse for him."

Indeed. And if Arlon Lindner has to walk the plank for being an idiot, Tom Rukavina should walk with him. Rukavina is, if anything, a bigger idiot than Lindner.

Lindner subscribes to some views that are just plain ignorant:

I'm not convinced that they were persecuted," he said, suggesting that the main gay participants in the Holocaust were Nazi concentration camp guards. That contention, he added, is laid out in a book called "The Pink Swastika," which he hasn't read but is trying to lay his hands on.

The book deals (so I've heard) with the homoerotic aspects of Naziism and the idea that Hitler was a closeted gay. And it's irrelevant...

...because Lindner is wrong (gays were murdered in droves), and if I were a Corcoran resident I'd be upset that such an invincibly ignorant person was representing me in the Legislature.

It's true - Lindner's critics are driven by nothing more than craven political opportunism. But it'd be nice if we didn't give them the opportunities.

Lott Moment - James Moran,

Lott Moment - James Moran, 14-year congressman from the Virginia Beltway, blamed Jews for the war at a pro-dictatorship rally:Compare this with the remarks that got Trent Lott into career-ending trouble:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either,"

Practically interchangeable, if you think about it - if it weren't for those damned reformers and Jews and blacks, things'd be a lot smoother, wouldn't they?

So, Democrats - how is Warner's remark any more defensible than Lott? And where is the groundswell of condemnation?

One of the worst things about the Lott debacle was his clumsy attempt at self-defensive spin afterward. It was cringe-inducing - and not as bad as this remark fro Moran:

"One is that some of the most compelling spokesmen against the war happen to be Jewish, and number two, it clearly is the smallest of the three major communities of faith in America," Moran said.

"If among any one of the major communities of faith in this country there was an organized consensus against the war, I don't think we would be going to war," added Moran, who is Catholic. "If she had identified herself as a Catholic, I would have said the same thing."

Moran said he supports Israel's right to exist and security and denied being anti-Semitic.

"I know in my heart that I am anything but anti-Semitic," Moran said, adding that his daughter, Mary Elise, is marrying a Jewish man and converting to Judaism, with her 9-year-old son. "One wishes I could learn to hold my tongue and to express myself in a much larger context so I would be able to communicate what I really want to say ... Nobody could berate me more than I do when I see my words in print compared to what I intended to say."

"Some of my best friends are Jewish!".

I'd love to see a defense.

(Via Reding)

War Movies Redux - An

War Movies Redux - An email correspondent sent this:

'Gods and Generals is an awful movie. Not because it doesn't include enough black characters or is too sympathetic to the Southern cause as I've heard some critics claim, it's simply a poorly made film. I don't know who claimed to have edited it but whoever did was sleeping on the job. Forty or fifty minutes could have been cut and you would hardly notice the difference. Would it be a good movie then? No, but at least it wouldn't be so blasted long.

G'nG joins the great tradition of incredibly pedantic bio-epics - "Midway", "Tora x 3", many others - that manage to swamp amazing historical events in a sea of detail.

I do have a couple of minor disagreements with you:

1. 'A Bridge Too Far' is a mediocre movie in my opinion. If you come into without a background knowledge of Operation Market Garden you'll have no clue as to what's transpiring. The action scenes are underwhelming and the pacing is plodding.

I agree that it helps - lots - to have read Cornelius Ryan's book on the subject. But once that's out of the way (an I did in fact read it as a kid, before the movie came out), I think it's a capable historical movie that showed the direct line between bad decisions and the suffering they cause on the sharp end of the stick.

2. Just because Kubrick did 'Full Metal Jacket' don't automatically toss it aside.

I didn't! I have seen the movie 5-6 times, and knew little of Kubrick's reputation before I saw the movie.

The basic training scenes are extremely well done as are the urban combat sequences in Hue. And how many Vietnam movies can you name that actually show Communist atrocities? The only other one that I can come up with off the top of my head is 'Green Berets' (although there is an implication that no prisoners are taken by the VC in 'Go Tell the Spartans' as well). The scene in 'Full Metal Jacket' with the mass graves and the bodies covered in lime is powerful.

All of this is true. FMJ has its compelling moments.

The background music is haunting and who can forget Joker's quote, "The dead only know one thing; it is better to be alive"?

Yeah, I knew I'd hear from someone about that crack! Yes, FMJ has its redeeming qualities. Many of them. In fact, that may have been the most frustrating part of the movie; there was so much to recommend about it - and yet, by the end of the movie, I still walked out feeling "I've been Kubricked". Maybe it was the closing scene - the survivors of the company walking to the Perfume River singing the Mickey Mouse theme. It summed up the big problem I had - despite it being a fascinating movie, I still felt like I'd been beaten over the head with someone's graduate thesis.

Keep the email coming!

Context - One of the

Context - One of the most common complaints coming from the (usually) left is that Bush has blown our relations with the rest of the world, squandering the goodwill we received after 9/11.

Mark Schmidt - writing in a completely different discussion group in an email used by permission here - responded to the oft-heard notion that "we'll win the war, but we've already lost the peace".

Catchy. But Bush was very, very unpopular in many parts of the world before Sept 11. And American policy in general was not popular, and much of this was due to Clinton's era also (and from just being America in general). Could Sept 11 have changed this for very long? I don't think so. The way Bush presents himself and policies doesn't help. But don't say we've squandered support that we never really had. We just had sympathy.

This is an excellent point. The US has sent billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to countries that hate us, due to the sympathy we feel for the victims as people; I'd suspect that if a tornado churned up half of Paris tomorrow, we'd have planes full of relief supplies the way shortly, however most of us feel about the French goverment's stances.

We probably lost some of the sympathy in places more quickly than we could have if we had a president with any talent for making solemn faces, but most countries aren't going to send their soldiers someplace to die next to ours just because of sympathy.

Remember also that plenty of people around the world were protesting and calling America names before the US even moved into Afghanisan. Others who weren't protesting the act itself were complaining about the proposed methods or the timeline for action. The effort there is not yet done by any means, in fact it just started and still needs our focus, but there is little doubt now about the validity of the action or the cause itself.

Bush is frustrating because he can't express his opinion in a convincing way and rarely in a comprehensible way, and he seems relunctant to send his administration out to perform this task. They appear to behave arrogantly even when they try to state their case, but this doesn't mean the cause is wrong or that most people wouldn't protest anyway. Look at the UK. Blair and his foriegn secratary Jack Straw have made some of the most moving and compelling speeches I've ever seen regarding military action in Iraq, and it makes little difference on public opinion even inside the UK let alone outside.

So while Bush needs to get better or get better people around him, the real question comes down to: how should America have better used this sympathy? The war on terror? That seems to be marching along. The Middle East crisis? Would Isreali or Palestinian sympathy have made them comprimise on anything?

Very true. Sympathy is cheap. Support separates the wheat from the chaff.

Bush needs to make a better show of things, and try a few minutes of that humility he mentioned so long ago. But in the end actions have to be taken and some aren't going to be popular. Bush doesn't help things, but even Clinton's "serious but caring" face and Reagan's speechwriters wouldn't have the security council giving us a foot massage this time.

Twisted Victory - This note

Twisted Victory - This note from Kathryn Jean Lopez, at NRO's "Corner" blog:

Sent out this weekend: "In a national poll from Quinnipiac University released Thursday, Americans said they would rather elect a Democratic president than re-elect George W. Bush! By a margin of 48 to 44 percent, Americans would rather have new leadership in the White House than continue following the same failed policies."

Does this mean they have finally recognized he was elected the first time?

Let the inauguration begin.

Send Us Your Trumped-up, Your Bribed, Your Coerced and Bought and Extorted..."

Senator John Kerry exhibited the foreign-policy acumen that so clearly distinguishes him from the allegations the left makes about President Bush's alleged ineptitude:

Kerry said during the speech at the downtown Marriott Hotel that Bush has been impatient, which has cost the U.S. support from its allies.

"The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgement in the pursuit of diplomacy," he said, "not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted, but in a genuine coalition."

I'm sure the British and Australian troops currently in the desert will appreciate that little bon mot.

(Via Instapundit)

War Movies

War movies have always been my genre. It probably started, I'm sure, with my pre-adolescent fascination with military stuff - planes, tanks, rifles, ships, you name it. As I got through high school and began reading some of the more detailed accounts of life at war, the fascination turned from the tools to the people. What made people do that - march or slither or fly or sail toward an enemy that is trying to kill you?

The books - some famous, like All Quiet on the Western Front or Bill Mauldin's Army, some virtually unknown today, like GI - the Anvil of Victory or the British Two Jacks and the B'Nai B'Rith's Black Book - hammered the human cost of war home to me at a fairly tender age. And the movies - the good ones, anyway?

There are really five different kinds of war movies:

• Jingoistic propaganda pieces. This isn't always a bad thing; Casablanca and Aleksandr Nevski are both propaganda exercises, and both are magnificent in very different ways;
• History lessons. The good ones - Patton, A Bridge Too Far - put huge events and people in a context that makes sense. The bad ones - Midway, Gods and Generals - make you wish a war would break out right about now, to halt the bombardment of factoids.
• Anti-war propaganda pieces. Again, not always bad; All Quiet On The Western Front and Dr. Strangelove both qualify. Platoon, too - I don't share many consevatives' hatred of this movie, which at least told a story Oliver Stone didn't have to substantiate.
• Works of Art. Usually anti-war, but the message - whatever message - is eaten up by the artist's theme and vision. I usually have very little patience with these movies - Full Metal Jacket and Thin Blue Line and The Naked And The Dead and Every Man a King all made me grit my teeth at the shrill pomposity of artists like Kubrick and MacNally and Mailer and Uri Zohar. My friends all loved Peckinpah's Cross of Iron, I could barely watch it - it was about Peckinpah, not the German and Russian soldiers that populated his movie without ever quite starring in it.
• Depictions of the lives of soldiers. The bad ones - Hamburger Hill springs to mind - are action movies with cartoon characters. The great ones - The Big Red One, Private Ryan, Europa Europa, A Midnight Clear- can't pretend to give you an idea of what a soldier's life is about, but they manage to combine real people's humanity with a cinematic treatment of hellishness that manages to deflate any residual notion of battle as a glorious thing.

Lileks' bleat today touches on We Were Soldiers Once, Mel Gibson's much-undeservedly-maligned adaptation of the great book.

It's a great bleat, and hard to pick a money quote - but here's the part I loved - about the dialogue, which some critics panned:

It was a movie about soldiers in a battle, and now I understand some critic’s chagrin: it took the soldiers’ side. I remember reading reviews that slammed the movie for its jingo factor, for shameless retreads of old war-movie clichés. One of the scenes depicted the hero’s penultimate night with his family; he’s reading to his little girl, and she interrupts the story to ask “what is a war, daddy?” This subsequent conversation doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings, it ties them to a piano and pushes the piano out a 30-story window. (Gibson is very good with the children in the movie - as befits a man blessed with many of his own, he doesn’t have to find his motivation when asked to play the father to a half-dozen offspring.) Then there’s the dying words of some soldiers, which are straight out of a black-comedy skit about war-movie clichés. But what if they actually said those words? What if they believed them? When you think of it, there’s not a single heartfelt sentiment that couldn’t come from a comedy skit nowadays. The more unvarnished and elemental the emotion, the more likely we glib sophisticates will roll our eyes: oh, please. Either die screaming as you stuff your guts back in, or keep still and trust the director to let Samuel Barber speak on your behalf.

Someone tell the critics - soldiers don't have scriptwriters. They speak with the same ratio of banality to profundity that everyone else does.

Read the whole thing - he also talks about our mutual radio alma mater, KSTP-AM, and The Babys "Isn't It Time?", the most gloriously overwrought piece of pop treacle in a decade that was swamped with it, and the song that still makes me ask "How can you associate John Waitt with "Missing You"?

Bush = Clinton? - Andrew

Bush = Clinton? - Andrew Sullivan has a great article on the similarities - huge ones - between Bush and Clinton's Iraq policies.

Are there deeper differences between Bush and Clinton on this? There is, of course, the matter of style. Clinton was a master of the European dialogue. He meant very few things he said but he said them very well. He was a great schmoozer. When he compared the Serbian genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, it sounded earnest but no-one, least of all the massacred Bosnians, actually believed he meant it. And he didn't. If he had meant it, he wouldn't have allowed a quarter of a million to be murdered in Europe, while he delegated American foreign policy to the morally feckless and militarily useless European Union. Ditto with Iraq and al Qaeda. A few missiles here and there; some sanctions that starved millions of Iraqis but kept Saddam in power; and a big rhetorical game kept the pretense of seriousness up. But there was no actual attempt to match words with actions. In this, the French were completely - preternaturally - comfortable. No wonder Clinton was popular.

Bush's style couldn't be more different. He's blunt, straightforward, folksy, direct. Although his formal speeches have been as eloquent as any president's in modern times, his informal discourse is of the kind to make a European wince. And his early distancing from many of Clinton's policies, his assertion of American sovereignty in critical matters, undoubtedly ruffled some Euro-lapels. In retrospect, he could have been more politic.

But the point is: the foreign policy of Bush is not so drastically different from Clinton. On Iraq, in particular, there isn't a smidgen of principled difference between this administration and the last one. In fact, Bush came into office far less interventionist than Clinton and far more modest than Gore. His campaign platform budgeted less for defense than Al Gore's did. And his instincts were more firmly multilateral. That, of course, changed a year and a half ago. 9/11 made him realize that American withdrawal from the world was no longer an option.

And this part is going into my standard repertoire of responses, when someone starts trying to knock Bush's diplomatic record:

The truth is: Bush's diplomatic headaches have much less to do with his own poor diplomatic skills than with the simple fact that he is trying ambitious things. Rather than simply forestall crises, postpone them, avoid them or fob them off onto others, Bush is actually doing the hard thing. He's calling for real democracy in the Middle East. He's aiming to make the long-standing U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq a reality. He actually wants to defeat Islamist terrorism, rather than make excuses for tolerating its cancerous growth. And when this amount of power is fueled by this amount of conviction, of course the world is aroused and upset.

As always, the whole thing is worth a read.

Hynde Quarters - Also from

Hynde Quarters - Also from Lileks, this Chrissy Hynde quote:

Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders recently expressed in concert the hopes that our soldiers die and lose.

At the risk of sounding like one of those bloodthirsty hawks you read so much about: I truly hope they don’t.

I'm not going to boycott The Pretenders - you'll get "Tattooed Love Boys" when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.

No, I'll just wallow in the gleefully satisfying irony that Chrissy Hynde has probably made more money from "My City Was Gone" being played three times a day on the "Rush Limbaugh Show" than from all the album sales in her career.

I'd say we're even.

Soldiers may have a different opinion, of course.

Small Favors - I'd like to thank those of you who've been dropping anonymous contributions into my Amazon box, on the right margin. They have made this site self-supporting since I installed the box, 3-4 months ago.

I'm humbled by the donations to this, my page of personal rants and musings, honestly, and I thank you all, whomever you are, sincerely.

"We'll Have the National Guard

"We'll Have the National Guard There in 30 Minutes, or the Pizza is Free" - At the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, each state's governor now has a secure phone line for emergency notifications.

Good idea, right? Sure. But they never bet on North Dakota's invincible bucolicism:

The new emergency telephone in Gov. John Hoeven's office rang three times in its first week, but it wasn't news of a disaster or terrorist attack.

One caller had a wrong number. The other two were telemarketers.

"It was a guy trying to sell him two pizzas on special," Lt. Gov. Jack Dalrymple said. "We're trying to figure out what kind of a disaster is taking place, and it's some guy trying to give the governor a two-for-one."

When I was a kid - probably six or so - I remember my grandparents (who lived in North Dakota's capital, Bismarck) taking me on a tour of the capitol building. As we got off the elevator at the 20th floor (then as now, the capitol - a skyscraper, and the only non-domed capitol in the nation - was the tallest building in the state), we walked...

...straight into the office of Governor Bill Guy. He shook my hand, and gave me a souvenir brochure about the capitol that I think I still have somewhere.

I'd like to think my home state is still that informal - but I'd doubt it.

(Via USS Clueless)

The Other Mike Jackson -

The Other Mike Jackson - The new commander of the British Army, Lt. General Sir Mike Jackson, talks about the readiness of the British military to fight in Iraq, among many other things.

It's an interesting article. Militarily speaking, I'm a bit of an Anglophile - they do a lot of things well, and our military has benefitted greatly by emulating many aspects of the British Army. So while their equipment situation is always a disaster - their new rifle is notoriously temperamental, and their Challenger-class tanks have never-ending technical difficulties (although a Challenger scored the longest-range tank kill in history, during the last Gulf War, killing an Iraqi T55 at a range of over three miles) - and their budgets are always the first cut by Parliament, their professionalism and training are second to none.

Worth a read if you follow such things.

Last Chance - Part CCCLXXVIII

Last Chance - Part CCCLXXVIII - The Axis of Weasels - and much of the American left - is demanding we give Iraq "a last chance".

Joshua Claybourn is running a list of previous "last" chances:

"Hussein will be given 'a last chance to comply before he gets clobbered,' The New York Times on Monday quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying."--CNN.com, Jan. 27, 1998

"Annan Admits Iraq Trip Could Be Last Chance for Peace"--CNN.com, Feb. 18, 1998

"Clinton: Iraq Has Abused Its Last Chance"--CNN.com, Dec. 16, 1998

"So President Bush on Thursday gave Iraq one last chance to comply with UN resolutions requiring that he end his weapons of mass destruction program and submit it to unfettered inspection."--Time, Sept. 11, 2002

"The return of the inspectors is widely seen as Saddam's last chance to avoid a devastating war with the United States. President Bush has warned Saddam that failure to cooperate with the inspectors will bring on an American attack and that Washington will pursue a policy of ''zero tolerance'' toward Iraqi infractions."--Online Athens, Nov. 18, 2002

"The White House suggested Wednesday that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has missed his 'last chance' to disarm."--CNN.com, Dec. 18, 2002

"Future European Union members endorsed a joint declaration Tuesday warning Saddam Hussein he has one last chance to disarm."--Associated Press,

Let the count roll.

Nazi, meet PETA. PETA, Meet

Nazi, meet PETA. PETA, Meet Nazi - Michael Coren of the Toronto Sun wrote a column comparing Nazis (like Toronto's famous holocaust revisionist Ernst Zündel) and PETA.

It's hard to figure who was more offended - or offensive. The column is fascinating, in a horrific way - here, he quotes a putative Nazi sympathizer named "Combat 88":

The 88, of course, stands for Heil Hitler. This is what he had to say.

"There are deniers and there are diminishers. Then there are hoaxers. The great Jew hoax. It never happened. But it will. This time we'll get it right. You filthy liar. You hide behind being a Christian but you should really be called Cohen. You'll die just like your family and kids."

Actually Coren is just as Hebraic as Cohen, and is a common name in Israel. Three of my grandparents were Jewish, and mum's dad killed a lot of Nazis in the war. Got medals for it. Actions speak louder than words.

There were dozens like these. But also dozens from animal liberation types who were less racist but almost as abusive.

"Hitler wasn't a vegetarian, and only became one on his doctor's orders. So what if the Nazis were good to animals. Makes them better than you. I don't hate Jews, but I do hate people who hate animals. I hope you're slaughtered like a pig."

Some did border on the anti-Semitic. "Kosher slaughter is obscene, and any people who murder animals in such a way will have to face the consequences. I'm not a Nazi, but you Jews can't keep hiding behind religion. Animals have rights too. The campaign is right. Just like those Nazis in 1945, one day you will have to face up to what you did to animals and be punished. Let's hope that we are more merciful than you are to animals."

My father, in teaching the difference between Stalinists and Nazis, used to say that the old "left/right" continuum was inadequate - it's almost like beliefs are in a big gull-winged shape, with the wingtips coming very close together, deep in "lunatic" territory".

Personal note - during my talk-radio career, I interviewed Ernst Zündel. One of the most chilling nights of my life, not only knowing intellectually that someone could deny the existence of the Holocaust, but hearing people - typical Minnesotans - calling in and giving him credence (in among those threatening to kill him). It's not in the least bit comforting to know that the animal rights crowd - nominally the Nazis' polar opposites - are not only just as bad, but pretty well established on our college campuses.

History Lesson - John Hawkins

History Lesson - John Hawkins of Right Wing News has an excellent, concise history of anti-Americanism. Hawkins goes over a number of points I'd forgotten; having Europe treat us like a hillbilly cousin goes back to the aftermath of World War I, and has been a consistent theme in every foreign-policy crisis in the past ninety years.

Money quote:

The truth is that if we're doing anything because we expect gratitude from another country, we're going to be sadly disappointed down the road. Maybe some of their citizens may appreciate what we've done, but even that is probably going to be very short-lived. Now why is that? Because as a general rule, I find that many people and all nations tend to decide what's in their best interests first and then come up with all the "moral" reasons why they're taking that position afterwards.

So, I don't worry about anti-Americanism that much. It has always been around and always will be. However, as long as our military and economy stay strong, it'll be in the interest of the other nations in the world to be friendly with us. And if it's in their interest, they'll come up with "moral" reasons why they should agree with/like us on their own -- especially once things start to cool down in the war on terror (although that will be years away). You may think that is a Machiavellian view of the world, but you'll find that it's a very realistic one in a world where politicking between nations is simply a clever way to mask that the law of the jungle is still in effect.

Our "Allies"

Sullivan discusses yet another reason the Axis of Weasels may be so reticent about confronting Hussein:

I fear that France and Germany's shenanigans - in allowing Sadam and our enemies to plan for months for war - may directly put Anglosphere troops at risk. This from people whom the New York Times still calls "allies." If any of this transpires, if France or Germany can be seen to have been complicit in selling weapons that are ulitmately used against American troops, we will shortly not be feeling mere disappointment with our "allies." We will be feeling rage. Maybe that's why they want to avoid war so much. They fear what it will reveal. And the American anger it will unleash.

One has to wonder - where did the technology for all of these weapons come from?

DFL Eschews News! - Once

DFL Eschews News! - Once upon a time, the Minnesota DFL website was a fairly competently-produced publication; more importantly, they actually presented some news that related to the DFL party in Minnesota.

So look at the party's website today.

I'll start with the technical stuff. I'm no graphics person (you can see that from my website) but I design user interactions - and the site's design is chock full of user-interface no-nos. (And I'll tell the DFL what they are for my customary billable rate). This isn't just nerdy bitchiness - the Americans with Disability Act includes a number of guidelines to make websites more accessible to the handicapped and visually-impaired. The DFL site falls drastically short of meeting many of these guidelines.

But that's fine - I'm not disabled and I am used to reading badly-designed web sites. I'd be happy to read a poorly-designed website that includes some useful information.

So we're in the middle of a very contentious legislative session; the DFL is fighting the GOP on a slew of very serious budget issues.

Where's the news?

Instead, we have a piece by "Dean of White House Reporters" Helen Thomas (read: an old hack who is walking proof of liberal press bias) on the Presidential Press Conference; several shrill screeds about national economic news and tax cuts; a "prebuttal" to the State of the State address (which is pretty old, now...) and...

Not much else.

No positions, beyond the platform. No initiatives. No news.

Nothing!

It could very well be that the DFL's website is the poor stepcousin in the DFL's communications budget - it happens. But look elsewhere in the media; where is the news? What is the DFL doing but sniping at the GOP?

After Skip Humphrey's 1998 debacle, some of us Republicans joked that the DFL was on its way to losing its major-party status (droppping below 5% of the vote). We're probably far from it - but the DFL' tone today, at least as expressed through their webste, is not that of a major party.

(By the way - the Minnesota GOP website is not in violation of nearly as many ADA web design accessibility guidelines)

Call Us When The War

Call Us When The War Begins - This story - from the London Daily Mirror via the always-excellent Powerline - almost made me ruin my keyboard.

TERRIFIED Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started.

The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise.

The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.

The drama unfolded last Monday as the Para batallion tested mortars and artillery weapons to make sure they were working properly.

Sounds like an endless debacle waiting to happen, doesn't it?

The troops of the British Parachute Regiment are roughly the equivalent of our Airborne Rangers. They've been in action all over the place recently - Sierra Leone, the Balkans, and of course the last Gulf War. So their observations are worth something:

The Paras are a tough, battle-hardened lot but were moved by the plight of the Iraqis. There was nothing they could do other than send them back.

"They were a motley bunch and you could barely describe them as soldiers - they were poorly equipped and didn't even have proper boots. Their physical condition was dreadful and they had obviously not had a square meal for ages. No one has ever known a group of so-called soldiers surrender before a shot has been fired in anger."

I say a week from tomorrow.

Minnesota Public Employees to State:

Minnesota Public Employees to State: "You Must Keep Paying, and Quit Asking Questions: During the cha-cha years of endless surpluses during most of the nineties, and especially during the go-go early years of the Ventura Administration, Minnesota's public employees (along with public employees nationwide) treated the extra money as a sort of bureaucratic birthright. In 2001, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks and as the nation faced an economic downturn, the state's public employees unions rammed through a large increase in pay and benefits, financed by the last surplus.

Today, of course, things are different. Except, apparently, in the minds of Minnesota's public employee unions.

Faced with an immense budget crunch, and in the midst of an economic downturn that has put Minnesota's enemployment rate over 5% for the first time in a decade, Representative Tom Neufeld (R-Northfield) introduced a bill that would freeze public salaries into 2005.

At a time when Minnesota's private sector families are learning 1001 ways to cook Government Cheese, Neufeld's bill would prevent roughly 1/3 of the currently-projected public employee layoffs (about 1,500 with the pay freeze, about 2,300 with the currently-slated pay hikes).

According to the Star/Tribune:

In short, the plan would prohibit managers of the state, cities, counties and school districts from agreeing to new contracts that increase pay, including those based on seniority. The bill allows for raises for promotions and wouldn't affect health coverage or pension plans.

In short - Public Employees would get a much better deal than Minnesota's private sector employees. As usual.

The University of Minnesota, which has special constitutional status, would be strongly encouraged to go along.

And the U of M's public employees will "strongly encourage" everyone else to...well, I digress.

The Strib continues:

A preliminary analysis projects savings of $26.5 million a year for the state, $114 million for local units of government and $31 million for the university -- figures that Neuville considers too conservative.

The DFL - which is largely controlled by public-sector employee unions - reacted predictably:

Sen. Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis, the committee's chairwoman, isn't convinced that the proposal is sound. She said it fits in the category of "simplistic solutions to complex problems."

It's worth noting that neither Rep. Ranum nor any other DFL representative has come up with a suitably complex solution to the budget problem, preferring instead to snipe at Governor Pawlenty. (Which seems to be a theme in the DFL this year; look at the "News" section in the DFL website, a formerly-competent production that now seems to be designed by trained dogs. Note the dearth of actual substantive DFL proposals being publicized by the DFL's official organ!)

Ranum said it would strip local government and school districts of flexibility in managing budget cuts.

I saw this news item a few weeks ago:"Alcoholics say AA strips them of flexibility in managing drinking".

No Kidding, Jane Ranum! They're being "stripped" of "flexibility", in the same way that thousands of Minnesota private sector companies have been "stripped" of options - their budgets are shrinking!

Union officials said the collective bargaining process would suffer. They noted that a decade ago, when the state's budget was in rough shape, unions agreed to go without raises for a year in exchange for health coverage protection.

Unmentioned: They more than made up for it in the intervening decade.

"Wage negotiations belong at the bargaining table," said Julie Bleyhl of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "The bargaining process allows for trades."

On behalf of every Minnesota private sector employee and small-business owner that's being asked to finance that "flexibility" with taxes drawn from our static, shinking or nonexistent paychecks, as we watch our own health insurance premiums zoom into the ionosphere, I ask: where's our flexibility? And why are your salaries and benefits any more sacrosanct than ours?

Protest - Went to the

Protest - Went to the capital today with the kids. We got there late - about fifteen minutes before the protest was over - but caught the tail end of the "Liberate Iraq" meeting on the capitol mall.

One of the organizers told me they'd given away hundreds of "Liberate Iraq" signs. I saw quite a few people walking around with them.

My kids and I each grabbed one, and stood on the median on Constitution Avenue for a bit. One lice-eaten cretin took the liberty of flipping off my 11-year-old daughter. Classy folks, those liberals.

Hopefully the Liberate Iraq group will be posting photos soon.

And - please pass this along - there's going to be a protest on the 494/France Overpass from 4:30-6:30PM this coming Thursday - liberals aren't the only ones that can take over bridges! I plan on being there. Hope to see you tehre, too - let me know if you plan on attending, maybe we can have a "Blog Corner" and get some pictures taken!

Jitters

The Great National Self-Doubt has set in. It's everywhere:

• People are wondering if Britain will even be able to go on board with us. Tony Blair's in political trouble, as elements of his own party fall back on their pusillanimous roots. Blair will need to be an immensely courageous man to get through this, knowing especially that wartime success treats British Prime Ministers even less kindly than it does presidents; the careers of Winston Churchill and John Major didn't survive their own successful wars.
• The nattering nabobs are clucking about Bush's performance the other night. He was tired; he was listless; his political fortunes seem dire at the moment.
• The economy continues to have trouble, as war jitters weaken the already-doddering markets
• While America doesn't seem particularly ideologically split about the war - most support it - the protest movement is getting bigger, especially if you limit your count to celebrities and people without jobs.

However you read the tea leaves, these are hairy days for the administration.

And yet they have a lot of great role models to choose from in getting their agenda, and the nation they govern, through these times.

Some pundits, like Minnesota's Jeff Fecke, talk about the president's approval rating, not remembering the depths to which Ronald Reagan's approval dipped; in January of 1983, his approval ration was 42%, while his negatives were up around a phenomenal 54%, according to a contemporary ABC/WaPo poll.

His victory in the Cold War was eight years in the future - and by no means assured; most pundits declared the USSR here to stay. The economy was still sweating out the biggest correction since the Depression, punctuated by oil prices that, in 2003 dollars, were around $90 a barrel (again due to Iraq!). The media, in those days when "talk radio" didn't mean "conservative", "Fox News" was a British hunting magazine, and the Internet just connected universities, was stacked against him like Persians against Leonidas. My own liberal beliefs were starting to crumble at the time, but I still feared Reagan - and remember rejoicing at the thought that he was looking like a one-term president at the time. Things looked that dire for Reagan back then.

22 months later, he won the biggest landslide in American history. What happened?

He stayed on message. Free Enterprise works. Tax Cuts will improve the economy. We'll thank ourselves for confronting the USSR later.

Freedom Works.

Two years later still, Reagan faced an equally grave test; at Rejkjavik, he confronted Mikhail Gorbachev; he refused to draw down US battlefield nukes in Europe, waved the Strategic Defense Initiative in the Russians' (and his critics') faces, and stood his ground against the most intense criticism of his career. Some liberals predicted imminent nuclear holocaust.

Four years later, after his successor won in one of the five biggest landslides in American history, the USSR collapsed. Freedom broke out throughout Eastern Europe, and much of the rest of the world as well. Why?

Because Reagan stayed on message. We'll thank ourselves for confronting the USSR, and soon. Screw the pundits, Communism's done for. Rumors of their long-term survival are greatly exaggerated.

Freedom Works.

Bush's challenges are immense. But the same answers still apply. Hold the line on tax cuts. Press the line forward on those who'd kill us. Don't write off a huge chunk of humanity because they're ruled by Islamofascists. Stand up for America.

Freedom works.

Bush isn't Ronald Reagan. It doesn't matter. He doesn't have to be Reagan. He just has to remember the message.

Freedom works.

Ugly Gringoes - Glenn Reynolds has this wonderful quote on the ugly-American blunderrings of...

...the NYTimes and the "internationalist" anti-war movement:

It's interesting to contrast Bush's careful courtesy toward nations who don't deserve it, with the language that the antiwar folks -- who are supposedly the internationalists -- use to describe the rather large coalition that Bush has put together. Remind me again -- who is supposed to be blundering and insensitive here?

Hey, Ho, Let's Go -

Hey, Ho, Let's Go - As I've noted often in this space, it's sometimes very strange being a conservative rock and roller.

That's why I periodically throw my hands to the heavens and thank my creator for the National Review's Kevin Cherry. This week; his review of the new Ramones tribute album:

The Ramones were unlike other punk bands in that they, especially Joey, had a real sense of melody. Their favorite artists included Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Phil Spector's stable of groups, and the Beatles...(Spector would also produce the album, End of the Century, when he shot at Dee Dee, a fact noted repeatedly this year.) This separated them from the other raucous bands of the time, like the MC5, the Velvet Underground, Iggy, and the Stooges. The Ramones were tough, but they were hummable, too. In addition, they had a sense of humor about themselves and about their lives. Their early material was a reflection of the times in which they lived: songs about mental illness, apathy, boredom, drugs, and girls were the norm. They would have the occasional political outburst — conservative Johnny vetoed Joey and Dee Dee's attempt to release a song called "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" (it was retitled, "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down") — but for the most part, their songs were simply about life in America, as dysfunctional as the nation had become. They were, in a way, rock journalists: neither approving nor decrying, always describing, in very short bursts of melodic energy.

It's hard to describe to people today exactly what the Ramones were to someone growing up in the late seventies, especially in a place like North Dakota, where only the most commercial, commercial radio fare ever saw airplay. Fun, liberating, utterly un-"Rock".

"Like Green Day, only fun", I used to tell my stepson.

Wanker Alert - As if

Wanker Alert - As if on cue, there's an Impeachment movement.

No, not among PETA members. In Congress:

At least one senior House Democrat has produced a draft impeachment resolution. It accuses Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft of more than a dozen "high crimes and misdemeanors," including bombing civilians in Afghanistan and constitutional violations in the domestic war on terrorism.

The resolution also charges Bush with "threatening the independence and sovereignty of Iraq by belligerently proclaiming an intention to change its government by force while preparing to assault Iraq in a war of aggression." A congressional aide provided the resolution's text on the condition of anonymity.

Rep. Danny K. Davis, a Chicago Democrat who has discussed impeachment with his colleagues in the congressional black and progressive caucuses, said a resolution probably would be introduced in the event of "a full-fledged military effort" that occurs without new congressional war resolutions.

"There are some [lawmakers] who obviously are more eager to jump hard, and then there are others who probably aren't even thinking this way at all" about impeachment, Davis said. "I'd probably be in the middle."

The motion is specious, of course - it's a protest, "sending a message" as liberals are wont to do.

But it's such an obvious payback for the Clinton years. One wonders if they're looking for a blue dress as we speak.

Lame - Big day of

Lame - Big day of job-hunting today.

I'll post more tonight, and/or one of my customary weekend salvoes.

Til then, please accept Jeff Fecke's excellent fisking of Syl Jones as a token of my esteem...

Quote Of The Night -

Quote Of The Night - Lileks, on the Press Conference:

My favorite question came from Terry Moran - and whoever named him bought the wrong vowel.

Press Conference - The President

Press Conference - The President looked and sounded tired. He should. This has got to be an amazingly difficult time.

He was on the most important message, though; before one talks about "final chances", one must remember that Resolution 1441 was a final chance - the last of many final chances.

I think it was the right message - and I think (at first blush) that it was delivered the wrong way. Perhaps it's just me and my own situation - I think Bush needs to deliver a ringing, rabble-rousing barn-burner of a speech sometime before the shooting starts; something like his speech to Congress after 9/11, a neo-Churchillian oration that clearly sets out the job to be done and the means we'll use to do it.

I'm sure he'll get his opportunity.

Weekend Agenda - I'm going

Weekend Agenda - I'm going to the capitol on Saturday. I hope to see you there.

Mood Swings - So I

Mood Swings - So I took a rare half hour of listening to Limbaugh on my way to an appointment today. He was practically climbing through the mic with a rumor that a US/Pakistani raid had captured Osama Bin Laden, and that tonight's press conference was to announce the apprehension.

"Has to be bogus", I said to myself, although there was a hopeful swing in my step as I got out of the car a few minutes later. But if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...

My suspicion? While the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was quite a coup, I'd suspect he's using his position to set up quite a smokescreen, on the chance that he does know anything about his boss' whereabouts.

But a guy can hope.

Dedicated to Martin Sheen - Rightthinking.com has gotten a couple of artillery guys to dedicate some 105mm rounds, not only to his blog - but to Martin Sheen as well.

It reads Hey Martin Sheen, how does it feel to have this dedicated for you? Now, one of you reading this must know how to get ahold of someone associated with Martin Sheen. Anyone know the email to his publicist? Let's make sure that old Marty knows just what the ground-pounders think about his politics.

I know I get the occasional .mil address in my hit log.

Rumor of War - I've

Rumor of War - I've been hearing snippets of rumors all day day.

• There's a presidential press conference tonight.
• The various Baghdad news bureaux are on a vastly higher state of alert today
• The whole UN front seems to have gone quiet - like it's irrelevant.

Might today be the final ultimatum?

We're approaching the new moon (next week). Most of the troops that really need to be in position, are. We've hit that critical mass of 250,000 troops that we'll supposedly need to prosecute the campaign.

What do you think?

Sex For War! - I've been reading for the last few weeks about the Lysistrata Project - a takeoff on the classical Aristophanes play in which a nation's women (all apparently pacifists) protest their menfolks' hawkishness (uniformly so, natch) by withholding sex. The "Project" will involve roughly 1,000 readings of the play in 56 countries (which means, if they use the same math as used by the Million Man and Million Mom Marches, we can expect about 75 readings in six countries, but I digress).

Like "Poets Against War", it smacks of the sort of pretentious, self-important diddling that artists have always embraced to try to "send messages" about life and death events.

I'd love to comment - but this one, by blogger Asparagirl, is too good to pass up:

And it's not enough for these "feminists" that sexuality, or even specifically female sexuality, be used as an oxymoronic anti-war weapon, but that it must be denial of female sexuality that is the weapon, that very special tool for keeping their social order and their status quo intact. Sex, after all, should only be given up in the appropriate manner and to the appropriate person, and woe to they who disagree...waitaminute, this is starting to sound kinda familiar...

What also galls me is that these women are claiming not only sex, but femininity itself as a uniformly passive, gentle, loving, pacifist attribute. What rubbish. I shouldn't support waging war on a mass-killing dictator because as a woman, my place is to elevate discourse and consensus and eschew "manly", messy action? They're even implying that if I am not a peaceful, good-mannered, right-thinking woman like them, a woman for peace, then perhaps I am not really a woman at all? And these are the women who are telling me this?

The whole article is worth a read, as are the various links to it.

As far as I'm concerned - while I support the war, as a military historian I do observe a fairly high standard of proof for whether a war is just or necessary. And I find the left-feminist notion that war is just a symptom of a masculine culture - a form of societal testosterone poisoning - as offensive as any racial epithet. Any feminists who want to debate the point are hereby invited to try.

(via Jeff Fecke)

Insane - What is it about Ohio's congressional delegation?

Democrat Marcy Kaptur, who represents the Toledo area, has compared Bin Laden with our own founding fathers.

One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown," Miss Kaptur said.

In Iraq and other Arab nations where revolutions are potentially brewing, religious fervor will play a vital role in shaping political events, she said, and the United States must be careful "not to get caught in the crossfire."

"I think that one thing that people of faith understand about the world of Islam is that the kind of insurgency we see occurring in many of these countries is an act of hope that life will be better using Islam as the only reed that they have to lean on.

That Rep. Kaptur ignores the completely different aims of the different "people of faith" - liberal democracy versus fascist theocracy - is...

...depressing. After 227 years of independence, centuries of political tradition and a solid (if far from perfect) educational tradition, and two world wars, that anyone - much less a US Representative - could compare James Madison with Khalid Mohammed or Mullah Omar is enough to render one catatonic with despair.

A Jug of Wine, a

A Jug of Wine, a Block of Feta... - It seems to be striking much of the liberal media as a huge revelation - but the US is quite popular in Eastern Europe.

Last month, when the governments of most of the members of the former Warsaw Pact sided with us versus Iraq, much of the media acted like it was news to them - although if you've worked with any Poles or Ukranians in the past decade, you'd wonder what rock the media'd been hiding under.

MSNBC's Gersh Kunstman lauds Bulgaria's wine, feta...and friendship:

Bulgaria actually seems to like us. I mean really like us—in that Sally Field way.
And I like them right back. In fact, the mere mention of Bulgaria brings to mind Will Rogers’s famous axiom: I have, indeed, never met a Bulgarian I didn’t like. Think about your own experiences with these exotic people of the East(ern Europe). I’ll bet you’ve never met a Bulgarian who wasn’t charming, demure and, to top it off, a fantastic dancer.
So that’s why I’ve started showing my support through copious consumption of Chateau Boriana. Sure, you French-wine-drinking snobs may scoff, but repeated tastings of Chateau Boriana revealed an extremely drinkable red—and when I say “extremely drinkable,” I mean that exactly the same amount of Chateau Boriana merlot was required to get me as messed up as I get on the genuine French stuff. At $5.99 a bottle, you do the geopolitics.

Yes!

I met this Bulgarian woman at a coffee shop last year...all I can say is, let's hear it for the new world order.

War For Oil! - Duke

War For Oil! - Duke University's Joseph Grieco makes the case why the war should be about oil.

Opponents of a possible war with Iraq say such oil will be used to fuel cars, especially gas-guzzling SUVs owned by Americans. But oil is also the lifeblood of modern industry. For example, 25 percent of all oil used in the United States goes to manufacturing operations, particularly in the plastics and pharmaceutical sectors.

Oil resources located in the Middle East are vital not just to the prosperity of rich countries, but for the prospects of growth in developing nations [emphasis added]. According to the IEA, future increases in demand for oil will come largely not from the world’s rich countries, but from fast-growing developing countries, especially China.

This trend highlights a link between oil access and world peace. According to the IEA, China over the next 30 years will become a "strategic buyer" in international energy markets. If those markets are periodically thrown into turmoil because of supply disruptions in the Middle East, China might decide to take control of the oil reserves thought to be under the South China Sea. That would bring it into serious conflict with such neighbors as Vietnam and Indonesia, and ultimately with the United States.

It's not about oil company profits. It's the economy, stupid - just just ours, but the one on which most of the world's poor depend.

(Via Instapundit)

Connecting the Dots - Sullivan

Connecting the Dots - Sullivan makes what is I think the key point about endless inspections and cascading resolutions:

But what Saddam has shown - rather brilliantly - is that even the slightest concession from Baghdad is enough for the appeasers to claim that the "inspections" are "working" (even though 1441 doesn't stipulate that the inspections should have any effect except verifying Saddam's complete and immediate disarmament). There is in principle nothing to stop this process from going on for ever. De Villepin has claimed that inspections cannot go on for ever, but has never proposed an end-date, or even a simple criterion by which one could measure whether they had failed. The truth is, I fear, that France, Russia and Germany simply want to keep Saddam in power and to humiliate the United States in order to build their own relationship with the Arab satrapies and pursue their own priorities in the region. If that's their game, no compromise will satisfy them, whatever the British think. So let them veto.

Indeed - none of this is about "peace". It's about a macchiavellian jostle for power in a realigning world. France and Germany team up to jostle us - and millions of Iraqis, and potential millions of future US and Euro terror victims - will be the ones trampled underfoot.

Veto away, indeed.

Blame Canad...er, France - If

Blame Canad...er, France - If the blogosphere doesn't have something for everyone, it will soon.

Itwas only a matter of time before we got this one ....

Terror Setback - The captures

Terror Setback - The captures over the last few months of Ramsi Bin AlShibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were all important.

But no victory against terrorism is quite as key as this; art shows can go on.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

While museums are pretty scarce on lists of potential terror targets, the price of insuring museums and the works of art they house (whose values have been immensely inflated over the past decade) has skyrocketed.

My congressional "representative", Betty McCollum of St. Paul's Fourth Congressional District, is on the job:

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. museums have struggled to obtain works for major exhibitions from overseas due to skyrocketing insurance rates and jittery art lenders who fear losing their pieces in a terrorist strike.

As more museums are unable to afford to insure exhibitions on their own, they are increasingly turning to the federal government.

Supporters of the arts, including Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., say the federal indemnity program that insures artworks is overwhelmed and needs to be expanded.

She has introduced legislation that would raise the amount of indemnity coverage that can be provided at any particular time from $5 billion to $8 billion. It also increases how much coverage the program -- run through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) -- can provide to one exhibition, from $500 million to $750 million.

"It's incumbent upon the federal government -- this is a role that they've undertaken since 1975 -- to help make art available to citizens throughout the United States," McCollum said.

So in other words, McCollum has spent her last two years opposing most effective military and intelligence responses to terrorism, she will go all-out to support subsidizing the payment of inflated premiums to cover museums in the event an attack happens anyway?

Walkouts - Students at Saint

Walkouts - Students at Saint Cloud State, Moorhead State University, Hamline University, and Hopkins High School are planning walkouts from school today.

I don't care so much about Hamline; while the students there are rapidly vying with MacAlester for the title of "most specious college students in the Twin Cities", it's a private school, and they're adults.

The students at Saint Cloud and Moorhead are (nominally) adults as well - but they attend a state-funded institution. The time they spend mincing about the quad on their specious protest costs me, the taxpayer. As long as I'm subsidizing their education, they can damn well either stay in class, or reimburse the rest of us for the money they're wasting.

As far as Hopkins High School goes; no way. No high school kid has any "right" to waste an hour of taxpayer-funded time. Not one second. If I were a Hopkins parent, I'd gather a posse of other parents to counterdemonstrate not only the waste of money, not only the vapidity of the education that has students participiating in such specious wastes of time, but also tracking the whereabouts of every single student.

Because you just know that every "protesting" student is getting of of school to "protest". Right?

The liability issue alone should get Hopkins High to wake up and smell the coffee.

Blogger, Heal Thyself. Again. Please

Blogger, Heal Thyself. Again. Please - Serious bloggus interruptus yesterday - blogger.com is having more spasms of downtime, which ate a few posts.

I'll try to catch up, as the day goes on today.

Behind Hills' Switch - Why

Behind Hills' Switch - Why could Hillary! break ranks with the rest of the Dems?

It's in the Polls!

Legalize Torture? - Blogger Rick

Legalize Torture? - Blogger Rick Heller of SmartGenes is kicking off a campaign to legalize the use of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, recently-captured Al Quaeda capo.

I have never before advocated torture, but I do now, for this one individual. There are strong reasons to believe that a massive Al Qaeda operation is immanent. MEMRI reports on indicators of an operation in Asia and one in the United States. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be likely to know of impending attacks, and had probably surfaced in order to facilitate them. His arrest might even cause the remaining Al Qaeda leaders to advanced the zero hour of the operations for fear of them being compromised.

Considering this man is suspected to be the Mastermind of 9/11, I doubt that any American jury would convict anyone who caused this man serious pain. I don't advocate torture for purposed of retribution. I'd leave that up to God. But in the classic case of a ticking time bomb, which this appears to be, violating the law to save lives is morally justified.

There's a certain deep-down satisfaction that comes from demanding something like this. But it'd be disingenuous of me - one who pleads "slippery slope" on so many other issues of galloping government power - to really endorse an idea like this, even though there's a perverse, purely utilitarian logic to it. I'm not the only one.

This has all the makings of a first-year law-school question.

Why We (Don't) Fight

Why We (Don't) Fight - Sullivan issues a shopping list of everyone's agendas:

For some it's about "war" in general - a newly empowered new age pacifism. For France, it's about ... France, and its eclipse as a power of any significance. France's crisis is deepened by the fact that a successful war against Saddam could also accelerate the end of the Franco-German bloc as the power-house of the European Union.

People in the US, dealing with our byzantine and often self-flagellating State Department, aren't used o living in a nation that acts, openly and brazenly, in its own self-interest. It's interesting to compare our diplomats (the foggy bottom stealth pundits, not appointees like Colin Powell) with those of countries like France, China or Vietnam; nations whose self-interest is waved like the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima.

For Russia, it's about money.

And, I suggest, Putin's desire to set a national diplomatic identity, separate from that of the US.

For the Germans, it's about a new national identity. The Germans have never been able to sustain a moderate polity on their own. They veer from extreme romantic militarism to romantic pacifism. Their current abdication of all strategic responsibility for Europe or the wider world is just another all-too-familiar spasm from German history.

Germany's like one of those guys you knew in high school; used to be a party vegetable, dealt some pot, a couple of illegitimate kids, who got saved at a revival meeting, and is now just a little too ardently born-again; you may like the change, but you wonder if a little moderation wouldn't help.

For the broader anti-war forces in Europe, it's about American uni-polar power - and the need to counteract it, even if it's being put to good use. For still others, especially in the Vatican and France, it's the old Jew-hatred again.

This part scares me. I think he's right. I think there's a lot of ambient anti-semitism that got papered over after the Holocaust, during Vatican II. I think the paper's wearing thin.

For the Democrats, it's about getting back to prescription drugs. For the anti-war left in America, it's really about Bush. The pent-up fury they felt after Florida never found expression or even validation in the wider culture. It was repressed in the first months of a new presidency - and then made irrelevant by 9/11. Finally, they have a chance to demonstrate their hate - which is why so much of the demonstrations' focus has not been on Saddam, Iraq or even war, but on Bush.

Yeah!

I've been wondering when a recognized pundit would pick up on this point, one I've been harping on (of course, far from alone) for a year now; hatred is a serious motivation for many on the Anti-Bush left (note I didn't say "democratic party"; although most Bush-haters are Democrats). The only battle that matters is the one that'll be fought at the polls next fall.

The anti-Bush left knows that a successful war will only strengthen the president further and marginalize them even more - hence their utter desperation and viciousness today. This is their moment; and the demonstrations are their therapy. Meanwhile, a real and actual problem in global security is being addressed.

That's the part they never can quite handle.

I'm a Bad Dad -

I'm a Bad Dad - James Lileks writes about a handout he got at his daughter's play group, about what to tell your kids about terrorism:

If your children ask, “What if another country attacks us?” tell them that by working with as many countries as possible, eradicating hunger, poverty, and preventable diseases, it will be less likely that this will happen. Tell them that is very important that all of us work to prevent the conditions that lead to war, and these are some of the root causes.

Other things we can do are: Be willing to not build as many nuclear weapons so that other countries don’t feel they have to build them to keep up with us.

Also let your children know that there may be certain instances where we have no choice but to protect ourselves like if we were directly attacked, but this isn't happening now.

Hm. Tha'ts not what I told my kids.

I remember the night of September 11. I told my kids that the world was full of people, most of whom love us, many of whom say they love us but put on like they hate us to impress their neighbors (being elementary school students, that made perfect sense to them), and some - a tiny minority - that hate us for being what we are.

I told them that we've made our mistakes over the years, but that we try to be the kind of nation people love; that we are the kind of nation the people who pretend to hate us mostly want to move to someday; and that the people that hate us, largely hate us not because of what we do, but because of what we are: Christians, Jews, or just free people in a society where people of all faiths and philosophies get along without blowing each other up (much).

And I told them that we try very hard to get along with those that hate us; we bend over backwards, in fact, more than does any other country in the world (which is true). We have entire branches of our state department that do nothing but apologize for our past, for crying out loud.

But there are people whose hatred is so deep, so intense, so unreasonable that there is no apology, no restitution, no reasoning that will make them stop. They're the kind of people that fly planes full of innocent people into skyscrapers full of other innocent people. And for them (or the ones they leave behind), we have cops and satellites and spies that go out and find the bad guys; planes that can fly halfway around the world and drop bombs down their chimneys; we have soldiers that drop out of the night to find the bad guys and haul them off to jail and leave all kinds of mayhem in their wake.

And they have a daddy that knows how to do everything from build a safe room to shoot a teeny tiny, tight little group with a Colt .45, and who has declared our yard a terrorist-free zone. Y'know - a daddy who doesn't feel helpless. Either should they.

Real terror - the kind of thing that gives people Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the real kind - comes from feeling absolutely helpless in the face of an intractable threat. I think it also comes from relying on unreliable people and institutions, like the United Nations, to protect you from the evil that walks the earth.

So I don't tell my kids about the UN and our culpability for all the world's ills and 34 flavors of mealy-mouthed phony diversity; I tell them that the United States is usually what I'm trying to raise them to be; thoughtful, fair, avoiding violence as far is is morally practical - and if someone just won't let it drop, and threatens you that badly, capable of thumping that person so hard that they reconsider their ways (and if they thump anyone that doesn't genuinely have it coming, Daddy's going to have some big words with them...)

Note to the Minneapolis Public Schools; I'm available for speeches to students. Feel free to call.

Concealed Carry Reform - Over

Concealed Carry Reform - Over the past couple of years, the Star/Tribune's Conrad deFiebre has provided something that's been exceedingly rare in the concealed carry debate - coverage that has been largely balanced, admirably thorough, and fair. Minnesotans of all political stripes are lucky to have had this issue in particular covered so well.

Today's piece is an exceptional analysis of the two women - Senator Pat Pariseau of Farmington and Rep. Lynda Boudreau of Faribault - who've broken the issue's normal gender stereotypes to drive Concealed Carry Reform for the past seven years.

As this issue approaches its endgame this session, I'll be covering it a lot more thoroughly than I have been. Stay tuned.

Ready, Fire, Aim - Powerline,

Ready, Fire, Aim - Powerline, on the first "anti-war" movement to precede any war it could be against.

Hindrocket quotes a WaPo piece on the subject:

"In Britain, according to organizer John Rees, several hundred activists first got together the weekend after Sept. 11. Most were from the hard core of the British left -- the Socialist Workers Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-capitalist organization Globalized Resistance, along with Labor Party legislators Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway. Within weeks, they had combined with representatives from two more important elements -- Britain's growing Muslim community and its militant trade unions. By October they had a name: the Stop the War Coalition."

That pretty much says it all. The "antiwar" movement precedes the war by a year and a half. No opposition to the murder of thousands of random, innocent people; just opposition to freeing the world from the threat of terrorism. No opposition to the war being made on the U.S. and other free countries by the Islamofascists; just opposition to our self-defense.

Turkey, Again - The

Turkey, Again - The situation in Turkey is not only not as simple as the knee-jerk media (and blogophere) puts it - it's not even as simple as my own relatively convoluted perception.

We all know about last weekend's vote against US troop deployment in Turkey against Northern Iraq. As a result, a fair chunk of the US 4th Mechanized Infantry Division is lying at anchor off the port of Iskendren, instead of off-loading and getting ready to move into Kurdistan.

So what's behind all this? Why did this happen in a country that is not only a traditional US ally, but that owes us, big-time?

Several things to remember about Turkey:

• The Turkish economy suffered terribly during the first Gulf War. Leaving aside Islamist feelings in the Turkish Street, much of the opposition to the war springs from memories of the misery of that time.
  
• Their government is, constitutionally, the only secularist government in the Islamic world. This secularism has helped Turkey to become the closest thing to a liberal democracy that can be found in the Islamic world - even with all of its well-publicized problems.
  
• One of those problems; its secularist system is being challenged by the new, ruling, pro-Islamicist party, reflecting the radical Islam that is sweeping the Turkish countryside. The new party has promised to make changes to Turkey's constitution...
  
• ...which includes a provision to allow the military to stage a coup to prevent exactly this eventuality. The Turkish military is quite pro-US, and the constitution gives it a role as a check and balance against the radicalization of the government - a role it has carried out several times in the last 40 years.
  
• Their political system is, to American eyes, a very strange, convoluted thing.
  

How convoluted? Well, the defeat of the US troops initiative over the weekend...

...was actually a victory that was turned back on a technicality!

The activity today followed the dramatic vote on Saturday in which more Turkish legislators voted in favor of the American deployment than voted against it. After a chaotic interlude, Turkish officials announced that the measure had been defeated because it had not been approved by a majority of those present, as required by the Turkish Constitution. Nineteen Turkish lawmakers abstained from voting [Emphasis mine].

The final vote was 264 votes in favor to 251 against. Passage would have required 267 votes.

Turkey's lawmakers were confused as well, with some leaving the Parliament and boarding planes to return home, thinking the measure had passed. Only later, Turkish officials said today, did they learn that it had been rejected.

By the way I'm presenting a summary - read the whole article for the details. They're fascinating.

So what conclusions can we draw from this?

Turkey is a strange place - but fundamentally supportive of the US. There are chinks in this support, but there always have been.

And Turkey will come down supporting us, I think, soon. The troops will land, and drive on through.

Turkey will face a period of intense wrestling with its strong islamist minority - a struggle it will eventually win, partly because of the defeat of Iraq and eventually Al Quaeda that its upcoming action (I predict) will help to bring about.

These are not, as some bloggers put it, a bunch of döner-eating surrender monkeys.

Dobry Dzien, Po Polsku -

Dobry Dzien, Po Polsku - Although most of the nations of Eastern Europe are openly backing the US as re Iraq, the support is as polychromatic as is the opposition in places like Germany (where a significant portion of the population supports us under certain conditions).

And that polarization is causing problems between the newly-freed nations and "Old Europe":

In Central and Eastern Europe, there's irritation in the countries about to join the European Union that they have not been invited to this Monday's emergency summit on Iraq. The mostly ex-communist candidate countries feel it is their openly expressed support for President George W. Bush on the Iraq issue that has made them unwelcome guests at the summit. In the meantime, police in Central European capitals are preparing for mass peace demonstrations this Saturday.

There's a deep reservoir of support for the US in most of Eastern Europe - in my experience (years of conversations with Russian, Ukranian, Belorussian and Polish emigres), many of them realize the debt they owe the US for their own freedom, as reflected in this bit here:

The most interesting Central European capital as far as turnout at Saturday's peace demonstration is concerned will be Warsaw. Poland has a large army and a deeply engrained military tradition; and the country has long been one of America's staunchest supporters, for a variety of reasons. Polish émigrés in the US (Chicago) have always seen to it that under communism, the plight of the Polish citizens was never forgotten – and that successive US governments followed the rise of the independent trade union Solidarnosc, and the arrival of democracy with special interest. In return, the Poles have always been aware of strong US feelings for their country.

As a result, Poland has always been the most outspoken pro-American country now about to join the European Union. Fashionable anti-American feelings have never taken root here. Even so, recent opinion polls show a majority of Poles oppose war against Iraq and 76 percent feel Polish soldiers should not take part in it.

It's interesting - some people from the left credit Germany and France's anti-war feelings to their experiences in World War II. So - what nation was more grievously mauled by the war than Poland?

The Regular Schmoes Strike Back

The Regular Schmoes Strike Back - The media lavished much attention on the worldwide series of "peace" rallies last month.

You'd never know about the growing series of pro-America, pro-liberation rallies that are breaking out around the world from watching the media. So I guess it's up to the blogosphere and talkradio to tell you about:

• This rally in Florida
  
• Or this one in Cleveland.
  
• Or this one in Houston.
  
• Or, of course, Nashville.
  
• And - this is encouraging - Seoul, where the majority that has some concept of life under a stalinist regime is taking time out from their day jobs to speak out.
  
• And, for that matter, Rome
  
• And, although we tend to ignore it, the Phiippines:

  At the pro-US rally, about 200 Zamboanga residents thanked the US soldiers and asked them to stay longer.

  "We love America," one placard read, with others slamming the anti-US group, while a band played American pop songs.

  Various victims of the Abu Sayyaf gang declared their support for the US presence.

  "We need (the US troops) here for the meantime," said Lydia Ibanez, a Basilan resident whose husband was among about a dozen Filipino farmers kidnapped and beheaded by the Abu Sayyaf last year.

  "They have helped us a lot," she said in tears.

  An elderly woman, Gliceria Ramirez, recalled the Abu Sayyaf "killed my two children. They chopped off their heads."

  "If (the Americans) go, the rebels will come again and harm us."

  "We want US troops to join the Filipinos in combatting the Abu Sayyaf," she added. - Nampa-AFP

So we're not completely alone out there.

(Some of these via Instapundit. The rest via Google)

Human Shield Alert III -

Human Shield Alert III - Someone Gets It! - The major Swedish "Peace" group finally gets it right:

On Friday, the head of Sweden's largest peace organization urged human shields to leave Iraq, saying they were being used for propaganda purposes by Saddam Hussein.

Maria Ermanno, chairwoman of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, cited reports that Iraqi officials were arranging transportation, accommodations and news conferences for the human shields.

"To go down to Iraq and live and act there on the regime's expense, then you're supporting a terrible dictator. I think that method is entirely wrong," Ermanno told Swedish Radio.

The first installment in a litany of sanity.

Reader Mail - I just

Reader Mail - I just got this one:

Nice to see that you haven't eased up on Clinton even though he has been out of office for a couple of years now.

So what? We're still dealing with fallout from administrations going back to the early 1800s. Race relations in this country are affected by administration policies going back to the founding of this country. The situation in the Middle East that we face today is in some ways a direct result of Woodrow Wilson's policies.

If the policies of James Polk (who set in motion many of the dynamics that affect us with Mexico to this day) or Harry Truman (who left us, for fair reasons or foul, with our current situation in Korea) or Richard Nixon (whose foreign policy still affects us to this day) are all up for discussion, why is it that you expect to suspend discussion of Bill Clinton's record?

Perhaps because it's almost unalterably abysmal?

You remind me of those ever backward looking people in the Reagan administration who blamed everything on Carter, from the day they entered the oval office till the day they left.

What, the economy? The only part of that blaming that wasn't fair was that some of the problem predated Carter, going back to Lyndon Johnson. Other than that, though, Reagan was right.

And we're the "backward looking people" who could look far enough ahead to see a world without a Communist Bloc, without the imminent fear of superpower conflict, without the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over mankind.

You're welcome.

When does George start taking some of the blame for the state of the Union?

What blame did you have in mind?

If things were in such an awful state when G dubya came on board doesn't he bear some of the blame for not fixing it?

It took Ronald Reagan - the greatest president of the second half of the twentieth century - three years to enact his policies - at that against a Congress that was, despite being totally controlled by Democrats, less obstructionist than the Senate that President Bush faced in the first two years of his administration. And Reagan didn't have a shooting war and 3,000 dead Americans to deal with.

Ah well but then that would mean conservatives would actually have to take responsibilities for their actions rather than blaming past administrations for our present state ( see their always rib tickling explanations of how the Clinton surplus actually led to the current recession and deficit).

Liberals never - never - back up such statements with specifics.

For what are we supposed to "take responsibility"? For creating the speculative bubble that buoyed the economy through Clinton's last term? That was a near-direct result of Clinton-era tax policies regarding stock options and corporate accounting.

Part of the difficulty Clinton faced in confronting terrorism was how to do so while respecting US and international law.

So that Sudanese aspirin factory was Tomahawked in accordance with international law?

Seriously - how did "US and international law" stand in the way of having Sudan capture Bin Laden? Or lead to the FUBAR that led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escaping from Quatar?

Specifics? I'll give you a hint; there are none. The "international law" plea is a smokescreen Clinton's apologists use to try to draw attention away from the fact that the Clinton Administration was a pack of blundering amateurs at foreign policy.

Of course since George cares not a whit for either of these he doesn't run into that obstacle.

That's why he's completely ignored the United Nations, and charged straight into Iraq with nary a nod to world opinion; why we began carpet-bombing Baghdad six months ago; why a CIA hit team landed in Abu Dhabi last August with Hussein's family's heads on sticks. Right?

As to the Democrat.com site being a hate link, how would you describe yours?

I describe my site as Minnesota's Only Legitimate News Source. I also describe myself as Marisa Tomei's soon-to-be husband.

Seriously, if you can find anything resembling Democrats.com's frothing hatred of all things with which one disagrees anywhere in this site, chime on in. With specifics, if I could trouble you to provide them.

Thanks for the email. Keep writing!

The Just War - Sullivan

The Just War - Sullivan states the case:

...war against Hitler killed millions - but it was also just. And no sane person, after all, is opposed to peace as such. The question is: Peace at what risk? Peace on whose terms? Peace for how long? Looked at this way, war is not only sometimes a moral option - as theologians have long argued. Sometimes, it's the only moral option we have.

The American Bishops - famous for supporting Daniel Ortega against Ronald Reagan - posted their criteria for a "just war":

• Just Cause: force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic rights of whole populations;
  
• Comparative Justice: while there may be rights and wrongs on all sides of a conflict, to override the presumption against the use of force the injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other;
  
• Legitimate Authority: only duly constituted public authorities may use deadly force or wage war;
  
• Right Intention: force may be used only in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose;
  
• Probability of Success: arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success;
  
• Proportionality: the overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved;
  
• Last Resort: force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted.

It's the last one that most of the US "Peace" movement harps on - if you think about it, there is always one more resort to which one may turn before war; England could have sought terms after Dunkirk; the US, UK and Netherlands could have given Japan the control they sought, over the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific; the West could have written off Europe, and its Jews in the bargain. You can keep backing up a long, long way, if you don't consider anything worth fighting for.

But by any reasonable measure, we've exhausted all rational steps short of war:

Have we exhausted every single alternative to war? Well, we've spent the last twelve years trying to find peaceful ways to get Saddam to live up to his promises. Waves of inspections; countless resolutions; occasional use of targeted force under the Clinton administration; crippling economic sanctions; and finally a last attempt under U.N. Resolution 1441 to give Saddam a last, last chance to disarm. He was told three months ago by unanimous U.N. agreement that he had to disarm immediately and completely. He still hasn't. I can't think of any recent war that tried so hard for so long to give peace a chance. This isn't so much a "rush to war" as some have bizarrely called it. It's been an endless, painstaking, nail-biting crawl.

Indeed. There comes a time when seeking one more "last resort" is, itself, immoral:

War is an awful thing. But it isn't the most awful thing. No one disputes the evil of Saddam's brutal police state. No one doubts he would get and use weapons of mass destruction if he could. No one can guarantee he would not help Islamist terrorists get exactly those weapons to use against the West or his own regional enemies. No one disputes that the Iraqi people would be better off under almost any other regime than the current one - or that vast numbers of them, including almost every Iraqi exile, endorses a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimun of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice.

I'm far from a warmonger. I have friends in Southwest Asia as we speak, getting ready for whatever comes. I - to say nothing of their families and friends - don't want them to go through this for frivolous or gratuitous reasons.

We as a nation need to search our souls over these sorts of things. But huge crises are great catalysts for the searching of one's soul. September 11 was that event. I think we're in the right. I'm not going to speak in terms of ass-kickings and walkovers when war finally comes - war is far too solemn an event for that. The lives of those that will die - ours and theirs - are too important to trivialize with jingoistic sloganeering.

But the opposite - the sloganeering of pacifism at any price - has come to the point of trivializing even more. It's not about oil, or patronymic loyalty, and to claim so over the bodies of 3,000 of our fellow citizens merely showcases one's intellectual bankruptcy.

Read the article. Get back to me.

Smear, CounterSmear - The London

Smear, CounterSmear - The London Observer went public with an email it claimed was a smoking gun, "proving" the National Security Agency (our ultrasecret crypto-eavesdropping organization) is spying on UN members.

The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

But almost immediately, the Drudge Report raised questions about the language used in the memo.

Here it is. See if you can spot the clinkers:

To: [Recipients withheld]
From: FRANK KOZA@Chief of Staff (Regional Target) CIV/NSA
on 31/01/2003 0:16
Subject: Reflections of Iraq debate/votes at UN - RT actions and potential for related contributions
Importance: High
TOP SECRET/COMINT/XL
All,

As you've likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc - the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises. In RT, that means a QRC surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters.

We've also asked ALL RT topi's to emphasise and make sure they pay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes. We have a lot of special UN-related diplomatic coverage (various UN delegations) from countries not sitting on the UNSC right now that could contribute related perspectives/ insights/ whatever. We recognise that we can't afford to ignore this possible source.

We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar, more in-direct access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines. I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels - especially as this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the SecState's presentation to the UNSC.

Thanks for your help

I added the italics. Look at them. They are British spellings (or, in the case of the 31/01/2003, European date formats).

Drudge adds:

GOVERNMENT SOURCES TELL DRUDGE CLASSIFICATION LEVEL WRONG ON MEMO -- 'TOP SECRET/COMINT/XL' -- IS BOGUS, DOES NOT EXIST.

Then, Drudge asks:

HOW ABOUT IT, GUYS, LET'S SEE A SCAN OF THE ORIGINAL 'MEMO' NOT YOUR RECREATED ONE.

My question isn't so much "is it a hoax". The real question is, how long after it's proven a hoax will elements of the left be treating it as gospel truth?

Like, for example, here - on Democrats.com, a hysterical Democrat-party linked hate site on which Minnesota democrat campaigns have bought thousands of dollars worth of advertising? (Scroll down - they link, with utter ingenuity, to the Observer article).

UPDATE: The Observer is now claiming that it altered the spelling in the email. So - where's the original?

Note To Franken - Al Franken, in talking about a potential all-liberal talk-radio network, famously said ""People on the left -liberals- don't want to hear simplistic demagoguery."

Someone needs to tell the good folks at Democrats.com. We've spotlighted these people before - a site that would challenge the hate-mongeriest fever dreams of the fringiest ultra-right web scribblers.

But Democrats.com isn't the fringe! They're quite proud of how connected they are with the Democrat mainstream! And among their biggest supporters was...the campaign of the late Paul Wellstone!

So read the site. Tell me how simplistic and demagogic these people aren't. Look at the list of media and politicians - mainstream as well as lunafringe - who link to Democrats.com.

Then tell Al Franken.

Sometimes I think I could do an entire blog on nothing but Democrats.com's content.

Human Shield Watch - This

Human Shield Watch - This article - by Charlotte Edwards, in the relatively conservative London Telegraph - is hilarious. It describes the blinding flash of epiphany that some of the "Human Shields" had; they were being used! By Hussein's govement!

The article all but screams "No! Duh!"

At the Andalus hotel five kilometres away, Dr Abdul Hashimi, the official overseeing their mission in Iraq, had issued the shocked group with an ultimatum: deploy to the "strategic sites" hand-picked by the government or leave immediately.

It was a chilling twist in the saga of the human shields' mission to stop a war in Iraq. It was also inevitable. I accompanied the first wave of shields throughout their 3,500 mile, three-week journey aboard three double-decker buses from Europe to Baghdad and remained with them while they battled unsuccessfully with Iraqi officials to be allowed access to the civilians most thought they had come to protect.

The article is rife with examples of the group's dithering, frivolity, and paranoia:

Among the catalogue of dramas they experienced en route were numerous breakdowns of the creaking 1967 Routemasters, bickering over the preferred route and acrimonious departures and illness.

During one cold, rainy night in Milan, we were left without our sleeping bags after an Italian went AWOL with the support bus. Later, a £500 donation from a well-wisher in Istanbul was squandered on boxes of Prozac in a misguided attempt to cheer up the war-weary Iraqi civilians.

Conspiracy theories spread like a contagion through the ranks. Whenever a puncture occurred it would be blamed on the CIA. "It's sabotage," Peter Van Dyke, 36, had whispered to a bemused mechanic as he removed a thick screw from a flat tyre in a garage outside Naples.

Sue Darling, 60, a former diplomat from Surrey, had been eager to demonstrate her civil service credentials: most importantly, she confided in one shield, she knew how to recognise a spy. Her first suspect turned out to be The Telegraph's photographer.

Little surprise then that so few were alert to the real nature of the regime that welcomed them to the Iraqi capital two weeks ago. After a propaganda lecture from Dr Hashimi, one young American told me: "It's so interesting to hear what is really going on in this country." He scoffed at any suggestion that their good intentions might be misused by Saddam's regime: "All we have seen here is continuous kindness and hospitality."

As an interesting note, the article makes mention of Ken O'Keefe, whom the left triumphantly describes as "a former US Marine who fought in the Gulf War", as if the presence of a former Marine renders the administration illegitimate. The article pounds a nail through that notion:

Not everyone was upset by the latest turn in events. Ken O'Keefe, 33, the founder of the human shields movement who served as a US marine during the Gulf war, had always planned to protect Iraqi "installations" should bombs rain down on the capital.

During the journey, the heavily-tattooed O'Keefe, who earned the title "black Ken" on account of his penchant for the colour and outlook on life, had alienated his companions who felt he had developed both a death wish and a messiah complex. Prone to tantrums and mood swings, his credibility had not been helped by the fact that he had, for much of the journey, been accompanied by his mother, Pat.

In Baghdad, Ken came into his own. Dressed in a thick, grey dishdash, he took to ambushing me in the Andalus corridors to brief me on his latest soundbites. "Dark forces have worked against me," he said, "but I have survived. My mission is hard core, in-your-face activism."

It goes on...and on. Read it, and know that if this is the bleeding edge of the "peace" movement, then the left is in truly dire straits.

(Via Instapundit and Tim Blair)

The Clinton Legacy - First,

The Clinton Legacy - First, Clinton passed on a chance to have Sudan hand Osama Bin Laden over to us.

Now, it turns out that he could have had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, too, according to the WaPo:

The object of a U.S manhunt for years, Mohammed narrowly escaped capture in 1996. At that time, he was staying with a member of the Qatari royal family at a farm outside Doha. The FBI wanted to snatch him, but others in the U.S. government balked. The Qatari government was notified instead, and by the time an agreement to turn him over was reached, Mohammed was gone.

We, as a nation, need to hold the Clinton Administration responsible for their legacy; terrorists allowed to roam free, pacification of North Korea, focus-group-driven responses to attacks, and military responses that were worse than useless, merely exacerbating the situation.

(Via Powerline)

The Countdown - The invasion

The Countdown - The invasion is just around the corner. When?

The New Moon is tomorrow. The Full Moon is March 18. Two Airborne divisions set out two weeks ago, along with a fair chunk of the British Army.

The Guardian presents several scenarios, and predicts March 18:

Nearly all coalition forces might have reached the combat theatre. Coalition forces would be approaching 250,000, about the size discussed recently as appropriate.

Mr Blair and Mr Bush would also have had time to play out their diplomatic strategy. The period is also still relatively cool in Baghdad, with high temperatures approaching 27 degrees. It is the time of the full moon. But that may not pose a big problem if the early days emphasised high-altitude bombing and ground force operations in open terrain, where US-British forces have enormous advantages.

How about attacking early, by surprise - perhaps (as some have theorized) as early as tomorrow?

Unlikely - we still have three divisions that are en route - the 82nd and 101st Airborne, and the 4th Mech Infantry. They should be off-loading in the Gulf any time here - but these units, especially the 101st, are all vital for a quick war, and each will need time to unscramble their equipment and get ready for action.

Still - I think this is the month.

The Sound of Dropping Pretenses

The Sound of Dropping Pretenses - Iraq is deploying its troops - including surface-to-surface missiles - to try to meet an attack. We're bombing them, in return.

Iraq, for example, is repositioning its Adnan Republican Guard division by moving it from its base near Mosul toward Baghdad or Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown. An Iraqi MIG-25 fighter has zoomed down to the Saudi border, one of several recent violations of the no-flight zone. That may be a way to test the American ability to defend the skies over Saudi Arabia and other gulf states as well as a means of trying to signal to the Saudis what might be in store for them if they cooperate with the American invasion plans.

But the deployment of Iraq's surface-to-surface missiles is a growing concern for the American military, and one that American officials assert violates Security Council resolutions concluded after the Persian Gulf war 12 years ago.

"They have moved some of their short-range, surface-to-surface missiles to the north and to the south," the senior Pentagon official said. He described the missiles as "an immediate potential danger to us and our allies and the coalition in the region."

By the way - for those of you who think inspections are the answer:

The Ababil-100 is one of Iraq's newest systems, and it is under study by the United Nations. The Central Intelligence Agency says the Ababil-100 has a longer range than the 93-mile limit permitted by the United Nations. Work on the engine is carried out at Iraq's Al Mutasim site. The British Defense Ministry says the missile's solid fuel makes the system easier to handle than the Samoud 2, which uses a liquid propellant.

This seems to have escape Hans Blix' attention.

The Disarmament Sketch - Mad

The Disarmament Sketch - Mad Swede at Viking Pundit has done a wonderful take-off on Monty Python's classic Argument Sketch:

USA: (Knock)
SH: Come in.
USA: Ah, Is this the right place for disarmament?
SH: I told you once.
USA: No you haven't.
SH: I’ve already disarmed.
USA: When?
SH: Just now.
USA: No you didn't.
SH: Yes I did.
USA: You didn't
SH: I did!
USA: You didn't!
SH: I'm telling you I did!
USA: You did not!!
SH: Oh, I'm sorry, just one moment. Do you mean full disarmament or just a couple of missiles?
USA: Oh, full disarmament.
SH: Ah, thank you. Anyway, I did.
USA: You most certainly did not.
SH: Look, let's get this thing clear; I quite definitely disarmed.
USA: No you did not.
SH: Yes I did.
USA: No you didn't.
SH: Yes I did.
USA: No you didn't.
SH: Yes I did.
USA: No you didn't.
SH: Yes I did.
USA: You didn't.
SH: Did.
USA: Oh look, this isn't compliance with UN. Resolution 1441.
SH: Yes it is.
USA: No it isn't. It's just defiance.
SH: No it isn't.
USA: It is!
SH: It is not.
USA: Look, you just contradicted me.
SH: I did not.
USA: Oh you did!!
SH: No, no, no.
USA: You did just then.
SH: Nonsense!
USA: Oh, this is futile!
SH: No it isn't.
USA: I came here for a full accounting for destruction of your weapons.
SH: No you didn't; no, you came here for compliance.
USA: Compliance isn’t just saying “I’ve disarmed.”
SH: It can be.
USA: No it can't. Compliance is revealing and destroying weapons of mass destruction in full view of U.N. inspectors.
SH: No it isn't.
USA: Yes it is! It's not just empty statements.
SH: Look, if I comply with the U.N., I must take say I’ve disarmed.
USA: Yes, but full disarmament isn’t just saying “I’ve disarmed.”
SH: Yes it is!
USA: No it isn't!
USA: Disarmament is an open process. Declarations of de-weaponizing absent records or hard evidence of actual destruction of WMDs is useless.

Pause

SH: No it isn't.
USA: It is.
SH: Not at all.
USA: Now look.
SH: (Rings bell) Good Morning.
USA: What?
SH: That's it. Good morning.
USA: I was just getting started.
SH: Sorry, the inspections are done.
USA: That was never disarmament!
SH: I'm afraid it was.
USA: It wasn't.

Pause

SH: I'm sorry, but I'm not allowing inspections anymore.
USA: What?!
SH: If you want me to allow inspections, you'll have to pass another U.N. resolution.
USA: Yes, but that was never compliance, just now. Oh come on!
SH: (Hums)
USA: Look, this is ridiculous.
SH: I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to argue unless you've passed another U.N. resolution.
USA: Oh, all right. (passes 18th resolution against Iraq)
SH: Thank you.

Pause

USA: Well?
SH: Well what?
USA: That wasn't really compliance, just now.
SH: I told you, I'm not going to allow inspections unless you've passed a U.N. resolution.
USA: I just did!
SH: No you didn't.
USA: I DID!
SH: No you didn't.

Sounds like the UN debate, really...

Vikings - A few weeks

Vikings - A few weeks ago, when I mentioned that Denmark was supporting the invasion of Iraq, a friend of mine wrote be "Whoah. What next, Vanuatu?"

This story from blogger Crimen Falsi, about Danes in action, should bely that. Scroll down to February 25 (his archives are broken) for the whole story.

But here's my favorite part:

That's when it struck me -- the Danes aren't mushy naked volleyballers like some of their Nordic neighbors -- they are the actually descendants of the Vikings, who as we know conquered a country whose name rhymes with "Pants", pretty much wiped out the Irish coastal cities, wreaked havoc in Britain, invaded (and traded in) Russia, and even knocked off Malta just for kicks. Yeah, that whole creeping socialist Danish government thing had me fooled, but then I remembered that the Vikings used to live communally for the most part, so maybe socialism is just part of their national culture, and not the same plague for them as it is for us.

Some of our European neighbors aren't the cheese-eating surrender monkeys that we keep hearing about in the media. It's worth noting that Danish and Norwegian special forces both fought alongside our guys in Afghanistan.

Reader Mail - I got

Reader Mail - I got this one yesterday:

I'm compelled to write to you after reading your piece on
'Indoctrination' because of the part where you say you 'plan on' talking to your daughter's teacher. I know, it was facetious... It amazes and appalls me at the same time when I read stories such as yours, that as a parent you don't take your daughter's education seriously.

Go back and read the original story.

Who was the kid - the only kid - that pushed back at the teacher and the Hamline students who were discussing the demonstration?

My daughter. My eleven year old girl was the one that brought up the fact that Iraq has misled the inspectors, that they've hidden weapons of mass destruction, and so on.

I'd say I've taken her education pretty seriously, actually.

Apathy abounds for most kids parents, and it's quite sad, I think. If I had a child in school today, and was told A.N.S.W.E.R. stopped by my kid's school, along with the disrespectful statements about our president coming from a 'public' institution, I would have called the school district superintendent, your daughter's principal, the media, you name it!

Been there, done all that.

And you know what? They'll be running into this through their entire lives. Someday they'll go to college, and things'll be worse, no matter where they go, and they'll be adults and it won't be my job, then.

So the way I see it, there are three options:

• Homeschooling. I could do it now, but once I get a job...well, I'm a single parent, and there are only 24 hours in a day.
• Private school. I can't afford this now. It may be an option soon.
• Teaching my kids to be critical consumers of education. As long as they're stuck in the public system (and for the moment they are), I want them to be as equipped as possible to think critically about what they're being told.

To credit my daughter, she's gotten her teacher to back off the George W. Bush jokes, and has pushed back on a number of other things. To me, that's a lot more important than making sure the public schools' indoctrination is acceptable to me.

I can't believe what you parents let these schools get away with! Let alone someone like yourself who is informed. I sincerely hope all of you wake up and smell the coffee, instead of some of the stench being shoved down your kids throats.

If these kids fail to know the difference when they grow up, I will harshly tell you you have only yourself to blame. It shouldn't be just a wink wink, nod nod, to the child. Do something!

Enh. I've been a fly in all my kids' schools' ointments for years. None of my kids have been found protesting at the capitol!

But most of all - yes, they do know the difference. I teach them a lot, too. How many kids celebrate Reagan' s Birthday at home?

Thanks for the letter.