Shot In The Dark

Once an Authority - Fraters

Once an Authority - Fraters Libertas has an excellent thrashing of Scott Ritter. Read it - it's brief but excellent, and has some great links.

And the opening question is a great one - have we reached an era when nobody can be discredited?

The likes of Ritter, Sara Brady, Paul Ehrlich, Michael Moore and on and on have been discredited, refuted, caught with their rhetorical pants down so many times that computer support is needed to calculate the number. Yet they're still regarded as "experts" (or, in Moore's case, "satirists").

It Explains Her Delivery -

It Explains Her Delivery - Cacklin' Katherine Lanpher has been charged with DWI and leaving the scene of an accident, after an April 12 incident in St. Paul:

Lanpher, 43, of St. Paul, was charged Tuesday with two counts of gross misdemeanor drunken driving and one misdemeanor count of leaving the scene of an accident.

At the time of her arrest, Lanpher's blood-alcohol level was 0.21 percent, more than twice the legal limit of 0.10 percent, according to a Ramsey County criminal complaint.

No one was injured in the April 12 incident. Lanpher is accused of hitting a car while turning onto a street shortly after midnight.

Now, as Lanpher is not only a radio person (of sorts) but a former newspaperwoman, I'm wondering - at a .21 BAC, she should hardly have been showing symptoms. Most newspaper people don't start to slur their speech until they get to about .4.

OK, seriously: this brings up a couple of questions:

• It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out in court; will Lanpher get "Community Service" that involves interviewing MADD people on her show?
• If MPR staff start drinking less, will it harm the Twin Cities' hospitality community? Seriously - some of those people are fish. No, I'm not naming names.

I'm not going to say "Behold, the liberal high priestess of enlightenment who feels she's above the law".

But if one of you says it, that's just fine.

UPDATE: An email correspondent writes: "Behold, the liberal high priestess of enlightenment who feels she's above the law".

Brain Destroyer - In Through

Brain Destroyer - In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty spoke with Alice:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The questions is, "said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all."

This is exchange frames much of the left-right debate in this country.

In many circles, the left has long been "Master" when it comes to defining that most important of things - what a word means. He or she that controls what a word means, controls communication. When one controls communication, one controls society.

Columnist Mark Morford, in SFGate.com (think "online Village Voice, only with very untalented writers") attacks Charleton Heston and the NRA - and exposes how deeply the left is used to being "Master" of our communal language.

Oh - and in the bargain, he displays himself as a rather uninformed commentator:

[Heston] is 78 and fragile and suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer's and hasn't made a decent movie in decades, unless you count how he sadly made himself look quite the undereducated, largely unsympathetic, defensive fool in the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine."

Morford's sympathies drive his conclusion, obviously - I thought the exchange between Moore and Heston made Moore look like a smug, uneducated cretin.

And now, Charlton Heston is stepping down as the High Lord Gunmaster Poobah (or whatever they called him)

"President?"

of the phallically righteous increasingly paranoid adorably manly National Rifle Association.

Now, attacking the rhetorical style of the likes of Mark Morford is rather like Daunte Culpepper connecting with Randy Moss against Ramsey Junior High's defensive secondary. But it's instructive, anyway: Phallic? Manly?

And the big daddy of them all, "Paranoid?"

We'll get back to this.

They are sighing in tribute. They are hugging each other and giving reassuring pats though not in an icky scary gay way.

Mr. Morford - if they were getting some tongue into it, would it have been more acceptable to you?

They are raising their rifles in salute.

And they are actually erecting, in front of the NRA's national headquarters in Washington, D.C., a 10-foot bronze statue of Heston, in character from a manly 1968 western flick no one has really ever seen called "Will Penny," in full bogus mythological cowboy gear, holding a handgun. Isn't that great?

Mr. Morford: I'm told that Prince Hamlet of Denmark may not have actually existed. Does that, in and of itself, render Shakespear's art moot?

Other nations erect statues of poets, artists, thinkers, revolutionaries. We erect statues of craggy actors holding a pistol. God bless America.

Other "Nations" may erect statues of whatever they want - but the NRA is not a nation. It is a private organization.

It's a thoroughly appropriate icon for the NRA, actually. A character that never really existed, a gun-totin' Wild West that never really happened, a studly kill-the-bad-guys posture that, well, the NRA pretty much invented and frantically clings to as its own raison d'etre.

The Hollywood version of the wild west indeed didn't exist in exactly the form shown in the movies. But the current leftist trope - that it was all fiction - is, anything, mnore ignorant. Cattle were driven, towns boomed, justice was sometimes rough, posses rode forth...

...and towns governed themselves, and order pretty much prevailed. Both extremes are wrong.

As is the frankly nutty assertion that the myth of the old west drives the NRA.

More:

Actors are, by definition, all about illusion, the propogation of manufactured myth, of collective delusion, as opposed to genuine human ideas and perspective. Voilè -- the perfect icon for America's gun culture.

"Perfect" indeed - if you suspend logic.

Heston's departure is a good time for reflection, truly. Arguably, the man has done more to promote the desperately macho causes of the NRA than any leader in the group's carefully racist, white-power history (as "Bowling..." so effortlessly describes).

"Bowling" describes it effortlessly because it makes it up, or strings together long-outdated out-of-context tropes into a conclusion that may as well be fiction.

Which is to say, because he is a reasonably articulate and well-known actor, he single-handedly did more to promote the NRA's trademark causes of fear and paranoia than any outspoken gun lover in 25 years. No wonder they are so proud.

"Paranoia" and "Fear" - there are those words again.

Ansme.com defines Paranoia: " 1. a psychological disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur".

So where's the paranoia? The NRA has fought - and, in a large measure, defeated - a legislative effort to functionally disarm Americans. That the effort existed is unquestionable - large (or at least well-funded) organizations like the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, The Fifty Thousand Mom March, the Violence Policy Center and the oft-renamed Brady Campaign dominated the media's attention span for decades (generally with fictitious information), and carried the day in legislatures nationwide from the sixties until the early nineties. Paranoia is delusion - was the gun control movement, or its intentions, unreal?

Because this is the great myth of the NRA. This is the true foundation. Despite the careful PR, the NRA is not much about the promotion of safe firearm use. It is not about enforcing the rules and sportsmanship of hunting, or about appreciating firearm artistry or improving your clay-pigeon target-practice technique. Maybe a little.

One peek into America's 1st Freedom: The Official Journal of the NRA reveals that the group is, more than anything else, all about paranoid defensiveness and the simple promotion of the right-wing brand of dread.

You know the one. That fear of the great ugly Other coming from somewhere "out there" -- someplace probably Muslim, or pagan, or inner city, or foreign or San Franciscan -- to steal your children and eat all your apple pie and take away your precious guns. Always, always to take away your guns. This is the Biggest Fear of All.

Morford makes the big leap; while showing no examples of racism or xenophobia, he charges the NRA and its official magazine of trafficking in it.

It doesn't exist.

Who is delusional? Who, indeed, is the paranoid?

Like pyromaniac children hording precious matches, the loss of unfettered gun-ownership rights ranks right up there with castration and the outlawing of beer in Worst Possible Evils for the NRA. The magazine is packed with lib-hating articles, attacking everyone from the progressive U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the entire country of Canada and its national gun registry.

And they do that because there are legitimate attacks to be made!

Or are columnists at "SFGate.com" the only ones allowed to do that?

Every single alarmist article delineates how "those damn anti-gun liberals" are skewing the statistics, lying and manipulating, trying to chip away at your God-given right to keep 157 sawed-off shotguns and a few submachine guns in your garage, for, you know, "hunting."

Again, all made up.

Morford must know that nobody in his audience is interested in digging beneath the surface.

Morford actually astounds with this next bit:

The NRA is, of course, wildly easy to hate. Easy to see the group as a cliched cadre of twitching socially inept boy-men with a seriously compensatory need to display their gun barrels. Problem is, such hyperzealous groups only feed on such sentiment -- it simply adds fuel to the cause.

And, moreover, the stereotype is largely wrong, and unfair. The NRA has some very smart, very passionate people who truly value their rights and their country. It's true. Let's admit it.

Whoah.

Never thought I'd see that.

However, he veers back to Wonderland with this next bit:

The tragedy, then, is how deeply this powerful group of rabidly passionate uber-Americans has bought into the lie, the myth, of what America really stands for, and has become a part of the tyranny of fear, a mouthpiece for that very divisiveness and paranoia and antagonism that keeps America volatile and childish and so bitterly derided the world over.

And here we get into the issue of the control of the language we all try to share in this country.

Morford is correct; the NRA (and CCRN, and even some members of the Minnesota DFL, for that matter) really defy the stereotypes when you dig beneath the surface.

And yet, there are those words, of whose definitions Morford is so cocksure: Is America volatile? Is America "childish"? If we're "derided the world over", by whom?

"Tyranny of fear"... of what?

In what way is the NRA's vigilance over the slippery slope of gun control "fear" and "paranoia", that NARAL's equally-zealous definition of any "erosion" in "abortion rights" is not?

It is a vision of America as this faux-virtuous, good-guy, white-hatted, monosyllabic brute, the well-armed hero enforcer of all that is righteous and pure and bullet ridden -- you know, just like the bogus and hollow Wild West of Heston's "Will Penny."

Again with the definitions.

Is our virtue "faux"? Is the cultural archetype of the white-hatted sheriff a bankrupt ideal?

Are the ideals and touchstones of the "fictional" western any less valid than the equally-fictional ideals of the samurai in Kabuki, or the tortured protagonists in Shakespeare, or the monochromatic archetypes of Greek theater?

Every society has its collective myth: Germany has "Volk". Greece has the Heroes of Olympus, France has the gallic heroes of the Carolingian era, and we have the "old west".

And tying whatever pros and cons attend our own nation's communal semi-myths to a legislative effort to protect a civil liberty that a well-heeled, well-connected part of the country doesn't value smacks...

...well...of delusions of persecution (that big baaad NRA!) and grandeur (of Morford's prowess as an amateur mind-reader).

Incongruous - I took a

Incongruous - I took a rare listen to the KQ Morning Show today.

The sponsor for the last "News" segment? The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

I listened to the spot, wondering when the ironic redirection would come. There HAD to be one! To reinforce the predication: the voice-over guy is the same guy who does all those funny "Minnesota Twins - Get to Know 'Em" spots. The spot HAD to end up funny, dammit!

Nope. No post-Letterman ironic displacement, no aural pratfall to endear the SPCO's MPR-ish approach to the Budweiser-'n-Minnesota Wild audience on The Morning Show.

I wondered why the SPCO was spending its ad dollars on KQRS. There were only a few possible answers that came to my not-yet-caffeinated mind:

1. Someone at the SPCO lost a bet on their kid's soccer game. Had he won, the other party to the bet would have had to join the NRA.
2. The SPCO's board requires a percentage of their ad dollar to go to ethnically integrated radio shows. Philip "Dog" Wise ironically makes KQ more integrated than relentlessly PC MPR.
3. Someone in the SPCO's business office has given up hitting on Cathy Wurzer, and is angling for Terry Traen.

I may revisit this after a cup of coffee.

Sometimes The Good Guys Win

Sometimes The Good Guys Win - Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the formerly anonymous Iraqi lawyer who tipped our snakeeaters off to Private Lynch's location, has been granted asylum and is in the US with his family now.

Prior to Tuesday, he was referred to as only as "Mohammed" in order to protect the safety of himself and his family while they were still in Iraq.

The Al Rehaief family arrived in the United States earlier this month after the Department of Homeland Security granted them "humanitarian parole." On Monday, the family was granted asylum by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

"Mr. Al Rehaief should know Americans are grateful for his bravery and for his compassion," Ridge said.

Can you see the way this movie is shaping up?

I didn't mean that to sound as cynical as it looks, in this post-Letterman world...

In The Cards - Re: Iraq - I'm wondering who the marketing genius is that came up with the "Iraqi Leader Card Deck".

Seriously - the whole "We got the Eight of Clubs" thing is getting downright catchy.

Either some CENTCOM PR flak has a big career in advertising when he/she gets out of the service, or CENTCOM mobilized one hell of an idea guy from some firm somewhere...

Yam Hashoah - It's Holocaust

Yam Hashoah - It's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Question for Doug Grow

You asked in your column today "Where are the groups supporting the new concealed carry law?"

Now, as I noted in my posting below, counting lists of endorsing or opposing group is a convenient dodge; I'd imagine plenty of "groups" opposed the Civil Rights Act, too.

But I'd like Mr. Grow (or any DFL columnist) to answer this question:It used to be that the DFL would pop off a couple of big gun-control measures every year or so; remember the glory days of Alan Spear? Yet for the last several years, the DFL (like the national party) has been very quiet on gun control, except against measures like concealed carry. Why do you suppose that is?

Before you answer "Fear of the NRA", remember - if "a majority of the people" really oppose the NRA, then opposing the NRA (or, on this issue, CCRN) won't affect their chances of re-election, will it?

No, indeed - legislators live by knowing their constituency. It's worth noting that seven DFLers broke ranks yesterday and voted for the bill, while only two GOPers did. You think senators will bet their electoral careers on NRA money, if the people don't really believe?

I'm not sure even I'm that cynical.

Carp Run - Strib Doug

Carp Run - Strib Doug Grow takes a predictable tack in today's column.

He writes about a bit during yesterday's debate where Senator Dille held up a list of groups oppposing the MPPA; the list included some left-leaning police organizations, and about 250-odd churches.

Grow romanticizes the opposition:

They knew they were outgunned. But one last time Monday, foes of looser gun laws walked into the Minnesota Senate chamber.

"You packing?" I asked Sen. Wes Skoglund, DFL-Minneapolis, long an ardent foe of liberalizing conceal-and-carry laws.

"Yep," he said. "I've got my pen, my reading glasses and the list."

Skoglund's list included the names of more than 300 church, school, business and law-enforcement organizations that opposed a bill that would make it possible for most Minnesotans 21 and older to get a permit to carry a loaded pistol.

Grow then goes on to describe Dille's reference to the list, and Senator Pat Pariseau's response:

. He rose from his seat and asked the two point people on conceal-and-carry, Sen. Gen Olson, R-Minnetrista, and Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, if they had a list showing groups supporting expanded permitting.

Pariseau shuffled some papers on her desk.

"None [of the law-enforcement organizations] have come to, ahh, a position of neutrality on this," she said. "We have, ummm, loose organizations of people who are civil-rights types who support it. This has citizen kind of support. Street cops support it. But they don't have an organization."

Dille repeated his question: "Does anyone have a list showing who supports this?"

No answer.

As an aside - with this paragraph, Doug Grow's biases wax crude; dutifully transcribing the "umms" and "ahs" that accompanied Pariseau's response, is intensely disingenuous. Doing the same for, say Dean Johnson - the almost unlistenably inarticulate DFLer from Willmar - would horrify anyone who values public oratory (although the radio stations' playing the tapes of Ellen Anderson's shrieking is good revenge).

Grow spins Pariseau's lack of an answer as if it's a comment, in and of itself, on Pariseau's bill. What it truly bespeaks is Grow's DFL myopia.

Because the concealed carry movement, as Sen. Pariseau said, is not a congregation of organizations. It's people. Citizens. Individuals. They banded together under CCRN, but it was a grassroots movement.

Most people on the right of center, Mr. Grow, don't think you are defined by the groups you belong to!

Grow nods to his PC clientele:

Although there were a number of people -- mostly men

Oh, dear. Those pesky men again.

at the Capitol wearing yellow stickers reading "Have Gun, Will Vote," polls have shown that most Minnesotans don't want more people carrying handguns.

I'd like to see a poll about this issue that wasn't commissioned by organizations that oppose concealed carry, and whose survey questions don't skew the results. (Yes, I design surveys for part of my living, and I can spot the bias!)

"It's so hard for a group of volunteers to keep coming back year after year against a powerful special-interest group with paid staff," said Becky Wardell-Gaertner, who was among those cheering for senators to keep fighting conceal-and-carry.

This, of course, is a lie.

Concealed Carry Reform Now has no paid staff. It's a purely volunteer group. And they - not the NRA - did most of the writing of the bill, in conjunction with GOP counsel.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. Some crimes will be deterred. Some crimes will never happen. Someday, one permit-holder will screw up, and get the maximum possible sentence plus a few as an example. In five years, an audit will show that the law has given us a slight net benefit. Wes Skoglund will be waving lists of groups that say the sun rises in the South.

And Doug Grow will be rearranging the deck chairs on the DFL's next sinking ship.

It's All In The Timing

It's All In The Timing - I was leaving the capitol yesterday just as the senator that "represents" my district, Ellen Anderson, was yelling "OJ Simpson could get a permit!".

Leave it to Kim Du Toit to have picked off the best line of the whole debate:

But the best zinger of the evening came when [Anderson] was moaning about how O.J. Simpson, having been found not guilty in his murder trial, could theoretically get a CCL in Minnesota in terms of the new law.

Replied Pariseau: "O.J. Simpson was not seeking a permit -- but maybe his wife needed one."

Today's project - looking for the whizzing and moaning that will inevitably come from the guardians of lefty taste in this state.

Scenes From A Debate, Part

Scenes From A Debate, Part II - As I mentioned in my previous post, many of the anti-MPPA audience members seemed quite uninformed about the issue - especially compared to the supporters, many of whom have racked up freqent flyer miles in the hearing rooms and galleries over the years.

Many of the antis ran a vocal commentary as Sen. Gen Olson read the MPPA-related changes to the bill. It went something like this:

Sen. Olson: "...the bill will impose a petty misdemeanor on permit holders who enter a school carrying a handgun...
Opponents in Audience: "Is that IT? How stupid!"
Sen. Olson: "Current law allows no penalty for carrying a gun into a school."
Opponents in Audience:(embarassed silence).
Sen. Olson: "The bill would impose a misdemeanor for carrying a firearm with a blood alcohol level of .04 or greater, and a felony charge for .1 or greater..."
Opponents in Audience: What? Only a misdemeanor? That's outrageous!
Sen. Olson: "Current law imposes no penalty for carrying drunk"
Opponents in Audience: (embarassed silence)
Sen. Olson: "Current law allows private businesses to post their property if they don't want firearms on premises"
Opponents in Audience: "Oh, criminy, that's just..."
Sen. Olson: "Current law doesn't mention this"
Opponents in Audience: (embarassed silence)

And so on, and so forth.

Worse still, the woman I sat near before the session started. She started running down the bill and its supporters. A few of us supporters tried to engage her; she responded by droning on about how ridiculous we all were (not overly different from Wes Skogland, really).

Finally, she leaped to her feet and bellowed "There's no gun in this purse!"

This, of course, is against Senate gallery rules. The sergeant at arms warned her - so she yelled the same thing again! The sergeant at arms ejected her, to the bewildered muttering of the antis present.

"It's the rule", we told them.

"Yeah...but...well...".

Rules are apparently for others.

Scenes From A Debate -

Scenes From A Debate - Now, trust me on this - I'm not saying this to be bitchy. Yes, I think most of the people who came to the Senate to oppose the Personal Protection Act were wrong. But it's their right, and God Bless America for it.

But many of these people were so blatantly, blitheringly uneducated about the issue! I spoke with one of the "Code Pink" leaders in the hall outside the capitol. I asked her if she knew of any "Dodge City" problems in the 34 states that have already adopted "Shall Issue" laws.

"I don't really know the issue that well", she said. Then why the hell are you here trying to foist your ignorance off as policy? I didn't quite ask.

Minnesota 35th "Shall Issue"

Minnesota 35th "Shall Issue" State

Flash - Senate File 842 - including the Minnesota Personal Protection Act - just passed the Minnesota Senate on a vote of 37-30.

When Governor Pawlenty signs the bill next week, we will be the 35th "Radical" state in the union to have adopted shall-issue concealed carry laws.

I sat at the capitol for seven hours today, listening to the bloviations of the radical left. I figured out a couple of things:

• Know how to tell when Wes Skoglund is lying about guns? His lips are moving.
• Ellen Anderson - the senator that "represents" me in my district (66, St. Paul) wasted 45 precious minutes of my life asking questions that had been answered. Over. And over. Again. If it had been a court of law, the judge would have called it badgering.
• Jane Ranum, DFL-Mpls, had obviously not read the bill when she started her list of questions of Gen Olson and Pat Pariseau.
• They tell me Dean Johnson is a lutheran parish minister. I guess it's a good thing he's in the Senate, rather than corrupting a perfectly good bunch of Wilmar lutherans.
• Sen. Berglin, from Minneapolis, began to cry when she related the story of the Minneapolis grade-schooler who was killed by a stray bullet last year. she failed to tell the crowd how shots fired by a bunch of worthless punk bangers had anything to do with concealed carry permit holders.

And at the end of the day - a long day - it doesn't matter. Game over. We won.

This moment would not be possible without eight years of relentless work from Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota, which took this bill from the "You must be some kinda wierdos" era, to today - when the plucky band of amateur lobbyists stared down the DFL and won at long last.

My own part in this debate? Endless punditry, both on my blog and on the Minnesota E-Democracy Discussion List and, long before it was a serious issue in Minnesota, on my old KSTP talk show. I had the easy part. The guys 'n gals in CCRN burned through a herd's worth of shoe leather buttonholing Senate members, winning them over one by one by one over the past 3/4 of a decade.

I'll see you at the courthouse.

I Want To...Siiiiiing... - The only song that seems to fit right now is "Chimes of Freedom". Dylon wrote it, but Springsteen ('89) and U2 ('88) did the definitive covers.

I'll play guitar. You all sing along:

Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin' rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an' forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin' constantly at stake
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Even though a cloud's white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An' the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An' for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry-eyed an' laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an' we watched with one last look
Spellbound an' swallowed 'til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Written by Bob Dylan

This is the end of seven years' work for a lot of people. Congratulations. And God Bless Minnesota.

Still On - The debate

Still On - The debate over the MPPA is still scheduled for this morning at the Capitol.

Again - supporters, if you can make it, I'll hope to see you there.

I'll update you as soon as I get home.

Concealed Humor Permits - The

Concealed Humor Permits - The Minnesota House revealed its inner standup comic last week, according to the PiPress:

While the issue of giving Minnesotans more access to handgun permits is serious, the six-hour House debate about it last week wasn't always somber. Some highlights:

Best piece of literature: Rep. Lynn Carlson, DFL-Crystal, thought his colleagues needed to hear the tale of gun-toting's dangers. So he passed out the lyrics to Johnny Cash's "Don't Take Your Guns to Town."

Best reason for more guns: Better umpiring at baseball games, suggested Rep. Joe Mullery, DFL-Minneapolis, if umps have to worry about armed fans in the stands.

Best line in the debate: "You never bring a knife to a gunfight,'' said Rep. Bill Haas, R-Champlin. He was talking to Rep. Ron Erhardt, R-Edina, who displayed a Swiss Army knife while seeking support for an amendment; it was defeated.

Best amendment offered: Rep. Tony Sertich, DFL-Chisholm, sought to add a prohibition on gun permits going to any person who might be "a current representative elected from District 5A who is 5-foot-5 inches in height or shorter.'' His target: fellow Iron Ranger Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia. The amendment appeared to pass unanimously on a voice vote, but House Speaker Steve Sviggum ruled it did not pass.

We'll see if the Senate is up to that daunting standard today.

Yet Another - Yet another

Yet Another - Yet another case where the Bush Administration was right; the "International Criminal Court" would seem to be a venue for politically-based harassement of US policies under a pseudo-legalistic veneer:

"The complaint will be filed stating that unknown American personnel are directly responsible for committing war crimes in Iraq," Mr. Fermon said.
"On some of these questions there is an issue of command responsibility for atrocities committed on the ground, and that responsibility ends with Gen. Franks and those who are under him in the U.S. military line of command," he said.
The administration official said the complaint highlights U.S. concerns that laws regarding war crimes and institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) can be used to initiate politically motivated prosecutions against American officials.
"This is obviously not a political case with the ICC, but it's typical of what we can expect in the future," the official said on the condition of anonymity.

Like some of us have been saying for a long time - the ICC is nothing but another means for has-been powers and sickly, envious social welfare basketcases to get leverage against the US.

Checkmate? - Over the past

Checkmate? - Over the past few days, word's come in that documentation linking Hussein to Al Quaeda has been found.

Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998.

The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa'eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad.

Bit by bit, every single complaint of the anti-war left is being shut down; the Al Quaeda link (if finally confirmed) would be among the ultimate grounds - and it'd deal with the ultimate "toldyaso" the left was holding over the debate.

If this debate were (for most people) about the right or wrong of invading Iraq, it'd be very nearly settled; 12 years of violations of sanctions, duplicity with weapons inspectors, trying to kill former President Bush, and now a link to Al Qaeda (and, by inference possibly 9/11).

But, again, as we know, it's not about Iraq. It's about 2004.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Typical - The Strib did

Typical - The Strib did a decent profile of some typical handgun owners.

Who are the gun owners? Who wants to carry a handgun?

Franz Metzger says they can't be pigeonholed.

Metzger was in the seminary for three years before becoming a dentist. He's married with two grown children, lives in Edina, played football at the University of Minnesota and sings with the Apollo Male Chorus.

And he owns a handgun.

"When the rhetoric about handguns gets emotional, you hear the stereotypes," said Metzger, 63. "But there is no typical handgun owner."

If you'd told me seven years ago that the Star Tribune would be running a story like this, I'd have gotten a court order to keep you away from my kids; I'd have figured you were daft.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It sometimes seems like this issue is too strange to be true, if you've been following it.

What It's All About -

What It's All About - Hollywood's brigade of leftists is battered but not beaten by the victory in Iraq or the hatred so many Americans are heaping on them. According to Mike "BJ" Farrell:

Mike Farrell, star of television's "MASH" and organizer of "Artists United to Win Without War," told Reuters that those who joined the loyal opposition in Hollywood had not been silenced and certainly were not backing down.

Instead, he said, the "huge coalition" of those opposed to the war were gathering strength and preparing to fight another day -- over post-war Iraq, domestic issues and future "preemptive strikes" by the Bush administration.

"What's the point of me saying anything right now, while they're in the end zone doing the dance and spiking the football?" Farrell said. "They are going to do the thing they are going to do, but we'll be heard from when it's appropriate and in the manner that is appropriate."

Good to hear our vital stars and former stars are hanging in there, with all of that pesky freedom and end of torture and stuff breaking out and all.

But Janeane Garofalo knows how to keep it all in perspective:

Garofalo, working hard on her upcoming ABC sitcom, did not respond to interview requests for this story. But she told the Washington Post last week that her anti-war stance had been a "positive" experience that had helped her career.

"Before this I was a moderately well-known character actress," she told the paper. "Now, I'm almost famous."

That's our Hollywood; they bend, but they don't break.

Lemonade - Madonna is lending

Lemonade - Madonna is lending her voice to anti-file-sharing efforts:

Warner Music Group had audio files purporting to be her new songs uploaded onto peer-to-peer file-sharing services. Anyone who downloaded the decoys, however, heard nothing but the pop star swearing at them.

But the file sharing world is apparently up to the challenge:

But since then, the pithy profanity has taken on a life of its own.

Some observers thought Madonna was smart to fight piracy with its own tools. Others perceived a thrown gauntlet -- hackers soon defaced Madonna's Web site with an equally profane retort along with several downloadable files of the then-unreleased songs. The defacement also carried a marriage proposal to Morgan Webb, an associate producer and on-air presenter at TechTV who had nothing to do with the prank.

A third group saw a creative opportunity. "What the f--- do you think you're doing," Madonna's now-infamous phrase, is turning up in dozens of remixes and the computer-aided musical collages known as cutups or mashups.

Independent music community DMusic is now hosting a competition for the best Madonna-based track, with the first prize being a "boycott-riaa (news - web sites)" T-shirt and stickers.

Wonderful.

Rally, He Flacks - Again

Rally, He Flacks - Again - so nobody misses it; the Senate should be debating the Minnesota Personal Protection Act tomorrow morning at 9:40 at the Capitol.

If you're a supporter, please be there.

If you're a blogger that plans to be there, drop me a line. We can meet somewhere on the premises. Could be fun!

I'll keep you updated on the times and places as incoming info warrants.

The Blog Bog - I set out this morning to write a simple note about how I probably wasn't going to blog much today - I was going to get the kids to church, do some housework, enjoy the sunshine.

Now, four stories later, I'm finally saying it.

Sigh.

OK. I'll be back tomorrow!

For your entertainment reading: Military Cookie Specifications! (It's a PDF file, and it's for real).

Some Dare Call it Treason

Some Dare Call it Treason - George Galloway, British Labour Party member of Parliament and perhaps the political leader of Britain's anti-war movement (who also seems to have been on Hussein's payroll) could be charged with treason:

The Observer can reveal that the Director of Public Prosecutions is considering pursuing the Glasgow politician for comments during the Iraq war when he called on British troops not to fight.

In an interview with Abu Dhabi TV during the Iraq conflict, Galloway said: 'The best thing British troops can do is to refuse to obey illegal orders.' Lawyers for service personnel claim his call for soldiers to disobey what he called 'illegal orders' amount to a breach of the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934. The maximum penalty is two years in jail.

The relevant part of the Act is Section 1, which states: 'If any person maliciously and advisedly endeavours to seduce any member of His Majesty's forces from his duty or allegiance to His Majesty, he shall be guilty of an offence.' Under the terms of the Act, the word 'maliciously' means wilfully and intentionally.

[...]

The lawyer spearheading the action is Justin Hugheston-Roberts, chairman of Forces Law, a nationwide group of 22 law firms which acts for service personnel and their families.

[...]

Galloway's calls for British troops to disobey orders came during the TV interview in which he described Tony Blair and George Bush as 'wolves' for embarking on military action.

It will be interesting to see what happens if the bribery allegations turn out to be true. Evidence seems to be mounting.

When accused of treachery, Galloway said: 'The people who have betrayed this country are those who have sold it to a foreign power and who have been the miserable surrogates of a bigger power for reasons very few people in Britain can understand.'

After Galloway made the comments on Abu Dhabi TV, Hugheston-Roberts wrote to the DPP asking him to prosecute or allow a private prosecution to be brought.

When I wrote about this last week, I wondered if any US figures were at the $10 million trough. One commenter suggested "Ted Rall". Good call - his participation against the war was worth a good $50.

Next!

Aziz - The London Telegraph

Aziz - The London Telegraph is kicking off the speculation that Tariq Aziz was the "mole" in the Hussein regime.

The background sounds typical for any Stalinist regime:

Saddam Hussein's security chiefs placed members of Tariq Aziz's family under arrest shortly before the start of the war to make sure that the former Iraqi deputy prime minister did not defect to the West, The Telegraph can reveal.

Concerns about the fate of his family - in particular his eldest son - if he surrendered to coalition forces was Aziz's primary concern during the lengthy negotiations that finally resulted in his decision to give himself up at the end of last week.

"Tariq was still terrified of what the remnants of Saddam's regime would do to his family if he surrendered to us," said a Western security officer. "Even if Saddam were dead, he knew that there were still Ba'ath Party loyalists who would want to exact revenge on his family."

Then, according to the Telegraph, the plot thickens:

As part of Aziz's surrender terms, coalition commanders agreed to place the Iraqi politician's immediate family under the equivalent of protective custody to ensure that they were safe from revenge attacks by Saddam loyalists.

But yesterday the favourable surrender terms agreed between coalition commanders and Aziz prompted speculation that Saddam's trusted foreign policy adviser may in fact be the Iraqi spy who provided the intelligence responsible for the cruise missile attack on the Iraqi dictator's bunker in southern Baghdad in the opening salvoes of the conflict.

Intelligence officials have claimed that the information they received that allowed them to target Saddam's bunker came from a "senior official" within the Ba'ath regime, and as one of the leading members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Aziz would have prior warning that Saddam was planning to hold a meeting at one of his heavily-fortified bunkers.

"You get the feeling, now that Aziz is safely in American custody, that he will be getting re-acquainted with people he has known for quite some time," said a former CIA officer who specialises in Iraq.

"The information that enabled the coalition forces to target Saddam in the opening hours of the war could only have come from someone like Aziz who had access to Saddam's inner circle."

It'd be ludicrous for me to try to pretend I know, one way or another. But whether the "senior" official is Aziz or someone very close to him, some parts of the profile for a "mole" seem to fit, as I understand them (and bear in mind, my understanding comes purely from reading; in a bit more depth than, say, Tom Clancy or John LeCarre, but not much):

• Aziz spent lots of time overseas. There was ample time for him to have been contacted over the past decades by western intelligence. This could have resulted in Aziz being recruited as a voluntary agent - or compromised enough to have been turned into a not-entirely-willing one.
• Even a passing contact with western intelligence could have been enough to "turn" Aziz, even against his will; Hussein killed anyone who even smelled treasonous to him, and their families, too.
• I just learned this the other day; Aziz was the only Christian in Hussein's inner circle. The persecution that Iraq's Christians faced could have helped Aziz' loyalties turn

It has the makings of a great story, someday.

The Minority GOP - I've

The Minority GOP - I've predicted it in this space before: the first black president, the first woman president, the first black or female governor of the state of Minnesota, will much more than likely be Republicans.

George Will comments on the same idea:

Before the 2000 election, the most prominent African American in public life was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is prominent because of a Republican, the first President Bush. Never have African Americans been as prominent in a presidential administration as they are in the current one, given the war against terrorism and the prominence of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the waging of it. Before the war eclipsed domestic policy, the president was particularly interested in education policy, which is the purview of Secretary of Education Rod Paige, an African American.

Britain's Conservative Party gave the country a Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and a female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The second African American elected governor of an American state since Reconstruction -- Douglas Wilder was the first, in Virginia in 1989 -- may come from America's conservative party, the ranks of whose elected and appointed officials are decreasingly monochrome. And the successes of African American Republicans in statewide elections will begin to produce modest -- and tremendously consequential -- Republican gains among African Americans in presidential elections.

Bit by bit, the erosion of Democrat hegemony in the minority community is beginning.

And I think the Dems know this. The race-baiting out there is getting more vituperative. And desperate. I'm already on record predicting that Condi Rice will be the first black AND first female president, and that Pat Awada will be either our first female governor or our first female senator.

This is something we'll follow as the next election progresses.

(Via Powerline)

Liberation - Looking at this

Liberation - Looking at this montage from Powerline, (thanks for the pointer, guys!), I'm reminded of a Stephen Ambrose quote, from "Citizen Soldiers" - I'm paraphrasing, here: Throughout history, a squad of armed 19-year-olds from an occupying army has been a terrifying thing; a squad of German, Russian or Japanese soldiers usually betided rape, looting and mayhem.

But Americans changed that. For the first time in history, a squad of armed-to-the-teeth teenagers brought with them chewing gum, baseball - and liberty.

We face problems in Iraq. The media, especially the likes of the Times and the BBC will make sure we know that.

But the simple fact is that an American army of liberation does exactly that.

Need More Brain - Yesterday

Need More Brain - Yesterday was one of those nights I wished I had a Palm Pilot with speech recognition. I was listening to some fascinating guests on NPR who had some incredible insights on the situation in Iraq, and also on a topic that I've gone 'round and 'round about here on "Shot", the notion of the "Just War" and whether Iraq was one.

And they kicked off a few ideas in my own head, and now it reminds me of when you have a blinding flash of epiphany in your sleep, and you wake up to try to write it down before the insights go away...

...or, possibly, of the times when you manage to write it down in the middle of the night, and you read your jottings in the morning, and you've scrawled "Linty Yellow Clinton" on your Qwest bill.

Which will it be?

Stay tuned!

Hearing - I'm going to

Hearing - I'm going to slip into announcement mode: Monday morning (4/28), the Senate will be apparently debating the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

If you're a supporter of the MPPA, meet at the capitol. I will see you there.

UPDATE: If you're an opponent of the MPPA, a highly-placed source tells me that there'll be a meeting at the Hennepin County Government Center, in the atrium at 9:40 sharp on Monday morning. Bring your signs. Remember - that's only if you're an opponent. Please pass the word.

Mmmmm, Beer - Just in

Mmmmm, Beer - Just in time for the weekend, The Black Table reviews "Cheap Beer".

Now I'm going out.

Personal Life Update - We

Personal Life Update - We interrupt the Concealed Carry coverage for some just-plain-Mitch notes:

• Job Hunt update: The previous two weeks were great. This week has been absolutely blah. Hopefully it's the calm before the storm. I should hopefully start hearing about things as we get into May here. It's somewhat bumfuzzling to note that as of a week from tomorrow, I'll have been on the beach for four months. Scary. And yet the world hasn't ended - yet. Knock wood.
• Bagpipe Update: Whenever you learn a new instrument, it always goes in fits and starts. You'll have a burst of new facility, and then hit a plateau where you sort of mark time -and, if you're practicing, get ready for the next burst. In all of my other instruments:
  • guitar
  • cello
  • bass
  • drums
  • keyboards (as long as it's old Bruce or Tom Petty songs)
  • mandolin
  • harmonica
  • pennywhistle
  • curan
  it's been the same thing. But I snuck an advance look at my band's online music archive last night. Oy, vey - do I still have a lot to learn. Even the simplest sounding "real" Scottish bagpipe song, "Scotland the Brave", looks brutally difficult. But I've never been one to worry about learning to crawl when I can see all that cool running going on.
• As I noted last week, I'm still baking all my family's bread from scratch. It keeps getting better and better - this past week, some great French, Challah and Wheat loaves. I even caught my kids snacking on the wheat bread, without my having to make them do it. Cool or what?
• I haveto get away from the keyboard. I think I'll bike over to Lake Como and noodle around a bit. No good job hunting happens on Fridays, anyway...

Finally - I see from my hit logs that traffic to this site seems to have survived the domain change pretty nicely - I'm still up between 350-400 visitors a day. Drop me a line, or just leave a comment - either way is great. I'd love to know who's visiting the site.

Whose Sports? - While I

Whose Sports? - While I did, in fact, praise the Strib's news coverage of the concealed carry debate, their editorial page is still carrying water for Sara Brady.

Today, as if on cue, they printed this letter from investment banker and "sportsman" Bob Johnson of Lakeville.

As a gun owner, hunter and sportsman, I'm concerned about a common misperception: the belief that gun owners are a monolithic body of people who all march to the tune of the National Rifle Association.

No, we certainly aren't. An awful lot of people own firearms who have no clue about the constitutional issues involved. A lot of politicials cynically manipulate that disconnect; Mark Dayton, a member of the gun-grabbing DFL, portrayed himself as a firearms rights supporter, as did Ann Wynia; Bill Clinton had himself photographed trunding through the swamp with a shotgun, shooting some sort of bird or another; Paul Wellstone did his damnedest to dissociate "sport" shooters from those of us who see firearms as a constitutional and moral issue.

And they're all wrong!

Johnson continues:

As legislators debate the measure that would put more concealed, loaded handguns onto our streets, they should not assume that most gun owners would be happy with a looser permitting system. Some very misguided policies are propounded in our names, and many common-sense measures that would protect all of us are never enacted -- all out of fear that gun owners will exact their revenge at the polls if our interests are not defended.

The unfortunate truth is that those gun owners who speak the loudest represent only one rather extreme element of the gun-owning population.

The NRA has about three million members. They're all extremists?

And the simple fact is that concealed carry is n ot extreme. The record nationwide - in 34 other states - shows i to be a prudent measure that at the very worst does no harm, and at the most does in fact reduce violent crime.

Pretty extreme, huh?

The rest of us do not support the notion that our community will be safer with thousands more gun-toting citizens carrying concealed, loaded handguns.

Who is Bob Johnson, suburban male soccer dad, to speak for "the rest of us?" I don't recall any elections.

Nor do we believe that military-style combat weapons should be marketed to the general public.

I'm not sure how to read this line: Does Mr. Johnson (and the editors at the Strib) think tossing scary army guns into the letter will associate it with the concealed carry debate? Or are they all just devoid of logic?

Most of us do not fear reasonable regulation.

But this isn't about "reasonable regulation", is it?

In fact, the permit-issuing process is all about "reasoable regulation" - in many ways, vastly more reasonable than the current system! Under the proposed bill, permit applicants must actually prove they have no criminal record, and undergo actual training. Under the current system, the applicant must merely be approved - purely subjectively - by their chief of police.

Which, indeed, is the more "reasonable" regulation?

Hunters are among the most responsible of gun owners. We store, care for and use our firearms properly. We treat them with respect because we know their power and understand their danger.

Well, that's fine - but if you combine all that responsibility with illogical myopia on the larger moral, constitutional and criminological issues, all you are is responsible and wrong.

Here's the part that makes me see red; the same line used by inveterate gun-grabbers like Paul Wellstone and Bill Clinton:

There is no threat to losing our right to own guns for sport.

But the Constitution doesn't protect hunting!

Sometimes I wonder who the bigger enemies are - those who actively oppose firearms rights, or those who can't see beyond their own recreational self-interest.

The real threat to gun owners is the same threat hanging over the rest of the population -- that the safety of our families will be jeopardized if the rhetoric of the gun-rights groups prevails.

Posted by Mitch at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

Duelling Studies? - First, the

Duelling Studies? - First, the praise; the Strib has led the local media in beginning to report the Concealed Carry issue as one with two sides; Conrad De Fiebre was among the first local reporters to break away from the traditional media role as Sara Brady's unpaid mouthpiece.

Bob Van Sternberg wrote a piece that compared the "Duelling Studies" that proponents and opponents of concealed carry cite in debates on the issue.

The story notes that the results of the studies diverge so widely that they are mutually contradictory:

Minnesota is only the most recent battleground over what are called "shall-issue" concealed-weapon laws, and it would be the 35th state to enact one. The long-debated bill, which would make handgun permits available to many more people than under the current system, is expected to be enacted as early as next week.

It would take effect 30 days after Pawlenty affixes his signature, as he has vowed to do.

So far, so good.

Already this year, such laws have been adopted in Colorado and New Mexico, and revisions of concealed-weapon laws are in the legislative pipeline in at least five other states.

Which is an interesting point to juxtapose against one from later in the story; Luis Tolley, the State Coordinator for Brady, said:

"Most of their successes were at least 10 years ago," said Luis Tolley, the Brady organization's state legislative affairs director. "They've got a small, very active core of gun owners who want these laws, but there's not a huge public outcry on behalf of them."

This is pure spin on Tolley's part. It's not necessarily the Strib's job to point that out - but it is mine.

The statement is accurate in the sense that a large number of states adopted shall-issue ten years ago. The number of shall-issue states has jumped from eight in 1983 to 34 today; Minnesota would make 27 states in twenty years.

But if three states adopt shall-issue in one year (and, as the article notes, the issue is in play in five more), that is hardly a slowing of momentum!

Proponents of shall-issue laws are inevitably going to hit a point of diminishing returns, though - shall-issue states outnumber discretionary or non-issue states by 2.33/1. The fifteen states that remain are the hard core of the American nannystate; New York, California, New Jersey, Delaware, Illinois, Massachussetts, the D of C - places where you'll have to jam a gun into the ruling class' cold, dead hands. Painting that level of success as a black eye against the firearms rights movement is very crude spin.

In every state, the NRA has repeatedly squared off against Handgun Control Inc., now called the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence...

Representatives of the NRA declined to comment.

Although, it's worth noting, not really here in Minnesota. It's been CCRN's show, locally.

The article then goes into describing the various competing studies:

But the struggle over concealed-weapon laws is less a matter of dueling rhetoric than a crossfire of competing studies.

The first was issued in 1996 by John Lott Jr. and David Mustard, faculty members at the University of Chicago. Its conclusion was distilled in the title of a book later published by Lott: "More Guns, Less Crime."

Examining crime data between 1977 and 1992, Lott and Mustard concluded that "allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths."

If states without "shall-issue" laws had adopted them, it would have prevented 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults annually, they wrote. They also concluded that concealed handguns had the greatest deterrent effect in counties with the highest crime rates, and that criminals opt to commit property crimes instead of running the risk of encountering armed victims.

So far, so good.

Opponents pounced almost immediately. Within weeks of the publication of Lott's paper, Stephen Teret of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research wrote that the conclusions of Lott and Mustard were "unsubstantiated."

"Their study contains factual and methodological flaws and reaches conclusions that are implausible based on criminologic research and theory," Teret wrote. More specifically, he said that violent crime reductions cited by the author failed to "distinguish a true effect of the law from an expected downward drift toward average [crime] levels."

Just as quickly, Lott rebutted the criticisms, as he has continued to do every time his conclusions have been challenged.

This is an important observation - in fact, a first from what I've seen in coverage of the fallout of Lott's work in the major media. Indeed, Lott and some of his supporters have not only shredded Teret and most other comers, but Lott has circulated his raw data to many naysayers asking them to fold, spindle and mutilate it to try to come up with a different answer. As of last year, none had.

In 1999, University of Arkansas law Prof. Andrew McClurg wrote in the Journal on Firearms and Public Policy that "blatantly fallacious argumentation continues to dominate popular gun control discourse."

While opting not to pass judgment on Lott's conclusions, McClurg described him as a man who has "developed a devoted cult following among gun lovers and has become a marked man among gun haters."

In other words, McClurg substituted a fairly superficial personal attack and a broad statement for actual data.

[McClurg] added: "There are simply too many variables contributing to violent crime to isolate concealed-weapons laws as a major cause in deterring or reducing it. It is simply not something that is capable of being proved by a statistical study. . . . In the absence of other proof -- which may never exist -- it would be reckless for state legislators or anyone else to rely on this single study."

In other words - "It's all just toooo complicated!".

Sounds like a cranky parent yelling at the kids - "don't bother me now. I'm too tired to explain why - just SHUT UP!".

In late 1999, Carlisle Moody of the College of William and Mary presented a paper at the American Enterprise Institute's Guns, Crime and Safety conference that concluded that concealed-carry laws "tend to reduce violent crimes" and burglary, but their effect on other property crime is uncertain.

Which, in fact, supports Lott's conclusions to a "T". Lott claimed reductions in violent crime, but some displacement into property crime. More on this below.

In 2000, the Journal of Economic Literature published an analysis by Florenz Plassman and Nicolaus Tideman that concluded that while the effects of concealed-handgun availability vary, depending on crime categories and states, they "appear to have statistically significant deterrent effects on the numbers of reported murders, rapes and robberies."

However, some crimes increased, and what the authors called this "ambiguous result" indicates that "right-to-carry laws do not always have the deterrent effects on crime that are envisaged by legislators and that the adoption of such laws is not without risk."

Which is, of course, more or less congruent with Lott's findings; property crime (auto theft, for example) increases in shall-issue states.

Question: Would you trade a couple of car thefts, garage break-ins or petty thefts for a murder, rape or assault?

To use the great liberal trope: "If we can save just one life" for the loss of a couple cars, lawnmowers and stereos, isn't it worth it?

The National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper in 2001 by economist Mark Duggan titled "More Guns, More Crime." He found that the decline nationwide in firearm homicides between 1993 and 1998 can be largely traced to a corresponding decline in gun ownership -- not concealed-carry laws.

Two responses to that:

1. John Lott has some interesting commentary on Duggan's work
2. Studies indicate that there is no decrease in firearms ownership; and if you recall the stories about media and Brady consternation about booming firearms sales (especially after 9/11) you'd be right to wonder where all those guns are going...

In other words, Duggan's data would seem to be suspect.

The laws didn't increase gun ownership or reduce crime, suggesting "either gun owners did not increase their frequency with which they carried their guns or that criminals were not deterred by the greater likelihood that their victims would be armed."

So let's take this claim at face value; the very worst, then, that the opponents can claim about shall-issue reform is that it has no effect.

The very worst!

If only every government initiative had no net harmful effect!

Most recently, Stanford University law Prof. John Donohue wrote in a book published by the Brookings Institution that Lott's conclusions about the laws' deterrent effect were "flawed" and "misguided."

Donohue's bottom line: "If somebody had to say which way the evidence is stronger, I'd say that it's probably stronger that the laws are increasing crime, rather than decreasing crime. But the stronger thing I could say is that I don't see any strong evidence that they are reducing crime."

Donohue, unfortunately, never actually claims that Lott's study is wrong, per se - merely that people might worry about the results. Donohue is incredibly disingenuous on this topic.

While it's not the Strib's job to necessarily dissect each and every study brought to the table on this issue, it'd be nice if someone were able to give some context to the reader/voter who wants genuine education on the topic.

Oh, No - Not Again

Oh, No - Not Again - Lileks seems to be down again.

UPDATE: Or not.

Galloway Slipping - The Christian

Galloway Slipping - The Christian Science Monitor follows the London Telegraph with documentary evidence that British Labour party MP and anti-war activist George Galloway was on the Iraqi payroll.

Big-time:

Evidence of Mr. Galloway's dealings with the regime were first revealed earlier this week by David Blair, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in London, who discovered documents in Iraq's Foreign Ministry.

The Labour Party MP, who lambasted his party's prime minister, Tony Blair, in parliamentary debates on the war earlier this year, has denied the allegations. He is now the focus of a preliminary investigation by British law-enforcement officials and is under intense scrutiny in the British press, where the story has been splashed across the front pages.

The most recent - and possibly most revealing - documents were obtained earlier this week by the Monitor. The papers include direct orders from the Hussein regime to issue Mr. Galloway six individual payments, starting in July 1992 and ending in January 2003.

The payments point to a concerted effort by the regime to use its oil wealth to win friends in the Western world who could promote Iraqi interests first by lifting sanctions against Iraq and later in blocking war plans.

The leadership of Hussein's special security section and accountants of the President's secretive Republican Guard signed the papers and authorized payments totaling more than $10 million.

Ten million dollars.

Galloway accounts for about $600 large.

Where's the rest?

If the leader of the opposition of the second-largest power lined up against Iraq got $600K, who could the Iraqis have been paying in the largest power in the coalition?

Your speculation is welcomed.

The Hamster Speaks - A

The Hamster Speaks - A lot of my far-left friends are very excited about Vermont governor Howard Dean. More and more, I hope the Democrats nominate him.

If he keeps saying stuff like this, he'll make McGovern '72 look pretty good:

Asked if the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam, Dean said, "We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet, Wolf. We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance."

He might even make Mondale look good in comparison.

Concealed Carry Redux - You'll

Concealed Carry Redux - You'll know them by their enemies.

And I'm proud to claim some of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act's opponents as political foes.

Here's what the Strib had to say:

Opponents tried unsuccessfully to pass several amendments. One would have prohibited weapons at the Metrodome, State Fairgrounds, the Target Center, movie theaters and liquor vendors.

That's right. Best to keep those places as sacred sanctuaries for gang-bangers and nutbars who carry with neither training nor permits.

Another would have allowed local governments to restrict possession in their own public buildings.

Creating a "Citizens Can't Shoot You Here" zone in public buildings - brilliant!

A third would have prohibited concealed handguns at colleges and universities.

The DFL obviously wants to avoid scenes like this, at a recent shooting at a Virginia law school, where armed students apprehended a mass-murderer:

When the sound of shooting erupted, panic ensued. "People were running everywhere. They were jumping behind cars, running out in front of traffic, trying to get away," Gross said.

Instead of joining in the chaos, Gross and Bridges ran to their cars and got their guns. Joined by an unarmed Ted Besen, an ex-Marine and police officer, the three men approached the shooter from different sides.

"I aimed my gun at him, and Peter tossed his gun down," Bridges recalled. "Ted approached Peter, and Peter hit Ted in the jaw. Ted pushed him back, and we all jumped on."

The obvious conclusion - the DFL wants to protect criminals.

Back to the Strib's coverage:

An amendment by Rep. Karen Clark, DFL-Minneapolis, would have required a person with a handgun to ask the owner of a private residence for permission to enter.

That's right, DFL - legislate how people interact with each other over personal issues like allowing firearms in the home. Don't allow the individual the dignity of doing any such thing for themselves. Make it government's job.

"I'm ashamed of us," Clark said later during the debate.

She should be.

Opponents said more guns in purses and under suit coats would result in more guns being used inappropriately and more being stolen.

Unfortunately, opponents showed no statistics of any such phenomenon in current shall-issue states.

Because no such statistics exist.

Could it be that the opponents just feel that Minnesotans are that much more depraved than everyone else?

No wonder Karen Clark's so ashamed.

"This is not the conceal-and-carry bill; this is the conceal-and-kill bill," said Rep. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park.

In 1987, Florida state senator Ron Silver coined the phrase "The Gunshine State", and predicted that the streets of Florida would be like Dodge City East, after Florida passed its concealed carry law. He's had the good grace to eat his crow in public over the past ten years or so.

Assuming Mr. Latz is still in office, I'll be there with my Heinz 57 Crow Sauce ready to go.

But I liked this one, by Rep. Jean Wagenius (Nannystater, Minneapolis, where else?):

The new provision prompted some opponents in the House to display signs in front of their desks saying, " . . . allows no firearms within these premises." Rep. Jean Wagenius, DFL-Minneapolis, suggested that people opposed to the expansion boycott businesses that fail to put up the signs.

"If the Mall of America does not post the whole mall, I've had my last trip to the Mall of America," she said.

Given the trouble the Mall's had with gang shootings in the past ten years, I'm thinking it'd be worth it just to have a Wagenius-free zone.

And I plan, myself, on boycotting any stores that don't have a damn good reason for posting themselves.

More as events warrant.

Why I Support Carry Reform

Why I Support Carry Reform - If you've read this blog more than, say, twice, you know I'm a big supporter of concealed carry reform. I'm a sometimes member of Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota.

When people ask me why I support reforming our currently patriarchal, antiquated and racist concealed carry laws, though, it takes a while.

It's not just personal reasons - I did thwart a break-in back in July of 1988, but that was in the home and had nothing to do with being able to carry a handgun or not.

It's not just the empirical fact that concealed carry makes a place safer - as shown in all of John Lott's exhaustive and unrefuted studies of the subject.

It's not even the prudential political fact that 33 states have shall-issue laws - or the more impressive fact that 25 of those states adopted the laws within the past 20 years, or, most impressive of all, that not a one has repealed their shall-issue law.

No. To me, it's a moral issue.

Currently, here in Minnesota, the criminal knows that the only people who can hurt him come in Crown Victorias with whoopie lights on top. The citizen in the street is no threat. The "balance of fear" is skewed away from the criminal, and toward the citizen.

Reforming our laws would change that - even if only a tiny minority of Minnesotans opted to get permits. Criminals that read newspapers might know that 1% of people in "shall-issue" states actually get the permits - but they'd never know which one of a hundred potential victims would be the one that could shut his lights out forever.

The balance of fear shifts; the criminal feels more; the citizen feels less.

Isn't that supposed to be what civilization is about - making the civilized more secure, and the barbarians less so?

Is a measure that makes the barbarians more secure and the civilized less safe, within the context of civilized society, moral?

I'll be following this, obviously, very closely.

Bloodbath at Foggy Bottom -

Bloodbath at Foggy Bottom - Newt Gingrich spoke to the American Enterprise Institute about the successes and failures in the war - and, more germanely, the diplomatic tapdance that led up to it.

Guess how the State Department comes out?

From President Bush's clear choice between two worlds, the State Department had descended into a murky game in which the players were deceptive and the rules were stacked against the United States.

The State Department communications program failed during these five months to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position. This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States.

As the State Department remained ineffective and incoherent, the French launched a worldwide campaign to undermine the American position and make the replacement of the Saddam dictatorship very difficult. This included twisting Turkish arms to block a vote in favor of the United States using Turkish soil to create a northern front and appealing to the other members of the Security Council to block a second resolution.

Gingrich juxtaposes this with the Department of Defense:

Fortunately the Defense Department was capable of overcoming losing access to Turkey, losing public opinion support in Europe and the Middle East and turned those disadvantages into a stunning victory working in concert with our British allies and with support largely secured by Centcom and DoD among the Gulf States. Had Centcom and DoD been as ineffective at diplomacy as the State Department (which is supposedly in charge of diplomacy) Kuwait would not have been available, the Saudi air base would not have been available, and the Jordanian passage of special forces would not have been available, etc.

The military delivered diplomatically [emphasis added] and then the military delivered militarily in a stunning four week campaign.

The DOD does a better job at diplomacy!

Read the whole thing.

Where's James? - In an

Where's James? - In an outpouring of concern not seen on the 'net since Mahir went missing (or, I guess, since Plain Layne's unannounced relocation), the whole world is wondering where Lileks' site has gone.

Our hopes and best wishes go out to those concerned. Team coverage to follow.

Iran - The Iranians have

Iran - The Iranians have been intervening among the Shi'ites in Iraq. The question is, why?

Especially given the trouble they're having at home themselves.

I think the mullahs need to spark a conflict to stay in power - just not too much conflict.

The New Era in Iraq

The New Era in Iraq - David Warren has a fascinating look at the curve-balls we face in governing Iraq.

Asked what his greatest challenge would be, [incoming administrator Gen. Jay Garner] said: "Everything is the challenge."

A remarkably calm, folksy, understated man, Lt. Gen. Garner (Ret.) would not have been kidding. Repairing infrastructure (including the large south Baghdad electrical plant that was more effectively sabotaged than first reports indicated -- U.S. and Iraqi engineers have been working on it day and night) will be the least of his problems. The central task of Iraqi reconstruction is political -- to create a viable civil order in the face of decades of savage tyranny, and the kind of pent-up social forces that were exposed in e.g. former Yugoslavia when Communism fell.

On the plus side, the Bush administration has learned much by studying what went wrong in places like former Yugoslavia. On the minus side, the challenge of Shia Islamism may make Balkan troubles seem like flies at a picnic.

That's just the exposition. Read the whole thing - it's excellent.

A Modest Proposal - Was

A Modest Proposal - Was there a hockey game last night?

I love baseball. I can watch football. But NBA hoops and NHL hockey both bore me stiff.

I can call the play-by-play of any NBA game more or less as follows:

"5:18 in the half, and [name of 6'10" mutant] has the ball...he [pick one] DRIVES...IN for two!/ReJECted!". Repeat until closing buzzer. If I don't pass out from boredom on the way.

In the meantime, Hockey combines the low-scoring thrills of major-league soccer with the endless, endless, endless, back and endless forth of professional tennis.

I have a proposal to make both sports more interesting - but it'll take some cooperation.

Currently, every hockey team has a goalie - a guy in padding straight from a bomb disposal unit who puts his mug in front of speeding pucks for a living. In the meantime, goaltending is a penalty in basketball.

So switch them.

Ban the goalie in hockey. Nobody, defender or attacker, should be allowed inside the box. And make shots from beyond the blue line worth two points.

In the meantime, add a goaltender to each basketball team; maybe even give him a helmet. He should be a guy with a superhuman vertical leap, whose job it is to keep the biscuit out of the basket.

Think of the revolution this would force on the strategery of both games! More importantly, it's make both games interesting enough to watch...

...when there's not a baseball game on the radio, anyway.

Gaaah. I need a job.

Nyaaa Nyaaa Nyaaaaaa - Yesterday,

Nyaaa Nyaaa Nyaaaaaa - Yesterday, Doug Grow called anti-tax-hike activists copycats. Citizens for a Subservient Safer Minnesota calls pro-carry-reform people "Yahoos in Parkas", as we noted below.

Today, Laura Billings is on the case. If you oppose tax hikes, you're a baaaaaaad person.

Though a grudging but civil send-off for our delinquent dead used to be one of the hallmarks of Minnesota Nice, a no-nonsense funeral now counts as one of those nonessential services, like Porta Pottis in public parks, after-school programs for kids, or libraries that are actually open when people might want to use them.

I, as a non-native Minnesotan, am getting very, very sick of the ever-expanding definition of "Minnesota Nice", which is itself turning into a rather sickening sobriquet. "Minnesota Nice" should be about not letting people starve. I'm not sure where porta potties and indigent funerals fit into that.

Ever since Gov. Tim Pawlenty's budget proposal came out in February, the slow trickle of news about cuts to social services like this have caused "a sort of a smoldering reaction" in Alex Ellison, the South Minneapolis mother of a 15-month-old daughter and the owner of a small recycling bin business.

"As each new thing came to light, I found myself getting more and more angry,'' said Ellison, a self-described Wellstone Democrat who says her interest in paying the upfront costs of social services like education and health care were inspired by the fiscal conservatism she learned growing up in a Republican household.

"I know that taxation has been vilified over the last 30 years, but it serves such a high purpose. Why is everyone so afraid to suggest it?''

Ellison and her husband, Chuck Tomlinson, who works in the University of Minnesota's general chemistry department, decided that Minnesotans who have been intimidated by the anti-tax crowd simply needed some encouragement to admit aloud that taxes can contribute to the public good. So they started a grass-roots campaign complete with an Internet site (www.betterminnesota.org), bumper stickers, prepaid postcards to pass the word, and bright orange lawn signs for others in the state who are, as their signs say, "Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota.''

I'm the last person in the world to criticize people acting in their own self-interest - but do you suppose Laura Billings could be honest enough to note that Ellison and Tomlinson's livelihoods both depend on tax-funded programs, to one extent or another?

Like Grow, Billings doesn't like the fact that the marketplace of ideas in this state has more than one shelf:

The Web site betterminnesota.org was up and running at the end of March, espousing a vision for healthy families, excellent schools, strong cities, clean lakes and thriving businesses, along with links about the consequences of budget cuts to those areas. By last week, the Republican Party of Minnesota had set up its own copycat Web site, www.betterminnesota.com, complaining about Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party "budget games." (Randy Wanke, communications director, explained, "We wanted to make sure there were better ideas presented.'')

"Copycat" site? No, it's not - it's a much better-designed site whose ideas intersect at one and only one point - the concept of "Better Minnesota". The last I checked, the right to express a different view of what a "Better Minnesota" is has not been trademarked.

Here's the part I find the most irritating; the column's slugline. It reads as follows:

Some Minnesotans say it's not nice to be stingy

Stingy?

First - we're not cutting the overall budget at all!

But second, and most importantly - Stingy?

Dictionary.com defines "Stingy" as:

1. Giving or spending reluctantly. 2. Scanty or meager: a stingy meal; stingy with details about the past.

That may be the left's most noxious conceit in this whole sorry debate - the notion that it's about being "mean", or "reluctant" about doing good for others.

No, indeed - I think you're seeing a state full of people who are perfectly willing to build and staff schools, but are sick of being treated like ripe sucks by the MFT; who have no problem paying for good infrastructure, but are repulsed by pork-barrels like the Hiawatha Line; who have no problem paying for a great university system, but are sick to death of the U of M's invincible institutional arrogance.

We're not mean. We're just not bottomless pits of money - not now.

I'd love to see if the institutional left in this state - the likes of Doug Grow and Laura Billings and Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota - can carry on an argument without the cheap stereotypes.

The Smell of Fear -

The Smell of Fear - Citizens for a Subservient Minnesota (CSM) is running a new radio commercial (requires Quicktime) to try to foment fear about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

Note the emotional buttons being pushed:

• The character reading the spot is, inevitably, a "mother"; "I don't want to walk into a store with my kids...". The appeal is obvious - they're trying to get the soccer moms (or, as we reported last winter, win them back; 9/11 won a lot of "soccer moms" over to the concealed carry side, according to some polls)
• Notice the crude defamation of those who favor concealed carry reform: "...any yahoo with a gun in his parka...". Not "rape victim", ""single parent protecting his/her family", "law-abiding citizen who is absolutely no threat to anyone"...no, just "Yahoo".
• Check out, while you're at it, the social stereotyping in the spot. The protagonist - cute-but-businesslike-sounding mom. The antagonist? A guy in a parka. In this day and age, "parka" is itself an iconic token; it screams declasse'; they're worn by the lower-class, the rural, the extras from Fargo, the "white trash" who live outstate and shop at Wal-Mart. There's a hint of depravity to it, too; the parka is very out of style for the "mainstream" (at least, the suburban, minivan-driving mainstream that this commercial is aiming at) - it was middle-class winter chic in the seventies, so among the spot's audience, it's likely associated with biker bars, homeless shelters, that crowd.
• Beyond that? The "Parka-wearing Yahoo" is, in terms of 21st century urban archetypes, a politically-correct boogeyman; in an era when you can't go on the air with a woman worrying about guns in the hands of "bangers in starter jackets"; the parka-wearing yahoo is an acceptable substitute for the real fear, read "Bigotry" underlying this commercial.
• Like most CSM communications, the commercial lies. It will take more than a simple background check to get a concealed carry permit when the MPPA passes. But even so, note the arrogance inherent in the commercial's subtext; the woman's fear of someone's external "Yahoo"dom is more important than the complete absence of criminal record?
• Listen to the ad; note the complete lack of references to "Minnesota" in the exchange between the "mom" and the "senator's staffer". The spot was cut by a national group - which one, I don't know, but I'll find out - and sent out to local victim-disarmament groups to have the local "tag" (the guy reading the bit at the end) added on in final production. CSM is working with someone nationwide.

I'm thinking, right now, that this commercial is good news, in a backhanded way. The victim-disarmament lobby is getting nervous enough to actually spend money; moreover, they're spending it in Minnesota, a state that even a few years ago had to have been considered rock-solid safe anti-gun territory.

I haven't had much time to follow the concealed-carry debate this session, with the job hunt and all. But I'll be on this as the session winds down; it's too important an issue to let slide.

UPDATE: I'm told the group is actually called "Citizens for a Safer Minnesota. My bad.

UPDATE AGAIN: An email correspondent writes:

"I hadn't listened to it myself, but I fully expected them to engage in, what sound likes from your report, simple name-calling and fear.

My feel is this: the media and people are beyond name-calling and fear; they won't respond to the advert; and it may just motivate our people to call in support.

Of this, I'm also confident. The anti-gun movement in Minnesota and nationwide is a mile wide and an inch deep; a lot of people are uncomfortable around guns or with firearms rights, but not uncomfortable to bother calling legislators or turning up at hearing after hearing; firearms rights supporters turn out for both in droves. I think that, as far as this is concerned, the ad will backfire.

And that the media are probably not susceptible to this bag of tropes is also encouraging; despite their bias on so many issues, enough of the Twin Cities media has learned to see through CSM's phalanx of strawmen that, from my vantage point, the media hasn't been that much of a handicap to the pro-liberalization side.

I think this advert is a real mistake on CSM's part.

Not that it'll be easy. The Senate is still too tight
for my comfort."

True on both counts.

Again - more to come.

Pro Death - The National

Pro Death - The National Organization of Women is scuttling away from its attack on "Fetal Homicide" laws in 23 states. The issue came to a head when California charged Scott Peterson with two murders in the death of his wife and unborn child.

NOW officials declined to comment Monday on statements made this weekend by Mavra Stark, "out of respect for (Peterson's) family and what they're going through," spokeswoman Rebecca Farmer said by telephone from Washington.

Farmer would not say whether NOW opposes fetal homicide statutes that exist in at least 23 states. The laws have been opposed by some pro-choice groups even though legal abortions are exempted from prosecution.
[...]
Stark, who heads the Morris County NOW, spoke Monday with the national organization's vice president, Terry O'Neill. Stark said O'Neill told her that NOW "felt it wasn't the right thing to take a position right now" on either the Peterson case or fetal homicide statutes.
[...]
On Monday afternoon, Stark said the "viability of the Peterson fetus … makes a great deal of difference" in assessing the criminal case.

"The position I was veering very close to was not even in synch with those of all the pro-choice organizations I belong to," said Stark, who had previously speculated that the double-murder charge could strengthen efforts by pro-lifers to enact a ban on late-term abortions.

As I said yesterday, I generall steer clear of abortion; my views aren't conducive to being pounded into a convenient quote, which is a little too deep for some people.

But leaving aside the fact that the Peterson baby was nearly full-term, a solid three months farther along than "Fetuses" have been successfully delivered, the whole "viability" question is a complete canard.

Left to its own devices, even with absolutely no medical care, a "Fetus" will survive to full term 3/4 of the time. Even on the prairie before medical care was widespread, at the turn of the century, 2/3 of pregnancies ended in a live birth. "Viability" is, in most cases, a matter of someone not killing the fetus on purpose.

NOW is backtracking because the issue and incident showed an awful lot of people what a bunch of extremists NOW is. (I almost said "Depraved Extremists", but that would have been inflammatory. I'd hate to inflame, so I won't say that).

Very Different Worlds - Doug

Very Different Worlds - Doug Grow's latest column covers one of the most irritating "grassroots" movements in Minnesota today - those asinine "Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota" signs.

Signs that Minnesota's progressive movement wasn't totally obliterated in November are popping up on lawns across Minnesota this spring.

"Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota," they read. They can be found -- if you look hard -- from Duluth to Rochester to the Twin Cities.

They're the creation of Alexandra Ellison and Chuck Tomlinson, who awoke on Nov. 6 in a Minnesota far different from what they had ever known.

It's ironic, isn't it, how this theme keeps popping up?

No, Alexandra and Chuck did not "wake up to a Minnesota far different from what they'd known". They woke up the morning after the Republican Party won most of the offices up for election.

Waking up to find the Taliban marching down University Avenue would have been "very different". Or perhaps turning on "KARE11 Today" to see a Jesse-Ventura-controlled secret police force mowing down their opponents and building a pyramid of skulls on Nicollet Mall as a warning - that would have been a "Very Different Minnesota".

No, all that happnened on November 6 was the DFL lost an election. And as long as DFLers take that as a cataclysmic debacle of human failure, rather than an electoral defeat, then I'm betting "Under" in this state's battle for civility.

Further sign of what this blog has been catalogueing since its inception - the blind contempt and gaping rage the DFL feels at having to share power with the unwashed masses.

Grow continues:

The "Say No to War With Iraq" signs obviously were their inspiration.

"You have a group which feels unheard," Ellison said. "A big yard sign is a way of jumping up and down and saying, 'Hey, listen to me.' "

I find it ironic that people who (I'll presume here, and I'll bet I'm right) find, say, "conservative talk radio" to be "shallow sloganeering" would jump to, say, lawn signs.

But a former Republican governor, Elmer L. Andersen, provides another motivation.

As an aside, here - I'm getting real tired of DFL mouthpieces like Doug Grow trotting out the likes of Elmer Andersen and Arne Carlson as "Former Republican Governors". Sure, they wore elephant pins; but at no point were any of them any more than "DFL-lite".

James Lileks, in one of his old radio shows, made the quintessential Minnesota Independant Republican joke, presumably before the 1990 election, where Arne Carlson ran against some cookie-cutter DFLer Rudy Perpich - and I'm paraphrasing from memory here - "It's hard for me to explain to my friends on the coast, that here in Minnesota we have a choice between the pro-choice, anti-gun, high-tax candidate - and the Democrat".

So when the "That Feels Good Sir, Give Me Another Tax" crowd cites the likes of Andersen and Carlson, you need to know that you're being played for a sucker.

Ellison and Tomlinson read a recent newspaper account of the man who represented a more moderate Republican Party than the party of Pawlenty, and they were struck by this Andersen thought: "Taxes are the way people join hands to get good things done. That's the tradition of Minnesota."

That quote is prominently displayed on a Web site that Ellison and Tomlinson have established, http://www.betterminnesota.org.

Again with the sloganeering!

Sorry, folks - Andersen's statement is only true if government is the extension of the will of the people.

Which nobody's really believed since Lenin.

I can't tell if this next bit is yawningly hypocritical, o just clueless:

Just as "Say No to War With Iraq" lawn signs begat "Liberate Iraq" signs, the betterminnesota.org site has stirred a counter site. The state's Republican Party recently put up http://www.betterminnesota.com.

Isn't that a little like Grand Old Party theft of somebody else's idea?

Great, Doug!

I presume you'll be out there condemning whitehouse.com next?

If "betterminnesota.com" was available for sale, then it's not theft.

"We didn't want somebody hijacking the term 'betterminnesota,' " said Randy Wanke, the party's communications director. "We just wanted to expand the debate."

The dot-orgs didn't learn of the dot-com's' theft -- oops, debate expansion -- until last weekend. Not surprisingly, some of the dot-orgs were upset.

As they should be. They screwed up.

Predictably, the Republicans' site is filled with derisive comments about DFL tax plans and praise for the governor. The grass-roots dot-orgs' site is far less partisan, except for anger at the Republicans' site.

"What does it say about the governor, his party and their confidence in their budget plan?" the dot-orgs ask on their site. "They're deceptively undermining a positive, grass-roots, citizen-led campaign."

What incredible, manipulative - and yes, Mr. Grow, partisan twaddle.

The .com site is a conduit for information about Pawlenty's plan. Yes, there are some japes at the self-righteous self-importance of the .org site - it's irresistable.

It's also communicating a message - one that the likes of Doug Grow will never treat fairly.

Speaking of manipulative:

They also are seeking progressive people to hold meetings in their homes to discuss issues and ways to counter the "no new taxes" mantra that is overwhelming all other political voices.

"Mantra".

Note Grow's choice of words - "Mantra", "Overwhelming"...like the idea of reducing our crushing tax burden is some Lucas-esque dark force sweeping the state. A darkness from which a plucky band of grass-roots activists - EVERYONE likes them, right? - must save the benighted masses. Save us from ourselves!

What buncombe. The people of Minnesota support Pawlenty and the budget proposal. I'd imagine Grow thinks this is some sort of pathology to be cured.

Demogogues are like that when it comes to genuine democracy in action.

As always, I would welcome Doug Grow's response.

Ironies of Design - By the way - since the "Happy to Pay..." "movement" is basically a throwback to the seventies, it's interesting to look at the actual signs.

They, too, are throwbacks to the seventies!

Check them out; the low-contrast orange-on-orange design, the inept use of capitals - the whole thing screams "Brady Bunch Living Room".

Someone Call Sara Brady! -

Someone Call Sara Brady! - Two Minnesota farm kids have a close call with a potato gun, according to the Strib:

Polk County Sheriff Mark LeTexier said the two friends were shooting a screwdriver from a homemade potato gun Friday night. The gun failed to fire after several attempts, then went off when one boy picked it up, the sheriff said.

The screwdriver just missed the other boy's heart, LeTexier said. He is expected to recover.

The accident took place near the town of Erskine. Would it be catty of me to say that Erskine is Roger Moe's home town?

Gaaah. People from my hometown ask me why I got the flark out of North Dakota...

Left On Iraq Update -

Left On Iraq Update - Nick Kristof admits admits his predictions about the war were totally wrong:

Since I complained vigorously about this war before it started, it's only fair for me to look back and acknowledge that many of the things that I — along with other doves — worried about didn't happen. So let's look back, examine the record and offer some preliminary accountability.

Despite my Cassandra columns, Iraq never carried out terrorist attacks in the U.S. or abroad, it didn't use chemical or biological weapons, and it didn't launch missiles against Israel in hopes of triggering a broader war. Turkey has not invaded northern Iraq to attack the Kurds.

So let me start by tipping my hat to administration planners whose work reduced those risks. For example, one reason Iraq did not attack Israel may have been the Special Operations forces in the western desert of Iraq, where the launches would have come from. And belated pressure from Washington has kept Turkey out of the war so far.

Then he goes and makes some more predictions:

Those Americans who contend that Iraqis hail us as liberators should try traveling around Iraq. I grew a mustache to look more like an Iraqi so hostile locals wouldn't throw rocks at my car. (I've now returned to the U.S. and had to shave my mustache so my family wouldn't throw stones at me.)

The hawks also look increasingly naïve in their expectations that Iraq will soon blossom into a pro-American democracy. For now, the figures who inspire mass support in postwar Iraq are Shiite clerics like Ali al-Sistani (moderate, but tainted by being soft on Saddam), Moqtadah al-Sadr (radical son of a martyr) and Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim (Iran's candidate), all of whom criticize the United States.

As in revolutionary Iran, the Shiite network is the major network left in Iraq, and it will help determine the narrative of the war: infidel invasion or friendly liberation. I'm afraid we infidels had better look out.

Bet your money on "Democracy".

Ebert - My friend Brian

Ebert - My friend Brian Jones runs "Boviosity". He uncorks on Roger Ebert (scroll down to the part beginning "Amateur patriot Roger Ebert..." - his permalinks aren't working).

The money quote, to me, is probably a toss-off to Brian:

It's so hard not to call people names when they're being this thick. The density of ignorance in this brief paragraph is astonishing. It's almost as if it was edited to seem perfectly and wilfully ignorant.

So the left regards virtually everything the right says as either supreme idiocy or lies; you can test this by cranking up Rush Limbaugh in front of a group of U of M CLA grad students and recording the remarks.

And of course, we on the right regard much of what the left says as ungaugeable cretinism.

In light of piece below, where we quote Andrew Sullivan about how "an intelligent opposition helps good government rather than hinders it", then here's my question:

If someone (of any political orientation) speaks in the forest, and everyone who disagrees calls it idiocy, will anyone hear it?

Not that Ebert's piece isn't pretty stupid...

Unhinged - On this site,

Unhinged - On this site, we've been chronicling the hatredof the left for the right since the very beginning.

Sullivan, today, sums up what it means for democracy (second article down, entitled "Why?":

What I'm saying is that the level of animosity has now gone to truly unhinged levels. This, of course, is good news for Bush, who is busy turning his opponents into shriller versions of Ann Richards. But it's bad news for Democrats and worse news for anyone who believes, as I do, that an intelligent opposition helps good government, rather than hinders it.

The whole piece is excellent, and not too long.

Payroll - Key British anti-war

Payroll - Key British anti-war politician and Labour party leader George Galloway was on the Iraqi payroll to the tune of $500,000 a year, according to the Telegraph:

A confidential memorandum sent to Saddam by his spy chief said that Mr Galloway asked an agent of the Mukhabarat secret service for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil for food programme.

He also said that Mr Galloway was profiting from food contracts and sought "exceptional" business deals. Mr Galloway has always denied receiving any financial assistance from Baghdad.

Asked to explain the document, he said yesterday: "Maybe it is the product of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture. Maybe The Daily Telegraph forged it. Who knows?"

Andrew Sullivan is cautionary - we don't know the sources, and nothing is confirmed yet. But he says about Galloway's denials:

Not exactly a clear denial, I'd say. Notice the Clintonian "maybes" and "to the best of my knowledge." Notice that Galloway doesn't clearly deny receiving laundered oil money either. I imagine the Telegraph must be pretty confident of its source materials, but I cannot independently verify them, of course. And I haven't seen the story picked up yet by anyone else. But this is the lead story in the largest-selling quality newspaper in Britain. If confirmed, it couldn't be more damaging to a man synonymous in Britain with the anti-war movement.

The big question, of course - if this is true (and it's only an allegation so far), do you suppose Hussein's secret police would have left the US alone?

One Of The Boys -

One Of The Boys - Andy Bizub of the Chicago Boys has this excellent rejoinder to the Celebrity Activist community:

The celebrity activist crowd is shocked, shocked that their feet are being held to the fire, that they are being made to suffer the consequences of taking their overwhelmingly unpopular stands. Welcome to the real world people, a world of personal responsibility where actions can generate reactions. The beautiful ones recoil in horror as individuals and private institutions move to disassociate themselves from anti-war rhetoric. Luckily, that does not shut down the pop icons, they just proceed to reel out more rope with which to hang themselves.

They don't suffer peasants gladly

Regarding Susan Sarandon and her new play (TelegraphUK) : She would not take the play to the Middle East. "I do work for Unicef but I don't know if I want to go to the Middle East. It's so violent and I've got a family." Well shit Suzy, we're all safe here, so let the human meat grinder keep running, after all, they're only Arabs and Zionists, right?

Now, this could be taken many ways - it could be completely out of context.

But if I'm allowed to wax cynical - yes, Susan, all those brown, non-coastal people do have it pretty rough under their current regimes, don't they?

As for her partner, (WNBC) : (Tim) Robbins reportedly threatened Washington Post reporter Lloyd Grove for interviewing Sarandon's mother, saying "if you ever write about my family again, I will (bleeping) find you and I will (bleeping) hurt you." Freedom of the press and speech are wonderful things, unless they are wielded against the extreme left, in which case they prompt threats of physical violence.

Tim! Your and your squeeze are semi-literate poseurs.

You know where to find me.

Discovery? - Every day that

Discovery? - Every day that we don't find immense caches of chemical weapons is another day that the extreme left gets to practically wet its pants with "Told you so!" glee.

Unanswered: what if Hussein buried the weapons, or shipped them abroad, or just destroyed them, or some combination of the three?

According to Judith Miller of the Times, there's evidence of all of the above.

We've found an Iraqi scientist, says Miller, who claims to know where the proverbial bodies are buried:

A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.

They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs.

The article continues:

Military officials said the scientist told them that four days before President Bush gave Mr. Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war, Iraqi officials set fire to a warehouse where biological weapons research and development was conducted.

The officials quoted him as saying he had watched several months before the outbreak of the war as Iraqis buried chemical precursors and other sensitive material to conceal and preserve them for future use. The officials said the scientist showed them documents, samples, and other evidence of the program that he claimed to have stolen to prove that the program existed.

By the way - you can practically year the conspiracy-theorists of the left shooting steam out of their ears over this bit:

Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.

Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked.

We'll be watching this one.

(Via Powerline)

Mac - Lileks had a

Mac - Lileks had a blast from my own past, in this scene from a postcard show:

The best find: some promotional cards for KSTP’s new studio, including some shots of the station’s talent. I didn’t recognize any of the names save one: John McDougal. He did the news for the AM station when I started working there. A big man, Foghorn Leghorn-shaped. A mild manner, a voice from that was mostly gut with a high note of nose to give it distinction. If something went wrong in a broadcast he had a way of looking over his glasses that loosened the bladders of novice board operators. Forty years of broadcast know-how came down on your sorry head.

Mac was the News Director when I started at KSTP, back in '85 - about a year and a half before Lileks, if memory serves. He'd had a fascinating pedigree; before working out his waning years at KSTP-AM, in a post that was probably largely ceremonial - it was well into the era when radio stations just didn't have their own news departments anymore - Mac had been the anchor for Channel 5 (KSTP-TV) News. Stanley Hubbard apparently felt enough loyalty for his old warhorse to keep him on the air, somewhere.

Before that, he'd been in New York. He'd been a big voice-over guy. He was sort of the Tom Barnard of his day; his voice appeared on a dizzying variety of commercials, and if you listen to some of the old "Christmas Story" audio records from the fifties, Mac is the narrator.

Before that, he'd been drafted from his first radio job (at the original WLOL radio in Minneapolis) and served as an infantryman, all the way across Europe in WWII.

Lileks continues:

He died nearly 10 years ago, but here he was in a suburban community center, filed away in an envelope of unopened promotional material. Caught me by surprise, it did.

Wonder if I’ll find a stack of my promotional postcards at a show some day. Fifty cents for the lot! Fine by me. That's what happened to John, and he was the best in the business. One approving nod from his gray head was like having the Museum of Broadcasting drape a medal around your neck. Posterity sometimes just seems like a drunk passing out cigars at random - when it passes over men like John you realize how arbitrary fortune can be, and how the Valhalla of the Briefly Reknowned But Mostly Obscure is probably the most interesting quarter of the afterlife. I'd post his picture here, but you'd forget it tomorrow. I'll post it some other day when I need to summon his shade. You'll know what I mean when it happens.

You surely will.

We worked together on the old Don Vogel show at KSTP - John, producer Dave Elvin (who's now a PR guy in Boston), sports guy Bruce Gordon or Mark Boyle (I have no idea where either of them are), and Mac. And while everything Lileks says is true - being on the wrong end of his wrath after you screwed something up, you knew how Moses felt after his people had really boned one, and a compliment from him, rare as it was, truly meant something - Mac was saved from being a stereotype cliche "crusty old news guy from central casting" by genuinely liking the motley crews he found himself cast up with.

Wow. Hadn't thought about him for quite a while.

Where Angels Fear To Tread

Where Angels Fear To Tread - Give me all the good old-fashioned conservative hot-wire topics; American Exceptionalism, Firearms Owners Rights, Taxes, the Nannystate, whatever; I'll eat 'em for breakfast and ask for more.

But I've tended to avoid abortion. It's not that I don't have an opinion on the subject - it's just that it won't fit into a seven-second soundbite. The libertarian in me doesn't want government regulating it (or paying for it); the Christian and conservative doesn't want people getting them; and to be fair, "choice" needs to be more than just that of the mother.

It's an issue where 20 percent of the population would ban the procedure, 20 percent regards it as a sacrament...and 60 percent is somewhere in the gray area in between.

It is, in short, an issue where, despite the raw emotionality of the topic, reasonable people can disagree.

The problem is, some of the parties to the debate just aren't reasonable:

The head of the National Organization for Women's Morris County chapter is opposing a double-murder charge in the Laci Peterson case, saying it could provide ammunition to the pro-life lobby.

"If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder," Morris County NOW President Mavra Stark said on Saturday

Ah. Better that a murder go unatoned than the pro-"choice" lobby be faced with a legal inconvenience.

The rest of the article is more of the same. It shows how far we have not come.

Kerry's Priorities - John Kerry was busy raising funds during the funeral of the first Massachusetts soldier to die in Iraq, according to Drudge:

So why wasn't U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry [D-MA] at last week's funeral of Matthew Boule, 22, the Dracut, Massachusetts native who was the state's first soldier to die in the Iraq war?

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was in Arizona on Tuesday -- fundraising and campaigning -- the very hour Boule was being buried, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

How very...Clintonian.

Clark - Some of my

Clark - Some of my Democrat friends have been bloviating about a possible Kerry/Clark ticket in 2004.

Given Kerry's mad dash for the left, I think the top of the ticket is something Bush can deal with, presuming the economy picks up at all (and my own consumer confidence grows with each job interview).

As far as Clark goes, NRO's Jim Geraghty writes about it:

Clark’s reputation appears to be in better shape than the Republican Guard, but it’s taken some hits.

Morton Kondrake of Roll Call says, “The Democratic party should think very carefully about taking advice from Wesley Clark, who has been a doomsayer about this from the beginning.”

“The two big losers of the war in the media were Gen. Barry McCaffrey and Wesley Clark,” says University of Virginia political-science professor Larry Sabato. “They were so wrong. They got way out on a limb on criticizing the Pentagon and the war plan and obviously the success of the operation cut the limb off.”

Sabato says the massive media exposure was a mixed bag for a Clark candidacy.

“He raised his name ID, but it’s likely that now there are lots of people who just know his name and don’t have much of an opinion of him as a candidate,” Sabato says. “He certainly comes across well on TV — he looks good, he sounds good, and comes across as authoritative. Those are all plusses.”

But Sabato also says the general’s doubts and criticism of ultimately vindicated Pentagon war planners mean Clark “shot himself in both feet for general election.”

Kerry's "Regime Change" jape from last week - perhaps the stupidest thing I've ever heard from a serious presidential candidate this side of Pat Buchanan - is certainly something that can be used against him next year.

As to Clark, his performance on CNN was just the latest in a series of problems:

One political observer who had dealt with Clark said that the general’s fights in the Pentagon were not the usual results of disputes over policy, but a refection of Clark’s “arrogance… he’s always absolutely sure of the rightness of his position.” Clark doesn’t appear to be on great terms with the most recent Democratic commander-in-chief, either. It is rumored that donors approached by Clark went to President Clinton for advice and got the thumbs down on the general.

Someday we'll go into Clark's record as US commander in Kosovo.

Happy Easter - Lest you

Happy Easter - Lest you forget amid the Hallmark (TM) hype that's nearly taken the day over, today's the observed anniversary of the day Christ rose from the dead to redeem you from your sins. (I'm not going to throw in any of the usual "...as Christians believe..."-type qualifiers. If you're Jewish or Moslem, you have my personal dispensation not to bow and scrape to my sensitivities on your holy days. If you're an atheist - find you own holiday!)

Easter is one of my favorite holidays mainly for the religious experience, which has become, if anything, vastly more profound for me over the years. Christmas is Christ's birth, and itself a deeply religious holiday for me, personally. But Christmas is so deeply associated with family (still the main time we're all together), the weather (I love the cold crispness of the air I always associate with Christmas) and, since I've had children, the joy of the whole gift-giving part of the holiday, as commercial as it is. Christmas is an overload of sensations, really - religious, familial, parental, gustatory, sensory - that it leaves me fatigued, needing the (otherwise inexplicable) New Years Day break more for relaxing from Chistmas than to recover from the drinking binge I haven't gone on in over a decade.

Easter, however, is rejuvenating in a mostly spiritual sense. The weather varies (often gorgeous, sometimes deep in snow, today gray and threatening rain), the only family involved is my own, and I'm free to focus much more on the meaning of the holiday than I am for Christmas, even though my approach to Christmas is still perhaps just a bit more spiritually-centered than that of most in our society.

At any rate - whatever your faith or approach to life, I hope you find today the sense of renewal and redemption that we all need, from whatever source. And for Christians - may you all have a blessed Easter.

No CommentSquawkbox, my comment server, seems to be having trouble today.

Hopefully the Comments section will return, as soon as they can make it happen.

Economics Ground World's Fastest Metaphor

Economics Ground World's Fastest Metaphor - One of the greatest stories from The Onion is their classic lampooning of the Titanic disaster, headlined "World's Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg".

We'll come back to that.

Today, the Star/Tribune editorial board mourns the demise of the Concord:

There was a time, not so long ago, when progress seemed linear.

Today - in many areas that truly matter - it's become geometric...

But I digress

A marvelous new supersonic passenger jet would surely revolutionize air travel by zooming people around the globe at ever increasing speeds. Fleets would expand, costs would drop and masses of travelers would eventually benefit.

But superior technology doesn't always win the battle of the marketplace, as attests last week's announcement of the Concorde's demise after 27 years of scheduled service. The sleek marvel of engineering will stop flying this year, British Airways and Air France said last week. World events and the precipitous drop in transatlantic demand hastened a retirement that would have come anyway.

Because, as far as the market was concerned, the Concorde and supersonic transports were not superior technology. It was an interesting, 30-year technology demonstration, indeed - but the technology was a solution in search of a niche.

People needed to get across the Atlantic fast less than they needed to get across the ocean fast enough, and affordably.

Developed in the 1960s, only 20 of the planes were ever built. It's a paradox that the constrictive economics of air travel never allowed Concorde to truly soar.

Frequent fliers know the harsh reality. Newer planes are more cramped, less comfortable. Most passengers, lucky to get pretzels, can't imagine the caviar and fine wines lavished on Concorde customers. Remember dressing up to fly? Flying nowadays is about as glamorous as taking the Greyhound. Even no-frill airlines struggle to stay aloft.

And yet, despite the "constrictive economics", subsonic air travel is a staggering success. Remember - air travel has been around for exactly 100 years this year. Passenger service is 80 years old - 65 years as a practical proposition. It's only been a truly mass market phenomenon - more than a genuine treat, or business indulgence - for less than thirty years.

The Concorde was "a technical miracle but an economic disaster," said Ronald E.G. Davies, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which expects to land one of the needle-nosed jets as an artifact.

The plane was never able to attract customers beyond the celebrity and executive elite. Yes, it flew twice as fast as an ordinary jetliner, allowing pampered fliers to arrive in New York or Washington an hour or two before they left London or Paris. But the Concorde was nine times more expensive to operate than a Boeing 777 and could accommodate only 100 passengers. Even the wealthy paused before spending $6,000 on a three-hour flight.

With that, we start to approach the crux of the matter.

The Concorde was never intended, in and of itself, to be a moneymaker. But it was also more than a technology demonstration. The next graf is the big payoff - although I wonder if the Strib editorial writers know it?:

Americans, showing their practical side, never built a supersonic jetliner. But it's good that the Europeans did,

And there's the real story.

Concorde was, from the beginning, a symbol of European - and by that, we mean Old European - technological prowess.

It was the product of a huge "public/private partnership", the apogee of socialist achievement; a cooperative effort between nationalized British Aerospace (BAe) and French Aerospatiale.

And its career as a symbol was rich in metaphor; the plane took 13 years from initial conception to first flight, and seven more until its first commercial flight. Even the most bumfuzzled military aircraft program moves faster than that.

And in the end - it provided a very specialized service at hideous cost; a solution, truly, in search of a need.

So to return to The Onion's parody; the Concorde was a metaphor for the technological power of the nationalized economy; it was conceived, built and operated by nationalized companies, and served as the points of pride of two nations that were, at the time, poster-children for the belief that command economies and freedom could coexist and thrive.

Since the Concorde first flew, air travel has become a case study in the supremacy and peril of the free market - and, as a side-issue, of the obsolescence of the state-controlled enterprise. Britain turned its back on the worst excesses of socialism 20 years ago. The Concorde became an artifact of the era of the all-powerful government - especially in its increasing obsolescence.

In the end, as the Strib says, the Concorde gave us:

...a fleeting glimpse, at least, of luxury and technological possibility.

And a not-so-fleeting lesson.

...And the #1 Sign Spring

...And the #1 Sign Spring is Finally Springing in MN - My magnolia bush is starting to bloom.

I'd hoped to have a job, so I could buy a digital camera, so I could show this on the blog.

You'll have to take my word for it...

Ice? Or Iceberg? - Here's

Ice? Or Iceberg? - Here's the picture:

• A large, motivated minority turns out to protest a military action they detest.
• A religious organization links up with a group that represents (and practically worships) an old, discredited dictatorship, proving that war does indeed make for strange bedfellows;
• The media plays the demonstrations as if they are a definitive, seminal mass movement.

Are we talking about the anti-war demonstrations? Or the Iraqi anti-US demonstrations?

Both, of course.

At overflow Friday prayer services at the huge Abu Hanafi mosque, a Sunni religious center which opened its doors to members of the rival Shiite sect in a rare demonstration of solidarity, hostility toward the Americans and the desire for an Islamic Iraq were on open display.

"No to sectarianism, one Islamic state," read a banner on the mosque, with the legend "No to America" emblazoned on top.

Now - allowing for the fact that:

1. the media will only tell us the story they see - which is the story involving the most immediate gratification in terms of conflict, and
2. the Iraqi people are getting back into free speech, and one might expect that, as with the looting, the long-repressed feelings might take some radical turns,

I have to ask: Is this something to genuinely worry about?

Is the "US out of Iraq" movement any stronger in Iraq than it is here in Saint Paul? Is it the same percentage of vocal, obstreporous people with a knack for getting camera time that it is in Minneapolis or San Francisco?

And as long as the mission - to remove WMDs and Saddam and his links to terror, and allow the Iraqis a real choice in their future, even if that choice is oppressive fundamentalist Islam - then does it matter?

More Inteview News - Second

More Inteview News - Second interview yesterday - oy vey.

I now have two positions for which I've interviewed, that I'd probably cut off an arm to get. The one with the very long interview from a few weeks ago, and the one yesterday.

I'd be happy to land an offer from either one.

Problem being, they're both taking at least another month to decide things here. Now, for the one I talked to yesterday, that's not too unreasonable - I only sent in a resume a week ago.

For the other? Well, I first applied at Christmas time. Patience is a virtue, but excessive virtue is a vice - didn't Oscar Wilde say that?

As far as Christmas presents go - I'm also torn between this, and one of these.

Decisions, decisions...

5.8 for Artistic Impression, 5.1

5.8 for Artistic Impression, 5.1 for Technical - First interview was a phoner (switched from a face-to-face at almost the last minute). It'd be a cool gig, if I can land it. I'm the only UI Designer currentl in contention, which is good. They haven't decided if they want a UI designer, which isn't so good.

Interview this afternoon - for a gig I really really want. Actually, among the five positions currently in play, there are two that I think'd be pretty near perfect; the one where I had the 7:45 hour interview three weeks ago, and the one I'm interviewing for this afternoon. The first was with a small company that's in that "just right" space; they've gotten past the startup growing pains, but they haven't hit the "excessively mature" stage yet. And I'd be the only UI person on the staff, in a role that I'd just kill to have, sort of the pivot between Marketing and Engineering, with a lot of responsibility for making sure that not only does the product kick ass, but that the company's whole message screams "Easy to use!". In short, everything I want out of a fulltime, permanent gig.

The second would be a nice counterpoint to that; working with a "consulting" company, jobbed out on project teams to different client companies. I'd combine everything I like about freelancing (getting to change locations and co-workers and projects periodically, learning new stuff constantly) with everything that appeals to me as a single father with a ton of bills to pay (health insurance, a steady check, even when I'm not on a project).

I got a new lead yesterday, by the way. But...

...ugh. It's with a big local corporation, through a local "Technical Staffing" company (think Temp firm for geeks). The "recruiter" was a guy who never got off the speaker phone and with whom I've never spoken when he didnt sound like he was guzzling potato chips - his mouth always sounds full. The "Account Manager" was worse - a woman who never, not once, let me finish a sentence. It's not like I ramble, especially not in job-interview-ish setting. I'm pretty loquacious in normal conversation, but I've been accused of being almost excessively to-the-point in business settings - a former boss said "meetings with you are like military briefings", which I took as a compliment. When I schedule a one-hour meeting, I usually wrap it up within 40 minutes.

So I try not to waste time - but being interrupted really harshes my mellow.

Then, the Accountmanagerette started lowballing the salary; one of her first comments after we started talking jing was "you DO know that the average technical professional has taken a $5-to-40-thousand-dollar pay cut, right?" Duuuuuh.

Which begs a question, all you people who work with Fortune 500 HR departments; it's perfectly understandable to lowball salaries when the economy is tight. But then, when the market opens up and salaries boom, like they did in the mid-eighties and late nineties, why do you act so perplexed when your IT department evaporates like a regiment of Republican Guards?

Anyway - gotta get ready for the next interview. Best wishes/prayers/karmic vibes gratefully accepted!

Big Day - Two job

Big Day - Two job interviews today, and plans later. Might be a light blog day today, but if so I'll catch up tomorrow. Plenty to write about!

Return of the King? -

Return of the King? - Abu Dhabi TV (via CNN) is currently showing footage supposedly showing Saddam Hussein standing amid a crowd of Iraqis, allegedly taken on April 9 - the same day the Marines were pulling down the statues.

The Abu Dhabi TV spokesman is claiming the footage was shot in a highly Sunni (and upscale) neighborhood, "Al Habamiyah" (spelling), where "he'd feel very safe". His son Qusay, his secretary Omar Hassan, and a number of other identifiable Ba'ath party officials are also shown in the footage, according to the spokesman.

UPDATE: It's interesting, listening to the CNN anchors questioning the Abu Dhabian. They're rolling some authentic tape taken on April 5, showing Hussein in front of a small crowd. There were oil clouds in the background. On the alleged April 9 footage, the sky is clear.

UPDATE AGAIN: I'm going to suspend my disbelief for a moment. The Abu Dhabi guy made a few good points: this is supposedly taken in a Sunni district, the sort of place that he'd spent a lot of money and time garnering support. Also, he noted that the Coalition controlled only a fairly small part of Baghdad proper at the time the video was supposedly shot.

UPDATE 3: CNN is now interviewing Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institute. "It reinforces the sense that Saddam stayed in Baghdad", Pollack says, citing the extensive tunnel network under Baghdad.

As to why the Iraqis waited nine days to release this tape to Al Jazeera: "He recogizes he's in very serious shape. It may be he realizes his best bet is to go underground and try to build some resistance".

He also acknowledges that "there are a lot of Iraqis that want to see Saddam not only dead, but eviscerated", that his paranoia has to be in high gear.

UPDATE 4: If I hear the phrase "hiding in plain sight" again, I'm going to chunder.

The Only Story They Have

The Only Story They Have is Fear Itself - Yesterday, Fraters Libertas beat me to working over a particularly craven Strib editorial. The editorial focused on the non-specific fears of a bunch of vaguely uneasy Minnesotans, and concluded that oofda, are we afraid.

The Fraters' conclusion was great:

I remember the night of 9/11 trying to fall asleep and instead of the usual steady drone of commercial airliners, hearing the sound of F-16's flying combat air patrols over Minneapolis. Now THAT is fear. The heart palpating, forehead sweating, rats gnawing at your intestines kind of fear that burrows into your soul and shakes you to the core.

Today I still worry but I no longer fear.

Great stuff.

But the Strib's still at it. Today, the Strib is trying to cobble together a broad anti-war consensus from among the 20% who actually oppose it.

One of Vietnam's great lessons was the importance of coherent public support, not only for the war itself but for the reasons behind it. Once the domino-theory rationale began to break down, so did support for continued bloodshed -- especially as the fighting, over time, produced no clear result.

They got it half right.

We found that without a clear goal and means of waging it, it was impossible to win a war. Fighting a war without aiming to win is not only pointless, it's suicidal. Men don't risk their lives for "Fortress DMZ", for pacification, for "Search and Destroy". They'll risk their lives when "The only way home is Berlin/Hanoi/Baghdad".

That is the key lesson we - especially our government's military and civilian leadership - learned from Vietnam.

Public approval is no less important now, especially if Iraq is to be part of a broader, longer project aimed at keeping terrorism from our shores. On these matters, the public holds contradictory views that the Bush administration, now flush with victory, should heed.

Americans overwhelmingly consider the war a success. The latest New York Times poll found 79 percent approval for the president's handling of Iraq. Within that number, however, lies a good deal of ambivalence and skepticism.

"A Good Deal...?"

I'd like to see them substantiate that.

What was the reason for the war again? Was it to find exotic weapons? To liberate the Iraqi people? To avenge the terrorist attacks of 2001?

Depose a tyrant?

Why is "All of the above" not an option?

And what comes next? Most Americans now expect military intervention in Korea, Syria or Iran -- actions they say they'd oppose.

Where are "most Americans" getting their information?

Despite success in Iraq and enthusiasm for President Bush, most say they're against his policy of preemptive attacks against nations considered possible threats.

"Hi, Mr. John Q. Public? This is Traceee from Polls R Us. We're taking a poll. We'd like to ask you a question; Which do you prefer: One, Peace, or two, launching immense shock and awe attacks on foreign government that disagree with our government. No, there is no "Three".

I'd love to see how the pollsters phrase that question.

This next bit is either an editorial error or a sly bit of disinformation:

Moreover, they feel strongly, just as they did before the war, that any future interventions should be done as part of an international coalition. Two-thirds say that the United Nations should take the lead in rebuilding Iraq.

Catch that? 2/3 of the people want the UN involved in reconstruction in Iraq - so that means they want the UN, as ineffective and worthless as they are, involved in any future actions against terrorists?

Actually, ambivalence is an authentic human emotion not well measured by public opinion polling. These various layers of nuance will likely spill out at thousands of family gatherings this holiday weekend, just as they did last week in New York Times interviews with scores of Americans. Those conversations revealed both elation and anxiety over Iraq -- often within the same person.

These conversations were then edited by humans with their own views on the war and the Administration.

"We have definitely sent a John Wayne message to the world," said a California man. "We're the good guys. We're the big guns in town. We'll tell you how it is going to be. But do we have the ability to build relationships? We're great with bullets and bombs, but this is the new war, and we haven't figured out how to fight it."

You know the rule on the internet, that says whenever Hitler is evoked in a discussion, the discussion is effectively over (in terms of rational discourse)?

I say we expand the rule to include invocations of "John Wayne" by liberals, Europeans, or the media.

And I'd say we figured out how to fight the war pretty well, so far.

Writing in the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg offered much-needed clarity. It's best to see Iraq not as a war, he wrote, but as one battle (like Midway or the Bulge) within a larger enterprise, the aim of which is "not to overthrow the Iraqi regime [but] to minimize the chances for another Sept. 11. The success of what might more properly be called the Battle of Iraq must ultimately be measured by whether it brings us closer to that larger aim or leaves us farther away from it."

My vote says "Closer", so far. But nobody asked me.

The Sound of One Clue

The Sound of One Clue Dropping - The LA Weekly's Marc Cooper has been a frequent subject in this blog; he's sort of like the City Pages' Steve Perry with more tan than talent.

The boy's outdone himself. His current column, on Castro's judicial murder of three hijackers last week, earns Kerri-Strug-like scores in logical gymnastics.

He starts off...well, like Steve Perry with a tan:

Have you ever imagined what it would be like living in a society where, say, a John Ashcroft would be unrestrained by the niceties of constitutional law? Where draconian enforcement of a Patriot Act includes long prison terms for alleged thought crimes? Where, in the name of fighting “terrorism,” nonviolent prisoners are summarily executed after being denied even the trappings of due process?

"Have we ever imagined...?" Hell, I read The Gulag Archipelago; I needn't imagine anything.

Apparently, neither need Mr. Cooper:

Imagine no more. Just read the latest news reports, I’m sorry to say, coming not out of Guantánamo but out of Havana.

"He's sorry" to break the news to his left-wing audience - Castro's a murdering tyrant!

One wonders; does this mean that this is news to Mr. Cooper? Or does Mr. Cooper honestly think it's news to the LA Weekly's audience?

Last Friday, three men were lined up at dawn and executed by a Cuban firing squad after being convicted of “grave acts of terrorism,” according to a statement read on state television. Their executions came a mere nine days after they had surrendered in a failed attempt to hijack a Havana ferryboat to Florida. Their trial was, of course, secret. Even the Cuban state isn’t shameless enough to open to public scrutiny such a degrading and chilling sham — a capital trial that allows no serious defense. And both Cuba’s Supreme Tribunal and its governing Council of State, headed by Fidel Castro, immediately rubber-stamped the death sentences. I suppose when you don’t have a real trial, you don’t need any real appeals.

You think so?

These are the New Socialist Men that Che Guevara so glowingly evoked in his essay of the same title 40 years ago? This is a society superior to savage capitalism?

Not only are "these" indeed those men, but some of us on the right have been saying it for forty years.

The state murders in Cuba only punctuate what has been an equally sordid season of broader repression. A month ago, as the war in Iraq was breaking out, Cuban police arrested nearly 80 dissidents on charges of receiving money from and collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine Cuba’s government.

I suppose, if you look at this the right way, that this is good news; someone on the left has the balls to yell "the Emperor has new clothes"; finally, after all these years, someone in the "alternative" press is looking past Cuba's "Free health care" to actually call Castro's regime out.

Here's the money quote - or I guess since we're talking Cuba it's a "five year plan quote":

Some friends of mine urged me not to write this column, arguing that at a time when U.S. troops are occupying Iraq, this would only “play into the hands of the right.” That is, of course, ridiculous. There are many enemies of freedom in the world, and — no — not all of them live in Washington.

Gracious of him, isn't it?

The actions taken by Fidel Castro this past month, precisely in this moment of American belligerence, are guaranteed to only please the ultraright. They help confirm my longtime suspicion that Castro lives in mortal fear that his most powerful tool of social control, the U.S. embargo, will one day be lifted.

"The actions will only please the ultraright".

That's right - Castro is really in league with the right. Fascinating what you learn reading the Weekly, no?

Cooper ends by quoting from a letter - and yet another online petition - from a Leo Casey, a leftie union activist, that heats my bile red-hot:

“By its actions, the Cuban state declares that it is not a government of the left . . .[no, the left could never spawn a Castro...] but just one more dictatorship, concerned with maintaining its monopoly of power above all else.”

Shades of Reagan, huh?

It only took them forty years to figure this out?

Leave aside the attempted evasion of accountability - as if the left has been on to Castro's game all along, while the "ultraright" has been backing Castro sub rosa from the gitgo.

One step up, two steps back.

(Via Instapundit and Matt Welch)

What He Said - Ya

What He Said - Ya gotta be true to yourself. I think it was Shakespeare that said "feed your head". Wasn't it?

Anyway - Glenn Reynolds said something that resonates with me:

That's why I can't bring myself to go on a blog vacation, or to quit writing about the war the way James Lileks is doing, just now. I'd like to, in a way, because all of this is, well, tiring. But I think, as Kelly did, that a lot hinges on what's happening now.

He's right.

What's going on in the Middle East right now is going to affect the world my children grow up in, just the way Vietnam and the Yom Kippur war affect the world I'm in now.

And when you get right down to it, this blog is all about my observations about the world we're handing off to my kids our kids in about twenty years.

So pardon a few more warblog posts. Or, maybe, it's better now to call them justpeaceblog quotes.

Justpeaceblog. Probably won't take off like "Axis of Weasels", but it's mine, dammit.

Things I Really Dislike -

Things I Really Dislike - Apropos nothing:

• Ed, Edd and Eddie. I mean, the Cartoon Network has lots and lots of shows that rub me the wrong way - CatDog, Cow and Chicken, IM Weasel, yadda yadda. But EE'nE is like rubbing salt in a cold sore, even just listening to it (when the kids are watching, two rooms over). Watching it (which I've only been able to manage for a couple of minutes) is worse. I'm no animation scholar, but it seems that in the post-"Ren and Stimpy" world of cartoons, animators thought they were making a wry, ironic comment on the plain, visually barren animation of the seventies and eighties with their overminimal, caffeine-drenched, seemingly (or even probably) intentionally-irritating style. With some cartoons, it's even fun; I like Home Movies, and the Tartakovsky 'toons like Dexter's Lab and Samurai Jack. But EE'nE adds an extra dimension - a snide-yet-overly-busy style that gives me, literally, a headache (on top of the one the atrocious voice-over gives me).
• Recruiters who drag me out (inevitably to the western 'burbs) for an "interview" for a position that has absolutely no chance of getting funded.
• Dead yeast
• The West Wing, which I watched last night for the first time in probably a year. Yeah, I know - it's well-written. So was "Triumph of the Will". I don't care so much that it's slanted to the left; if a conservative show was so utterly marinated in self-righteousness and sanctimony, I'd be as quick to chunder.

That's pretty much it for today, though.

Deal with the Devil? -

Deal with the Devil? - I rip on Ellen Goodman a lot. She usually has it coming.

She actually has a fairly good piece in the Strib (and probably the Boston Glob) today, though, on the Eason Jordon flap.

She starts:

It isn't every day that a journalist kicks up a furor over the stories that he didn't report.

That's what happened when Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by telling prewar tales that never made it on the air. There was an Iraqi cameraman who'd been abducted and tortured. There was an aide to Saddam Hussein's son who had his front teeth ripped out with pliers.

These were, Jordan wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece, "awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

So far, so good. She notes the compromises that usually attend wartime journalism

Just a week before Jordan released "these stories bottled up inside me," someone asked a CNN spokeswoman why the network rarely showed injuries or blood or soldiers killed. She replied, "It's a news judgment where we would of course be mindful of the sensibilities of our viewers."

Isn't this also a deal with the devil, a decision to edit the hell out of war? Aren't we also jeopardizing lives by not telling the essence of war itself?

Fair enough. We don't report war in all its grisly truth in the US. European newspapers and news media tend to report more of it - but, given the overt (and honestly stated) political biases of European news media, the "honesty" will tend to have a political motive.

But for whatever reason, yes - we do censor blood and gore in American war reportage, for the most part. As Goodman notes:

I've been reading Chris Hedges' unflinching look at war and its correspondents, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." Hedges is a sort of recovering war correspondent whose bylines stretched from El Salvador to the Persian Gulf War. He writes of war as "a drug, one I ingested for many years."

About himself and other war correspondents, he says that "the lie in war is almost always the lie of omission." Included on the list of omissions are the blunders of generals, the murders of civilians; "the horror of wounds are rarely disclosed."

Very true. For better or worse, that's how US media cover war, or at least combat.

Goodman continues - and surprises me just a bit in the process:

I am not a pacifist. I share Hedges' view: "The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison -- just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live."

But how do we know, really know, that war is a poison rather than a tasty elixir of patriotism and pride and triumph? The question is left behind on all battlefields by the stories that aren't told.

The point being that as a war corresondent (or an editor working with them), you leave things out, the things that are just too horrible to report to the folks back home. Fair enough.

But remember what the column is about. Despite its foray into the life and ethics of the war correspondent, the article started with a reference to Eason Jordan and CNN. And Jordan wasn't dropping the gory details of a firefight - a decision one makes in a moment and moves on, much like the firefight itself. He was relating a decision made in a boardroom among CNN executives over the course of more than a decade.

This isn't a war story that remains untold. It is a corporate compromise with ethics.

Sunset - Senator Orrin Hatch

Sunset - Senator Orrin Hatch is proposing to remove the sunset provisions from the Patriot Act.

The small-"l" libertarian in me is always fighting with the big-"C" Conservative about things like civil liberties in wartime. Both sides are adamant about liberty, but realize that all liberties involve compromises.

The Patriot Act gets a bad rap from some of those dogmatically opposed to everything President Bush does (Quick - how many times did Michael Moore even mention that the Patriot Act even had a sunset clause?) but there are some rather noxious provisions.

Especially if the sunset provisions are abolished. That's the key.

So you - we - need to get on the horn to our Congresspeople and stuff this idea back into the cave of misbegotten notions from whence it came.

So - email your Senators and Representatives. If you're from Minnesota, you can contact Senators Coleman or Dayton.

We - and that means liberals and conservatives - need to stop this.

(via Instapundit)

To Do List - for

To Do List - for Thursday, April 17:

1. Get a Job.
2. Figure out this @#$@#% Movable Type. I'm a software designer, so I'm hardly a complete software illiterate. And I was working with UNIX, oh, um, during Ronald Reagan's first term. It's not like the concept of configuring an application is totally foreign to me. But you'd think after all these years that someone in the world of open source software would figure out how to write installation instructions that weren't almost completely opaque to people who don't speak Klingon as a second language.
3. That job thing again. I have two interviews on Friday, unless plans change. They often do - each interview has been scheduled for at least two different times and places so far.
4. Teach Rachel Lucas a new imprecation. Don't get me wrong, I love Rachel's blog. But the standard term for anyone Rachel doesn't like is "Assclown". This is one of those terms that make me wonder if someone is a native speaker of English.

   English has a long history of the imprecative contraction - but there are rules. All imprecative contractions are constructed like a good chinese dinner - take a word from List A, add a word from List B.

   • List 1: S___, P___, D___, F___, T__, D_u___, C__, S_u___, A_s, Sp___, W__, H___ or Semprini
   • List 2: -nozzle, -stick, -nugget, -poke, -face, -bag, -toes, -mantle, -jinsky or -monkey.
   So if you see this, Rachel - keep up the good work, except for "Assclown". Work=good, "Assclown"=bad.
5. Get out of warblogger mode. Write about some good Minnesota politics.
6. Find some good Minnesota politics to write about. Oh, there's plenty of politics to write about - but the budget squabble is about as sexy as a slinky redhead sidling up to you in a nothing-to-the-imagination red cocktail dress and telling you that not only does she sell insurance, but she's also a Jehovah's Witness who has some literature she'd like to...

   (Please don't construe that as a slap against JWs, OK? Honest. It was a slap against redheads that sell insurance).

7. That job thing again. Not to complain, but this is not only the longest I've been out of work in my life - this is longer than all my other out-of-work stretches since college, combined. I hate to use the "d" word lightly, but it is a tad depressing. I'm not someone who lies about gracefully - and indeed I'm not lying about at all. In three months, I can count my hours of daytime TV on one hand, and give you three fingers' change. I'm on the phone, or interviewing, or working on little freelance contracts, all. the. time. Gaaah. It's gotta end one of these days.

   OK, I'm done now.

8. Work on lung power. I've been taking bagpipe lessons - indeed, if you've ever been interested in bagpipes or highland drumming, these people offer free lessons, and they're mighty good, plus you might meet me. Anyway, the other night I broke my reed, the one that came with my practice chanter. I bought a new one from the guy who supplies them. I cinched it in there, and started to play...

   WHOAH! It was like trying to blow air between a couple of 1x8s - and oak ones, at that. My chanter, which used to sound like a calf trying to yodel "Drowsy Maggie", now sounded like an outboard motor trying to hum "Drowsy Maggie".

   I blew harder, and it started to sound better - like a real chanter, even! And for about four times the lung power that I'd had to use before!

   Anyway, it's all about practice. Whew.

9. Start planning my house-warming party. For October. Assuming I have a gig by then. Yes, I've lived here for ten years - but between having babies and changing jobs and getting divorced, I/we/I never actually wound up having a housewarming. I've been dying to.

   Which, unfortunately, involves:

10. Cleaning the house. When I'm out of work, it'd be an understatement to say I concentrate on job hunting. It's pretty all-consuming. So the house is kind of a mess.
11. Make fewer lists.

That should tide me through today.

Oh, yeah:

11. Get some sleep. I've been up for hours, prepping for an interview. Gaaah.

That is all for now. Carry on.

Lessons Learned - Compare and

Lessons Learned - Compare and Contrast - Email correspondent Peter Jessen sent me this item from the Jerusalem Post (free registration required).

The article has a swiss bank full of money quotes. This one sort of sets the stage:

Since the fall of Baghdad last week, many Palestinians have joined the increasingly growing chorus of Arab writers, intellectuals, and politicians who argue that other Arab dictators should draw conclusions from his downfall.

The war in Iraq has bolstered Arab and Palestinian reformers who believe that the time has come for real change in the Arab world.

The change, they say, should begin by getting rid of the Arab despots and their corrupt regimes. In the words of one Palestinian analyst, "It's time for the Arab world to turn over the page of repression."

These quotes are not from people who are inherently friendly to the US!

Now - constrast the overall tenor of that piece with this one this one, by Julian Barnes in the Guardian:

Well, peacenik, are you happy now that peace is coming? No, because I don't think this war, as conceived and justified, was worth a child's finger. At least, are you happy that Saddam's rule is effectively over? Yes, of course, like everyone else. So, do you see some incompatibility here? Yes, but less than the incompatibilities in your position.

And in return, warnik, I have two questions for you. Do you honestly believe that the staggering bombardment of Iraq, televised live throughout the Arab world, has made Britain, America, and the home town of Torie Clarke, safer from the threat of terrorism? And if so, let me remind you of another statement by your war leader, Mr Blair. He told us, in full seriousness, that once Saddam was eliminated, it would be necessary to "deal with" North Korea. Are you getting hot for the next one - the humanitarian attack on Pyongyang?

Forget whether these people inhabit the same world we do. Ask whether the inhabit the same world as each other.

"Failure" - I really have

"Failure" - I really have to stop warblogging...honest, I can do it any time...

But this one, from Curmudgeonly and Skeptical", made my day:

MEMO TO NANCY PELOSI:

A Failed Plan?

1. We took Iraq in less time than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation.

2. It took less time to find evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.

3. It took Teddy Kennedy longer to call the police after his Oldsmobile sunk at Chappaquiddick than it took the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard.

4. We took Iraq in less time than it took to count the votes in Florida in the year 2000!

Nancy, you and other Democratic leaders sure have a strange concept of failure.

Indeed.

State of Democrat Mind -

State of Democrat Mind - Powerline cites a New York Times piece on the Democrats' outlook for '04 - according to the Democrats:

Yet as they watched Mr. Bush turn his sights to Syria, other party leaders expressed fresh concerns that the White House would not permit the election of 2004 to become a replay of 1992.

"The big difference is that the first gulf war ended," a prominent Democratic senator said. "This administration will never end the war. And because they never end the war, they will have an ongoing advantage. An open-ended war on terrorism that will never end and that keeps people constantly on edge. A never-ending military commitment in Iraq that might lead to other commitments beyond Iraq also keeps people focused on national security."

Simply amazing, isn't it? The war's not over - ergo, it's a Bush ploy. As Hindrocket from Powerline said:

We're not at war because we've been attacked and because determined, vicious enemies continue to wish us ill. No, we are at war because the "administration will never end it." This view is so perverse that the Democrats can only hope that most Americans--non-readers of the Times--have no idea what they really think.

And in that, hope springs eternal, I guess.

But talkradio wasn't a synonym for "Conservative" in 1992. There was no conservative blogosphere. CNN ruled the all-news airwaves without rival.

It's a tough row to hoe for the Dems these days.

Tim Robbins - I heard

Tim Robbins - I heard bits and pieces of Tim Robbins' address to the National Press club yesterday.

Now, unlike a lot of conservatives and bloggers, I'll admit it; I've liked a few of Robbins' roles (and even a few of Susan Sarandon's). Bull Durham was a great movie. When you love the art and ignore the artist, then art and movies and music and books are a whole lot more rewarding.

But yeah, I detest Robbins and Sarandon's politics - that should be no surprise.

And listening to his appearance at the National Press Club yesterday, I was struck by an insatiable desire to fisk what he said.

How he said it was bad enough - in a clipped monotone that sounded like he was reading handwriting he couldn't quite make out.

But reading the text of the speech today - it's just too depressing. The same old stuff, over and over; the same anti-Bush cant, the same strawmen, the same unsupported assertions, the same crap. I can't go through with it.

Gaaaa. Maybe tomorrow.

Sign O' The Times -

Sign O' The Times - Our success in Iraq is starting to get a lot of peoples' attention.

Not least of which is the Star/Tribune Editorial Board. Since Baghdad fell last week, they've had a sudden attack of common sense.

What's happening now between the United States and Syria is predictable and wise -- provided the proper skill is applied from Washington. The Bush administration is attempting to use what happened in Iraq as a lever to force a change in the behavior of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and his regime.

It's funny that this surprises the Strib editorial board. Some of us benighted conservatives have been predicting this all along (and if my permalinks were working, right about here I'd link back to a few of my old posts on exactly this subject from last summer).

I think that in the days after 9/11, the Administration prioritized the states in the Middle East, and came up with a list looking a little like this:

1. Afghanistan: That's where Al Quaeda was hiding out. Take them out, find out a lot about their MO.
2. Iraq: Sits amid terror sponsors Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, all of whom need attention. But Hussein had WMDs - an immediate threat. And Iraq's position is too strategic to pass up; controlling Iraq lets us
   • squeeze Iran - they're between two US-friendly states now, which is paying dividends for Iraqi moderates, as we saw yesterday
   • lean on Syria, which is now stuck between a US-controlled Iraq, a US-allied Israel, a US-friendly Turkey, a Lebanon that has been an endless money pit for three decades now, and the Meditarranean, which is a US/UK lake these days, and
   • let us pressure the Saudis to stanch their support for militant Wahabism without the politically unpalatable notion of sending tanks to Mecca.

They continue:

It wants Damascus to hand over Iraqi officials who apparently have found safe haven there. It wants the Syrians to stop supporting terrorism against Israel. It wants Syria to abandon the chemical programs that the CIA says it has. It wants Syria to play a more respectable and responsible role in the region.

The logic of applying that pressure is strong. Imagine how the stunning victory in Iraq looks from Damascus: In three weeks, a relatively small allied force totally defeated the Iraqi military and occupied the country. It did that despite qualms at home and almost universal condemnation abroad, despite being denied access to open a needed northern front through Turkey, despite horrific weather. In the process it lost very few of its own soldiers and kept the civilian death toll low. The victory means that Washington's voice will be listened to in Damascus -- especially with 300,000 U.S. troops just next door.

Nice to know the Star-Tribune can catch onto the blazingly obvious.

No, that was catty. A good chunk of the Strib's audience is used to getting their foreign policy information from the likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. A lot of this - realpolitik, for those of us who paid attention to history made before 1967 - is new to many Strib readers, and the editorial board is doing them a service, although it can't be going down easy.

This is America's neoconservative foreign policy on full display. It is more muscular and less inclined to work through a community of nations.

45 nations supported us. We spent at least eight months getting them on our side.

What's "less inclined?" The Administration spent more time working on getting multilateral cooperation this time than the Bush 41 administration did in 1991. George Senior didn't have to deal with Franco-German perfidy

It has a grand vision for the world that involves the United States aggressively taking on threats from rogue or failing states. It gives much of the world the willies, and that's partly its point.

There's a great deal to debate about that approach, but Americans should be careful whom they listen to, and that's not the hotheads on talk radio who just love to think this means America will arrogantly strut its stuff now. That's unlikely to happen.

Americans should be careful who they listen to, indeed. Most of the media are no better informed, or less in error, than the worst caricature right-wing talker (I'm thinking Michael Savage).

On Syria, for example, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the interventionist approach, recently said, "We'd like to see change in a lot of places, but it's going to come about by different means in different places. I think it's important . . . that we make it clear that the military is not the only instrument -- it isn't even necessarily the main instrument."

Whatever else I may say about the Strib, bravo to them for at least finding that quote. It says a lot.

A few convincing, and relatively cheap, victories like Afghanistan and Iraq, and you don't need to use military force for the rest of the problem. You'll see Syrians, Saudis, Iranians, Palestinians, Israelis...maybe even the EU, all thinking a lot more clearly.

Other influences also make military action against Syria unlikely. First, Iraq is going to require an intense American focus, including a military focus, for a long time. Two, the American economy is in bad shape, and voters are not happy with President Bush's handling of it. With the campaign for 2004 getting underway in earnest soon, the last thing Bush needs is further division and further economic damage from another war.

While I'd be the last to urge war, least of all for frivolous reasons, and I don't believe war with Syria is going to be necessary (Assad is no Hussein), I think the Strib is mistaken; the war didn't hurt the economy. The uncertainty and waiting and wondering that led up to it did. Speaking as a job hunter, things seem to have picked up a lot in my own little corner of the job market since the shooting started. Not that that's a justification for war - but the Strib has the causes and effects wrong, I think.

Finally, even the most hawkish Bush administration officials acknowledge that American relationships worldwide have taken a severe bruising over Iraq and might break completely if the United States now took on Syria. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair wants the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be the first order of business. Washington can't afford a break with Blair.

And the Strib is mistaken to separate Syria from the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

It's been in Syria's best interest for the past 35 years to sabotage any potential settlement - and they have. Repeatedly. They have played their part in refusing to absorb refugees from the '67 war; three generations of Palestinians have grown up in camps largely due to Arab (especially Syrian) intransigence. The Palestinians were worth more to the Syrians as a disaffected minority, a foetid malarial swamp of anger and disenfranchisement, than as people who'd settled and found peace.

Leaning on Syria will help bring and end to the killing - indeed, there are signs it is already.

Notwithstanding the success in Iraq, there clearly are limits on American power. The White House appears to recognize that. It seems to be jawboning Syria in an effort to effect change there without arms. If it works, it will be a victory every bit as important as the victory over Saddam Hussein

Indeed.

They say nothing succeeds like success. The victory in Iraq has caused a lot of people to see more clearly; people in Damascus, Teheran, Gaza, Tel Aviv...

...even a few at the Star/Tribune offices in downtown Minneapolis. Could you have imagined such an editorial before the events of this past month?

Me either.

Life Update - Enjoying a

Life Update - Enjoying a rare evening off from the kids. Going to read a book and go to bed.

Bagpipe lessons are going well, thanks! Finally got most of "Drowsy Maggie" down, and I can really kick tush on "Scots Wa Hae Wi' Wallace Bled". Next trimester, I get to learn "Scotland The Brave", I'm told. Hopefully, I get a decent tax refund next year, so I can actually buy pipes. Of course, I actually have to earn money to get it refunded, don't I?

Job interviews Thursday and Friday, for a couple of companies I think I'd really like to work for. A third interview probably in two weeks at another local company that I'd also love to land at - but they're taking their sweet time. I applied for the job at Christmas time, had a phone screening in early February, a first phone interview in mid-March, the storied 7 hour 45 minute interview at the end of March, and probably looking at a third interview by the end of the month if I'm lucky. Gaaaaa.

Anyway - I'll have a bigger posting day tomorrow. It's a brave new world, and I'll be grabbing my piece of it!

See you then.

Deep Breath - Let's start

Deep Breath - Let's start at the top:

It's been a busy 48 hours, not only in Iraq, but worldwide.

Remember the barbering about the Bush Administration's alleged diplomatic incompetence?

1) North Korea, after six months of sabre-rattling, has dropped most of its demands; it will engage in talks with its neighbors and the US, and its nuke program IS on the table.

2) Prominent Iranian "conservative" theocrats, including former president Rafsanjani, are proposing trying to normalize relations with the US and Egypt - something they'd soundly rejected in the past year or so. This could include a referendum - opening the decision to the "Iranian Street", which by most accounts has lost its stomach for fundamentalism, radicalism and anti-Americanism.

3) The new Palestinian Prime Minister has nominated a mostly reformist cabinet, removing or demoting many Arafat-linked hardliners. Arafat is, of course opposing the cabinet - but this story has just begun.

4) In the meantime, Ariel Sharon is offering to give up key settlements in areas that had been off the table so far. More after the link:

Now, this sort of talk is absolutely unthinkable from a "conservative" like Ariel Sharon. The man was elected on a three-item platform:

• Safety from terrorists,
• safety from terrorists,
• safety from terrorists.

Yet here he is, a week after the liberation of Baghdad, offering to give up a big chunk of his nation's anti-terrorist buffer zone...why?

Who provided the sanctuary, financing, weapons and training for the terrorists that have plagued Israel? Syria, Iran and Iraq (and the Saudis, but most of that money funnelled through the other three).

The Syrians are denying any complicity with Hussein, of course. But they're being very circumspect about it, so far.

Pure speculation: The Syrians, trying like mad to avoid problems with the US *and* save face in the Arab World, are operating through back-channels to ensure Israel and the US that the reign of terror, as far as they're concerned, is over.

What do I base this on? Nothing. This is speculation. However - see how many terrorist attacks Israel sustains in the next six months. See whether Arafat's faction in the Palestininan Authority holds water in the next few months. See whether the contingencies for the administration's Roadmap are met.

Look at the developments - and while I grant that they are all preliminary, they are all significant. They illuminate a very important point - actually, for purposes of this mailing list, two of them.

1. The hawks were right. War with Iraq is already showing signs of immense *potential* political dividends; leadership in Palestine, North Korea, Iran and Israel are all making the kinds of noises we (and the "world community") have been trying to coax out of them all along.
2. For purposes of argument: Rumors of Bush Administration diplomatic incompetence may have been greatly exaggerated. If we can follow up on the dividends from the war in Iraq, it *could* be one of the great diplomatic coups of all time.

Of course, we won't know anything about this for a long time. But I'm optimisitic, for a change.

(Some via Filibuster)

Readjustment Blues - The Pentagon

Readjustment Blues - The Pentagon reports that a C-130 is en route from Doha, Qatar to Tikrit with a load of 300-pound altos.

The war is not over, but the Pentagon is feeling confident enough to say the "major fighting is over".

Just out of the infantry this morning,
I had to pay my dues across the sea.
No one back in boot camp ever warned me
what the readjustment blues would do to me.

"Welcome to Havana", said the pilot.
“We must have made a wrong turn on the way.
Let's buy some cigars and keep it quiet,
if they don't know we're here we'll get away."

I think it was a Tom Paxton song - I remember learning the chords and words when I was a kid, learning the guitar.

118 American dead so far - 29 fewer in four weeks than died in four days in the first Gulf War. Each one a personal, human tragedy, to be sure - my prayers, for what they're worth, are with each of them, and the 30 Brits who died as well.

They died to free 26 million people - at least, give them a chance at freedeom, and God save them if they blow this one. The mission for which they died dragged Kim Jong-Il back to the negotiation table, his nuke program on the table. While the Syrians are still making some defiant noises, there must be something going on behind the scenes that prompts Ariel Sharon to concede on the settlements; Israel never compromises on safety. Something is making them feel safe enough to deal away this buffer zone. Maybe - perhaps - we'll know in the next few weeks, if the waves of Syrian (and Iraqi) supported suicide bombers dry up, if our action, and our sacrifice, affected Israel's war on terror.

If you read around the media, and especially the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of readjustment; "what's next?" combined with the realization that the tension of the past year is relaxing. It feels like the world - and the blogosphere, and my humble blog for that matter - are all taking the sort of deep breath you take when your kids have just trashed a room. "Gaaaa. Gotta clean this up now - and while I'm at it, maybe rearrange it, to boot". The intensity of war is replaced by the endless, niggling adminstrative challenges of hard-won peace; we've made the collar, now we have to fill out the arrest report.

One needs to be realistic about the results of these things: World War One didn't end all wars; the fall of the Wall didn't end conflict; the "New World Order" George HW Bush declared after the liberation of Kuwait wasn't much different than the old one. New orders don't change old habits, or the human condition.

But, with any luck, there are three people on this world who are right now telling their flunkies to cool it with the dynamite vests; to consider getting out of the Nuke business; to think about moderating their mullocracy.

Worth it? We'll know soon enough. And a great enterprise, in any case.

The Incredible Shrinking DNC -

The Incredible Shrinking DNC - Jay Reding's back, with a vengeance.

He asks a question that I've been chewing on for a while now; what's the DNC's sprint for the left going to do for them?

The left has used the vilification of the President as a crutch for their own lack of vision. It is the same weakness which sent the Democratic Party into a tailspin in 2002, and unless someone can emerge from the Democratic pack with real leadership potential in 2004, the DNC is set for a repeat of that election. Of course, that's difficult to do when one's party has been hijacked by the extremist and reactionary left of Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi.

Anthony Downs once wrote a book called An Economic Theory of Democracy. It is quite possibly one of the most important books of modern political science ever written. What Downs finds is that the electorate lies along a rough bell curve in terms of political ideology. In short, the party that can best capture the center will win the election.

The Democrats aren't even trying for the center.

Their class-warfare rhetoric couldn't support them during a time of economic turmoil. What possibly makes DNC strategists think it will work when the economy is on an upswing post-Enron and post-Iraq?

If the "eat the rich" mentality didn't float 'em last November, when will it?

To me, the key question is, where is the Democrat base? Who is it? Is it the working union stiff, teacher, government employee? If so, are they really represented by the Nancy Pelosis and Howard Deans of the party?

I'm seeing 1972 parallels here. In '72, the Democrats were hijacked by the anti-war left, and nominated George McGovern. Nixon clobbered them; the union lunchboxes deserted McGovern in droves.

There's a strong current in the Democrat party to follow the same path today; a hard tack to the left, to "solidify the base" that is ever more removed from the population at large, maybe to retake the 3-4% they lost to the Greens in '00.

This will be a huge topic as we move into election season.

Betrayal, Redux - The big

Betrayal, Redux - The big question, as far as I'm concerned, about the revelations of the media's sitting on stories of Hussein's brutality is this: Were they pushed, or did they jump?

Victor Davis Hanson, in the National Review, digs into the Eason Jordan op-ed and the sickness underlying it:

...craziness often takes hold of our own elites and media in the midst of perhaps the most brilliantly executed plan in modern American military history. Rather than inquiring how an entire country was overrun in a little over three weeks at a cost of not more than a few hundred casualties, reporters instead wail at the televised scenes of a day of looting and lawlessness.

Instead I had been expecting at least some interviews about bridges not blown due to the rapidity of the advance. Could someone tell us how special forces saved the oil fields? How Seals prevented the dreaded oil slicks? Whose courage and sacrifice saved the dams? And how so few missiles were launched? Exactly why and how did the Republican Guard cave?

In short, would any reporter demonstrate a smidgeon of curiosity — other than condemning a plan they scarcely understood — about the mechanics of the furious battle for Iraq?

Indeed, such coverage is conspicuous by its absence.

In its place? Public Relations. That was, in effect, what it was - uncritical parroting of the Ba'ath party line.

It is impossible to calibrate how such Iraqi manipulation of American news accounts affected domestic morale, if not providing comfort for those Baathists who wished to discourage popular uprisings of long-suffering Iraqis.

There is something profoundly amoral about this. A newsman who interviewed a state killer at his convenience [Dan Rather] later revisits a now liberated city and complains of the disorder there. A journalist who paid bribe money to fascists and whose dispatches aired from Baghdad in wartime only because the Baathist party felt that they served their own terrorist purposes is disturbed about the chaos of liberation. Now is the time for CNN, NPR, and other news organizations to state publicly what their relationships were in ensuring their reporters’ presence in wartime Iraq — and to explain their policies about bribing state officials, allowing censorship of their news releases, and keeping quiet about atrocities to ensure access.

In general, the media has now gone from the hysteria of the Armageddon of Afghanistan to the quagmire of Iraq to the looting in Baghdad — the only constant is slanted coverage, mistaken analysis, and the absence of any contriteness about being in error and in error in such a manner that reflected so poorly upon themselves and damaged the country at large at a time of war. It is as if only further bad news could serve as a sort of catharsis that might at least cleanse them of any unease about being so wrong so predictably and so often.

In the weeks that follow, the media, not the military, will be shown to be in need of introspection and vast reform.

When the government, or the military, or big business is rotten or corrupt, it's the "free press" that's supposed to check and balance them.

So who checks and balances the press?

It's Baaaaaack - Democrat affilated

It's Baaaaaack - Democrat affilated hate site Democrats.com is rerunning an oldie but goodie: the photo supposedly debunking last week's scene in the
Bagh where the large Hussein statue was toppled:

This is conspiracy-mongering at its most craven. Odd, isn't it, that not a single reporter - even dedicated anti-war, anti-Bushites like Robert Fisk never noted any of these things, even as they were at the scene.

Democrats.com . Send 'em some tinfoil. They'll need it.

Bam - There It Is

Bam - There It Is - While I was out yesterday, Tikrit fell. "Saddam's Hardcore" didn't even put up a token resistance, other than the occasional sniper.

Today, the Pentagon says the major fighting is over, although sporadic and sometimes intense fights can be expected while mopping up.

And a twelve-year-old institution, the No-Fly Zone, has been rendered obsolete nearly overnight:

With little public notice, the last two American aircraft based at Incirlik, Turkey, flew home Saturday to Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., ending 12 years of enforcing a flight-interdiction zone over northern Iraq.

About 45 U.S. and British planes were based at Incirlik; they did not participate in the war against Iraq because Turkey would not permit it. With the fall of the Saddam Hussein government, the need for ``no-fly'' zones over northern and southern Iraq had disappeared, officials said.

Three carrier battlegroups (one British) are coming home. The First Cavalry Division's orders to move to the Gulf were rescinded today. Rumors have it that the Third Infantry will come home soon.

Behold the quagmire.

Hawks Like Us - Instapundit

Hawks Like Us - Instapundit posts a (currently non-functioning) link to "The Filibuster", asking "maybe the hawks were right?"

We note that we're seeing:

(1) A high-profile Iranian conservative [calling] for a reexamination of Iran's relationship with Israel.
(2) North Korea may enter multilateral talks -- the kind that the Bush administration has demanded -- about its nuclear program.

More importantly, they'll enter those talks with their nuke program on the table; their intransigence on that issue is apparently ended.

(3) Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has picked a reformist cabinet. (Arafat, the power-hungry jerk, has rejected it.)

It'll be interesting to see how the Syrian deflation will affect Arafat. "Similar to China jerking Kim Jong-Il's chain" is my guess

(4) Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, ally and champion of settlement builders, may uproot his West Bank base "faster than people think."

Let's add: the Syrians are denying fast, but very tactfully. I'd suspect it's a good time to short-sell Hamas stock.

Pyongyang, Damascus, Teheren, Tel Aviv and all the other usual suspects are talking the right talk now.

Nothing succeeds like success.

The Last 24 Hours -

The Last 24 Hours - It starts as a fisking "of a headline" in the Guardian - but blog Buzz Machine sums up a pretty incredible, if underreported, 24 hours in this conflict:

he Guardian's daily update tries to make it look as if we're losing. Getaloada the headline:

Small successes outweighed
Confusion, looting and tension about Syria overshadow the few achievements of this war

It's bad when you can fisk a headline.
Well, let's see. We took Tikrit, the last major city in Iraq. Saddam is in control of nothing. I would say that is the mark of victory.
Our POWs were free. Let's say that again: Our POWs were free.
The buses are running again in Baghdad as even al-Jazeera admits that order is returning.
Syria is not answering our scolds with taunts; it is acting like a dog that's under control.
And we have arranged a meeting of Iraqi leaders this week to start creating Iraq's first democratic government.
And all that happened in the last 24 hours. Looks like a pretty damned good day to me.

A damned fine day indeed.

One wonders what the likes of the Guardian really expect.

Busy Day - Lots going

Busy Day - Lots going on. I'll post this evening.

The Public Has A Right

The Public Has A Right To Know - I mentioned yesterday that I've been baking the vast majority of the bread my family eats since I've been job-hunting. Someone wrote asking if I used the loaves of frozen pre-mixed bread, used a bread machine, or made it from scratch.

Oddly, I do it all from scratch. I've always wanted to learn, and it's cheaper. As in, very very cheap.

I have two loaves of whole wheat cooling on the kitchen table right now. Mmmmmm!

Your Name - Misha at

Your Name - Misha at the Rottweiler draws our attention to Tom Bennet, who has this classic letter in the SFGate - an ultraleft website:

Editor -- To the "Not in My Name" geniuses, the Hollywood posers, communists and anarchists posturing as "peace protesters": Iraq is on its way to being free; and just as you requested, it's not in your name. So, for the hundreds of children released from prison where they were held for not joining Saddam Hussein's army, that was not in your name. For the exposure of the torture chambers where Hussein and his henchmen killed and raped, that was not in your name. For the hundreds of Iraqis who will not die this year for speaking out against their brutal regime, that was not in your name. For the oil fields that will be turned into wealth and prosperity for the people of Iraq, that was not in your name. For the Iraqi citizens wildly cheering their glimpse of freedom as the statue of Hussein was toppled in Baghdad, that especially was not in your name.

In all of your names, as it happens, is this: a desire to prolong Hussein's regime; a sense of preening moral equivalence that believes that liberating Iraq was the same as or worse than 9/11; blood of the unacknowledge innocents on your hands.

(Via Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler)

Barbara Billingsley Award - I

Barbara Billingsley Award - I have bought exactly one loaf of commercially-baked bread in the past two months. I have been baking my own. It's usually tasty and inexpensive.

Usually.

Delayed Blogification - So Instapundit

Delayed Blogification - So Instapundit isn't blogging much today, Fraters Libertas are talking hockey (which only takes away time for telecasting baseball, in my book), Jay Reding seems to be taking a long weekend and dealing with server trouble, Plain Layne seems to be offline for some reason, it's a weekend so there's no Lileks or Sullivan, and I've read the last week of Jeff Fecke's last week or two pretty much from cover to cover...

Maybe I should go outside, huh?

Jordan and Iraq - I've

Jordan and Iraq - I've gotten a few emails from people discussing Eason Jordan's revelations that CNN sat on details of Hussein's brutality. I have to say, I've learned a bit, to the point where I've changed my mind.

My initital reaction was "wow - that had to have been a tough call'.

Today, I'm a lot less sympathetic. If, as Jordan says, they were unable to really report - to get at the truth under the conditions to which they were subjected by the Hussein regime - then why report at all?

When one is hamstrung from reporting the story, doesn't one cease to be a news organization, and become a de facto PR operation?

Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center says:

Rich Noyes, director of research at the conservative Media Research Center, said that "Jordan now admits that CNN kept many of Saddam's secrets.
"Have other networks also censored their own tales of Saddam's evil?" he asked.
"If accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was access to this dictatorship so important in the first place? And what truths about the thugs who run other totalitarian states — like North Korea, Cuba and Syria — are fearful and/or access-hungry reporters hiding from the American public?" Mr. Noyes said.

. There are many questions that need to be answered. As Sean Hannity (whom I normally can't stand to listen to) asked last night, does anyone honestly think that CNN would have held off running the story even one day had Hussein's regime been idenfied with the political right?

And the big question - what did the other networks, and the newspapers and wire services, know? When did they know it?

And will this change any of the major media's priorities? The New Republic asks in this editorial:

We think that's an excellent question. But the thought that occurs to us as we read Eason's op-ed is: Well, then why the hell did CNN's Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, write us a scathing letter accusing TNR's Franklin Foer of "cross[ing] over into fiction" when his piece, "Air War," chronicled the extent to which CNN's (and other networks') desire to appease the Iraqi regime was distorting its news coverage. "I'm not sure why anyone would go through the process of obtaining the Iraqi visas Foer describes," Arraf wrote, "other than to fuel dinner-party stories about the horrors of getting into Iraq or to rack up frequent guest points at the InterContinental Hotel." Come to think of it, we're not sure either.

The day that CNN decided to compromise on the truth in this story - as tough as the call no doubt was - was a dark day for American journalism.

Iraq - Democrat Meltdown? -

Iraq - Democrat Meltdown? - We've all heard House Minority Leader Nancy "Facelift" Pelosi and her remark that "...We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less".

As usual, she doesn't say exactly how, which continues a Democrat pattern of passive-aggressiveness on these sorts of issues.

Here's the part I find encouraging about this article:

Mrs. Pelosi also praised the troops at the rally. But she didn't address the war itself at the event. Later, in her news conference, she told reporters she is not convinced the war in Iraq has made Americans safer.
"That remains to be seen," she said. "I certainly would hope so, and I think we have to think in a very positive way about it, but we don't know."
That put her at odds with House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, who said to some U.S. troops present at the rally: "Your cause is noble and just. You are disarming a dangerous despot and ending his ruthless regime."
He also said he believed the war was "strengthening the security of our nation, as well as the nations of the Middle East and the nations of the world."

Even Tom Daschle is laying low on this one; Iraq has burned him badly, even scuttled his presidential ambitions.

So we see Pelosi and the far left (Moseley-Braun, Dean, Nadler, etc) splitting from the more sensible moderates, just as the presidential campaign season gets underway. this is very good.

More Pelosi - From the same article, Pelosi said:

As Mrs. Pelosi praised the troops, she also said their success was owed "in large measure" to former President Bill Clinton.
"This best-trained, best-equipped, best-led force for peace in the history of the world was not invented in the last two years. This had a strong influence and strong support during the Clinton years," she said.

This part almost made me gag up my sugar pops.

Where does one start refuting this lunacy (which I've been hearing from Democrats ever since Afghanistan didn't turn into a quagmire)?

With serving soldiers who've been through several administrations? I know that my friends who are in the service can testify; the Clinton years were almost as bad as the Carter years, and had we not had the Reagan years in between the two, they shudder to think of how awful things would be. The Reagan years brought some things to the military that were as important to the military as money (as we found during the Clinton years): Pride, esprit de corps, a sense of deep-rooted professionalism that keeps a military together even when its tanks lack spare parts, a fifth of its planes are "hangar queens", where there was no money for the kind of training the saves soldiers' lives in combat.

This story was not atypical in showing the military's situation during the Clinton Administration:

Anyone who subscribes to Elaine Donnelly's Center for Military Readiness newsletter can give you a convincing disquisition on how the last decade saw Bill Clinton and his civilian appointees turn the Army into a Nerf version of its former self. From the assistant secretary Sara Lister, who was run out of town for calling Marines "extremist," to former Army secretary Togo West, who launched programs like COO ("Consideration of Others Training"), the leadership saw to it that troops were sensitized as often as they got haircuts. And as recruiting got harder (the Army missed its goal three out of the last five years), the culture grew softer. Even former defense secretary William Cohen—whose military career consisted of one day in ROTC—admitted that coed basic training lacked rigor. Meanwhile, after downsizing from 18 to 10 divisions, money is still scarce. As one angry Ranger tells me, "Because you have no money, you can't train, can't go on deployments, can't even afford to buy bullets. But because you have no money, you have plenty of time to do more Consideration of Others Training—because we've got to feel good about things. Hey, you know something?" he thunders. "The time for feeling good is over. We've got problems."

Yep, the military performed well in Iraq. You'd have to say it did well in spite of Clinton's efforts, not because of them.

Paging Jesse Ventura - Fidel

Paging Jesse Ventura - Fidel Castro, alarmed at the number of Cubans who are willing to resort to violent means to leave his island paradise (they have national health care, you know!), has executed three men who tried to hijack a ferry to the US. The executions were carried out after a drumhead kangaroo trial, according to the WaPo.

The men were prosecuted Tuesday in summary trials for "very grave acts of terrorism" and given several days to appeal their sentences, according to a statement read on state television.

However, the sentences were upheld both by Cuba's Supreme Tribunal and the ruling Council of State, and were carried out at dawn Friday, the statement said.

Castro must be alarmed; this seems to be becoming an epidemic:

The Baragua was hijacked a day after a Cuban passenger plane was hijacked to Key West, Fla., by a man who allegedly threatened to blow up the aircraft with two grenades. The grenades turned out to be fake.

Ten of the Cubans aboard that flight opted to remain in the United States and 19 others asked to go home.

Another Cuban plane was hijacked to Key West less than two weeks earlier.

Can you imagine this - over half the people who were on a random airplane (let's assume they weren't in on the plot until we know better) decide, on the spur of the moment, to defect to a foreign country on the drop of a hat, when a plane is hijacked.

Now...wasn't this the same country that our former Governor was sucking up to?

Ventura, for his part, says he was struck by Castro's seemingly good health.

"For his age, he looks in pretty good physical shape. And if our policy is is we're going to wait until he's gone, I would say we may be waiting a long time," Ventura said.

Ventura has publicly called for normalizing relations with Cuba sooner rather than later, and he discussed the point during an afternoon meeting with Cuba's minister of agriculture.

The governor says he and Minnesota agriculture commissioner Gene Hugson discussed what hot commodities Cuba might sell to Minnesotans if U.S. laws were relaxed to allow importation of Cuban goods. Ventura says he expects Cuban coffee and, of course, cigars, would be popular.

Yeah, I thought so.

Let's not forget - however badly you want your cigars and cheap vacation havens, Fidel Castro is a murderous thug and dictator. He's sponsored terror. He's sent troops around the globe to terrorize other people. The man is a worm.

Not that we need to invade them or anything. But normalizing relations without the sort of human rights improvements that would involve Fidel Castro sitting in solitary confinement is utterly wrong.

Duh - The Los Angeles

Duh - The Los Angeles El Al shooting has been ruled a terrorist attack.

Bitter? - We've seen the

Bitter? - We've seen the symptoms:

• Anti-Bush protesters, marching in their thousands (or, lately, hundreds or dozens) complaining that the government and the "corporate media" are shutting them up. All x thousand/hundred/dozen of them.
• "anti-war" activists who've had to successivily fall back from position to position; from "Afghanistan will be a quagmire" to the current "We won the war, but we will lose the peace" and "the "liberation" [always with the sneer quotes] of Iraq wasn't worth the human or social cost", and all the many, many steps in between (anyone remember "War won't work, Inspections will"? Weren't those quaint, trifling days?), and laying the groundwork for the next fallback position
• The endless conspiracy-mongering - like yesterdays' bogus, specious attempt to debunk the celebrations in Baghdad, to the creating of a vast, Zionist conspiracy between the US and Israel, to promote Jewish hegemony in the Middle East

What are these? They are hallmarks of people who've taken some reverses in life, and the experince has made them bitter and recriminatory rather wiser.

Eliana Johnson and Jamie Kirchick, in an excellent article in Frontpage Magazine, explore how this paranoid bitterness is manifested at a "teach-in" at Yale:

Wrongfully assuming that the audience was filled with antiwar students, [History Professor Glenda] Gilmore found herself at a loss for words when her tenuous reasoning was accidentally exposed to critical questioning. It became clear that Gilmore was never in fact silenced. The opposite occurred; her views were exposed, disseminated, and legitimately criticized by those who disagreed with her. Coming from the insulated world of leftist academia, Gilmore assumed that criticism and denunciation of her vitriol was evidence of a conspiracy against her.

We're seeing this in the Twin Cities, too. On political discussion lists, criticism of leftist thought is being attacked - sometimes viciously - as "thuggishness" and "anti-free speech". As conservative talk host Jason Lewis has been saying for years, for these people, freedom of speech is not, apparently, for other people. It's the last refuge of the bully - in this case, the intellectual bully; to beat up one's opponent, and then cry "foul" when stood up to.

It goes on:

Rather than present well-developed or coherent arguments against the war, she filled her allotted time attempting (successfully) to elicit pity from her audience. It was a spectacle of self-aggrandizement.

Perhaps more than anything else, Yale’s anti-war “teach-in” shed light on the divide between the hawks and the doves that grows as American success in Iraq increases. While pro-war students have been vindicated by the liberation of Iraq and were rightfully ebullient on Wednesday, a common trope of the professors and their sycophantic followers in the student body was that a quick and easy military operation in Iraq should not be equated with a victory in the war.

"We could still lose the peace!", don't you know.

Here's the payoff:

Indeed, the conspiracy theories espoused by Gutas and Gilmore are a symptom of the hateful bitterness that characterizes the campus left in the face of American success. As Wednesdays’ panel demonstrated, vicious prevarication has become a substitute for honest argumentation. The jubilant celebrations in the streets of Baghdad, the crushing of Saddam’s Stalinist regime, and the kisses from Iraqis on American soldiers’ cheeks, undermine the words of Ivy League professors who purport to defend the interests of the people of Iraq from American military might.

Like most great academic theories (perforce of the left, since academia, especially in the social sciences, is so violently skewed that way), the theory doesn't often survive contact with the real world.

This is good news. We have a generation of college kids who, despite appearances at places like MacAlester, are much more conservative than their teachers. Deeply impacted by September 11 (as deeply as I was by the denouement of the Cold War, personally), they seem to be starting to reject the tropes of their elders. Perhaps we can look forward to a more enlightened, less insular, more genuinely diverse academy in 20 years.

Not a moment too soon.

Shades of Weimar - The

Shades of Weimar - The big challenge occurred to me last night.

CNN was broadcasting, live, pictures of an endless line of Iraqis - former soldiers who've shucked their uniforms and were dressed in a motley assortment of civilian garb - walking south. They were apparently largely Shi'ites from the south of Iraq - according to John Keegan, the Shi'ite majority was largely shunted into the cannon-fodder regular army units, and the Republican Guard were largely minority Sunnis like Hussein. And they were going to walk home. They were tired, hungry, and had had enough.

And I was reminded of the Weimar Republic - the post WWI German government formed after Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated his throne after the Armistice.

The stories aren't entirely parallel. Germany wasn't conquered; many of its prewar institutions - the civil service, the state-sponsored Lutheran and Catholic churches - survived intact.

But there were parallels as well: vicious factions; an international "governing" body whose principals couldn't agree on how to deal with the situation; and those endless lines of soldiers walking home from the front. Oh, yeah - and the French, acting in self-interest borne of vengeance back then (understandably so) and perfidy today.

Early in the war, I posted a theory of which I'd picked up scraps; the US was going to try to use the less Saddameriffic elements of the Iraqi army as the nucleus of a new Iraqi administration. We all blew that one - the regular Iraqi military put up even less of a fight than expected, and has effectively dissolved (except in scattered instances when they were driven into battle at gunpoint by the Guards and Fedayeen - and that didn't last long). Their cohesion and morale were even worse than we'd expected. For purposes of providing help with reconstruction, the Army as an institution seems to be completely useless.

And this provides us a challenge; doing something to keep all these unemployed men busy. Idle hands are the Devil's work, but they're also the radical's tools. It's the idle hands of the returning German soldier that that joined the gangs - really private armies - of the extreme left and extreme right political parties. The Communists, Socialists, Monarchists and (eventually) Nazis went on to fight pitched battles, literally, in the streets of Germany, accelerating the misery and discontent started by the implosion of the German economy (whose collapse long predated the Great Depression, from which it also suffered greatly).

Iraq has 26 million relatively literate, relatively educated people; their infrastructure is intact to a degree the Germans and Japanese of 1945 could only dream of hungrily; they have a national and cultural identity that the typical Afghan does not.

They just need something to do.

Which is one excellent reason to keep the French completely out. They are a nation that celebrates indolence, indeed institutionalizes it; Iraq needs hard work.

Starting from the clean slate is somthing the West generally does well at: we bombed in Germany in the twenties (largely due to the League of Nations' inability to curb France's thirst for economic vengeance and help introduce actual rule of law in Germany); we succeeded beyond history's wildest dreams in Germany and Japan after WWII; Eastern Europe is developing, after years of teething pains - the more market-oriented the society, the better they're doing.

Here's hoping we learn from the best of those lessons.

Out of Spin

A friend of mine posted this article, "Out of Spin" by Lloyd Grove, on a different, non-political email discussion group. I'm normally loathe to post entire articles, but it's too good to pass up.

It's about the immense loss the the world's Public Relations industry in the disappearance of former Iraqi Information
Minister Mohammed Saeed "I'll Take You To The Airport" Sahhaf.

Grove says:

All over Washington, public relations professionals are distraught at the sudden disappearance from television screens of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf.

"Many of us turned to his daily briefings just as people in this town look forward to their morning Starbucks," said veteran Democratic operative Dale Leibach, a principal in Prism Public Affairs and a man with an antic sense of humor. "We need to bring him over here to practice his amazing public relations skills. He has taken our profession, such as it is, to a level that is as inexplicable as it is humbling. I would hire him in a nanosecond."

In recent days, Sahhaf has dazzled professional spinmeisters here with his irrepressible optimism -- "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad" -- and his uncanny gift for the
mot juste, at one point referring to the United States, Great Britain and their supporters as a "gang of bloodsucking bastards."

Some of Sahhaf's greatest hits:

• "There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad."

• "We butchered the force present at the airport."

• "Iraqi fighters in Umm Qasr are giving the hordes of American and British mercenaries the taste of definite death."

• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is "a criminal dog." Rumsfeld and President Bush "only deserve to be hit with shoes."

• "After we finish defeating all of those animals we will disclose that with facts and figures."

Leibach, a veteran of the Jimmy Carter White House and the offices of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and former senator Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), told us: "There was great concern on Monday when we heard that his office was bombed. In all my years in this business, I have never seen
anyone handle himself with such 'skill' as he demonstrated during his press briefing yesterday -- with his Ministry of Information building literally on fire, causing him to move his news conference to the sidewalk, and with the flames visible behind him, saying with a straight face that they had 'the infidels' on the run, that the Iraqis are winning this war. They just don't teach you that in college. This is a
PR guy who may give new meaning to 'knowing how to take a bullet' for a client. Literally."

This piece is a treasure.

Dr. Donald - I think

Dr. Donald - I think we're looking at a boom market in Donald Rumsfeld impersonators.

This, from Esquire magazine, is a classic.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

The Story They Sat On

The Story They Sat On - Eason Jordan of CNN writes about the Iraqi stories he couldn't tell.

And it's not from any political bias.

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

That's just the beginning. The story goes into nauseating detail, yet obviously leaves a lot out.

Day of A Thousand Quotes

Day of A Thousand Quotes - Today has seen an embarassment of riches in the quote department; I may have to set up a separate page for great quotes about the war and its denouement.

This is from a great Victor Davis Hanson article about Maureen Dowd's craven, scurillous, post-ironic columns on the war, its principals (at least the American ones) and its effects:

On a minor note, I was pleased to read that Maureen Dowd yesterday criticized things that I (a.k.a. "Mr. Davis") had written as consistent with the thinking of some in the administration. I confess that her writing has long bothered me, always in times of national distress reflecting an elite superficiality that is out of touch with most of us in the America she flies over. It is not just that for the last two years she has been wrong about Afghanistan, wrong about the efficacy of the war against terror, and wrong about Iraq — despite yesterday's surprising sudden admission that "We were always going to win the war with Iraq." The problem is more a grotesque chicness that quite amorally juxtaposes mention of tidbits like alpha males, Manhattan fashion — and her own psychodramas — with themes of real tragedies like the dying in the Middle East and war's horror.

So she just doesn't get it. It is precisely because Mr. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz hate war, wish to avoid a repeat of the vaporization of 3,000 in Manhattan and the specter of further mass killing from terrorists, armed with frightening weapons from rogue states like Iraq, that they resorted to force. She evokes Sherman (who called something like 19th century Dowdism "bottled piety") with disdain, but forgets that Sherman, who saw firsthand the grotesqueness of Shiloh, proclaimed that war was all hell — but only after his trek through Georgia where he freed 40,000 slaves and destroyed the icons of the Confederacy, while losing 100 soldiers and killing not more than 600 young non-slave-holding Southerners, an hour's carnage at Antietam or Gettysburg.

It might be neat between cappuccinos to write about leaders getting "giddy" about winning a terrible war, or thinking up cool nicknames like "Rummy," "Wolfie," and titles like "Dances with Wolfowitz," but meanwhile out in the desert stink thousands of young Americans, a world away from the cynical Letterman world of Maureen Dowd, risk their lives to ensure that there are no more craters in her environs — and as a dividend give 26 million a shot at the freedom that she so breezily enjoys.

This war will have lots of great side-effects; freedom for Iraq, a position to lean on other terrorists in Syria and Iran, removal of Iraq's WMDs from the world terror market. But I think the huge database of quotes suitable for future rhetorical blackmail is a nice side-effect as well.

Speaking of Great Quotes -

Speaking of Great Quotes - I often wish this blog could make enough money that I wouldn't have to work (or, lately, look for work). Don't get me wrong - the fact that you people donate enough money to support the actual running of the site itself is amazing, and I'm deeply thankful.

But if I did this fulltime, I could spend the time it took to keep track of things, like the dumb things anti-Bush protesters said before the war, and especially before the Race to Baghdad.

Fortunately, Andrew Sullivan has the time to do it. His latest round of Von Hoffman awards - given to egregiously bad predictions - is a classic.

Quote of the Day -

Quote of the Day - Hard to pick just one, but I love this, from David Warren:

Saddam Hussein had 30 years to make Iraq unliveable; naturally people such as the West's peace marchers in street and media expect the U.S. military to put it right in 30 minutes.

The whole article is great, and very much worth a read. But I love that quote.

Commentary - I may put

Commentary - I may put this Glenn Reynolds quote on a sign, for the next time I go to an anti-Bush rally:

What worries me is that there are still people -- who when agitating for "peace" pretended to have the Iraqis' interests at heart -- who would like to see Iraq descend into the depths again just so they can blame Bush and vindicate themselves. And they're not all in France.

Very true.

We'll be stalking writing about some of those, here in the Twin Cities, in coming days.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory - Hate site Democrats.com tries to impugn yesterday's famous pro-liberation demonstration in Baghdad, trying to pass it off as a small, controlled demonstration staged by the US.

Since Democrats.com always changes its front page around midnight eastern time, and never archives its lead stories (the better to avoid accountability), I'm going to snatch the picture for future reference:

Note the picture, that purports to show a tiny crowd gathered around the statue. The picture is shown without context, without timestamp, without any indication as to exactly when it was taken.

Compare the tiny crowd in the picture with the scenes you saw yesterday; does it look like the same group, at the same time, to you?

Ask yourself this; in a crowd that included the likes of Robert Fisk and the BBC World Service, do you think that a tiny little crowd could have been portrayed as a teeming mob, universally and without stint? Do you honestly think the world journalistic community is that dim and uninquisitive?

Am I wrong here? Let me know.

Bipolar - Two different extremes

Bipolar - Two different extremes here in Minnesota.

On the one hand, Minnesota's Iraqis. The Strib reports on their reactions:

"The Iraqi people lived a nightmare under Saddam Hussein, but now the nightmare is over," said Moslem Al-Jayashi of Fridley. "It's like a holiday today!" He stayed up all night Tuesday, watching developments on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic network.

On Wednesday afternoon, he and friends drove to the U.S. Courthouse in Minneapolis, waving American flags and patriotic signs to show their gratitude.

Another Iraq native, Yacoub Aljaffrey of New Brighton, said he wept with joy when he heard that U.S. troops had taken control of Baghdad.

"I cannot express how much happiness I feel, and how I thank the United States government and the troops that are fighting for our country," he said.

Said Rodwan Nakshabandi, a St. Paul restaurateur whose roots are Iraqi Kurdish: "The era of terror and brutality -- it's unbelievable it's ended."

It's hard to imagine the fear under which the Iraqi people have lived, said Adnan Shati of Minneapolis.

People were tortured and murdered by the secret police, who returned body parts in plastic bags to their families, he said.

Seeing the end of the war reminded him of visiting Iraq some time ago. "I was sitting in the living room and turned on the BBC. My younger brother jumped over me, grabbed the radio and turned it off. 'What are you doing? What if someone walked by and heard that? We could all die!' "

As Shati talked, his jubilant brother, Ali, phoned from Chicago: "Congratulations for free Iraq for getting rid of the monster!"

On the other hand, the "peace" movement, seemingly oblivious to the obsolescence of their cause, vows to continue...er, whatever it is they do. And what a contrast to their ebullient Iraqi neighbors these people are:

Willis Mattison, 59, former regional director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in Detroit Lakes, participates in a vigil at noon every Saturday in Detroit Lakes.

Those vigils, too, will continue, he said: "We may have inflicted as much harm on the Iraqi people by waging war there as Saddam Hussein was doing to his own people."

I'd love to see Mr. Mattison meet Mr. Shati, from earlier in this post, face to face.

One of the most irritating facets of the local anti-war movment is its appropriation of the ancient Christian tradition of the vigil. What was originally a humble group expression of prayer has been turned into a pretentious political statement of sorts.

And often one that is misguided to the point of hypocrisy:

One of the largest and oldest is on the Lake Street-Marshall Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River on the border of Minneapolis and St. Paul. About 400 protesters were there Wednesday, and organizers handed out fliers saying the vigil will continue "as an ongoing symbol of our resistance to war and our efforts to promote peace through direct nonviolent action."

Non-violent, indeed. There've been reports of "non-violent" protesters spitting and throwing things at the counterprotesters that show up.

But it's ironic to note - as I will no doubt do next Wednesday - that peace has probably won a bigger victory through our armed action than it could have through another thirty years of vigils and faulty "containment" and "non-violent resolution".

Terrible Swift Sword - Victor

Terrible Swift Sword - Victor Davis Hanson writes this superb article about democracy's record in war.

Tyrants write us off in advance - and, the record shows, at their own peril.

The article is chock full of great observations. I like this one in particular:

It is easy to libel William Tecumseh Sherman and his terrible march through Georgia in autumn 1864, which covered about the same 300-mile distance through the heart of enemy territory as the present roll from Kuwait to Baghdad. But Sherman's exuberant army of Midwestern yeomen freed 40,000 slaves, killed no more than 600 Southern youth and targeted the icons of the Confederacy and the plantations of the secessionists. His critics, even at the time, protested that the use of force was inconsistent with the values of a liberal society. But Sherman called that "bottled piety" because they never explained how an evil like slavery or, we might add, Saddam Hussein is to be removed without violence.

Read the whole...er, you know.

Light Flicks On - The

Light Flicks On - The Arab Street's reactions are fascinating:

Feeling betrayed and misled, some turned off their sets in disgust when jubilant crowds in Baghdad celebrated the arrival of U.S. troops.

"We discovered that all what the (Iraqi) information minister was saying was all lies," said Ali Hassan, a government employee in Cairo, Egypt. "Now no one believes Al-Jazeera anymore."

What? You mean Al Jazeera and Al Arabia weren't objective?

You don't have to search very far to find accounts of how the Iraqi-American Street is reacting to the news.

Ach. Ptui - To wash

Ach. Ptui - To wash the taste of Fisk out of my mouth, Lileks:

The Fog of Peace comes next; we will hear many stories of Setbacks and Troubling Developments and Roadblocks to Peace and the rest of the vocabulary the media deploys when a brutalized nation is freed from jail and does not immediately assume the characteristics of a Nebraska small-town school board. We’ll hear of many babies thrown out with the Ba’ath water, in other words. Today at the Pentagon press briefing, a reporter asked about Humanitarian Crisis, and Rumsfeld described at great length the humanitarian crisis that existed before the Allies got there, and how things were actually improving.

And you can't observe Rumsfeld without this:

It was classic Rummy; he not only refused to accept the premise of the question, he refuted it like a blacksmith working out marital frustrations on a red-hot horseshoe. You can just imagine what some of the reporters say to one another as they leave the briefing:

I say, what’s that in your hands, there? That pink thing?

Oh, this? It’s my ass. Rumsfeld handed it to me. And I see you have a nice clock there - brand new?

No, it’s quite old, but Rumsfeld cleaned it. Free of charge.

The dreaded blog directive follows: read the whole thing.

Robert Fisk: "Journalist" of the

Robert Fisk: "Journalist" of the "Liberation" - Robert Fisk, ultraliberal toady, wrote this about the liberation of Baghdad today:

The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday,

Note the sneer quotes.

I should quit right here, because Fisk has already given his entire game away. Liberation is "liberation", in Robert Fisk's world. He and I inhabit very different places. Freedom - er, "freedom", to the likes of Robert Fisk, is something that pertains to journalists, not brown people who speak funny languages.

...but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy.

Most accounts say that it was pretty much the government buildings and Saddam's palaces that got looted.

It was a day that began with shellfire and air strikes and blood-bloated hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator's statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for 25 years, had grovellingly obeyed Saddam's most humble secret policeman turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.

Note the implied ridicule; "they were big men, tackling statues...

"It is the beginning of our new freedom," an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: "What do the Americans want from us now?' The great Lebanese poet Kalil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual yesterday, forgetting that they – or their parents – had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath Party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq's generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the "liberators" were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq.

Just like in Japan.

Oh, wait - that would trash Mr. Fisks's preconceptions, woudn't it?

In Al-Fardus (Paradise) Square, US Marines helped a crowd of youths pull down the gaunt and massive statue of Saddam by roping it to an armoured personnel carrier. It toppled menacingly forward from its plinth to hang lengthways above the ground, right arm still raised in fraternal greetings to the Iraqi people.

It was a symbolic moment in more ways than one. I stood behind the first man to seize a hatchet and smash at the imposing grey marble plinth. But within seconds, the marble had fallen away to reveal a foundation of cheap bricks and badly cracked cement. That's what the Americans always guessed Saddam's regime was made of, although they did their best – in the late Seventies and early Eighties – to arm him and service his economy and offer him political support, to turn him into the very dictator he became.

It took Fisk about four minutes to exhume that strawman.

Mr. Fisk; we also supported Stalin, when he was our enemy's enemy. For that matter, many American and English leaders, including John F. Kennedy's father Joseph, and Henry Ford, supported Hitler. How complicit do you all feel?

In one sense, therefore, America – occupying the capital of an Arab nation for the first time in its history – was helping to destroy what it had spent so much time and money creating. Saddam was "our" man and yesterday, metaphorically at least, we annihilated him.

Let's do try to be honest here; France, Germany and Russia sent a thousand dollars to Hussein for every dollar we did. He was "our man" for a very brief window, twenty years ago, before Hussein developed into quite the criminal he has been for the last 15 years. Hussein was an old fling from long ago; France, Russia and Germany are still in bed with him.

Hence the importance of all those statue- bashing mobs, of all that looting and theft.

But of the real and somewhat less imposing Saddam, there was no trace.

Neither he nor his sons, Uday and Qusay, could be found. Had they fled north to their homeland fortress of Tikrit? Or has he – the most popular rumour this – taken refuge in the Russian embassy in Baghdad. Were they hiding out in the cobweb of underground tunnels and bunkers beneath the presidential palaces? True, their rule was effectively over. The torture chambers and the prisons should now be turned into memorials, the true story of Iraq's use of gas warfare revealed at last. But history suggests otherwise. Prisons usually pass over to new management, torture cells too, and who would want the world to know how easy it is to make weapons of mass destruction.

There will be mass graves that will have to be opened – though in the Middle East, these disinterments are usually performed in order to allow more blood to be poured onto the graves.

This is, of course, the same Fisk that was predicting world-class slaughter in Afghanistan. He just can't let that thread go.

Not that the nightmare is entirely over. For though the Americans will mark yesterday as their first day of occupation – they, of course, will call it liberation – vast areas of Baghdad remained outside the control of the United States last night.

Three days ago, all of it was outside our control.

Here, it gets interesting:

And at dusk, just before darkness curled over the land, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam's regime that remained intact within the vast, flat city of Baghdad. Down grey, carless streets, I drove to the great bridges over the Tigris which the Americans had still not crossed from the west. And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam Street, were a small group of mujahedin fighters, firing Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.

For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam Fedayeen had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs, like the Frenchmen of the Nazi Charlemagne Division in 1945 Berlin, fought on.

There's a great parallel here. Only the deluded from outside Iraq - the foreign zealots, the Robert Fisks, the matron from Highland Park with her "At Least Saddam Was Elected" sign at the "Peace" rally - attributes Hussein to be anything but a thug, a glorified gang-banger who has held power for thirty years because his thugs were bigger and badder than the opposition's thugs.

...tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind from which smart young soldiers with tanned faces look down with smiles at Iraqis who are obliging enough to wave at them, tanks with cute names stencilled on their gun barrels, names like "Kitten Rescue" and "Nightmare Witness" (this with a human skull painted underneath) and "Pearl". And there has to be a first soldier – of the occupying or liberating kind – who stands at the very front of the first column of every vast and powerful army.

So I walked up to Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, from Michigan. He hadn't spoken to his parents for two months so I called his mother on my satellite phone and from the other side of the world, Mrs Breeze came on the line and I handed the phone to her son.

And so this is what the very first soldier to enter the centre of Baghdad told his family yesterday evening. "Hi you guys. I'm in Baghdad.

"I'm ringing to say 'Hi! I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys. The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon.''

Yes, they all say the war will be over soon. There will be a homecoming no doubt for Corporal Breeze and I suppose I admired his innocence despite the deadly realities that await America in this dangerous, cruel land. For even as the marine tanks thrashed and ground down the highway, there were men and women who saw them and stood, the women scarved, the men observing the soldiers with the most acute attention, who spoke of their fear for the future, who talked of how Iraq could never be ruled by foreigners.

Just the way you were saying Afghanistan could never be liberated by Americans, not so very long ago, Robert Fisk.

It goes on from there. Read it, if you have the stomach.

Er..."stomach".

Miller - I caught part

Miller - I caught part of Dennis Miller on Leno last week. No, honest, Miller was the only reason I tuned in. Criminy.

I wanted to transcribe his whole bit, because it has some great, .sig-file caliber lines, but I forgot most of them by the time I got the the computer.

Fortunately, someone did it for me, summarizing his remarks on a bunch of topics:

-- Pride in conduct of the war:
“I cannot tell you how proud watching that war coverage makes me. I know a lot of people are saying that they think that it's, that you know what we're doing is imperialistic. I watch the way we handle ourselves over there and I've never felt more patriotic in my life.”

-- Denouncing anti-war protesters, Miller described how he puts them into four categories, the second one made up of those who call everyone but Hussein a Hitler:
“The second type you have at these parades seems to be the people who want to mislabel Hitler. Everybody in the world is Hitler. Bush is Hitler, Ashcroft is Hitler, Rumsfeld is Hitler. The only guy who isn't Hitler is the foreign guy with a mustache dropping people who disagree with him into the wood chipper. He's not Hitler.”

-- On the up side of war protesters:
“I'll say this about the war protesters: At least most of them are only putting duct tape across their mouths so I can still tell the rest of them to blow it out their ass.”

-- On the Dixie Chicks:
“Surprisingly, making fun of the President on foreign land in a time of war doesn't seem to play with the NASCAR crowd!”

-- On Peter Arnett:
“How am I supposed to trust the honesty of a reporter that has that bad of a comb-over on top of his head? He's got four hairs left and he's swirling them around...This guy is dangerously close to pulling hair over from another guy's head. Hey guess what Pete? We know you're bald, okay? The outside of your skull is as empty as the inside.”

-- On Michael Moore:
“He's going to wake up every day for the rest of his life, and he's going to tell us how he hates everything about this country except his right to hate it. And then we say that we love it and he's going to tell us what naive sheep we are and that he's the true patriot because he hates it and he sees all the problems in it. Yeah, right, Mike. You know something, if my yawn got any bigger they'd have to assign it a hurricane name, okay?
“Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong.”

-- On justification for the war:
“It is stupid for anybody in the world to say they're for war. But I am for this war because, you know, we've got to protect ourselves now. And we've got to remind the world that there is a point that we will not be pushed past before the [bleep]hammer comes down. Now, the simple fact is, do I think Saddam Hussein can bury the nuclear jumper from the top of the key? No, I don't. He's a putz. But I do think he can distribute the ball going down the lane and I think we've got to smack him around. It's time to circle the SUVs!
“The simple fact is, you've got to view this war like we've been on a long family car ride. Bush is the father and he's been screaming [gestures with arm as if a driver scolding kids in back seat] 'don't make me come back there!' for around 200 miles now and it just reached the point where we had to pull the car over and the bad kid is going to get the spanking of his life.”

-- On those whining about the length of the war:
“And now we've got people whining about how long the war is taking. For God's sakes it's been two weeks. You know, it took Joe Millionaire eight weeks to pick Zora (sp?).”

-- On global warming:
“There's a lot of differing data, but as far as I can gather, over the last hundred years the temperature on this planet has gone up 1.8 degrees. Am I the only one who finds that amazingly stable? I could go back to my hotel room tonight and futz with the thermostat for three to four hours. I could not detect that difference.”

-- Advise to soldiers in Iraq:
“I would encourage the boys though not to rip down all those big wall portraits of Hussein because you got to remember, pretty soon we're going to need a headstone for my main man's grave and you might want to save one for him.”

-- Praising the troops:
“God knows that we've got things we've got to perfect in this country. But there's enough people downplaying it right now. I want to go so far against that. I want to thank the President. I want to thank the troops and say God bless you for doing the tough job which allows us to sit here and do the easy jobs, like be on the Tonight Show.”

I liked Miller even before he came out of the closet as an occasional libertarian-conservative.

Between Miller, P.J. O'Rourke and Drew Carey, I'm getting pretty happy with the right-wing comedy corps these days.

The Lou Reed Curse -

The Lou Reed Curse - A pox on Eric Alterman's politics, but he does some great music writing.

In this article, he talks aboutthe Lou Reed Curse:

A few days later, I was telling this story to my close friend, Mike, who lived in Washington. He told me of the curse that Lou had cast on his life. I don’t remember all the details, but Mike was the Lou Reed fan to end all Lou Reed fans from the time he attended Columbia as an undergrad for about a decade and a half. That’s when Lou’s curse began to take effect. I forget the details, but it was no joke. Mike would always put on one of Lou’s albums mark the key moments of his life and something would always go horribly wrong. Girls would dump him; his wife had a miscarriage and I forget what else, but it was bad. He never listened to his favorite artist ever again. I tried to think of what life would be like if I felt forced to exile myself from Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. I couldn’t bear it

That's just the beginning - it gets much better.

Unlike, say, his political commentary.

Gotcher Crow Right Here -

Gotcher Crow Right Here - A month ago, this list (and the local left in general) was all abuzz about what a bad idea this war was going to be.

Two weeks ago, the "Q" word - quagmire - was everywhere on this mailing list. The Administration was jeered as shortsighted, inept, presiding over a plan that was doomed to quagmire and stalemate at the very least. The plan was derided for having only one heavy division, requiring that we empty the US Army wholesale into an endless morass. Our diplomacy was dinged for failing to open a second front (while the French interference in the Turkish parliamentary process went unacknowedged). The "V" word - Vietnam - was broached with a straight face.

Some of us said "wait and see".

We waited. Let's see:

Most of Baghdad has poured into the streets to greet our troops. Foreign mercenaries and volunteers are being turned in wholesale by angry Iraqis.

Today, the Rumsfeld/Franks operational plan for taking Iraq is being complemented by the experts. The Dash to Baghdad is already being hailed as one of the great armored advances under fire in history:

The stunning advance, at a cost of fewer than 10 U.S. combat deaths, would silence complaints by television generals, and even some officers in the field, that the war was being mismanaged. It also would provoke another kind of talk.

"The U.S. advance on Baghdad is something that military historians and academics will pore over in great detail for many years to come," British Air Marshal Brian Burridge said Monday. "They will examine the dexterity, the audacity and the sheer brilliance of how the U.S. put their plan into effect."

Instead of getting bogged down in pitched battles for cities along the road to Baghdad, U.S. forces raced directly to their main objective, pausing to fight only when given the chance to exact a heavy toll on the Iraqis. " Hey - wasn't that one of the things our plan was getting beaten up over two weeks ago?

Well?

Three weeks. Fewer casualties than the 1991 Gulf War or the 1982 Falklands War. Fewer casualties than the Second Battalion of the 330th Infantry Regiment suffered in *one week* in the Hürtgen Forest in 1944 (from a book I ghostwrote a while ago) advancing two miles.

No, the war's not over. There is some heavy skirmishing going on; according to some reports, much of the opposition is coming from foreigners and Ba'ath hardliners. But you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The "Arab Street" - at least, the one in Baghdad - is voting with its feet on its opinion of the US liberation of their country, with jubilation on the streets that looks even more intense than the fall of the Berlin Wall (another event that broke many a lefty heart).

Given the abuse that the Administration - and those of us who supported the liberation of Iraq - took on this mailing list, I think it's only appropriate to mention these things.

See you on V-I day!

I'm going to mosey down to the Marshall-Lake Bridge and see how things are going. I'll report later.

Open Letter to Protesters -

Open Letter to Protesters - This note appeared on the Minnesota National Politics discussion list, in a topic about Minnesota's clacque of anti-Bush protesters. I liked it, and am using it with permission.

I don’t think there is any questions that the majority of Americans and Minnesotans believe that those people out protesting the war in Iraq weeks ago were Anti-American professional protesters who if the war was not the issue of the day, would be out protesting something else. In other words the usual suspects who regardless of the issue not only fall on the left side, but the far left side.

They are a tiny fraction of a minority of America, there candidates can not get elected to office, and there views, when fully explained to the masses are laughed at and ridiculed. When one of them does attain some degree of notoriety and is paid attention to in an electoral situation there views are such that they do more harm than good to there movement (See Ken Pentel and the Minnesota Green Party). For the most part there are politically irrelevant, except on lists such as these which allow them to spout there drivel to the masses and afford them some degree of credibility that they are unable to receive in the real world.

Once again what has happened in Iraq has proved not only there dire predictions wrong, but has shown them for what they are, anti-American professional protesters who care little for anyone, other than themselves and there warped world view. The fact is simple Americans, Minnesota and now the World is rejecting these far left people who protest on a dime, who left to there own devices could not govern a fraternity, let alone a nation.

The professional protesters are not gone, just proven wrong on this issue-next week they will be back, protesting Governor Pawlenty, Mayor Kelly or maybe even Mayor R.T. Rybak. Once again average ordinary Americans will be forced to listen to this minority drone on and steal precious resources from society as a whole .just to get out there bigoted,mean spirited and hatful message.

Of course there's a right to protest. There were even rational reasons to oppose the war, if you wanted to find them.

But so many of the anti-Bush protesters have taken such incredible leave, not only of reason, but of simple morality. Opposing the war, in full cognizance of the evil Hussein represented and the things he'd done meant supporting Hussein; agreeing with institutional rape, the torture cells, the child prisons, the nerve gassed families. To end the war at that point - go "Support the troops by bringing them home" - would have been to deny liberty, and unleash a degüello on the Iraqi people like we haven't seen since...

...since the last time we betrayed them, at the behest of the UN.

So yeah, I'll be going to the demonstration today. If there is one.

Same the World Over -

Same the World Over - Footage on CNN a bit about of a US Marine walking through a building on the campus of Baghdad University.

As he walked a young, shrill Arab woman harangued him, in excellent English, pointing at a poster: "Do you see these heroes? They are going to come to America and blow you up!"

The leatherneck just kept walking, scanning the area ahead of him, studiously ignoring her.

The scary part was, she was indistinguishable from many of the little cretins I run into at demonstrations here in Minnesota. The good news for her? MacAlester will probably give her a full scholarship.

Paging Captain Smith - International

Paging Captain Smith - International A.N.S.W.E.R. is planning another round of anti-Bush rallies this weekend, including in DC.

I plan on going down to the Marshall-Lake Bridge in a bit, to see if the usual suspects are clogging up the bridge down there today. Anyone wanna meet me by the old gas station on the St. Paul side? Email me by three-ish - I'm in!

Amazing - I didn't expect

Amazing - I didn't expect to see a day like this. I expected something like Germany or Japan - a shell-shocked populace slowly waking and getting its feet wet with the idea of freedom.

A stunning day.

The Children's Jail - Lileks,

The Children's Jail - Lileks, on what the Children's Prison really means:

The end result of a fascist regime is always this: a man who seeks advancement by proposing a children’s jail; a smarter man who sees the political advantage of building one; the men who lock the doors and make the gruel with dead empty hearts, and the man who worries what will happen to him if the jail is found wanting.

The children, of course, don’t matter at all. In fact they matter least of all, and after a while their jailers come to hate them for what they make the jailers do.

A daisy chain of snakes biting their tales. Look up at the portrait hanging on the wall. Ask yourself what he wants. Bite harder.

So - does the left think Cuba is any better? North Korea?

So who is this they want to co-exist "peacefully" with?

I still don't recall Hals Blix looking for the children..

Leave Nobody Behind - One

Leave Nobody Behind - One of the most fascinating stories so far has been that of Navy Lieutenant-Commander Scott Speicher, a pilot shot down on the first night of the Gulf War.

The 1991 Gulf War.

The story is still alive, as the Navy, operating on evidence dug up by Amy Waters Yarsinske, civilian reporter, over the last several years.

Speicher, then 33, was piloting a Navy F/A-18 Hornet jet when enemy fire shot it down January 17, 1991 -- the first day of the Persian Gulf War. He subsequently was declared the war's first combat death, but the U.S. Navy changed his status to missing in action in 2001 after receiving information that he may have survived.

His status was changed a third time in October to missing-captured.

In a memorandum announcing the change, Navy Secretary Gordon England said the decision was based on the following factors:

• Analysis of the wreckage concluded that Speicher survived the initial damage to the aircraft and ejection.

• The flight suit found near the wreckage and turned over by the Iraqis showed no signs of a crash impact, as it would have if the pilot had been in the plane when it hit.

• The Red Cross team that investigated the wreckage reported that the cockpit had been expertly dismantled.

• Cumulative information received since Speicher was shot down continues to suggest strongly that the Iraqi government can account for him.

I heard Waters Yarsinske on (ahem) the KQ Morning show last week. The story she tells goes way beyond the fairly clinical details in the CNN articles; she alleges (and claims her allegations have been backed up by US intelligence - which would seem to be supported by the Navy altering his status) that Speicher lived among the Bedouin of the western Iraqi desert for a few years, hiding out with a broken leg, until a neighboring tribe gave him up (resulting in the massacre of the tribe that had hidden him).

Most damningly, she claims, the Clinton Administration was given the same evidence that she's given the Bush team. They didn't want to hear about it - preferring (she said on the radio) to concentrate on getting more women and gays into the military.

Although finding clues as to Speicher's fate has to be a lower priority, it is apparently on the military's agenda now that they're in Iraq.

Whoops - Yes, I moved

Whoops - Yes, I moved the blog to my new domain. It was simpler than I thought.

More changes to come soon.

More - For those who

More - For those who still think that we should have left Hussein alone:

More than 100 children held in a prison celebrated their freedom as US marines rolled into northeast Baghdad amid chaotic scenes which saw civilians loot weapons from an army compound, a US officer said.

Around 150 children spilled out of the jail after the gates were opened as a US military Humvee vehicle approached, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Padilla told an AFP correspondent travelling with the Marines 5th Regiment.

"Hundreds of kids were swarming us and kissing us," Padilla said.

What? Hans Blix missed this? Who'da thunk it?

The kids were in jail, according to the story, because:

"The children had been imprisoned because they had not joined the youth branch of the Baath party," [Col. Padilla] alleged. "Some of these kids had been in there for five years."

Wow. Imagine how much better this would have been with UN support.

Top Five Signs Your Movement

Top Five Signs Your Movement Is Losing Steam - Drum roll, please:

5. Canadians now support the war by a 2-1 margin.

4. Le Figaro is editorializing in favor of the war.

3. The Guardian is writing some of the best pro-liberation material.

2. Even the Strib is being uncommonly muted in its anti-war opinions...

And the #1 Sign Your Movement is Losing Steam:

1. A majority of San Franciscans support the war!

(Via Sullivan and Reynolds)

My "Representative" - Betty McCollum

My "Representative" - Betty McCollum is my "representative" in Congress - I put it in quotes, because while she does sit in the chair reserved for Minnesota's Fourth Congressional District, I find that she doesn't represent me in the least.

Least of all in the current flap, as told in the Strib this morning:

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., asked Sen. Norm Coleman to apologize on Monday after the Republican senator told a Capitol Hill newspaper that he's "a 99 percent improvement" over his predecessor, the late Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone.

"To be very blunt and God watch over Paul's soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone," Coleman said in a front-page story published in Roll Call. "Just about on every issue."

Now, the Strib supplies the key piece of context that Rep. McCollum omits in her statement:

Coleman made the remark as he sought to stress his ties to President Bush. He told Roll Call that Wellstone "was never with the president."

McCollum called the remarks inappropriate and disrespectful and said they were "an unnecessary attack on a leader our state continues to mourn."

Ms. McCollum? As much as some of you loved Senator Wellstone, and as much as many of his opponents respect him, life is for the living. Mourning ends.

And, frankly, Rep. McCollum, Senator Coleman is under no obligation to suck up to Senator Wellstone's memory, any more than President Bush was obliged by the close election in 2000 to adopt Algore's platform.

Norm Coleman is our Senator now!.

In a statement released by his office Monday night, Coleman said: "[Mark] Twain said the problem with talking to the media is they're likely to print what you say. It was my responsibility to be more clear in my remarks to Roll Call. It was my understanding we were comparing my relationship to this White House to the relationship Senator Wellstone had with this White House. I would never want to diminish the legacy or memory of Senator Paul Wellstone, and I will accept full responsibility for not having been more accurate in my comments."

Seems like an honest clarification of something that wasn't a mistake in the first place,

Minnesota Democrats obviously see it differently:

The Roll Call story caused an uproar among Wellstone's former staffers.

Jim Farrell, Wellstone's former spokesman, called it a "shameful, self-serving assertion" from Coleman.

And Jay Howser, a former senior aide, called the remarks "sickening" and said they showed Coleman to be "a selfish, classless" man.

For Coleman to attack Wellstone less than six months after his death "is beyond the believable," he said. "One would think that no U.S. senator would ever stoop to such a disgusting level but today Norm Coleman has."

McCollum said the remarks were hurtful to the Wellstone family and to all Minnesotans who loved Wellstone and his wife, Sheila, both of whom died Oct. 25 in a plane crash.

All very small and petty, don't you think? Here's the part that I liked the best, though:

Saying the 2002 campaign is over and it's "now time for leadership," McCollum called on Coleman to apologize to Wellstone's family and to all Minnesotans

"Paul Wellstone represented Minnesota families with integrity, respect and passion for 12 years," she said. "Senator Coleman's remarks attacking our late senator were tasteless and do absolutely nothing to benefit the Minnesota families he now serves."

Democrats! It's time to stop waving Paul Wellstone's image like an Orthodox icon before you as you walk! Minnesotans have moved on to deal with a war, a tough economy, and a state budget addled by your free-spending history; Move On!

Coleman finishes with a salient quote:

In the story, Coleman reflected on his election to the Senate and said "there is a lot of anger" still coming from Wellstone forces.

"They lost their champion and they thought something was taken away," he told the newspaper. "All you can do is say, 'Hey, I mourn the loss, but I am here and I am going to do what I think is the right thing to do, and thank God I have a chance to be here.' "

It's a lot more than anger, I think. It's the contempt that those who feel themselves entitled feel for those they believe are the usurpers. Applied to invidividuals, it's a sign of a person that's on his or her way to becoming an angry, bitter person. The Minnesota DFL seems to fit that description.

As do many Democrats, including Democrat hate site Democrats.com, which misleadingly sluglined its linked AP story "Norm Coleman Trashes Paul Wellstone's Memory".

Note to Democrats at all levels; keep this up. Nobody likes a whiner. Keep dangling Wellstone in front of the voters, and you'll be a minor party by 2012.

Three Months - That's how

Three Months - That's how long I've been out of work.

Now bear in mind, I'm not one of those people who likes being out of work. Truth be told, I'm a bit of a workaholic. I've had to moderate that impulse quite a bit in the last few years; raising kids'll do that, if you're a lucky workaholic.

And I'm not totally out of work; I've picked up a few freelance contracts that have stretched my unemployment a bit. And I'm here to testify, looking for work is a fulltime gig; I've probably sent out 250 resumes in the last three months.

But the fact is, I've been job-hunting nonstop for three months, and it's starting to show.

I have three fairly solid job leads right now; one that I interviewed for on Valentines Day, that absolutely wants to hire me, but the budget still hasn't been approved; one that popped up two weeks ago and is still developing; and the one with the nearly-eight-hour second interview last week. The latter is being incredibly persnickety, interviewing a rolling cattlecall of human factors and usability people. If I end up finishing second of 12 candidates...well, it's still finishing second. Granted, the interview seemed to go very well, but...blah. There are a few other possibilities, but nothing worth talking about.

They say to remember "you are not your job". True. But I'm starting to identify pretty closely with my lack of job, and that can't be a good thing.

Casualties of War - It's

Casualties of War - It's almost specious to point this out, but here goes:

In 1991, we lost 147 dead in four days of fighting; about a quarter of them were "friendly fire" deaths.

Today, in almost three weeks of land combat, we've lost about eighty dead. Half are due to accidents, according to the military.

We've lost two fixed-wing aircraft in action (one of them a Brit shot down by a US Patriot battery) and three (if I recall correctly) helicopters to enemy fire. In 1991, we lost more than a dozen in the month we were in action; the Brits alone lost five Tornadoes, and the Italians lost another.

In exchange - the war seems nearly at an end, as opposed to the very limited goals we won in '91.

Just to keep things in perspective.

It's a Gas - For

It's a Gas - For the past day or so, the left's latest intellectual rear-guard action has been "See! No Weapons of Mass Destruction!"

The anti-Bush left's intellectual rear-guard is folding up like the Republican Guard these days; the 101st Airborne seems to have discovered Sarin and Tabun gases at a compound southwest of the Bagh:

The evacuation of dozens of soldiers Sunday night followed a day of tests for the nerve agent that came back positive, then negative. Additional tests Sunday night by an Army Fox mobile nuclear, biological and chemical detection laboratory confirmed the existence of sarin.

Sgt. Todd Ruggles, a biochemical expert attached to the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne said, "I was right" that chemical agents Iraq has denied having were present.

In addition to the soldiers sent for decontamination, a Knight Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman and two Iraqi prisoners of war also were hosed down with water and bleach.

U.S. soldiers found the suspect chemicals at two sites: an agricultural warehouse containing 55-gallon chemical drums and a military compound, which soldiers had begun searching Saturday.

Growing up in North Dakota, I saw lots and lots of legitimate agricultural chemicals. Some of them are even from the same chemical family as Sarin and Tabun.

But - ! - there's more!

The soldiers also found hundreds of gas masks and chemical suits at the military complex, along with large numbers of mortar and artillery rounds.

You find farmers trying the damnedest things to apply pesticides, but mortar and artillery rounds usually didn't top the list.

Pack it up, left. It's over.

Fantasy Life - I love

Fantasy Life - I love this this editorial in the relatively-liberal Die Zeit. The translation from the German is via Google; I could have done a better job, if I'd had an hour or two to spend on it.

This paragraph - which I'll translate myself - sums it up:

To replace unpleasant historical realities by denial of the facts, and arbitrarily making up fictitious events - that is not new. So far the "Geschichtsleugner" (History Liars) had however always used a certain spatial or historical distance, a certain time at least, until the primary memory of the material facts had already faded a little, before they dared take their fabrications public. Now the events are already denied and expunged, as if they never happened. These falsifications made for preaching to the choir: those convinced of the fact from the beginning that everything that comes from American side must be a lie.

Google translations are amazingly bad at times (and at the same time miracles of of technology), but this one gets the basic idea across; many of the Anti-Americans live in a fantasy world, where US troops mow down Iraqi children like cordwood and where the Iraqi Street seethes with resentment against us.

I'll be here in six months to compare reality with this fantasy. I'll be naming names - and sending emails.

Count on it.

Busted? - We've had false

Busted? - We've had false alarms before - but this might be it; US forces discover possible chemical weapons in two separate finds near Baghdad - one involving drums of chemicals, and this one:

The U.S. National Public Radio, reporting what appeared to be a separate discovery to the one in Albu Mahawish, said U.S. forces found a weapons cache of around 20 medium-range missiles equipped with potent chemical weapons.

NPR said the rockets, BM-21 missiles, were equipped with sarin and mustard gas and were "ready to fire."

Smoking gun?

Black Watch News - This

Black Watch News - This story has three of my favorite things: bagpipes, Challenger main battle tanks (about as good as an M1, and much cooler-looking) and a leftie myth being shot down (in this case, "Urban Combat will totally chew up the coalition forces; that's where we'll get our quagmire!").

Gethin Chamberlain of Glasgow's The Scotsman sets the stage:

On the other side of the bridge over the Shatt al-Basra canal, Lieutenant William Colquhoun had unpacked his bagpipes and sat on the turret of his Warrior waiting for the order to advance. As the sun attempted to poke through smoke rolling lazily across desolate marshland stretching away on either side of the bridge, wading birds were picking their way among the long grasses.

As he began to play, the sound of Scotland the Brave drifted across the bridge towards the city, competing with the clatter of rotor blades as four Cobra helicopters raced in to join the attack.

Read the whole story - it's a fascinating look at restrained, modern urban combat.

Alternatives - The Strib asks

Alternatives - The Strib asks the unanswerable question: "When will the DFL actually come up with a budget plan of its own?"

And as expected, Speaker Steve Sviggum made much of the fact that his caucus has declared its fiscal intentions, while the DFLers in charge of the Senate have not. Two posters were propped on easels as Sviggum presented the House plan. One poster detailed the House GOP's proposal; the other was blank but for the headline, "House/Senate DFL budget plan."

The GOP should rub it in.

The DFL is fading back into passive-aggressive mode; not suggesting anything of its own, holding itself to sniping at the GOP. It's the safe approach; sort of like letting the other guy poke his head into the tiger cage, then criticizing his technique.

But as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The DFL are venturing nothing; venture also brings risks. With the economy the way it is, and Minnesota's voter still unsure on their conservative legs, it may be the safe route.

The Strib continues:

It's a void that is crying to be filled -- and will be filled this week, DFL leaders vow. It would best be filled by a clear alternative to the deep cuts the Republicans have proposed -- in other words, by a budget that combines more modest service cuts with a state tax increase.

And that's probably what it'll be; full of sops to the public-sector employees and the special interests that essentially are the DFL.

Odds are against such a budget being adopted this year. But the political reality of the 2003 session is that the odds do not favor the adoption of any budget with DFL parentage.

When dealing with the Minneapolis Star/Tribune, it's hard to read between that statement's lines. Is the statement

• Shorthand for a belief that last November was jut a hallucination, that Minnesotans really do like high taxes, but are just in a temporary GOP fling? Or...
  
• A sign that the DFL-leaning Strib is slowly coming around, but can't quite admit it? Saying "the Legislature won't pass something with DFL lineage" goes down easier than saying "Voters are sick of high taxes".

The Strib continues

The DFL may control the Senate by two votes. But with the House and the governor in Republican lockstep, the DFL is a de facto minority, consigned to playing the minority's role. It's a role that needs to be played well.

The minority's role is neither to echo the majority, nor to simply criticize the majority's ideas. It is to present principled alternatives, and advocate for them in a way that attempts to educate and persuade the public. A vigorous minority does not just say that there must be a better way; it shows the better way.

We'll have to look and see what kind of "way" the DFL shows us. I'm suspecting "same old same old". We'll see shortly.

DFLers undoubtedly would tweak the Pawlenty budget in different places. But tweaking is not the same as standing apart, or standing for principle. If DFLers are sincere when they say that the Republican approach is detrimental to Minnesota, they are honor-bound to propose a real alternative.

They are, indeed.

I'll be waiting.

Focus - Believe it or

Focus - Believe it or not, I never set out to do a warblog. Yeah, military history has always fascinated me - and since I'm a straight male (despite the fact that I own a potpourri heater) I naturally am drawn to any piece of news involving tanks and artillery.

But this last couple of days has been kinda out of hand.

So I'm going to make a special effort to include some non-military, non-non-Minnesota things in the blog this week.

Unless, like, things really heat up.

If It Ain't Broke, Fix

If It Ain't Broke, Fix It? - According to Drudge, Steven Brill is getting personally trashed by the chattering classes for his new book "After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era".

His crime? Admitting the administration is doing a good job.

Says Drudge:

why have there been no fresh terror strikes in the United States since the start of the war?

Brill says it's the competence of the current leadership.

PBS host Charlie Rose shouted and squirmed and called Brill's premise "ridiculous" during a promo for the book "After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era," which Brill released last week.

[AFTER ranked #678 on the AMAZON.COM sales parade Sunday afternoon.]

"He is a laughing stock!" mocked one network executive, who has been a friend of the self-described "lapsed-liberal" for more than 10 years.

Brill has been telling associates how arguments over the 700-page book have "nearly become violent."

I'm sure they have. There's nothing the left hates worse than apostacy. The only thing worse than a conservative is a liberal that has switched sides. Brill apparently even commits the ultimate sin; praising John Ashcroft and aspects of the Patriot Act.

As a personal aside, here's the part I love, again from Drudge:

Brill explains: "I’ve had a kind of cultural revelation, and it centers on Tom Ridge, whom all my friends think is a bumpkin because he doesn't look and sound like them. Janitor’s son wins scholarship to Harvard, gets elected governor. Yet my friends think he’s a dummy. The reason: because he’s utterly without guile. To me he is emblematic of what’s great about the country – a guy who leaves his cushy governorship and therefore his wife has to go get a job to pay the bills because they have new rent to pay, and goes to Washington to help. And his staff is the same way.

"Sure they don’t do everything right, but they work their asses off and take all kinds of s**t from the press and the pundits and just keep their heads down and do the job they said they would do. The book is full of poignant scenes of these decent people just plain working hard and making sacrifices. No politics. No bulls**t. No glory. No scouring the papers for news clips about themselves."

The left hates that - real people doing a real job, the way most Americans do theirs. No macchiavellian intrigues, little evident sense of career entitlement; just people doing the job they were sent to do.

Can looks be deceiving? Of course - but the intense animus of the left is not a sham.

Troops? War? - Terry Eastland

Troops? War? - Terry Eastland of the Weekly Standard asks the question - is it possible to support the troops but oppose the war? To Eastland, the answer is "no":

Rep. Charles Rangel of New York has stated it succinctly: "We support the troops, but we don't support the president."

That is morally better than supporting our troops "when they shoot their officers." Yet what does it mean, what can it mean, to support the troops but not the president?

Not very much. The protesters "support" the troops in the sense that they hope our men and women in uniform will be okay, notwithstanding their dangerous environment. To spell out the obvious, they hope our troops won't suffer death or injury or capture, nor hunger, nor (too much) sleep deprivation, nor (another) blinding sandstorm.

But note that the protesters' "support" doesn't extend to the troops' actual mission. Consider that the oath of enlistment obligates each soldier to obey "the orders of the president of the United States." President Bush's orders to disarm Iraq and effect regime change, given to the Pentagon and our armed forces, are precisely what the protesters oppose. Thus, they are unable to support our armed forces in Iraq in the discharge of the very responsibility they have accepted and that matters most to the country--the execution of their mission.

I'm more and more inclined to agree. A soldier's life and well-being is deeply interconnected with his/her mission. If the soldier fails to accomplish the mission, it's usually because they've been harmed in some drastic way - or they've abandoned the mission, rendering their and their comrades' sacrifice vain.

Supporting the troops while opposing the mission is logical, in the same way that wishing for puppies not to die is logical; it feels good, but there's really no logical basis to the idea.

Compassionate Caring Liberals In Action

Compassionate Caring Liberals In Action - The death of Michael Kelly brought out quite a reaction among the Democratic Underground. Much of it, unforunately, was nose-hair-curlingly awful.

I'm imagining what would have happened had a conservative reaction to Paul Wellstone's death like some of these morons.

Indymedia has also held forth with its characteristic invincible inflammatory ignorance.

(Via Rachel Lucas and Right Wing News and Jeff Fecke)

Hentoff - A genuine liberal

Hentoff - A genuine liberal and genuine libertarian, Nat Hentoff, comments about why he didn't march with the anti-war protesters this time:

I did not cite "weapons of mass destruction." Nor do I believe Saddam Hussein is a direct threat to this country, any more than the creators of the mass graves in the Balkans were, or the Taliban. And as has been evident for a long time, I am no admirer of George W. Bush.

The United Nations? Did the inspectors go into the prisons and the torture chambers? Would they have, if given more time? Did they interview the Mukhabarat, Saddam's dreaded secret police?

An Iraqi in Detroit wanted to send a message to the anti-war protesters: "If you want to protest that it's not OK to send your kids to fight, that's OK. But please don't claim to speak for the Iraqis."

The article catalogues some of the same Hussein atrocities that the rest of the world - or the part of it that isn't run by Josh Bartlett - has become familiar with. Some of them turn the stomach:

The UN is crucial for feeding people and trying to deal with such plagues as AIDS; but if you had been in a Hussein torture chamber, would you, even in a state of delirium, hope for rescue from the UN Security Council?

From Amnesty International, for whom human rights are not just a slogan, on Iraq: "Common methods of physical torture included electric shocks or cigarette burns to various parts of the body, pulling out fingernails, rape. . . . Two men, Zaher al-Zuhairi and Fares Kadhem Akia, reportedly had their tongues cut out for slandering the president by members of Feda'iyye Saddam, a militia created in 1994. The amputations took place in a public square in Diwaniya City, south of Baghdad."

As John Burns of The New York Times wrote in January: "History may judge that the stronger case [for an American-led invasion] . . . was the one that needed no [forbidden arms] inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors."

As I wrote in my "Death Factory" piece yesterday, I've had about enough of the anti-Bush movement's specious claims. The last time I went to an anti-Bush rally, I was a passive observer. Next time, I'm speaking up, asking the questions.

I've had enough.

Fade - The anti-Bush movement had a bad day in Boston yesterday.

I'll be going to the Wednesday ritual demonstration on the Lake Street Bridge to see what attendance is like.

Anyone wanna meet under a "Liberate Iraq" sign? Strength in numbers, y'know...

Your Two Cents - I

Your Two Cents - I finally added a comments section to my blog. Click on the "comments" line at the bottom of each post, and let 'er rip.

It's an experiment, of course; if it's too much of a hassle, or doesn't add anything (which I find hard to believe possible), I'll spike it. But 'til then, it should be interesting.

Death Factory - Note to

Death Factory - Note to the American Left, especially all you anti-Bush protesters: Read this, and then tell me you have any claim to moral superiority:

Each sheaf of notes contains a picture of a man or woman. Each and every one has been shot in the head. Their wounds are mangled and gaping. Many of them barely look human any more as the anonymous photographer chronicled their dead faces. It is a horror almost beyond words.

It is hard not to look at the black-and-white photographs -- two for each victim -- and wince. Yet each was a brother, a father or a son; or a mother, a daughter or a sister. Each had a past and hopes for a future, yet each ended here, in this dry and dusty hall of the dead. There must be at least 200 of them in the plywood coffins, roughly hammered together by a hurried carpenter. All of them are in bags, jumbled together in sad piles of remains.

The story, in the British Sunday Herald, discusses British soldiers' discovery of one of Hussein's death and torture marts, in As Zubayr. Hundreds of bodies. Evidence of torture. Most damning; detailed records of what happened.

So one of the left's most persistent tropes is "we shouldn't be fighting this war; it's killing Iraqis! If we weren't invading Iraq, innocent Iraqis wouldn't be dying!"

Iraqis like this?

In one sack a single photo lies. It is a simple ID card. On it a middle-aged man stares out. He has black hair, a long face and a drooping moustache. In life he would perhaps have looked pensive. But lying, half-covered by his own dusty remains, the man pictured within looks sad and forlorn. He looks regretful for the life stolen from him. A splotch of bloodstain on the corner of the card is reminder enough of the brutality of how all his hopes died.

I'm normally pretty dispassionate about the things I write about in this blog. Not so, now. I can barely contain the rage I feel at the idiocy of some on the American left, even some of my own neighbors.

Speculation: About 500 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have died in this war so far.

Fact: Hussein's regime has killed over a million Iraqis in the past thirty years. That's 30-odd thousand a year, on average, an average of 250 a week for the entire time. That's a rate actually a tad higher than the estimate of casualties so far for the war.

And it ends now.

Lefties: explain this to me. Anyone.

I doubt any of you has the balls to try.

Where Will It End -

Where Will It End - So listening to Arthur Kent's bleating (as indistinct from so much other bleating this past few months), I tried to catalog the little rhetorical steeplechase has characterized the spin over this war so far:

• "We couldn't possibly fight Iraq and hunt for Al Quaeda"
• There's just no way we can do this without allies!
• Without the UN, we can't possibly consider fighting a war!
• The war had better get underway by February, or it'll be too hot to fight!
• Without the Turks' cooperation, there's no way this can work!
• The Arab Street will have a cow! There will be terror attacks against US soft targets worldwide!
• This will be a quagmire!
• Hussein will blow the oil wells!
• Hussein will use his chemical weapons (the ones Blix said he didn't have)
• The Iraqi Irregulars will bog this thing down!
• The Iraqi people will fight for Iraq, if not for Hussein!
• Our troops will avoid urban combat; the US doesnt' have the stomach to fight in the streets of Baghdad.

  and now,

• the US/UK plan to administer Iraq will be a disaster without the buy-in of the French, Russians and Germans.

Any others?

The backed-up fountains of ridicule are ready to break loose in a torrent. Get ready, American Left.

SCUD Dud - As I

SCUD Dud - As I was writing the piece below, who should pop on the TV but none other than Arthur "Scud Stud" Kent himself. He's writing for McCall's magazine and hosting a puff show on the History Channel today. He was on the Larry King show, talking about the announcement today about the post-war provisional government of Iraq. He was in a panel discussion with King, Winston Churchill (grandson of the great British prime minister) and a reporter for Nile TV.

Kent commented on the notion of a government led by CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks and proposed civilian administrator, retired General Jay Garner: "This means quagmire. Game over".

The Q word, again. You'd think they'd learn.

Churchill responded, with some of his granddad's aplomb:

The idea that the UN, with its threat of Russian, Chinese or French vetos, would produce a better thing thatn a UK/Us administration, is absurd. I think the moment will come when the regime cracks, and people across the world, including the Muslim world, will see scenes of rejoicing after liberation fro 30 years of tortunre and murder...and that'll have an amazing effect on the Arab Street. We have to make sure we follow through and not just move on and forget about Iraq.

Kent dismissed Churchill:

SUre, there'll be a period of rejoicing. But the fact of matter [this seems to have become Kent's favorite modifier to any sentence, by the way; "the fact of the matter is, we're taking a break" is only a slight exaggeration] is, the Russians and French are more popular in Iraq than the US is. I think the reporting needs to consider the deep animosity among the Iraqis against US and UK for the twelve y ears of crushing sanctions and the twelve-year bombing campaign. When the time comes to estabilsh a supposedly free iraq, and there's no UN - where's the logic in that? The Iraqi people and the Iraqi government aren't buying it.

Arthur Kent; from "Scud Stud" to "Clairvoyant UN Flack".

Listen; you can hear the sound of a career falling faster than a SCUD that's been hit by a Patriot.

SCUD Studs - There's been

SCUD Studs - There's been no Arthur Kent, so far in this war.

Maybe you remember the first Gulf War; NBC correcpondent Arthur Kent was widely christened the "SCUD Stud" for his performance while reporting from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. As the missiles fell about him, Kent's reports were distributed worldwide via satellite.

We've not heard much about the heroism of the reporters this time. I think that's because the embedded reporters have shown us the real heroes. They're the men and women on the ships, at the airbases and aloft, and most of all in the tanks and Bradleys and trucks rolling through Iraq, or blazing away in green light at unseen enemies, or going door-to-door through the cities and villages of Iraq.

In 1991, Arthur Kent and Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf were the best we could do. Today, we can see a quarter-million potential heroes in action.

So who will the American people remember in ten years?

• PFC Lynch, of course - assuming she recovers (and our prayers are with her, as well as the families of her comrades tonight).
• The "Devil Docs" - the team of Navy doctors that have been running a mobile surgical hospital right behind the front lines. These guys, the real-life counterpoints to Alan Alda and company, have been getting incredible coverage from their own embedded reporter,
• Sanjay Gupta, the medical reporter whose neurosurgery background has been pressed into service twice so far in the war.
• To be determined.

Time will tell, of course.

Separated At Birth? - Christiane

Separated At Birth? - Christiane Amanpour and the late Joey Ramone.

RIP Michael Kelly - Michael

RIP Michael Kelly - Michael Kelly, WaPo columnist who left the newsroom to travel with the 3rd ID in Iraq, was killed yesterday in a Hummvee accident.

He was a literate, commonsensical, tough-as-nails conservative commentator. He is sorely missed already.

Out - I've got some

Out - I've got some stuff to take care of today, that'll probably eat up my whole day and evening.

Look for a blogalanche this weekend, per usual.

Have a great weekend!

Crushing British Defeat - AFP

Crushing British Defeat - AFP is carrying this report of British Marines being thrashed in action in southern Iraq:

Leading Airman Dave Husbands said the marines were beaten from the start. "We turned up to play and there was no-one around, just a few kids messing about," he said.

We're talking soccer, of course:

"Then suddenly, out of nowhere, came this kitted-up football team together with a referee and two linesmen.

"The boys thought they must be the Iraqi international side or something"

Y'know, it was GIs who made baseball - "Besoboro" - the Japanese national sport. I think we need to get cracking here.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Garry Owen - While the

Garry Owen - While the particulars of the PFC Lynch story have changed in the past day or two, it seems clear so far that she's a hero.

But lest we forget, we have a group of about 1,000 heroes to talk about.

While PFC Lynch's story (and that of the snake-eaters that rescued her, and the Iraqi that tipped us off to her whereabouts) is a wonderful story, it'll be great, one day, to hear the story of the 3rd Squadron of the Seventh Cavalry.

This battalion-sized group, the armored recon element of the Third Infantry Division, spent nearly two weeks way out ahead of the rest of its division - its mission (I don't know this, but a look at the map would seem to confirm it) to drive as much as 50-60 miles in front of the main advance - finding the enemy, fixing his location for the rest of the Division to either destroy or bypass, and pressing further onward toward the capital.

Worth a thought, anyway.

Why We Fight? - Jim

Why We Fight? - Jim Dwyer, an embedded reporter for the NYTimes, may have found the keys to Iraqi democracy.

What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?

"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"

Now, I've got the usual visual indicators of my sympathies. My house has a large "Liberate Iraq" sign. My car is festooned with a "Deserve Victory" sticker. My website...oy vey, look at my right margin.

But I have to add this - courtesy of today's Lileks bleat - without which neither my blog nor life will be complete.

Sorta sums it all up, I think.

They Really Hate Us, You

They Really Hate Us, You Know - The Iraqi man who tipped us off about PFC Lynch didn't seem to resent Americans too deeply for conquering most of his country...:

Mohammed watched as the man slapped the American woman with his open palm, then again with the back of his hand. In that instant, Mohammed recalled today, he resolved to do something. The next day, when the man in black was not around, Mohammed sneaked in to see the young woman.

"Don't worry, don't worry," he told her. He was going to help.

As he recounted the events today, that decision set in motion one of the most dramatic moments in the first two weeks of the war in Iraq. Five days after Mohammed located U.S. Marines and told them what he knew, Black Hawk helicopters swooped in under cover of darkness, touching down next to the six-story hospital, and a team of heavily-armed commandos stormed the building. With hand-scrawled maps from Mohammed and his wife, the commandos quickly found the injured Pfc. Jessica Lynch and spirited her away to safety.

It'll be interesting to see how many of these things happen as we close in on Baghdad.

Sad, Sad World -

Sad, Sad World - As much as I biff on Steve Perry, he's at least worth mixing it up with. The guy is rational. I think he's wrong about a lot of things, but he's rational.

But I worry about the City Pages' Brad Zellar.

I'm not sure what to chalk this piece from his blog up to (you'll have to scroll down - his archive links don't work); solipsism, the eternal self-absorption of the eternally single. The word that jumps to mind: embarassing.

At least he starts with the key admission:

I don't have any kids myself,

It goes downhill from here.

but that's precisely because I know how dangerous they are.

"I'm not a neurosurgeon, but that's precisely why I know everything about operating on the brain..."

Dangerous and erratic. Dangerous and erratic and cold blooded. Every dark impulse known to man can be found in the heart of the average five-year-old.

No more so than in the heart fo the average solipsistic thirtysomething alternative writer. Five year olds have fewer inhibitions and even less artfulness about expressing the dark - or the light sides, for that matter - of their personalities.

Children are instinctively militaristic, and people spend years trying to civilize it out of the little bastards, but it's hopeless.

"Little bastards". Charming.

Children are inherently fascinated with the dark side of everything; it's how they learn to deal with the dark sides that seem, more and more, to surround them as they become more aware. To try to make this into some sort of all-encompassing social commentary is absurd.

Kids have a sophisticated understanding of vengeance and the consequences of messing with the man. They know what happens when they don't do what daddy tells them to do, or they for damn sure should. That conflict of fearing the man and wanting to be the man is at the heart of the military instinct.

This is claptrap.

Kids are taught the "consequences of messing with the man", usually inheriting from parents who learned them in turn from their own parents.

Look around and see if I'm not right on this point: the adults who most enthusiastically embrace war as a spectator sport are those who are most in touch with their inner child.

Read: Mr. Zellar has a friend that reflects this notion. Mr. Zellar is extrapolating. serving up the extrapolation with a healthy dollop of his own preconceptions of the world - and of the children he's never had to raise..

But enough dicking around. I'll get right to my point: as always, honesty is the best policy with your kids. And if this war isn't a coachable moment for the entire family, I don't know what is. Your children need to understand that there are no longer any non-combatants in this world, and the sooner they learn the rules of engagement the better off we'll all be.

Spoken like a person who's never had to care for a person outside of his own turtleneck in his life.

Because America's youngsters are born gun crazy and trigger happy, but they have the battle ethics of the Fedayeen. Hand a kid a gun and I guarantee you they'll know what to do with it. Guns are to humans as litter boxes are to cats --all right, that's a terrible analogy, but what I'm trying to say is that weapons are part of our wiring. Put a pistol in a kid's hand and see how long it takes for them to point it at their mother's forehead and pull the trigger.

It's called "curiosity", and "testing boundaries", and modelling behavior. It's quite normal - a Masai kid will do the same with a pretend bow and arrow.

Show me a kid who doesn't like to blow stuff up and slay God's creatures and I'll show you a panty-waist with a long, tortured life ahead of them.

Show me a writer who makes such gross and (let's call a spade a spade), bitter generalizations about children, things he has no clue about, and I'll show you someone with a hidden axe to grind.

So, look, parents: relax. Let your kids watch this war to their heart's content. Trust me: they'll get a big kick out of it. There is, of course, always the chance that some particularly fragile children will be freaked out by what they see, and perhaps even permanently affected. I can assure you, however, that in such instances the problem is with the child and not with the war. Neurosis is inescapable in this day and age, and like pretty much everything short of sexual gratification it should be first acquired in the home. So: don't sweat it. War or no war, you're gonna have some stiff therapy bills down the road. That's your problem.

I'm pondering two possible responses here:

• Facing a world peopled with the likes of Brad Zellar would tend to assure that.
• "Daddy? Is this what they call 'tranference?"

We continue:

As your kids watch the televised war, of course, they'll likely have questions about what they're seeing, and you must be willing to answer these queries truthfully. There's not a damn thing in the world wrong with telling your kids that we're killing a bunch of belligerent foreigners and that America's going to be a much better place without them. Believe me, your children will understand.

Or, better yet, tell them the real truth.

They'll understand even better than you do. Kids get this stuff, they really do. "The bigger the gun, the bigger the fun" is one of life's earliest and most useful lessons.

While it no doubt made a great-sounding theory down at (I'll guess) the First Avenue one night, it has no bearing on how real children react. But what would I know - I'm just one of those benighted slob that's raised/is raising three of them

Your kids are also sure to encounter protesters, but, again, simply tell them the truth about these odious characters: these people are hippies and vegetarians who've never done a damn thing but run America down, and you can boil all their babble down to one word: hogwash.

I'm saving that lesson for their first encounter with Brad Zellar's writing.

Brad! Time to up the Zoloft. And since you would seem to live in Uptown or Dinkytown or Loring or some other child-free haven, you might think of meeting some actual children, rather than dreaming up kids who resemble manifestations of Eric Budd or Edvard Munch paintings.

Y'know. Most of them.

Sightseeing - I've done a

Sightseeing - I've done a bit of driving around lately. I've noticed a few things:

• In the upper part of Northeast Minneapolis and out on the East Side of St. Paul: "Liberate Iraq" signs seem to outnumber the "No War in Iraq" signs. Flags are flown openly.
• In Highland Park, South Minneapolis and Mac-Groveland, the "No War" signs of various types outnumber the good guys by several to one - and may of the "Liberate" signs have been vandalized.
• Many St. Paul fire trucks fly the American flag from a jackstaff astern...er, I mean at the back of the truck. Wait until the City Council hears about this!

At The Gates - In

At The Gates - In the movie Enemy at the Gates, itself rather loosely adapted from one chapter of an excellent book by the same name, one of the most striking scenes is at the beginning of the movie.

The Soviets - Stalin - were desperate to stop the Germans - every bit as desperate as the stalinist Hussein or his minions are to stop us today.

A trainload of Soviet conscripts, unarmed except for their Communist Party overseers, rolls across the steppe to Stalingrad. On the east bank of the Volga, they detrain, and are herded to boats through thick artillery fire (which kills a number of them). The boats sail through artillery fire and an attack by Stuka dive-bombers that kills some of the boats, and kills more of the men packed on the decks. Some men jump and try to swim for it, and are shot by the Komissars.

The boats arrive on the west bank of the Volga, still under fire (shrapnel mows down more of them), and they climb a stairway and run down a street to stand behind a US-supplied truck. There, an officer hands out rifles - one rifle and five rounds to every two men. "Those without rifles, pick up the rifle when the man with the rifle is killed", the officers bellow. The conscripts are herded to a jumpoff position, realizing that this is not a good situation.

The whistle blows, and the men - armed or not - jump off and charge down a street toward a German position. Waiting rifles and machine guns mow them down like ripe wheat.

The survivors turn and try to run back to Russian lines. A machine gun manned by a KGB crew also mows them down. The few survivors, having no choice, continue the attack, stepping over bodies from their own group and several previous attacks. Almost all die - except the movie's protagonists.

But there we leave the movie to join the present day. In Iraq today, a similiar scene seemed to occur:

There was fierce fighting in Kut, to the south, where desperate Iraqis armed with rifles charged tanks in a suicide raid. "We mowed down" the attackers, said Lt. Col. B.P. McCoy.

The stories have been circulating for weeks: Ba'ath machine gunners driving Iraqi conscripts forward to the charge; Fedayeen press gangs rounding up civilians, Soviet-style, and in effect holding the families hostage to make the men and boys attack; stuff straight out of World War II.

Again - we really have to win this one.

Grow: Protesters and the Free

Grow: Protesters and the Free Ride - Last week, we talked about Governor Pawlenty's proposal to charge court costs and arrest-related expenses to protesters who break the law in the name of civil disobedience.

In the Twin Cities, we've raised a generation of protesters who've grown used to being able to conduct their "civil disobedience" - complete with scores of "vanity arrests" for trespassing and other offenses - completely at city/county cost.

Doug Grow wrote about this last week.

There are only a couple of problems, beyond those pesky civil-rights issues, that I can see with Gov. Tim Pawlenty's desire to place a "restitution" charge on people arrested for civil disobedience.

Mr. Grow - leave aside the simple fact that one does one not have a "civil right" to break the law. Doesn't the whole notion of a whiffle-ball justice system undermine the whole idea of "civil disobedience"? If the "protesters" approach an act of civil disobedience knowing that there will be absolutely no meaningful consequences, is it really disobedience at all?

Back to Grow:

1. He's not planning to charge enough per bust.

2. Many of the people I know who get arrested don't have that kind of money. Though many protesters work and raise families, many are students and many others frequently don't have the all-American gumption to get the sort of jobs needed to move to places such as Eagan.

Forget for a moment the snarky little class-warfare sneer (which is completely misguided; most "anti-war" protesters I've met are either perfectly well-to-do Highland Park matrons who drive to the "protests" in Volvo 740s, or college kids with no real bills or responsibilities.

To say "they can't afford it" infantilizes both the protesters and the notion of civil disobedience.

And it's irrelevant; the law is the law. Someone arrested for trespassing outside the context of a (politically correct) demonstration can not expect the kid-gloved tokenized treatment that "anti-war" protesters, rich or poor, can expect.

Either, for that matter, can a demonstrator for a less PC cause. Pro-life protesters rarely if ever get quite as sympathetic or consequence-free forum from the legal system.

Before examining its possible shortcomings, here's a quick review of the governor's outside-the-box -- and likely outside-the-Constitution -- proposal:

Pawlenty, apparently agitated that police arrested about 90 antiwar demonstrators last week in the Twin Cities area, said the protesters should pay for the costs of their arrests. He believes $200 would be a nice, round number to work with.

"We're not saying people don't have a right to free speech," Pawlenty said Friday on his weekly radio program. "We're just saying people don't have a right to free arrest."

And this is unconstitutional precisely how?

Very glib, but civil libertarians, of course, already are voicing objections to the governor's plan. (What don't they object to?)

"A surcharge on free speech," is what Senate Majority Leader John Hottinger, DFL-St. Peter, calls the Pawlenty plan.

So many ways to respond to this.

Breaking the law may be speech, but it's not specifically protected by the Constitution; nothing in the Constitution says that either protected or disobedient speech need be cost-free. I enjoy freedom of the press - but I have to pay for the bandwidth and server space. If I intended to break the law to make my "speech"'s point, why would I not expect to pay for it?

My concerns are less academic than Hottinger's.

For starters, $200 often isn't going to be nearly enough to cover the cost of an arrest.

The state record for cost-per-protest-bust, for instance, came on Dec. 28, 1998, when more than 600 law enforcement officers -- police, sheriff's deputies and highway patrol officers -- moved as a mighty army against a bunch of Hwy. 55 protesters in south Minneapolis.

In the end, 36 scrawny tree-huggers were arrested at a cost of $332,488 in overtime billing alone. In addition, law enforcement officers consumed $7,309.90 worth of box lunches, doughnuts, muffins and coffee. Under a pay-for-your-own arrest plan, each tree-hugger would have had to write a check for more than $9,000.

Grow fails to mention that this was a rather extraordinary operation; not in the least bit like the usual protest. Grow uses it to emotionally manipulate the argument.

We saw an exercise in efficiency just this past Tuesday when 68 protesters were arrested outside the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis by a modest force of 50 Minneapolis cops. No overtime was involved in the two-hour operation, and the protesters were hauled to Metro Transit buses, which were lent to the police at no charge.

Assuming the average Minneapolis cop is paid about $25 an hour, the bust-per-protester charge should be only about $40, not counting booking and any upcoming court costs.

Note the clever rhetorical device: for the extreme case, Grow has taken the trouble to get the actual numbers. For the "typical" case that applies to the vast majority of arrests, he takes a wild guess.

Grow fails to account for the non-police-time-related costs; worse, he fails to mention or account for the costs incurred while the fifty cops involved in hauling off the 68 protesters weren't doing their real jobs, patrolling the streets of Minneapolis. The costs of longer response times to robberies and domestic assaults in South Minneapolis, while fifty cops were busy nursemaiding 68 corn-fed Highland Park matrons and college students to their meaningless court dates.

Doug? Get back to us when you've done your homework.

Now, here's the part that really gets me:

The second big flaw in the Pawlenty plan is the fact that some of these peace-and-justice people haven't invested much time in moneymaking careers.

Take career protester Marv Davidov, for example. Davidov figures he's been arrested 51 times going back to the 1960s. He'd be out $10,000 under the Pawlenty rule. Except . . .

Davidov's done a lot of things in his life but has always looked askance at having your standard American job. This means he frequently can't get his hands on $200.

So professional protester Marv Davidov's right to a symbolic arrest and meaningless charge trumps the right of the taxpayer - especially the Minneapolis taxpayer who has every right to expect that her tax money will give her relatively timely police protection, and that the police's time will not be wasted on trivialities like indulging Mr. Davidov's self-righteousness?

That Davidov never has aspired to a steady paying job surely agitates Republicans such as Pawlenty. Why, it even frustrated Marv's own mother, Gerty, who died at age 100 a little more than a year ago.

As we discussed the Pawlenty pay-per-arrest plan on Friday, Marv recalled a phone conversation he once had with Gerty:

Gerty: "What did you do this weekend, Marv?"

Marv: "I went to hear the Minnesota Orchestra. It was wonderful."

Gerty: "You love the orchestra. Why don't you get a job with them?"

Marv: "I can't get a job with the orchestra. You never taught me to play a [very strong expletive] instrument."

Gerty: "Don't use a word like that when you're talking to me."

Marv: "What word? 'Job?' "

Touching.

I'd suspect that Mr. Grow considers it admirable, that someone can reach late middle-age and never have held a job, having devoted his/her entire existence to...what? "Activism?"

Tell you what, Marv (and Doug): Spend your energy learning a [very strong expletive] instrument, and quit talking to your [very strong expletive] mother like that.

And pay for your own [very strong expletive] symbolic arrests. Assuage your self-righteous ego on your own [very strong expletive] dime.

Sometimes, our governor doesn't seem to see the complexities.

Normally that's not such a good thing.

In this case? Stomp on the "complexities", Governor. Charge them for every [very strong expletive] dime they cost the rest of us.

By the way - I know I have some readers in the Strib newsroom. I'd welcome Mr. Grow's response to this.

Progress - Reiterating my analogy

Progress - Reiterating my analogy from yesterday; if Fargo is Kuwait and St. Paul is Baghdad, a Coalition probe just pulled into Robbinsdale, maybe even North Minneapolis.

According to the radio news, it then pulled back - it may have just been a reconaissance in force.

But after two weeks, that's pretty amazing.

Interesting watching the way the media's mood has changed in the past week, isn't it? From gloom and doom to euphoria. Both, of course, are inappropriate.

The McGovern Gambit - I'm

The McGovern Gambit - I'm not saying Bush couldn't be vulnerable in the next election. Who knows - we have a double-dip recession, or the battle for Baghdad goes badly, anything can happen. We i>could have a Dem president in '04.

But I'm suspecting that using terms that tacitly to Saddam Hussein or some other tinpot dictator isn't the way to do it.

''What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States,'' Kerry said in a speech at the Peterborough Town Library.

Despite pledging two weeks ago to cool his criticism of the administration once war began, Kerry unleashed a barrage of criticism as US troops fought within 25 miles of Baghdad.

By echoing the ''regime change'' line popular with hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters who have demonstrated across the nation in recent weeks, the Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential contender seemed to be reaching out to a newly invigorated constituency as rival Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, closes in on Kerry in opinion polls.

Oh, please please please please PLEASE, Democrat party - please please do in '04 what McGovern did in '72. Please line up behind someone who's so far to the left even the trade unions turn up their noses at him. Please nominate someone who's aligned himself with the wackjobs blocking traffic in San Francisco.

Tell you what - you nominate Kerry, I'll pitch a couple bucks in to the Sierra Fund. Deal?

Three Articles - I hope

Three Articles - I hope that's enough until later today. I have to get to a school conference, then get to a project (and hopefully find some coffee - I've run out).

By the way - thanks for those of you who've contributed to the site via my Amazon link on the right. You have not only made the site self-supporting for these past six or so months - you've funded what could be a fairly significant (if not important) development which should be rolling out in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

The Revolution and the Arab

The Revolution and the Arab Street(s) - Thomas Friedman had a fascinating piece yesterday on how the war is playing in the "Arab Street".

For starters - there is no "Arab Streets" - according to Friedman, there are three streets - Arab liberals, the chattering classes, and officials in the various governments. Each is having different reactions to what Friedman calls "the revolutionary side of US power", which Friedman describes:

for Arabs, American culture has always been revolutionary — from blue jeans to "Baywatch" — but American power, since the cold war, has only been used to preserve the status quo here, keeping in place friendly Arab kings and autocrats.

. Friedman goes on to quote an Arab professor:

I spent this afternoon with the American studies class at Cairo University. The professor, Mohamed Kamel, summed up the mood: "In 1975, Richard Nixon came to Egypt and the government turned out huge crowds. Some Americans made fun of Nixon for this, and Nixon defended himself by saying, `You can force people to go out and welcome a foreign leader, but you can't force them to smile.' Maybe the Iraqis will eventually stop resisting you. But that will not make this war legitimate. What the U.S. needs to do is make the Iraqis smile. If you do that, people will consider this a success."

There is a lot riding on that smile, Mr. Kamel added, because this is the first "Arab-American war." This is not about Arabs and Israelis. This is about America getting inside the Arab world — not just with its power or culture, but with its ideals. It is a war for what America stands for. "If it backfires," Mr. Kamel concluded, "if you don't deliver, it will really have a big impact. People will not just say your policies are bad, but that your ideas are a fake, you don't really believe them or you don't know how to implement them."

So in other words, we can't screw up the post-war period.

And I don't think we will. George W Bush is not George HW Bush. He's not motivated primarily by a desire to stabilize the region - he is truly, as Friedman says, applying a revolution to Iraq.

Unlike most revolutions, the American Revolution had an upside for those who survived it. We need to make sure the American Revolution in Iraq bears more resemblance to ours than to, say, the French or Russian or Nicaraguan versions.

The Diversity Tapdance - John

The Diversity Tapdance - John Fund, on how badly the "diversity" movement has failed to convince even liberal college professors of its value - and the lengths they're going to in covering their tracks:

That negative attitude may be wholly the result of the methods used to produce diversity. Those methods have silent majorities opposing them. A majority of faculty members oppose relaxing academic standards in order to promote diversity. Even administrators, who oversee diversity policies, are sharply divided, with a full 48% opposing racial preferences. While two-thirds of administrators don't believe that admitting minority students with lower academic qualifications affects academic standards, those who believe they have a negative effect outnumber those who think they have positive effects by a margin of 15 to 1. "Those who argue that diversity will improve the education of everybody haven't made their case," concludes Mr. Rothman. "The data do not support them."

Maybe that's why an obviously frantic University of Michigan felt compelled to collect a record-breaking 78 friend-of-the-court briefs supporting its position...

...The briefs backing Mr. Bollinger came from dozens of leading companies, labor unions, three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and members of Congress. All of them cite diversity's benefits, but they offer scant evidence and little data.

Indeed, some engage in outright deception. Peter Wood, a professor of anthropology and author of "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept," was appalled at what some of the material in the briefs--and he looked at only a few of them. Indiana University's law school, for example, claimed that it gave great weight to law school board scores and undergraduate grades in determining admissions. The school claimed that race was at the end of a long list of "other factors" it looked at. In reality, half of the students are admitted on the basis of their test scores and half of those go into a pool where race is a prime factor in the decision. The Hoosier Review, a student publication, quoted a former admissions committee member as saying that "to meet de facto quotas, we leapfrog less qualified minority applicants over approximately 330 more qualified nonminority applicants." An internal law school memo mentioned the "concern that a minimum of five blacks per section of the first years class is needed." But in practice the quota is a ceiling as well as a floor. Indiana University has seen the number of black applicants to its law school nearly double in the past three years, but the number of blacks admitted is a rigid number (52, 52 and 53).

I'll be writing - maybe later today - a piece on how this movement has reflected itself in the St. Paul Public School system.

Attention, Islamacist Terrorists! - This

Attention, Islamacist Terrorists! - This sort of things has just got to piss off the likes of Al Quaeda:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."

OK - let's allow for the possibility that this is creative spin by the military, manipulating the press a la Wag the Dog - hey, it could be a big trick. I doubt it - from a PR perspective, this story didn't need a more sympathetic protagonist. But even if it is a made-up or exaggerated story, so what? This is the kind of thing that has to make Al Quaeda grind its teeth with rage. "Woman takes out a couple of Fedayeen thugs and fires off all her ammo before being captured, probably unconscious. Fedayeen guys violates a slug of Koranic rules by stabbing her after she was incapacitated. And the infidels get her back anyway". See how this is going to play in Karachi?

A Debka Flash - Debkafile

A Debka Flash - Debkafile is reporting that there may just be nobody at the wheel in Iraq today:

In a move that smacked of panic, Iraqi intelligence agents went round the capital impounding cell phones to cut off contact with the outside world as wild rumors swirled around the fate of Saddam Hussein, his sons and his regime.

The little hard information reaching DEBKAfile’s most reliable intelligence sources is that Saddam and his sons departed Baghdad some days ago. They do not know where he went, or in what state of health, whether he traveled abroad for medical treatment or the family headed for a safe berth prepared in advance, or even if they arrived safely at their destination.

But it is safe to say that Saddam and the senior members of his family are no longer at the helm of government. Iraq is undoubtedly in the process of regime change, the main objective of the Iraq War. Anything beyond that is hazy. Other members of the Saddam regime may have seized power after the ruler himself departed.

Now, this next part is an intrigueing twist - yesterday, there were rumors, which the Administration and Pentagon quashed immediately, that the US and Iraq were involved in secret peace negotiations via some kind of intermediary.

If the Debka story is true, it could give a motivation to the "negotiation" angle.

The new ruling caste may be divided between a faction negotiating terms of surrender with the Americans and a second, which is determined to fight on. The whole truth of the day’s events on April 2 may never be fully discovered. The war may come to an abrupt end, but not the Iraq crisis which promises more upheaval ahead.

As the guys from Powerline say, Debka is usually pretty reliable, often reporting news that seems farcical because it's so far ahead of the pack (like their report around Christmas that indicated US, UK, Australian, Jordanian, Turkish and Iranian Special Forces were already in action in Kurdistan and the Marshes; except for the Iranians, this story was largely confirmed by the major US media not too long ago.

So take what you need and leave the rest. But in this case, pray they're right. This could end the war very quickly.

This story via Powerline, which has been absolutely on fire these last few days.

Sniffing - Jesse Jackson is

Sniffing - Jesse Jackson is now trying to serve as an intermediary to contact our POWs.

This quote almost made me yakk up my soup:

To be humane, you must have a commitment to reconciliation".

Since the only people he'll be dealing with are the Iraqi leadership, and/or the leadership of the Fedayeen, whoever they are, I have to wonder what he's talking about.

I don't suspect we want to "reconcile" with them.

Diminuitive - I'm still waiting

Diminuitive - I'm still waiting to see the first reaction in the "alternative,", anti-Bush media to the rescue of PFC Lynch. I'm especially waiting for the urbane, hip left-wing media to start in on the soldier's family; on TV, they come across as Appalachian blue-collar working stiffs, with the accent, the tumbledown house, the three kids in the Army. If you see any such references, send them to me.

But I have a bunch of bones to pick with the major media - and I wonder if any so-called "feminists" will echo this. Too many in the media have referred to PFC Lynch in diminuitive terms; "the nineteen-year-old was brought...", "the Girl from West Virginia..." and so on.

She's a soldier! She's grownup! Yes, her relative photogeneity certainly doesn't hurt "sell" the story, but let's not ignore the fact that PFC Lynch is a member of the Army, no different than the crustiest Staff Sergeant in the dustiest tank unit.

More on this as it develops.

Finding the Dark Cloud -

Finding the Dark Cloud - Not to use up a whole day talking about Steve Perry, but I had to touch on this bit from his blog that involves some of the most creative digging for encouragement I've ever seen:

A Gallup poll released over the weekend shows that black America continues to oppose this war, and by a striking margin: 68-29. Maybe you've already heard as much. But here's another detail from the same poll that few have mentioned: The $30,000 a year income threshold is a major breaking point, too. Above that level, 78 percent of all Americans now say they support Bush's war; below, only 58 percent. Still a majority for Bush, but a tenuous one,

Whoah!

Leave aside, for now, the fact that Americans who earn over $30K support the war by a 4-1 margin, by Perry's own data.

According to Perry, Americans who earn less than $30K, the ones to whom Perry and his paper constantly depict as a seething cauldron of anti-establishment frustration, support the administration by a 3-2 margin.

When a political campaign ends with a 3-2 margin for a candidate, it's regarded as a drubbing. A landslide. A politcal and statistical degüello.

Suddenly, according to Steve Perry, the fact that Bush has a 20 point lead among low-income Americans is "tenuous"?

Leaving aside the fact that all all polling numbers are transitory (vide George 41); if one is to believe the spin that Perry et al put on class relations in America, this number is utterly inconceivable!

How could this be?

and it's not likely to get better as the economy keeps on stagnating or sinks lower.

Well, Mr. Perry will have to just hope, won't he?

Contrarian Blues - Steve Perry

Contrarian Blues - Steve Perry is the editor of Minneapolis' City Pages. In previous mentions, I'd said the Pages were Minneaoplis' version of the Village Voice. In fact, they are the Twin Cities' subsidiary of the company that owns both papers.

Steve Perry is a gadfly to both sides - he rather famously shredded the DFL after last November's defeat at the polls.

But make no mistake, he's anti-war. Soooo anti-war.

He (along with most of the CP's writers) has a blog, one of the few "out" anti-war blogs in the Twin Cities.

But it was his editorial from last week's CP that caught my attention:

If your viewing habits are anything like mine, you probably did not tune in to Oprah last Tuesday...Oprah taping antiwar show! Developing! Right, I thought. What might Oprah Winfrey--Goddess of All Media, a figure nearly as shining and raceless and apolitical as Tiger Woods--have to say about invading Iraq? ...So I watched, and I am here to tell you: For anyone concerned to know where the fabled silent majority is these days, it was a revelation.

Perry seems to have a problem with accepting numbers; in various articles, he's noted, and even tried to rationalize, the fact that Americans seem to support the war by a 3-1 margin, digging hard for any nugget or bon mot that shows that the 3-1 majority is really a minority.

In Oprah, he thinks he's found it:

From the start the air was heavy and melancholy; Winfrey and her guests (the ubiquitous Tom Friedman of the Times and a Middle East specialist from Sarah Lawrence, Fawas Gerges) all seemed shaken by the quickening of events. Friedman looked especially cowed. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner spoke as though he had just wandered in dazed from a particularly brutal Dr. Phil taping. The thing is, he kept saying, America has to come to grips with the way it has hurt the world's feelings. "We've been exporting our fears, not our hopes," he scolded.

Fear is one of nature's means of assuring self-preservation.

Messrs. Perry and Friedman: In 1942, we exported our fear of Japanese invasion, and Nazi dominion over Europe. Seen in this context, Omaha Beach was a firesale of US fears.

Israel was, in this context, the result of gathering together a lot of fears; one wants to ask Messrs Perry and Friedman if fear of mass extinction and genocide is a valid reason to fight?

Yes, we export our fears; it's called "Self-preservation", or "Defense". I see a bunch of drunk bikers throwing beer cans in front of a bar? I step carefully - or, as Messrs. Perry and Friedman would have it, "export my fears".

Yet even the always-dependable Friedman could not exactly endorse Bush's war.

Because he's not, nor has he ever been, a Bush supporter. For a NYTimes columnist, he is as close to balanced as anyone this side of William Safire, but he's never been mistaken for a Republican.

...the mood of the broadcast was quietly and vehemently antiwar. The most amazing segment came midway through, when Oprah lent her seal of approval to a lengthy and fairly devastating bit of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine--the scene in which shot after shot and caption after caption recount bloody U.S.-sponsored coups and dictators while Louis Armstrong croons "What a Wonderful World." Now first, you rarely see this sort of thing on American television, and when you do it is always followed by a litany of credentialed hacks telling you what hogwash it is.

Piffle. "Columbine" was one of the most lionized movies of the year. It won the friggin' Oscar, for the love of pete.

But after the clip, and Moore's own pointed comments about our bloody empire, no one tried to deny the veracity of the claims. Well, Friedman said wearily, you could make a similar clip about Saddam. Right, said Gerges, and you could make a dozen more about the U.S.! Friedman fell silent.

And this - an exchange between a mild Anti-Bush pundit and a rabid Anti-Bush pundit - proves what? Which Anti-Bush pundit gets more cred with Steve Perry, apparently.

Perry drives toward the crux:

What's so remarkable about this? So Oprah did an antiwar show, you might say. She's not God.

But you're wrong about that. Oprah is the author of the most successful syndicated show in television history. She presides over one of the largest-circulation magazines in the country, launched a scant few years ago. She sells millions of books magically, simply by causing their names to pass her lips. She spins the likes of Dr. Phil into gold. She knows the pulse of workaday America better than you will ever know your spouse, your children, yourself. Where the public taste is concerned, she is God.

Wrong, Mr. Perry.

For that part of the public that watches daytime TV, and lets their opinion be driven by the likes of a pop-psych diva, she's a large female Michael Jackson. For volvo-driving soccer moms that are trying to find personalities of their own, Oprah fills a vaccuum, perhaps.

She is the daytime TV-watching, supermarket-tabloid-reading public what Michael Jackson was to music in the eighties.

And that is all. Her demographic is big - but no bigger than her savvy in marketing to them, in squeezing every last viewer and dollar out of that cachet. But it's not a synonym for "America", or even "Silent Majority".

Ask yourself; do you think Oprah's audience is bigger than Rush Limbaugh's?

She attained this status not just by telling her audience things they already knew, as some of her critics have charged; Oprah's great gift is that she never tells them things they will not want to hear.

So you see what it means for her to step out this way. It says that, at the start of a war that will not end in the present theater of battle and may conceivably not end at all in this generation, the president of the United States is already losing the hearts and minds of the American people.

Perhaps - if you follow the desired story line far enough. I have my doubts that that'll happen.

Mr. Perry proceeds:

A majority--or near majority, depending on the day and the poll--have opposed waging war on the present terms. (Polls since early last week have shown a large and predictable spike in support of the war, but that is an emotional reaction and probably a fleeting one.)

In this, Mr. Perry reminds one of the Adolph Hitler of 1945; not ideologically, of course (I'm not comparing Perry with a Nazi), but psychologically. As the Red Army advanced on Berlin, Hitler stood before his map table, moving division that existed on paper, planning offensives jumping off from places he no longer held.

Perry's numbers in this argument are like Hitler's phantom divisions in 1945 - comforting to those who want to believe in the cause; just not real.

The polls before the war were pro-liberation. Today, the difference is nearly 3-1. That's more than a "spike".

Not only that: A shockingly large and heretofore unseen minority have begun to realize that their country is an iron-fisted world empire that is despised on nearly every corner of the globe.

Note the choice of words; "Shockingly Large" to whom? And how "Shockingly large" is this minority? Who interviewed them? From where did they start on the way to this realization - from the far left? Do you see legions of truck-stop waitresses and ex-Marines switching sides?

If that "shockingly large" minority constitutes Mr. Perry's social circle, it would make sense. Beyond that - let's say I need convincing.

And now the most revered producer in American media thinks that message is ready to go mainstream.

No. It means that America's most successful pop-psych lifestyle huckster feels safe telling her large, but captive, audience what it most likely believes anyway.

And it'll be interesting to see if a "Shockingly large" minority of Oprah's viewers desert the show in coming weeks, in light of her stance.

We shall see. I'm not betting against it.

That would be something new under the sun, indeed.

Maple Grove - Following my

Maple Grove - Following my analogy from earlier this week, depicting the US advance in Minnesota terms (picture Fargo as Kuwait and St. Paul as Baghdad), US troops are in Maple Grove and Chanhassen:

The 3rd Infantry Division ( Mechanised) pushed beyond the Iraqi's "red line" defensive positions on the approaches to Baghdad - the point at which it was feared Saddam would unleash chemical weapons.

Asked if they would reach Baghdad today, a senior US source said: "Keep watching the television." Ahead of them Apache helicopters blasted missiles at anything in their path, clearing the way for the advance. In the first of a series of dramat ic move s , troops completely encircled the city of Karbala, 68 miles south-west of the capital this morning. They then swept past along both sides of the Euphrates. US units later crossed the Euphrates at a bridge north of Karbala.

In the south-east, US marines fighting the Republican Guard near the city of Kut took and secured a vital bridge over the Tigris. Thousands of US troops crossed the bridge today. Brig Gen Brooks said their advance was "a dagger pointed to the heart" of Baghdad. At Kut the US forces dropped two huge "daisy cutter" bombs, sending giant mushroomshaped clouds billowing into the sky. Troops were this afternoon punching forward on three fronts. The first was north-east from Karbala. Another advanced north-west from Kut where they seized Highway 6 to Baghdad. The third front was moving directly north from the town of Hillah on the eastern side of the Euphrates.

I'm going to try to find a map I can post. This is getting interesting.

Business As Usual - I

Business As Usual - I hope I get a job soon, so I can settle down to a halfways sane pace. Between calling, interviews, and little freelance gigs, I'm a lot busier now than when I'm working.

Some work to do today - I'll post more later on this afternoon or evening. I'm hoping - hoping, mind you - to write something about Steve Perry, at the City Pages, and his approach to the whole war thing.

Be sure to check back!

Sullivan Quote of the Day

Sullivan Quote of the Day - Sullivan sends a challenge to the anti-war left.

Here's the payoff:

The rhetoric of the "anti-war" movement has consistently argued that this is indeed a criminal war: that it is being conducted by an illegal president for nefarious ends - oil contracts, the Jews, world domination, etc etc. When you have used rhetoric of that sort, when you have described your own country as indistinguishable in legitimacy from a Stalinist dictatorship, when you have described the president as the equivalent of the Nazi SS, when you have carried posters with the words Bush = Terrorist and "We Support Our Troops When they Shoot Their Officers," then why shouldn't you support the enemy?

Before the war, such hyperbole could perhaps be dismissed as rhetorical excess. During a war, when American and allied soldiers are risking their lives, it is something far worse. Before the war, it was inexcusable but not that damning for the mainstream left merely to ignore the rabid, immoral anti-American rhetoric of some of their allies. But during a war, ignoring it is no longer an option. In fact, the mainstream left has a current obligation to declare its renunciation of what amounts to a grotesque moral inversion, to disavow the sentiments that were cheered at Columbia University.

You can see why they might be reluctant. De Genova's rhetoric - and that of the rest of the far left - describes president Bush as an unelected, maniacal tyrant, a caricature that is useful to Bush's political enemies. But indeed, if the president is what de Genova says he is, if he is, as the posters have it, the same as Hitler, then why indeed isn't Saddam indistinguishable? Why should we back one unelected dictator against another? Those are questions the rest of the anti-war left never answered categorically before the war, because they didn't have to. Now they do.

An excellent article. Always worth a read.

Note to the Media - I'm getting tired of seeing stories about "US Troops" read over footage of British troops.

Handy recognition guide for US-based producers:

• Roundish helmet, yellowish uniforms, or wearing berets of any kind? Brits.
• Helmet shaped like WWII German helmet, and green or tan-pattern camo uniforms? US.

Don't make me repeat this.

The Sane French - While

The Sane French - While I've had my "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey" moments with the French, and I and many Americans have rightly pointed out the fact that French foreign policy is at odds with ours because, though they're a weak, sclerotic nation, they still feel powerful.

Still, more French are with us than against us, according to a Le Monde poll. 34% of the French back us in Iraq, while 25% support Iraq, with 31% neutral.

A stunning victory? Hardly, but a plurality (and not much different than our last gubernatorial election, actually).

This is all by way of saying; our stereotype of the French "America-hating coward" is no more accurate than the sneering Frog intelligentisa's slurs about cowboys and ugly Americans. Stereotypes exist for a reason - but as in all questions, there's more to it than surface indicators and satisfying one-liners.

Left Tackles Peaceniks - The

Left Tackles Peaceniks - The LA Weekly - the La La Land version of the City Pages - has been astoundingly balanced for this type of publication (especially when compared with the comically dogmatic City Pages (or, to be fair, the comically-intense dogmatism of editor Steve Perry and the vast majority of his staff).

In this article, Marc Cooper tackles some of the hypocrisy and self-absorption of the "anti-war" movement:

Maybe someone in the peace movement should figure out that not only Bush could stop this war. So could Saddam — by resigning his unelected post and saving his people any further sacrifice. Yet I’ve yet to see one anti-war placard allude to Saddam’s responsibilities in securing the peace.

But talk about quagmires. The peace movement, which promises so much in its scope and energy, itself remains bogged down in a minimalist program of simply and only opposing U.S. military action. That’s hardly enough. The movement suffers a malady similar to that of the Bushies, but in reverse: smart principles but dumb — no, make that stupid — operational politics. Pure rejectionism, since the outbreak of war makes the peace movement as blind and indiscriminate as a WWII-vintage iron-cast bomb, though considerably less dangerous and infinitely less powerful.

Blocking traffic when 74 percent of the American people support the war, or endlessly whining about CNN’s coverage, or grandstanding as Michael Moore did at the Oscars (news - web sites) telling America that a president who currently enjoys (for all the sordid reasons we know) stratospheric popularity ratings is “fictitious,” has much more to do with personal therapy than with effective politics. Continue on that tack and you can pretty much count on another four years of Bush, no matter how ugly the war turns.

The article also notes, rightly, that the whole notion of "bringing the troops home" is specious - if we were to turn around and drive back to Kuwait, it'd open the Iraqis up to horrendous consequences.

Protecting the Iraqi people, as the peace movement rightfully desires, is one helluva lot more complicated than merely shielding them from the collateral damage caused by U.S. bombs. (That is, unless you really believe that America is the “greatest terrorist state in the world,” as is so often repeated on KPFK’s drive-time shows. If your world-view is that facile, then indeed we have little more to discuss.)

Those who chant “U.S. out of Iraq” ought to be prepared, then, to offer themselves as human shields to protect the Kurds against threatening Turkish troops (a task currently in the hands of U.S. special forces). Or as shields to protect the southern marsh Arabs against occupation by the theocratic armed forces of Iran. Perhaps all those human shields, idle now after fleeing Baghdad when Saddam’s government ordered them anchored to strategic military targets, could assume these new responsibilities.

It's all worth a read - high praise from something from the LA Weekly.

The Other Rescue - While

The Other Rescue - While the rescue of Army Pfc. Lynch was a moral coup and a tactical showpiece (although the 11 bodies found with her are most probably not good news), there was another rescue in the news yesterday that, in its details, showed every bit as well the evil we're fighting.

Troops of the 1st Battalion, The Black Watch (the senior Scottish regiment, and one of two Scots regiments in the Gulf) rescued a pair of Kenyans who had been kidnapped and badly mistreated by the Iraqis. The two men were apparently held in a school for ten days, used as de-facto human shields.

The good news? According to the story quoted by Powerline, the Scots were tipped off to the Kenyans' presence by locals.

Side note: So if the worst fears are true, it's possible that most of the people captured in the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company are dead. I'm waiting for the first feminist to make a jape at the fact that the only one spared was a cute 19 year old blond. It's inevitable, you know.

Side Side Note: Yes, I was drawn to the story about the Black Watch due to my current interest in Great Highland Bagpipes. Why?

Twice Shy - So many

Twice Shy - So many on the left are convinced that Iraqis are, completely at odds with prewar hopes, irredeemably hostile to the US; that their sense of Arab nationalism will trump any relief that obtains from being liberated from Hussein.

I just saw CNN's Ryan Chillcothe (sp?) reporting from An Najaf, with the 101st Airborne. He indicated that in this city - where the US intends to come to stay - they were welcomed quite warmly. With the mass of US troops present, the Fedayeen death squads seem unlikely to recrudesce.

In other towns - the ones we've bypassed - the death squads are still able to travel, undercover, terrorizing, murdering those who express any joy at the Coalition arrival.

Something had to give in an offensive like this; with four divisions and change attacking a nation the size of California, you can not both garrison every town and drive for the objective.

But, like in any counterinsurgency operation, we will need eventually to put troops on the job garrisoning the Iraqi hinterlands, and especially hunting down any zealot guerrillas. Reports that Iraqi citizens have helped by pointing out sniper positions and headquarters are a promising thing.

Restraint - For those who

Restraint - For those who don't follow these things, the British have more successful experience at counterinsurgency warfare than anyone; in brushfire wars in Malaysia, Yemen, Northern Ireland and Oman, they literally wrote the book on the sort of "hearts and minds" operations that we'll need to master to make the liberation of Iraq work out.

And there are problems:

Monday’s checkpoint shootings were seen as a disaster for the coalition’s efforts to win Iraqi hearts and minds. Asked if they undermined attempts to court the local population, Colonel Chris Vernon, a British army spokesman, replied: “It does indeed, and if you were a civilian watching that you would interpret it in that way.”

The difference in approach was epitomised yesterday when the Royal Marines in four southern Iraqi towns swapped their helmets for berets as a sign of goodwill. American troops wear helmets at all times and checkpoint troops cover their faces with goggles and scarves.

US commanders are also said to have instructed their troops to adopt tougher tactics to weed out militiamen. “Everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven otherwise,” one Pentagon official is reported as saying before Monday’s checkpoint shooting.

British military sources spoke at length about the hard-won experience of UK troops from manning checkpoints and policing in Northern Ireland. “There is no doubt that with that experience, as well as in peace support operations in countries such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, the British have learnt the art of restraint,” one source said.

We may be the best in the world at putting firepower on target - nobody else comes close. But the psychology of transitioning from war to peace is something at which the Brits are still the experts.

It's a little disturbing that this gulf exists.

Support the Troops, Oppose the

Support the Troops, Oppose the War? - Is it possible to oppose the war and yet support the troops?

Of course it is. It's even possible to oppose war in general, yet support the liberation of Iraq and also support the troops.

But there is a dividing line. And plenty on the left cross it. The most egregious example, of course, is Professor Nicholas De Genova, who famously called for "a Million Mogadishus" at an anti-Bush rally over the weekend.

But that example is just too easy. Let's look at an article whose author is obviously This slobbering at the thought of a US defeat.. The defeat, of course, would help the author's desired political outcome, a Bush defeat in 2004.

Military defeat is inevitably accompanied by death and misery on the part of the loser. If you wish for a political victory couched in a military defeat, the deaths to ones servicepeople inevitably follow; logically, these people wish for the worst for our troops.

You can't have it both ways.

So yes - a person can oppose the war and support the troops simultaneously. But it's not an automatic thing; when people claim they can do that, there's a burden of proof they need to meet.

By the way, Mr. Parry unleashes this hooter:

The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia.

Hm. Doesn't really square with Mark Bowden's non-partisan take on the situation; Clinton cut and ran like a scared girlscout after Mogadishu, even though Mogadishu was a tactical victory on the ground. Clinton caved in on every count. To spin that as a clever loss-cutting strategy is incredibly disingenuous, and more or less shows the author's agenda.

Beneath Contempt, Part II -

Beneath Contempt, Part II - Several emailers wrote to tell me the picture I cited yesterday, from Democrat-affiliated hate site Democrats.com had disappeared. It seems the site changes its pages around midnight every day.

I wish I'd saved it - it was probably the yellowest piece of hack I've seen on the web - and I've seen lots. It showed a US soldier - an Afro-American - sitting in an airport, in tears, obviously bidding his family (wife and little girl) goodbye.

Fair enough - but the caption they added was absolutely diabolical. I'll paraphrase (I wish I'd saved it): "Sergeant XXXXX ponders the fate that awaits him in Iraq, fighting a war for an unelected president bla bla bla...". Oh, yeah - the heading was "COM-EDY". Ha ha.

Today? A new hooter, a petition demanding the President be indicted for "war crimes".

Yeah, I know - these people crank out petitions faster than my kids do their homework. And internet petitions aren't worth the paper they're not printed on.

So the temptation's there to just ignore their little hate site. But there's satisfaction in calling a spade a spade.

Or calling a vile, opportunistic little hate site by its true name.

Leave Nobody Behind - Nine

Leave Nobody Behind - Nine Marines died last week in an effort to rescue the POWs from the 507th Maintenance Company.

Sunday is the first time U.S. military officials revealed that Marines conducted a search-and-rescue operation to recover the wounded Army soldiers. All but one of the missing Marines was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, from Camp Lejeune, N.C.

The part that gets me - for the first time, I can really, truly identify with all the fathers who are wondering about their sons and daughters. It hit me with a bang a few weeks ago - my son is eight years away from being able to join the military. My stepson is well within military age.

And of course, we're all on the front lines anyway, whether we're in uniform or not.

We really need to win this one.

Another Tricky Day - Much

Another Tricky Day - Much more work to do.

And Blogger is acting up...again.

But I'll be posting this evening.

Terrorists - Powerline has an

Terrorists - Powerline has an excellent piece on the Ansar-e-Islam compound our forces raided, and what it means to the war on terror:

The Associated Press reports that American and Kurdish forces have searched the compound formerly occupied by Ansar al-Islam Islamofascists in northern Iraq, and have found "what may be the strongest evidence yet linking the group to al-Qaida." The search also yielded documents and computer data identifying Ansar members or sympathizers around the world. General Richard Myers says that the Ansar compound is believed to be the source of the ricin that was found in London a couple of months ago.

And as the guys say - it's not just about Al-Quaeda. Even if there's no link between Al-Quaeda and any Iraq; the terrorist world is both decentralized and cross-pollinating.

We have no idea what a big win this is going to turn out to be.

Attention, Garage Logicians - Great

Attention, Garage Logicians - Great story in the Strib this morning about a Marine tank crew that ended up stranded in the desert for about three days, and was declared Missing In Action for 11.

Read the article, of course. But the part you GLers have to love was right here:

The next morning, the crew went to work with rope, communications wire and duct tape.

It really is universal, isn't it?