Shot In The Dark

Shooting at the Government Center

Shooting at the Government Center - A woman with a history of mental instability shot two people inside the Hennepin County Government Center yesterday, killing one.

I have no intention of making light of this tragic shooting, but there's a point here.

The Hennepin County Court has defied state law and made the Government Center a "gun free zone", forbidding legal carry permit holders from the premises, huh?

No, shooter Susan Berkovitz wasn't one of them:

Berkovitz hasn't applied for a permit in Hennepin County, authorities said.

Wow. I'm sure the two victims feel much better knowing that.

No, indeed, amid descriptions of the incredibly lax security at the Government Center...:

"I could have had an AK-47 in a duffel bag and walked right into the building and up to the courthouse," [District Judge John Holahan] said.

...we're supposed to rely on government-provided security (from the county, in this case) to keep us safe once we step through those doors.

Well, most of us are:

An army veteran and hunter, [Judge Holahan] said he was so frightened by one man's death threats early last year that he got a permit to carry a handgun.

Apparently judges' lives are worth more than yours is.

You can't blame Judge Holahan. You can blame the Hennepin County Courts, who have defied state law and created a cocoon where the homicidally insane know that nobody without a uniform can really hurt them.

Plame/Wilson - The left -

Plame/Wilson - The left - including certain lefty bloggers - have been clinging to hope with the Plame/Wilson story. In their world, this could have been the great equalizer - the one thing that truly signalled "moral equivalence", that would mean the Bush Administration was really no morally better than Clinton was (and that they know, deep in their hearts, Clinton was, assuming they have some sense of right and wrong).

But it's not going to happen.

Sullivan lays out the non-story.

The Daily Kos claims

Novak has had a rocky relationship with this administration, but at the end of the day, he would rather have a Republican in the White House than a Democrat. He is a partisan, and his statement (which remember, doesn't exculpate the administration from wrongdoing) is simply the first salvo of the administration's counterattack.

Perhaps. But for a first salvo, it's one of the "fluke shot that smacks into the enemy commander"-type first salvos.

Fun With Polls, Part III

Fun With Polls, Part III - The left is hanging on every poll they can find that shows the President doing anything short of conquering the universe.

Yet there's more to the polls than meets the eye, says Michael Barone in next week's US News:

"Last week's Gallup Poll showed new entrant Wesley Clark leading the Democratic presidential field and leading Bush in a general election. This is a double reversal. Howard Dean had been the Democrat zooming to the top of the field; now we see something like a statistical tie, with Clark apparently a contender. Similarly, this is the first time Bush has trailed a specific (as opposed to generic) Democrat. But there is reason for caution here. The Gallup sample seems to be disproportionately Democratic (48 percent of respondents passed the screen as Democratic-primary voters), and it puts Bush's job rating at the lower end of the 49-percent-to-59-percent range in polls taken over the past month."

In other words, Bush is losing - as long as you ask a sample that includes triple the proportioinal number of likely Democrat voters.

Talk About Pop Music. Talk

Talk About Pop Music. Talk About... - There's a strain of revisionism going around that tries to deprecate '80's pop music. A couple of the Infinite Monkeys have been having it out; James started the exchange:

One more thing about Robert Palmer: man, Power Station totally sucked. Had to be one of the worst bands of the 80s-- I'd put them up there with Toto or Styper. Oh, God the memories are flowing back: Wham! Haircut 100. Boy George. Thommpson Twins. A-ha! Oingo Boingo. Duran Duran. Flock of Seagulls. ELO. Whitesnake. Warrant. Scorpion. Wang Chung. Tom Tom Club. Hall and Oates. Bananarama. The Bangles. The Go-Gos. Journey. Styx. Yes. Sugar Hill Gang. The Alan Parsons Project. Genesis. XTC. Simple Minds. Peter Gabriel. Devo. Human League. The Cult. Depeche Mode. The Motels. Rick Astley. DiVynyls. Pet Shop Boys.

Robbo continued with a...er, oblique defense:

I don't want to hear any crap about Oingo Boingo!

Mentioning XTC (who also don't deserve to get lumped in the same list with A-ha and Stryper) reminded me of a great song by They Might Be Giants called "XTC vs. Adam Ant".

Sigh.

OK, kids; I claim absolute expertise on this subject of '80s music and XTC, in that:

• I was a disc jockey during the peak of '80s music - '82-86 - and
• I stood at the next urinal with XTC's Andy Partridge (and told him why "Dear God" was a really irritating and smug song, although in that jovial way guys have when we're unrinal-to-urinal

Fact is, and I can say this without the slightest fear of being taken as a curmudgeon, the period from 1982 to 1986 was one of the three best periods for pop music in the entire rock and roll era. There were lots of reasons for this:

• It was the first and only time the Top Forty was just as good as the Alternative charts - because it largely was the same as the alternative charts! The bands that had been "alt" in 1979 - the Clash, Devo, The Police among many others - and the genres that had never seen radio were suddenly what everyone was listening to.
• The best rock and roll band of 1983 was headed by a little black guy who fronted a band that was 2/3 white. Black and white music cross-pollinated in a way that it hadn't since Hendrix, and hasn't since (rap-metal doesn't count; it's not cross pollination, it's aping a style).
• For all the critics' perennial yawping about women becoming powerful forces in pop music, today's grrl singers - all of them - look like talentless tarts against the likes of Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Christina Amphlett, Exene Cervenka, even Joan Jett.
• It was a time when rap, rock, R'nB, and about five different directions of pop shared prominence, unlike today's tired scene (with nothing but stale hip hop, R'nB and the descendents of Grunge)

Fact is, any period of time that simultaneously had Prince, Michael Jackson, Big Country, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Schilling, Run-DMC, U2, Peter Gabriel and the Police on the charts has to be pretty damn good. Or, let's be honest, vastly better than anything since, any most anything before (except for 1955-58 and 1964-68).

Keep your Flock of Seagulls references to yourself, thank you very much.

Johnson - As I've said

Johnson - As I've said before, I was a liberal until I was in the middle of college. Most of the artifacts of that liberalsm have been hunted down and destroyed. There are really only two ways, besides my admissions, to prove that I was ever a liberal at all. If you tell any of my high school classmates that I evolved (by age 25, no less) into a conservative talk show host, they'll probably assume you're nuts (the ones that don't know, already, anyway). And when I was at North Dakota Boy's State in the summer of 1980, I wrote (in my capacity as a state party chairman) a party platform rife with "redistributions of wealth" and "interlocking foreign policy with the UN" and probably a dozen instances of the term Progressive.

Then, in college, I encountered the work of four thinkers:

• Alexandr Solzhenitzyn
• George Orwell
• P.J. O'Rourke
• and finally, and perhaps most importantly, Paul Johnson.

All but Orwell were people who, like me, had started life on the left and swung to the right (to whatever extent).

But the marquee name - the one who gave me the intellectual backing to the rafts of anecdotes that the other three provided - was Johnson.

Best of all, Johnson is still in action. His critique of the EU in Forbes is a classic.

The truth is that the EU has been living beyond its means, and its bills are coming due. The biggest bill of all--the cost of generous state pensions, which in most EU countries are underfunded--is looming. It's true that most advanced countries are having difficulties meeting pensions because people are living longer and work forces are expanding more slowly (or not at all). Britain is running into a pension crisis. Most of those who banked on a healthy private pension for their old age are going to be disappointed, partly because returns on investments are so low and partly because the Labour finance minister, Gordon Brown, has been raiding the till by abolishing tax-free pension dividends. This is the issue that will lose Tony Blair the next election, as the pain of Labour's 'pension raid' is felt. But at least Britain has a properly funded public pension plan. And the British economy is moving forward, perhaps not as fast as America's, but at a healthy and accelerating rate.

The omens for continental Europe, however, are sinister. The entire plan for perpetual improvement upon which the EU depends is based on continuous economic expansion. There is no provision for stagnation. As we see in Japan, once stagnation sets in, it can last many years. Americans should count their blessings, above all the supreme blessing of having an economy that is run by businessmen not bureaucrats, or that--under wise governance--runs itself. "

Read the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.

Then, when you're done, read Modern Times, the Birth of the Modern, and Intellectuals. Thorough yet enjoyable, rigorous yet fast-reading, all three books should be on the Christmas List of any conservatives you love, or any liberals you'd love to convert.

The Numbers - Some left-blogs

The Numbers - Some left-blogs have been obsessing to an unnatural extent over the fluctuations of the various polls that have shown the president is (gasp) dropping from "immortal" to "human". The mantra for many of these bloggers is "Watch the GOP shrug and say 'it doesn't matter'". They have a good point; that's what we'll say.

Because it's the truth.

I was giving Sean Hannity a rare listen on Friday night. He pointed out that, if you look at poll results for sitting presidents taken 14 months before the elections over the past forty years, very few have had numbers as good as Bush currently enjoys.

• In September of 1995, Clinton had worse numbers than Bush has today.
• In September, 1993, Ronald Reagan had a little over half Bush's approval rating.
• Richard Nixon's approval in September of 1971 was lower than Bush's today - and 14 months later when he faced the original Howard Dean, he scored a historic landslide.
• In September of 1967, Lyndon Johnson's ratings were lower - but he opted not to run.

In addition, said Hannity, John F. Kennedy's numbers in September of 1963 - the month before his assassination - were on par with Bush's current numbers.

I'm not going to presume that the Democrats' fixation on poll fluctuations is a sign of desperation. I just can't think of a better answer...

Questions We Need Answered -

Questions We Need Answered - Paul Miller asks twenty questions that need to be asked:1. Where is all the money from the UN’s Oil for Food Program?

2. How many people have now lived at least six months longer than they would have under Saddam?

3. How many civilians were really killed in the major combat portion of the war?

4. How many civilians have been killed since the end of major combat?

5. How unreliable is the Iraqi electric distribution system in comparison to, say, the Washington, D.C., area system?

6. How many people (estimates allowed) are crossing into Iraq from its neighbors each month?

7. How many people entering Iraq are Iraqis returning after escaping Saddam in the past?

8. How many Iraqis are suffering for lack of health care, lack of food, lack of potable water, etc.? (Not individual hard luck cases - good figures.)

9. How many Iraqis are directly involved in the “guerilla war” campaign against coalition forces?

10. How many non-Iraqis are directly involved in the “guerilla war” campaign against coalition forces?

11. What precisely has Bremer’s administration been spending billions of dollars on? (Show us the buildings, bridges, factories, power plants, oil fields, etc., assuming they exist.)

12. What was the average Iraqi’s income prior to the war, and what is it now?

13. What did Saddam do with his weapons of mass destruction and the component programs? (Don’t ask what “people” think; go find out!)

14. How many American and British service men and women in Iraq believe the cause of Iraqi democracy is hopeless?

15. Was the “looting” of the National Museum and Library an inside job?

16. How would international troops change the minds of the “guerilla” fighters?

17. How would additional American troops be useful in the 15 or so attacks and firefights per day now experienced by the 150,000 troops (10,000 per attack) in Iraq?

18. Is Saddam Hussein actually dead, and the tapes and such are all a hoax?

19. What is an average day in Iraq like for an America soldier? (Remember, the ratio of attacks to soldiers is 1:10,000, so a bloody firefight is clearly NOT average.)

20. What would Iraq be like if the coalition pulled out early and left things to the U.N. and Iraqi players? (Explore this with examples and a wide range of experts, please.)Please forward to media figures worldwide.

Said What? - Steyn's obit

Said What? - Steyn's obit of Edward Said is a keeper.

Reading List - Salam Pax,

Reading List - Salam Pax, the celebrated Iraqi blogger, says this is the best newspaper in Iraq - although it's apparently not available in Arabic.

Interesting, and worth a read.

Keep your KFAN - Here's

Keep your KFAN - Here's a sports story I actually like - about the semi-pro Minnesota Maulers football team.

The Curse of the CD

I listened to an artist's debut album the other day. It was an artist I wanted to like; I'd heard a few songs off the album, and I liked them.

But when I finally listened to the whole thing, it was another story; there were three absolute classics, true, but of the rest maybe three songs were pretty cool, and the rest ranged from "filler" to complete dreck.

If that album would have been about 2/3 as long as it was, it might have been a classic. But it's not - and the album is, shall we say, "flawed" at the very best.

The artist, of course, is Springsteen. He's the best American songwriter of the past thirty years. And even so, his debut album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey", released when he was 23 years old, is a wildly uneven effort; it has "For You" and "Blinded By The Light" (in their original versions, before Manfred Mann butchered both) and "Growin' Up", all of which jump off the vinyl and say "Great stuff here!". There are also songs that would only be fully realized later, in live performances ("It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City", "Spirit In The Night") and some that should have been left on the cutting room floor ("Mary Queen of Arkansas"). Three fewer songs - or another few months to write and record a few better songs - and "Greetings..." might have been a classic.

Springsteen had two relative misfires ("Greetings..." and 1974's less uneven but still flawed"The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle") before he really found his voice on "Born to Run".

Thirty years later, it's a different world than when Springsteen got his start. Today, even an artist that gets some airplay and sells some records usually will only get one chance to generate knock 'em dead sales before being cut, shunted (if lucky) to the indy labels to languish in splendid obscurity. Yet it usually takes a songwriter an album or two or three to really find his or her voice. Quick - name the non-singles on the first two Beatles or Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan albums! Most of my favorite artists - Springsteen, U2, Richard Thompson, The Iron City Houserockers, even bands like REM that I don't like so much as respect - took a couple of albums to really hit their artistic strides.

The compact disc isn't helping things one bit.

Case in point: my favorite artist of the past year, Franky Perez; I've written about him a couple of times in the past four months. When I saw him at the Basilica Block Party, he was an amazing live performer - he reminded me of footage of a circa '74 Springsteen. He absolutely owned the stage. And his first video, "Cecilia" (not the Simon and Garfunkel one, either) was striking enough to etch his name in my memory for the six months it took to actually see him perform.

Remember when an album - meaning an LP or a cassette - held maybe eight or ten songs? Back then, Perez' debut album, "Poor Man's Son", would have been as solid a debut effort as a rocker could want - he's written more than eight solid songs!

1. Two Lost Angels
2. Cecilia
3. Something Crazy
4. Cry Freedom or Southwest Side, but not both. Both songs are similar, and either one would be better with a healthy dollop of the best parts of the other song
5. Class Act
6. Leave Me Alone
7. Bella Maria
   
8. Love and Hate

   and as a bonus track, his acoustic version of...

9. America (You Are A Part Of Me)

There. Nine songs, all of them excellent, three of them ("Cecilia", "Love And Hate" and "Leave Me Alone") just plain great.

Unfortunately, "Poor Man's Son" has 18 songs. And the other eight not listed above are the sort of thing a young songwriter used to crank out, maybe record as demos - and then leave them there. The producer would have known they weren't the sort of thing you put on a record, much less a debut album.

It's the CD's fault.

I never liked the compact disk; they're smaller than LPs and have fewer moving parts than cassettes, and that's about all they have going for them. The "all digital" sound always struck me as cold, fussy and teutonic, compared to the warmth of a well-mastered LP; their cost after about 1989 was obviously inflated (it has cost much less to make CDs than cassettes or LPs since the early nineties). And their supposed reliability was always a sham; I have many thirty-year-old LPs that still play wonderfully, while I routinely see CDs start skipping and fritzing out within the first year after buying them.

But worst of all is the dilution of music that the record companies force on the buying public via the CD; rather than writing music to fit some genuine artistic goal (which few songwriters in leagues below Dylan, Petty, Springsteen, Richard Thompson or Elvis Costello can consistently do anyway), the goal is to fill up space on a disk, to hit a goal in megabytes of product so that the customer will feel less ripped off by the inflated sticker price, at least in terms of song-count. It's forcing art to fit a medium, rather than the other way around.

People have been attacking the ethics of, and predicting the demise of the traditional record company for at least a decade. Maybe it'll happen, maybe not.

But I can't wait for the CD - or at least the artificial, top-down use of the CD as a de facto production quota - to go the way of the wax cylinder. Someday, when an artist can record a single, a four-song series, or a six-hour opus, and have them listened to and marketed on their own terms rather than shoehorned or diluted to fit an artificial, arbitrary volume limit, it'll be a great day for music.

UPDATE: Yes, I really DID first hear "Greetings from Asbury Park" about twenty years ago. It's called "suspension of disbelief", people. Sheesh. (Thanks to email correspondent DL. I think).

Compare This

Compare This - The left has been trying to chip away at the Bush Plan for rebuilding Iraq. Seems that while the Administration compared it in a broad sense with the Marshall Plan, some academics (eagerly cited by the left) have found that it's not exactly like the Marshall Plan in every single respect.

This is big stuff, when you're an academic (or a party that cites them, in or out of context, obsessively).

As Steve Gigl notes in an excellent post this morning, they don't really cite many actual dissimilarities. And when they do, Gigl notes, it doesn't always make them look all that good:

"OK, so what was the only solid reason given?

[U of Connecticut professor Imanuel] Wexler [author of "The Marshall Plan Revisited] said that unlike Iraq, the Marshall Plan nations had economic and political environments that enabled the funding to be used effectively.

Oh. Racism. Checkity-check-check!

Real headline? 'Democrats and leftist academics agree--money is wasted on backward Iraqis'"

That's been one of the interesting notes to come out of the anti-Bush left's approach to Iraq - the incipient racism. Remember the claims (these go back decades) that Arabs just didn't value freedom like we do?

A few months ago, during the WMD fracas, a friend of mine - an engineer and a local "moderate" lefty - said "I hardly think Iraq has an Edward Teller in the lineup."

Look at that statement. Leave aside the facial absurdity of the strawman (you don't NEED Edward Teller to build a copy of an atomic bomb, to say nothing of a "dirty bomb"), and note the racist undertone; Iraq, that nation of little brown people descended from the people that helped develop algebra and astronomy while people in the West were living in huts made of offal and paying tribute to thugs in tin suits just couldn't develop a person of genius comparable to one of ours, could it?

Back on point; call the plan what you want, compare it any way you choose with any other plan throughout history (it won't take you long, there's really been only one). The technicalities only draw you away from the real point; If we stay our course, Iraq will most likely grow to be a solid democracy.

And I think that thought terrorizes some on the left. Too many, to be sure.

Gaping Ignorance - Predictably, gun-ban

Gaping Ignorance - Predictably, gun-ban group Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota are trying to get everything they can out of the shootings last week at Rocori High School.

Truth, of course, is the first casualty, as it usually is when CSSM is involved.

How and why did this happen? The answers are, no doubt, complex. But, as a community, we must remember to ask why we allow our young people easy access to handguns? How do we accept the proliferation of lethal weapons in our communities?

Well, in the case of Jason McLaughlin, the answer is easy; his father was a Sheriff's Department deputy.

You know - the ones that CSSM knows are the only people we can trust with firearms.

One out of six Americans keeps a handgun in the home, many unlocked, some even loaded. A survey of Hennepin County residents showed that of families with children under age 16 and a gun in the home, a full one-third admitted to storing their weapon unlocked and, in some instances, loaded.

And stupidity is indeed no defense (although I'd love to see the raw number and methodology behind that survey.

Most families who keep a handgun in the home, do so for protection. But, according to medical research, guns in the home are more often used to kill a family member than to be used in self-defense [Journal of Trauma, 1998.] Clinging to the belief that a readily available handgun protects us, we place our children and communities at risk.

The "Journal of Trauma" "research" was deeply flawed, and didn't account for

• Acquaintances or family members of the shooter who were carrying out criminal acts (drug-dealer acquaintances, abusive spouses)
• Presence of drugs or alcohol in the home
• Criminal records of anyone in the home
• Firearms training
• Above all, the "research" didn't calculate the deterrent value of the handgun in homes with no drug, alcohol, mental illness or criminals in the home. But then, they never do.

The CSSM writer continues:

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that guns be removed from environments where children are present.

The AAoP is completely politically motivated.

What drives a child to murder his classmates? The answers are complex. But the simple truth is that access to a gun can turn a desperate situation into a tragedy.

Unmentioned; access to a gun can also avert or prevent tragedy, as it did in the Pearl, Mississippi school shooting.

If you're upset about yesterday's school shooting incident, contact Governor Tim Pawlenty and let him know that you've had enough! Once and for all we, the responsible adults, must protect out children by supporting sensible gun laws.

And which laws are they talking about?

CSSM's current stalking horse is the Minnesota Personal Protection Act - our "shall issue" law. But Jason McLaughlin was seven years away from being able to qualify for a permit; it's a safe bet he never will, now.

More as developments warrant.

California: The Precedent - A

California: The Precedent - A liberal governor, with a landslide mandate, enacts a raft of interventionary and costly programs; then his state hits some economic troubles, a recall initiative passes, and he is faced with a European immigrant in the final showdown.

California? Nope. The state perhaps as far from California, socially, politically and economically, as can be.

My home state of North Dakota is an odd place.

Although North Dakota has voted Republican in virtually every presidential election in memory; other than 1912, 1916, 1932, 1936 and 1964, and a strange, split election in 1892, it has voted Republican in every single election since statehood (1889). And yet the state continues to send the likes of Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad to the Senate - tax-and-spenders that make Ted Kennedy run for the nearest Federalist Society meeting for protection. The state also runs the only successful state-run banks and mill/elevators in the country - socialistic institutions that are a vestige of the once-powerful Populist, Non-Partisan League and Granger traditions that had the plains humming with socialist cant in the first half of the last century.

And for Gray Davis, there's a portent that feels like the chilly, wet wind that signals a blizzard is creeping into Sacramento; North Dakota was the first and only state to recall a governor, under circumstances that, according to NRO's Lawrence McQuillan, should make Davis' supporters sit up and take notice:

In 1919, [Lynn] Frazier and the NPL [Non-Partisan League - a populist/liberal party that was later absorbed by the Democrats]-controlled legislature established state-owned industries: the Bank of North Dakota, and the State Mill and Elevator. They believed that a state-owned bank and state-run mill would protect farmers from private companies that they claimed paid bottom dollar for grain and then overcharged customers for flour. An Industrial Commission, consisting of the governor, attorney general, and agriculture commissioner, was created to govern the state enterprises.

In 1920, the year Frazier was narrowly reelected to a third term, farm prices tumbled, bad weather cut crop yields, and exports fell. The state entered an economic depression, exposing huge weaknesses in North Dakota's budget, which went into deficit. More North Dakota banks closed in 1921 than in any other year. The resulting contraction of credit caused many farm foreclosures.

The recall election in 1921 was a nasty one - as elections in North Dakota frequently were, and still are; the state's bucolic reputation wasn't earned on the campaign trail.

And the governor was recalled; narrowly, but finally. It's been done.

And the polls are looking more and more like it'll happen again - even if Tom MacMillan doesn't bow out, which I suspect he will.

I suspect we're as likely to see a prairie blizzard in Sacramento as we are a Democrat governor in 2004.

Scope Creep - Following the

Scope Creep - Following the lead of Ryan "Rambling" Rhodes, I downloaded everything I've ever written for this blog, from February 5, 2002 to September 25, 2003, and put it into Microsoft Word.

Nearly 1,600 pages.

More telling still; while my postings from 2002 were shorter - monthly archives didn't get much over 30 pages apiece until last October - since the elections and the burst of exposure I got from the Keillor Lutefiskings, I've probably been averaging well over 100 pages a a month.

Part of this is testimony to the effects of long-term unemployment. A bigger part of it is just that I genuinely like doing this.

Now, if only there was a way to make it pay the mortgage...

The Wrong Profile - Northern

The Wrong Profile - Northern Alliance pals Powerline gut Doug Grow's report that Minnesota is rife with racial profiling.

According to the actual data that led to Grow's report, while black drivers are pulled over disproportionately, the officers who actually did the pulling over were unaware of the drivers' races about 90 percent of the time. I think we can grant this figure a bit of leeway - cops will fudge paperwork - and still say that "profiling" stops still verges on liberal fantasy.

Here's an interesting finding - the rate at which cops found "contraband" in cars (things that aren't supposed to be there, like bottles of booze, bales of marijuana, murder victims and the like):

Although blacks were stopped and searched much more frequently than whites in Minneapolis, the hit rates were roughly equal -- 13 percent for whites, 11 percent for blacks. Accordingly, contrary to Grow's allegation in the column, the data strongly suggest that the Minneapolis police officers are conducting searches based on observed conduct rather than the skin color of the driver.

And so on. Read the whole piece

Especially interesting is Hindrocket's view of Trunk's appearance on an MPR show dedicated to the topic:

The other participants treated him like ants at a picnic, and the fact that he had actually read not only the report but the data underlying it made it so awkward to have him on the show that they disconnected him after a few minutes.

Ah, the fair and balanced MPR.

Chaitred

Power Line has an excellent take on Krauthammer's analysis of the Chait article - among other Bush-bashing pronouncements from the left.

Sample:

Charles Krauthammer made a good case that no rational person could believe all of Kennedy's statements (just as others have made the case that Chait could not rationally have believed all of his statements about Bush in the article that started all of this). However, Krauthammer did not show that Kennedy himself believes the statements. So there are at least two possibilities here. The first is that, blinded by hatred, Kennedy has become unhinged from reality. The second is that he is in touch with reality, but chooses to distort it in his public pronouncements for political gain or mere gratification. In short, he may not be irrational; he may just be a liar.

ACLU Alert - According to

ACLU Alert - According to a radio news report: During the shooting last week at Rocori High School, one of the teachers gathered her students along the edge of the room, and asked them if they wanted to pray.

Most - the news report said "all" - of the students gathered around the teacher and started praying along.

Expect a lawsuit.

If It Bleeds - Instapundit

If It Bleeds - Instapundit has links to some excellent discussion on the media's obsession with the bad news in Iraq, at the expense of covering the vast tracts of the country where things seem to be going quite well.

New Fox Analyst? - Dan

New Fox Analyst? - Dan Barreiro writing about U of M alum Quincy Lewis, via Steve Gigl's Blogj:

Lewis traveled through parts of Europe where Americans are not exactly universally welcomed, especially after the U.S. decision to go to war. "The people in Israel are very receptive and warm," he said. "In other places, you find that Americans are disliked by a lot of people. But you have to realize that as an American, you're going to get some of that anyway. Some people look at us as bullies, which in some cases we are. But it's almost like, they like the bully if we'll help them, but don't like the bully if we don't."

And they say jocks are dumb.

Joy In Mudville! - The

Joy In Mudville! - The Cubs clinch!

My lifelong fantasy - a Twins (AL) vs Cubs (NL) World Series could now, in theory, actually happen!

Tale of Two Blackouts -

Tale of Two Blackouts - David's Medienkritik posts about the double-standard in German left-wing newsmag Spiegel in reporting two power outages.

One was in the US:

The dazed world power was plunged into chaos by the largest blackout in the super power's history: Cities in the dark, planes on the ground, and a nation marching single-file like geese through the darkness. The land of limitless opportunity was shut off by a couple of exploded fuses. A world power between perception and reality - SPIEGEL TV with observations from a country whose lights have gone out."

One was in Italy:

France rejects responsibility for the blackout. In Italy, the power went out in the early hours of the morning this Sunday, affecting more people than the blackout in the USA [my emphasis]. In all likelihood, storms knocked out two major power lines connecting France and Italy. The search for a scapegoat has begun."

As David notes "The blackout in the USA proves the weakness of the American nation. The blackout in Italy proves the weakness of two major power lines."

Weekend! - OK, for real

Weekend! - OK, for real this time; I'm really taking the weekend off!

See you Monday!

The German Attitude - Fascinating

The German Attitude - Fascinating piece on David's Medienkritik yesterday from an American living in Germany, on the growing anti-American attitude he perceives among Germans.

I'm going to try to make a connection here.

In my comments on the academic roots of liberals' sense of entitlement to power and status yesterday, I quoted a Nozick piece at Cato that connected the sense of stimulus and reward that verbally-excellent children get in school with statist leanings later in life. Now - given what we're seeing among Germans, where the education system is even more centralized and striative (kids are "rewarded" for their "wordsmithing" and test-taking skills at about age 10, with the Abitur exams, which segregate them into University and vocational tracks), wouldn't the same phenomenon be compressed and amplified?

The connection seems valid, especially insofar as while the German academic and "wordsmith" classes seem to be stridently and increasingly anti-American, some of the less academic segments of German society still show indications of fraternity with us (as in the case of the crew of the German warship which "lined the rail" as an honorific for a passing US carrier on or about the 9/11 anniversary, an echo of the famous lining of the rail by the German destroyer Lütjens on passing the destroyer Churchill right after 9/11).

And the educational parallels hold up throughout Europe. Any Europeans in the audience care to comment?

Medienkritik has become daily reading for me this last few weeks. He runs all posts simultaneously in English and German. I love the site if only for the German practice I get - but it's a great site, and you should be reading it early and often.

Blazing Saddle Redux - Brian

Blazing Saddle Redux - Brian Lambert, the most unbroadcastworthy broadcast critic ever, has an excellent if typically-blinkered (but oh, no, never politically biased) piece on the departure of Jason Lewis.

Read the whole thing. Especially interesting are the insights into the politics behind the departure:

"Many close to the in-house politics of AM 1500 suggest the fundamental issue was the fact that having both Joe Soucheray and Jason Lewis on the roster made for one too many bulls in the company pasture, and that Lewis knew the Hubbards would always be more comfortable with Soucheray."

Sources of my own at KSTP tell of years of conflict between Lewis and Soucheray. For at least half of his stint at the station, Lewis had to fight with Soucheray for the scraps and leftovers in the promotional budget. For most of the mid-nineties, getting the Hubbards to spend any money promoting anyone but Soucheray was like pulling teeth.

Lambert also cut to the big reason why Jason Lewis is so good at doing what he does, and why everyone who loves to argue politics can't do a good talk show (partially including yours truly); it was a show. Lewis was able to separate the parts of his brain that thought about politics and programming; when he was on the air, he was thinking with the programming side. That's why I'd have trouble, perhaps, trying to do a show like Lewis's - to me, the politics is an end unto itself. I was a good comedy producer and sidekick (for Don Vogel) because it was all just a show, not much different than the user interfaces I design are work product, not personal passion (as much as I love doing both). It's a distinction lost on most people who haven't been there.

Not to say that I couldn't, y'understand...

Anyway - very much worth a read. As is much of what Lambert writes, when he's not insisting that liberal bias is a figment of the conservative imagination...

Job Hunting or Housecleaning? -

Job Hunting or Housecleaning? - Housecleaning or job hunting?

Both!

Blogging this morning will be a bit light. This afternoon will be much better!

And The Hits Keep Coming...

And The Hits Keep Coming... - After two days of Chait talk, today's Day By Day seems oddly appropriate.

Mongolians Return to Baghdad, This

Mongolians Return to Baghdad, This Time as Peacekeepers - When I first read this headline on Kinsley's site, I thought it was Scrappleface.

It's not.

Mongolians. Wow. Hey, too bad the UN isn't involved, so we could get seriously diverse nations to send help, huh?

Anyone Wanna Bet - ...that

Anyone Wanna Bet - ...that this story leads all three hours of Joe Soucheray's talk show today?

Will the Real Wesley Clark

Will the Real Wesley Clark Stand Up? - Evan Thomas has an excelleng piece on the history of Wesley Clark:

To say Clark was unpopular among his fellow officers in the military is an understatement. As he rapidly rose through the ranks, he was widely regarded as a champion brown-noser and know-it-all, a sort of Eddie Haskell in Army green. In conversation with friends, Colin Powell would privately put down General Clark as “Lieutenant Colonel Clark,” i.e., a perpetual eager-beaver wanna-be. Some officers questioned his judgment. Talking to a high-ranking Clinton administration official, Gen. Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who engineered Clark’s firing, bluntly referred to Clark as a “nut.”

There's much more of course - favorable and otherwise. Worth a read.

Look! They Killed PJ! -

Look! They Killed PJ! - Fascinating piece by John Tabin in TechCentral about "South Park Republicans" in the "Blue States".

Two issues here:

First - there obviously needs to be some rapproachement between red-state conservatives, who come from environments where social and economic conservatism go hand in hand, and blue-state conservatives who may not toe the red-state line on social issues, but speak the gospel when it comes to the economic issues that, I'd argue, are what draw most of us to conservatism in the long run.

"It's been argued here at TCS that there exists a constituency of culturally liberal South Park Republicans. It's clear that in the Blue States, there exist politicians with corresponding attitudes -- and equally clear that they succeed by sticking to the economic principles that characterize the GOP at its best. "

Perhaps. But this brings us to the second point:

South Park? Give me a break. PJ O'Rourke christened this group, the "Pants Down Republicans", twenty years ago.

Some perspective, please.

Toys For Iraqi Tots -

Toys For Iraqi Tots - Chief Wiggles has had one of the most consistently compelling blogs to come out of Iraq. His contributions to the reportage on the war can not in any way be overstated.

And it goes on. He's started his Toys For Iraqi Children drive. The linked post gives some handy dos and donts, and gives the relevant details.

And (as noted on Instapundit), Virginia Postrel points out that it might be a good idea to order toys from an online toy dealer (like Toys R Us) and have them shipped directly to the Chief.

Via whatever means - if you have anything to send, here's the address:

Chief Wiggles
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO AE 09335

That is all.

How They Make Liberals -

How They Make Liberals - I took the opposite route of an awful lot of people; I entered college as a McGovern Liberal, and left as a committed Reagan Conservative.

Shortly after I moved to the Twin Cities, I met a couple of MacAlester College graduates at a party. One of them - an Anthropology major, who, along with his Poli-Sci major girlfriend, were working at miserable temp jobs - voiced his big dream:

What we need is for government to give jobs to smart people".

People like them, of course.

I remembered that exchange on Tuesday night, when I was writing my response to Jonathan Chait's piece in the New Republic. Chait gave voice to the reasons for his (and by extension, many liberals') hatred of President Bush, in statements both illuminating...:

"Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!

...and pathetic...:

"He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it."

The subtext of the message: "If only real life were fair. Like school. Or, let's be accurate here, the good parts of school, where the smart kids got their rewards for their good grades - not the unfair stuff, like gym class or recess or prom".

A comment to my post yesterday referred me to an excellent article by Robert Nozick, from the Cato Report that examines this phenomenon on a broader scale.

It may go a long way toward explaining Chait's article.

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling--the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge--spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better...

...The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

So why does the intellectual - Nozick uses the term "wordsmith", a term I hate as a verb but makes great sense in this context - prefer statism?

The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

Nozick draws a sociological conclusion:

In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

This brings to mind two major points.

First: This would seem to explain so much of the Chait article, wouldn't it? Chait's piece fairly exudes a sense of frustrated, denied entitlement. "The dumb guy got what should rightfully have gone to one of the smart guys - and as a fellow smart guy, I resent that". Bush doesn't play the academic game - which is the game that spawned so much of our "wordsmith" intellectual class. It's the same thing that dogged Reagan with the "intelligentsia"; Dinesh D'Souza noted in "Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader" that the thing that most infuriated the intelligentisa of the eighties was the Reagan not only didn't have the trappings and credentials of authority that they so valued (the degrees from prestigious institutions, mainly), he didn't care about them, nor did he especially value them in his associates and advisors. This devaluation of their currency was a huge threat to their sense of legitimacy.

Second: It helps to explain a lot of the facile, social observations I make about lefty society, especially here in the Twin Cities. Take a walk through Highland Park or the Wedge or Kenwood; if you encounter a fiftysomething man wearing a ponytail and beard, and dressed like a college kid, you can probably fairly assume that:

• He votes DFL or Green,
• Works for an academic, government or non-profit entity
• Has had more or less the same style and outlook since college.

They learned their theory of value in school, where their strengths were rewarded; as adults, they favor a system that grants rewards the same way school did; indeed, they haven't changed their appearance since college. It's not "arrested adolescence", it's "arrested worldview".

The whole article is worth a read, by the way - be sure you do. Read it and the Chait piece side by side, and see if you don't make the same connections I (and the person whose original comment sparked this post) did.

Hewitt in the Weekly Standard

Hewitt in the Weekly Standard - Many thanks to Lord High Chamberlain Hugh Hewitt for the mention in the Weekly Standard.

Hewitt piles on the Chait piece with one more essential fact:

Of course, THE WEEKLY STANDARD and other magazines were hard on Clinton, but they kept their critiques closely aligned with objective fact. Chait felt no such obligation. The worst example of his approach was in his assertion that "Bush aides" had "impugned the patriotism of any Democrats" who opposed the creation of the Homeland Security Department. This sweeping and damning charge is backed up by one alleged bit of evidence--the now famous ad that ran against then Georgia Senator Max Cleland that did not challenge the senator's patriotism, but did attack his judgment. That's it--one ad produced and run in Georgia--that does not mention patriotism--is all Chait can muster for the assertion that Bush hatred is justified by the president's embrace of a new McCarthyism.

Last year, when the blogosphere piled on Garrison Keillor after his churlish attack on Norm Coleman, it didn't take long for him to file an even more churlish retort. I'll be interested in seeing what Chait does, now that his article has been so widely and thoroughly panned.

If you're a new visitor from the Standard or the Hewitt website - Welcome!

Come for the fisking of Chait - stay for the relentless, beleaguered Minnesota conservatism!

Da Partay - The Fraters'

Da Partay - The Fraters' Elder exhumes something I wrote in February:

It's time to start planning my party, for this October. And I may just make it the first blog-centric decade-late housewarming in history - an occasion to meet the Twin Cities' small but pretty darn high-quality band of bloggers, among many others.

Of course, it's all dependent on finding a job (and there've been some positive developments in the past week, although obviously one development short of where I'd like it to be) by then.

Well, I wrote that in February - and things are still one development short of where they need to be.

There've been quite a few new developments in the past couple of weeks - but at the end of the day, I'm still on the unemployment line.

But keep your fingers crossed. Once I do land the gig, the Housewarming/Blogwarming party will proceed.

Naturally, if you are a blog fan and your company needs an Info Architect/Usability Engineer/GUI Business Analyst/Human Factors guy, you could play a key role in this process - and get yourself an instant invite to the party, if you know what I'm saying.

By Any Other Name -

By Any Other Name - Spoons, on why being anti-Israel is being anti-Semitic.

Cold Spring Shooting

A tragic shooting at the Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota - in exurban Minneapolis.

The Strib takes up the story::

"One of two students shot late this morning at Rocori High School later died, authorities said.

The other student was in critical condition Wednesday afternoon, police said.

Authorities were holding a freshman in the shooting of the two male students."

So at a time when schools adopt ever-more restrictive, borderline paranoid restrictions on students' activities, the schools are still unable to keep students safe.

And I'm counting the minutes until some misinformed left-wing pundit tries to tie this to concealed carry - ignoring (or omitting) the fact that 14 year olds are not eligible for permits, and that schools are, ahem, "Gun Free Zones" in any case.

Good thing they rammed that exemption to the MPPA through, isn't it?

Analyze This

"Folsom" James Phillips writes regarding this morning's article on the Chait article:

Think back to the study by a bunch of shrinks out of California a few weeks ago (Stanford or Berzerly?) identifying the psychiatric traits of conservatives. The Chait article seems to me to scream for psycho-analysis. He and his ilk seem seriously imbalanced.

Two questions arise from this:

1. Yeah! Will someone be psychoanalyzing the hatred of the left anytime soon? Any psych majors out there wanna tackle this?
2. I'll join the Fraters in asking - why doesn't James Phillips have a blog?

These and many other questions as we work through the day.

Handicapping Arnold

I haven't written much about the recall effort; I don't live in California, and while I have a broad understanding of the issues, there are many better local bloggers, to say nothing of Hugh Hewitt, who are experts on this situation.

Still, Schwartzenegger's editorial in the WSJ bodes well (as King Banaian from the Scholars notes this morning) for those who worry about his goals:

So how can I be optimistic about California given all of these bleak developments in our state? Because our economic problems are not a failure of our people--they result from a resounding breakdown of our political leadership in Sacramento...

...My plan to rescue the economy in California is based on the opposite set of values: I want to slash the cost of doing business in California; I want to unburden businesses from regulations that strangle economic growth; I want to bring taxes down to levels competitive with our neighboring states. Within three years, I want business groups to trumpet the fact that California is once again one of the best places in the country to do business.

Sure, talk is cheap. Much cheaper than Bustamante's talk, so far...

Pundits like Medved are urging Tom McClintock to get out of the race. Here's my hunch; McClintock puts up a good battle, gets through the debates, and then - knowing he's holding the voters Arnold needs - negotiates himself a place at the table in exchange for endorsing Schwartzenegger. Election over.

Just a hunch, of course.

Yow

My traffic this morning is roughly double my normal rate - which is pretty heavy for a day that I haven't had an Instalanche.

So - where are you all coming from? (Leave a comment, if you'd be so kind! Thanks! There's a virtual mint on the ePillow...)

The Blood of the Infidel

In Islam, there are two states of being: the World of Islam, and the World of Jihad (meaning Struggle, not "Holy War" in this case).

Moslems see the World of Islam as a world of peace, faith, and joy.

They see the World of Jihad as a place of confusion, unease, unfulfillment, ruled by the infidel. It's the true Moslem's mission to annex as much of the World of Jihad into the World of Islam as possible.

Those who resist the World of Islam - infidels - are not subject to the niceties reserved for the good Moslem. Few indignities are spared them.

Islam packages this idea more neatly than most faiths - but the orthodox wings of most major religions share the separation between the world of the believer and the world of the infidel. No indignity in this world, no torture in the next, is spared them by those faiths.

Which brings us to Jonathan Chait's rhetorical fatwa against George Bush.

In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait starts his article "Mad About You: The Case For Hating Bush" with this:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.

With this tossing off of one of Western Civilization's great moral laws - the Judeo/Christian/Lennon-McCartney injunction to "Love they Neighbor" no matter what - and the granting of leave to wallow in hatred, that most otherwise-reviled of human weaknesses, Chait sums up the great theme of liberalism since 9/11.

Because it's not about terrorists, or prescription drug benefits, or even hanging chads and stained dresses anymore.

George W. Bush has put an enormous clinker in the left's sense of exceptionalism - maybe even the sense that their worldview, their politics, is the one true faith. And boy, are they angry.

True believers are like that when it comes to infidels.

---

I'm not someone who uses religious comparisons lightly. I think they're appropriate here.

Driving around in Minnesota, you see the little green bumper stickers on the backs of rattling old Subarus and sedate Volvo wagons: "What Would Wellstone Do", the late Senator replacing Jesus in the popular trope in a way that is more than casually symbolic. Paul Wellstone was a messiah to the left in Minnesota: his death was explained by innumerable conspiracy theories (saints and prophets and Messiahs must always die for a higher cause, often martyred; there's a reason none of the saints died by choking on a sandwich); the infamous Paulapalooza resembled an old-time revival meeting, complete with Rick Kahn's call for the Republicans present to repent and give themselves over to the spirit of Wellstone.

This was echoed, after the elections, by Democrats' churlish sniping at the Republican winners and the people that had supported them, like Garrison Keillor's vituperative rants against not only Norm Coleman, but everyone that voted for him; political points took a back seat to an attack on the beliefs, even morals, of Coleman's voters.

The guy is a Brooklyn boy who became a left-wing student radical at Hofstra University with hair down to his shoulders, organized antiwar marches, said vile things about Richard Nixon, etc. Then he came west, went to law school, changed his look, went to work in the attorney general's office in Minnesota. Was elected mayor of St. Paul as a moderate Democrat, then swung comfortably over to the Republican side.

A true believer, y'see - who went and rejected the faith!

Now - if one true believer can reject the One True Faith, that's bad enough. How about when a whole nation shows signs of rejecting the faith?

---

Now, one of the great defining features of modern Liberalism is its belief that "if we bring enough of our brilliance to bear on a problem, we can solve any human malady". The New Deal Liberals thought they could abolish the business cycle; the postwar left thought they could conquer human nature with the UN; the Great Society liberals thought they could spend human frailty into submission; today's left believes...

...well, that's a good question. What is their key belief? Never mind; the one that matters today is the one that underlay all the other forms of exceptionalistic liberalism: that those who believe, those who refuse to "park the bus", are noble and worthy. Those who resist, on the other hand, are beneath contempt; none of the indignities and tortures permitted in civil society are spared them.

We've seen signs of this, of course, continuously ever since the rise of modern conservatism; the left's schizophrenic treatment of Ronald Reagan (ping-ponging between portraying him as a doddering old fool and a slavering warmonger) was the mark of a movement that couldn't quite comprehend disbelief, rather like a congregation of Keillor's stereotypical Lutherans nonplussed to notice a bunch of Moonies sitting in the choir.

After Bush's election, of course, it was about denial; it was an aberration of a rogue court that stifled the voices of the nation's better 48.1%, by their logic.

But since 9/11, and especially since the mid-term elections, it's been more serious. A huge part of the population has actively rejected the gospel. To the mainstream left, this is beyond a crisis; it's a major heresy. And major heresies must be stamped out, their ringleaders punished, their beliefs either hidden or made the targets of abject revulsion, the sinners made to repent and come back to the fold - for the very good of their souls.

Fighting the heretics - it's the one great call for the True Believer.

---

Oh, yeah - Jonathan Chait's article. How does one actually attack something so long-winded and rambling?

In alphabetical order? The article is:

• Blinkered: "Certainly Clinton had his defenders and admirers, but no similar cult of personality. Liberal Hollywood fantasies--"The West Wing," The American President--all depict imaginary presidents who pointedly lack Clinton's personal flaws or penchant for compromise." Forget for a moment the Barbra Streisands and Chers and Alec Baldwins and the myriad other sycophantic paeans to the Clinton Magic that plagued this nation for so long. The "West Wing" and The American President aren't about Bill Clinton; they're about the Liberal idealization of themselves. And remember - the left forgave Clinton for all the ways he'd fallen short of Josh Bartlett's monklike example even before they knew what the sins were.
• Conveniently Ignorant: "Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional regressive tax cuts. " Reagan didn't have simultaneous hot wars and recessions, either.
• Extraterrestrially Wrong: "Bush's legislative strategy has revolved around...applying relentless pressure to GOP moderates--in one case, to the point of driving Vermont's James Jeffords out of the party." Jeffords jumped ship before any real legislating got under way. It was a Jeffords power grab, not symptom of a Bush power play.
• Immature: "He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it." Jon - it was high school. Get over it.
• Ludicously Selective: "It's certainly true that there is a left-wing fringe of Bush haters whose lurid conspiracy-mongering neatly parallels that of the Clinton haters. York cites various left-wing websites that compare Bush to Hitler and accuse him of murder. The trouble with this parallel is, first, that this sort of Bush-hating is entirely confined to the political fringe...Mainstream Democrats have avoided delving into Bush's economic ties with the bin Laden family or suggesting that Bush invaded Iraq primarily to benefit Halliburton." But this is two issues, isn't it? One needn't be a conspiracy theorist - a fringe player - to hate Bush. And indeed, Bush hatred is mainstream; it explains the popularity of Howard Dean, not only its Bush-bashing rhetoric and lily-white constituency, but the sincerest flattery - the scuttling of eight of the other Dwarves to the Bush-Bashing gospel.
• Muddled: "During the 2000 election, liberals evinced far less disdain for Bush than conservatives did for Al Gore. As The New York Times reported on the eve of the election, "The gap in intensity between Democrats and Republicans has been apparent all year." This "passion gap" manifested itself in the willingness of many liberals and leftists to vote for Ralph Nader, even in swing states. " But the voting for Nader was a symptom leftist passion - indeed, leftist fundamentalism; the ultraorthadox liberals flocked to their own sect, to get away from the less-fervent believers.
• Paranoid: "There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. " Someone needs to get some perspective, here.
• Self-Servingly Myopic: "Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!--and then, rather than truly earning his living, amasses a fortune through crony capitalism? " George Bush's grades were no worse than the "meritocratic" Algore's, and his SAT verbals were better than Bill Bradley's. Let's forget the bitter irony of the whole "liberal meritocracy", whose dumbing-down of schools and piddling on merit throughout society, especially in education, is such constant fodder for the Blogosphere and Joe Soucheray alike - it's not germane (although anyone who can say "meritocracy" with a straight face about a movement that includes Ted Kennedy deserves a rhetorical wedgie).
• Superficial: "I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang." Better that we all walk, talk, look...think the same, I guess.

You get the point.

Other writers tackle the gist of Chait's article: Powerline exposes many of its errors as well as illuminating more of the results of this hatred, Exultate Justi capably deconstructs the motivations of the hatred, and the Commissioner himself turns a hot light on some of Chait's claims. Read them all - and there will no doubt be more.

But Chait's article is just a symptom. The left today is awash in symptoms. They all tie back to the same illness.

---

Chait sums it up with this passage:

The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing.

It's been said by many that to the real liberal, politics is the true religion. The religion mustn't be sullied by the mundane any more than by the profane.

Note in this, the story's ultimate paragraph, the climax of Chait's thesis: That Liberals hate Bush because he's "mediocre", not "great", that it's "absurd" to consider him a "hero" - as if the President must be "better" than the people whose government he leads. The leader must be a "hero", like the sainted Kennedy or the "martyred" Wellstone (there's a lot of perversely wishful thinking among the conspiracy theorists), or an...Al Gore? The leader must not merely lead the followers - he or she must redeem them.

That a "mediocre" man can have had such success in stymying the left's exceptionalistic, messianic mission? To be beaten at every turn is one thing. To be beaten repeatedly and consistently, and badly, by one you consider your "mediocre", hated inferior? Unconscionable. To the true believer, it's as if the barbarians (short, dumb ones) are breaking through the gates.

No - it's worse than that; like a pious Moslem would say of the World of Jihad encroaching on the World of Islam, it's an attack, not on your temporal here and now, but on the true believer's chance of eternal redemption.

And you know how true believers are about that sort of thing.

Indoctrination Alert, Part III -

Richard Broderick wants to use the St. Paul Public Schools not only as a platform for indoctrinating students with the Green worldview - he also sees it as a potential lobbying and political action resource for liberal causes.

This is his current press release, gotten through a local politics mailing list:

Green Seminar: Peace curriculum in the St Paul Public Schools

Is a comprehensive peace curriculum possible in the St Paul public
schools? What would a peace curriculum look like? How would it be
implemented? How much would it cost? What would be the practical benefits?

These and other questions will be the focus of a panel dicussion and
public forum put on by the Rich Broderick for School Board campaign in
Black Bear Crossing Como Park, Tuesday, September 30, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Broderick, the Green Party endorsed candidate for the Saint Paul School
Board, has proposed the creation of a peace curriculum and the
establishment of student-run conflict resolution committees in every St.
Paul school as one of the main planks in his campaign platform.

In other words, Broderick wants to have the SPPS new "peace" curriculum written by "Friends for a Non-Violent World" - a left-wing "peace" group.

He is also advocating a leadership role for the School Board in next year's fight to repeal Minnesota's Conceal-and-Carry law.

Put more directly, Broderick wants to spend School Board time and resources to lobby for this pet liberal cause.

He is joined by panelists
Frank Schweigert, a peace studies teacher and consultant who has worked with the So Saint Paul public schools in creating Restorative Justice Circles
Mary Eoloff, a peace activist, member of Pax Christi, and subject, along with her husband Nick Eoloff, of the recent BBC documentary "Israel's Secret Weapon"
Phil Steger, Executive Director of Friends for a Non-Violent World
Kim Stanley, from the Coalition to Repeal Conceal-and-Carry.

In a perfect world, I'd say this candidacy is the lunatic fringe. But this is St. Paul, a city nearly as infested with liberal moonbats as neighboring Minneapolis.

Ignoring these people would be satisfying - but I wonder if it'd be counterproductive?

Long story short - is there anyone else from St. Paul that'd be interested in attending the meeting, and "showing the flag", as it were?

Because I certainly am.

Write me.

Can't Fool the Fraters -

Can't Fool the Fraters - They're on to me.

Attitude Check - Sgt. Stryker's

Attitude Check - Sgt. Stryker's "Sgt Mom" on Greek anti-American attitudes, then and now.

Your Chaiting Heart - Hugh

Your Chaiting Heart - Hugh Hewitt has called on the Northern Alliance to tackle Jonathan Chait's article, Mad About You: The Case for Bush Hatred," in the New Republic.

Look for it in this space, tomorrow morning.

Comments Are Back - Hopefully,

Comments Are Back - Hopefully, Haloscan (my new comment server) will not wuss out on me, like my last comment server did.

Enjoy!

Riding the Blazing Saddle Into

Riding the Blazing Saddle Into the Sunset - Jason Lewis is leaving KSTP-AM.

The speculation has already begun as to who's going to replace him.

For starters; I think KSTP program director Joe O'Brien's made a great move, sliding the Soucheray show to 3-6PM. Soucheray's blend of bowling-alley politics and sardonic humor is a local institution, and is perfect for the afternoon drive.

It's there that the problems pick up. Lewis had great ratings, and benefitted greatly from starting before the dreaded 6PM hour. 6PM is often a big brick wall in radio; it's when people get out of their cars and flip off the radios, eat dinner and turn on the TV. Lewis, with his extra hour before the dinner drop-off, could grab the dregs of Soucheray's numbers, whip them into a partisan frenzy, and then - and here's where Lewis' talent comes in - hold enough of them through the news and into the evening to make the show pay off. He used his patented talent as a rabble-rouser - and, let's face it, a whole lot of partisan charisma - to hold onto a crowd through the supper shift and into the early hours of prime-time.

So this leaves the 2-3 PM and 6-8PM shifts to fill. I'd imagine 2-3 will be some sort of satellite program, but who knows? The big question is - what'll KSTP do in the evening?

Fraters and Steve Gigl have commented already - Steve was kind enough to float my name along with Lileks, while the Fraters posited Bob Davis and Dave Thompson. Thanks!

I doubt all four of them. I haven't heard Davis in the morning yet, but I'd suspect he'll click better than most of the contenders in that slot; if I were the program director, I'd wait to see how the momentum was going in the morning before I juggled anything.

Lileks? He's great on the air, but too low-key for afternoons, I think. I say this as a huge fan of his late, great "Diner" show, easily the best late-night talk show ever - but I just don't see it in the afternoon. Also, there used to be some genuine antipathy between Soucheray and Lileks (this is going back at least a decade - but I get the impression that Soucheray is if nothing else consistent), and I doubt O'Brien is going to ruffle his franchise player. Finally, I'd bet dimes to dollars that Lileks has other irons in the fire (to say nothing of his steady gig with the Strib; radio careers being as ephemeral as they are, I can't imagine Lileks ditching the steady gig at the moment anyway).

Fraters tossed out the notion of Dave Thompson. Dave's a great guy and an excellent weekend host. But unless he has a different personality hiding in his desk, I don't see him being the type of partisan firebrand that's going to get the masses out waving pitchforks and torches, which (I think) is what I think you need to succeed during the early evening.

Me? Yeah, I could do it, but Joe O'Brien has no evidence to support that. My outing last January (filling in for Bob Davis) was fun, but it was also tentative; it didn't really have much of a direction. Joe O'Brien wanted to see direction. Enh. I didn't think it was bad for a first show in fifteen years, but such is the breaks.

If I did get a shot at the show, though, it would be very much an online version of this blog; relentless, rabble-rousing conservatism, combined with the sort of informed criticism of the status quo (especially locally) that made Lewis famous. I'd be as relentlessly, even stridently partisan as Lewis was - indeed, as I said in my comments on the subject last winter, Lewis was the host I wanted to be when I grew up - but I'd be even more aggressive about taking it to the streets than Lewis was. In fact, I'd be very much like a continuation of Lewis, only with much, much better bumper music.

What will O'Brien do? Good question. Here are some possibilities; I won't bet money on any of them:

• Given KSTP's enamourment with existing institutions (which is what gave us John Wodele and Barbara Carlson), I'd imagine there's a strong chance he goes with one of his small stable of existing fill-in hosts from outside the station; Katherine Kerstin, maybe.
• Putting Thompson in the evening as a place-holder until they figure out what do do with evenings
• Reviving some form of sports programming in the evenings (although I doubt this - while sports used to be a relatively reliable guarantee of a couple of ratings points in the evenings, I think KSTP was smart to hand that over to KFAN and 'CCO ni the past ten years)
• Extending the evening shift to 9PM, and running the tape delay of Sean Hannity at 9, tying the whole evening together. This, of couse, would squeeze out Tom Mischke, which would stink (I love the Broadcast), but might make sense from a programming standpoint, especially if you assume Hannity is a strong property (although I detest Hannity)
• Putting Hannity in from 6-9, and filling from 9 until Tinfoil Hat talk (or whatever replaced Art Bell - I never listen to it longer than it takes to reach the tuning knob) with Mischke, which I think would work better than the current situation, sticking Mischke between conservatives Lewis and Hannity, and Davis before that.

I'll check around and see what I can come up with.

Roots of Hatred

Probably no big revelations in this piece by Krauthammer, but it's interesting to see the roots of the Democrats' blind hatred of Bush catelogued so succinctly:

"Whence the anger? It begins of course with the 'stolen' election of 2000 and the perception of Bush's illegitimacy. But that is only half the story. An illegitimate President winning a stolen election would be tolerable if he were just a figurehead, a placeholder, the kind of weak, moderate Republican that Democrats (and indeed many Republicans) thought George Bush would be, judging from his undistinguished record and tepid 2000 campaign. Bush's great crime is that he is the illegitimate President who became consequential "

Worth a read.

In the meantime, Sullivan starts to plumb the depths of the antipathy:

faced. But the intensity of the desire to see him defeated - by whatever means and whoever benefits - is a real phenomenon. It's stronger and more widespread than the antipathy to Clinton in, say, 1996. It will propel the coming electoral cycle. All the frustration that so many felt at the cultural realignment in the wake of 9/11 is going to come to a head. It was bad enough for some that this "moron" was elected. But that he presided over a real shift in the country's mood - against apologizing for American power, against appeasement of Islamo-extremism - is still too much to contemplate with equanimity. This is payback time.

This is going to be an incredibly ugly election; it will pit not only candidates, but cultural emotional mind-sets against each other. On the one hand, there is the still-deep-seated anger, fear and rage - mostly but not exclusively in the red states - left over from 9/11. Middle America is still revolved by the idea that we can be attacked, slaughtered in our workplaces, maybe even gassed in our homes. They want payback, and most importantly, security. They don't see it from the Democrats.

On the other hand, we have the incredibly deep hatred of Bush and all he represents among the rest of the electorate.

I'm trying, hard, to remember a time since Reconstruction, other than perhaps the sixties, where overriding social emotions have maneuvered for such a clash. And I don't know that the sixties pitted such large swathes of the population against each other; remember how well the counterculture left did with McGovern in '72? I could be wrong, of course - I was nine years old in 1972 - but that's the impression I get.

What about you? What do you think? Write me if you have any perspectives on this. Cultural clash, or electoral rhubarb?

Let me know.

Happy Birthday, Brother Ray -

Happy Birthday, Brother Ray - Ray Charles turns 73 today. PowerLine and the Big Trunk write their usual wonderful tribute.

Unsustainable Growth - CuriousFurious ::

Unsustainable Growth - CuriousFurious :: asks the questions nobody else will:

"Senator John Kerry can play the environmental Democrat guy all he wants. But I've got news: a hairdo that looks like that involves some secret hair care ritual that is definitely buggering the environment, no matter how he much claims to the contrary ..."

Hidden WMDs, perhaps?

Kiss Of Death? - Moore

Kiss Of Death? - Moore Endorses Clark, in an "open letter" to the German newpaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Well, almost:

This is not an endorsement. For me, it's too early for that. I have liked Howard Dean (in spite of his flawed positions in support of some capital punishment, his grade "A" rating from the NRA, and his opposition to cutting the Pentagon budget). And Dennis Kucinich is so committed to all the right stuff. We need candidates in this race who will say the things that need to be said, to push the pathetically lame Democratic Party into having a backbone -- or get out of the way and let us have a REAL second party on the ballot.

But right now, for the sake and survival of our very country, we need someone who is going to get The Job done, period. And that job, no matter whom I speak to across America -- be they leftie Green or conservative Democrat, and even many disgusted Republicans -- EVERYONE is of one mind as to what that job is:

Bush Must Go.

This is war, General, and it's Bush & Co.'s war on us.

Well, at least we know we're dealing with civil, even-handed opposition, huh?

It's their war on the middle class, the poor, the environment, their war on women and their war against anyone around the world who doesn't accept total American domination. Yes, it's a war -- and we, the people, need a general to beat back those who have abused our Constitution and our basic sense of decency.

The General vs. the Texas Air National Guard deserter! I want to see that debate, and I know who the winner is going to be.

Think Clark will lead with this?

Think the media will report it?

(Via David's Medienkritic - scroll down for English translation)

"But Liberals Love America, Too"

"But Liberals Love America, Too" - Martin Sheen reallly doesn't like his countrymen much, according to Drudge:

"American actor and activist Martin Sheen had kind words for Canada when he received an award for being a Christian role model, the CANADIAN PRESS reports.

'Every time I cross this border I feel like I've left the land of lunatics,' Sheen said Saturday, adding he was 'proud' of Canada for not entering the Iraq war.

'You are not armed and dangerous. You do not shoot each other. I always feel a bit more human when I come here.'

Sheen, who has been outspoken recently in his opposition the U.S.-led war in Iraq, was in Windsor to receive the Christian Culture Gold Medal from Assumption University. "

No word if Josh Bartlett will be assuming the premiership of Canada during the upcoming season.

French Humanitarianism - Joe Katzman

French Humanitarianism - Joe Katzman of Winds of Change, on the French record in nation-building and peace-keeping.

If I Had a Million

If I Had a Million Dollars - Fraters brought up a great point (and a nice plug) the other day. Let's talk about the Star/Tribune and Pioneer Press - and, by extension, nearly every other major newspaper site that I'm aware of.

Newspaper websites are designed to look, essentially, like online versions of newspapers. Like newspapers, they present their material - news, features, sports - in descending order of what the editor perceives as the reader's interest in the subject: The section A, above the fold story from the dead-tree edition is the top-center item on the website; the next story comes in below; the lead sports or special interest or politics or biz item comes in below that, depending on the news, or, more accurately, how the editorial staff decides to present the news.

Across the top of the webpage, there are menu links which are analogous to the major sections of the print edition. It makes sense - if you're used to operating in the world of print - which, naturally, is newspapers' only frame of reference. And in most cases, the newspapers' online editions are perfectly capable transliterations to the online world - almost as if the paper is being scanned and plopped on a web page (although the Strib apparently plans to make things even worse - creating, literally, a scan of the daily paper. You get all of the disadvantages of the print newspaper (linear, paginated access to stories, visual searching for pieces of content) and all the problems you get online (slow downloads, exacerbated by the size what has to be a big scanned or Java version of the paper).

In other words - they want to take a bad idea and make it even worse.

There are reasons why paper newspapers are organized the way they are, and have been for most of recent history. The traditional organization has hundreds of years' worth of "user testing", and it generally works fine - for print newspapers. It suits the technology involved - once ink is pressed onto paper, it's there, permanently. You can't reorganize it - although newspapers have certainly thought about it. About ten years ago, some newspapers (including the Strib) thought about, even experimented with, custom-designed newspapers - which would allow a subscriber to essentially get a custom newspaper delivered every morning. Want more metro and sports, less A-section and Variety? Voila, it's yours. Of course, while the logistics of gathering and storing all of that subscriber preference information has become dirt-cheap, the cost of actually producing, printing, assembling and correctly delivering potentially thousands of permutations of the basic newspaper (and the advertising without which it just makes no sense!) were daunting. (And the Star-Tribune seems to think that the way forward is

So how can an online newspaper be better than a print paper and the current incarnation of newspaper websites? What does technology have to offer the newspaper, besides a different layout challenge?

Here's a partial list:

• Immediacy: News doesn't have to be printed and distributed.
• Free Form Access: No pages to turn. No sections to keep track of. No paper layout conventions to follow, if you don't want to. Many ways to access a given piece of material - by browsing, drilling into any section you want, or searching.

But doing that with an online newspaper is not only relatively simple, it verges on the trivial today. Not only is the technology everywhere, but it's being user-tested constantly. It's the common blog - or rather, the uncommonly sophisticated weblog.

Here's a simplified mockup of a hypothetical newspaper - what we call a "wireframe" in the user-centered design business. It's not too-detailed a layout, but it should give you the basic idea.

Rather than cramming the content into a pseudo-newspaper, it presents stories the same way a Blog does - in reverse order, newest stories at the top, as they're published. If the user wants to see nothing but Sports, he/she clicks on the "Sports" link at the top, or the "Sports" (or "Vikings" or "Wild") icon next to the story head, or in the head's footer. If the user wants to find all references to Norm Coleman, he/she types "Nahm" in the "Search" box at the top, and gets all references to the Senator (that haven't been archived) in reverse chronological order. In other words - the user picks his/her own layout. The newspaper doesn't have to.

Of course, there's more to it than just a page layout.

• Ditch the long, detailed registrations. Collect the bare minimum of demographic info, if anything, and let the system do the rest.
• Use information gathered by the user's usage patterns and click-throughs to tailor the advertising content presented to the user, rather than making the user do the work. Associate the user's "profile" with something user-related (an IP address, a cookie, or whatever), private and automatic, rather than put the user through the laborious, frustrating process of entering personal information to "register".
• Use these features - lack of intrusiveness combined with heretofore-unheard-of access to information - as a key marketing hook. Why not? You'll have the best online newspaper - or at least the best-presented one - in the business.

Needless to say, if you're the editor of a newspaper website, I'd be more than happy to help out...

Now, Is This "Praise by

Now, Is This "Praise by Faint Damnation", or "Damnation by Faint Praise"? - Yale Diva spills the bad news for Howie Dean:

According to Newsday, "Jimmy Carter says he sees a little of himself in insurgent Democratic White House candidate Howard Dean." Says Carter, "He claims, at least to me, to have had in part of his campaign technique about what worked for me in those ancient days in 1976."

Some jokes don't need punchlines.

Irony Towers - The Scholars

Irony Towers - The Scholars point us toward a treasure trove of academic tomfooloery, Erin O'Connor's "Critical Mass" blog. .

One piece links to details of an associate of Michael Bellesiles, who is in the same sort of trouble.

Another - cited by the Scholars yesterday - is a fascinating piece about the genetics of Political Correctness.

Worth a read.

It's Policy - Lileks wraps

It's Policy - Lileks wraps up the summer with perhaps the classic Bleat; food observations, Gnat adventures, a trip the the Mac store (where else?) and with a subtle, non-screedy political ding at the end.

I noted this item:

" We have one of those “zero tolerance” cases here, and I’m sure you can guess the details. Kid’s friends are playing around with cap gun. The gun migrates to the car in the course of weekend tomfoolery. Kid drives to school. Security guard notices gun in car while trolling the lot and peering through windows. Kid - who is a good student, and attends Bible class every morning for class - gets in trouble. And by “trouble” I mean he is suspended for the entire year.

Three years ago, I got a call at work around noon. My son had been suspended from school for a week, said the "assistant principal", and I needed to pick him up immediately.

"Er, why was he suspended?" I asked.

"Weapons violation", she said. I leaped to my feet, apologized to my boss about the sudden emergency, and drove the 25-odd miles to school.

My son was sitting in the principal's office, and had been for quite some time. I asked the "assistant principal" - a doughy, 40-something woman who exuded political correctness and "educationese" the way some people exude stale sweat - what happened. The words "weapons violation" careened through my stream of consciousness as the woman held out her hand with grim solemnity. I expected her to show me a razor blade, or a bloody shiv.

Three yellow plastic pellets.

"Er..." I started. "Um - what are they?"

"These are pellets from a toy gun".

I had to take her word on that. "Your son admitted they were from a toy gun - and we're thankful for that", she went on.

My son had inadvertently brought three little plastic pellets from a toy gun to school - he'd been playing with it while waiting to leave for the bus stop, and while he left the "gun" at home, three of the little, yellow, bb-sized plastic pellets were in his pocket. Just the pellets, mind you - the toy gun was at home, ready for any bad guys that would break into his room.

"He was playing with these at recess, and a few kids were concerned..."

Suuuure they were.

"They violate our school's zero-tolerance for weapons policy".

"Did you even KNOW they were from a toy gun before you asked?", I asked.

"No, he told some kids on the playground, and then he told me".

I paused a moment. "So he could have told you these pellets were from one of those little roller-flippy games, and gotten off - but because he was honest, he's being suspended?"

The woman looked visibly confused. "It's policy", she said, Borg-like.

I paused for a moment. Then I laughed out loud - which clearly irritated her. "You're kidding?" I nearly yelled. I stood and left the woman's office (and the phumphering, non-plussed woman) and went to see the principal, an equally-PC person, but one with a thin film of common sense to go with the academic fripperies that seem to attend these people these days. I told her the situation; I'm missing an afternoon's work (at least), son is missing FIVE DAYS of school...over three plastic pellets. Not exactly the stuff of Columbine, no?

After haggling worthy of a Turkish bazaar, we cut Son's suspension down to the rest of the day. "We HAVE to have SOME consequences - it's policy".

As I walked out the door of the building that had been cleansed of plastic toy ammunition, I tallied up the day's balance sheet: Half a day of work missed; half a day of school missed; and a son who's learned one of life's most important lessons:

The Authorities Just Aren't Very Smart

I doubt it's the lesson Doughy-woman wanted to impart.

I mean, kids aren't stupid. They know what the problem is - the abused, neglected classmates with the wretched role models for parents; the ones from homes where violence is accepted; the ones who are just plain crazy. The ones the schools can't touch because the special-ed system has glommed onto them, stamped the "Special Ed" label on them, turned them into long-term projects, problems and all.

Ironically - had my son been one of the "emotional problem" special ed kids, the ones that were most likely to inflict some sort of violence, there'd likely have been no suspension.

It's policy, you know.

Paging Al Franken - Hugh

Paging Al Franken - Hugh Hewitt with a great piece on the Sacramento Bee's capitulation to PC pressure over the SacBee's political reporter Daniel Weintraub.

Weintraub dinged Cruz Bustamante; the California Latino Caucus squawked; the Commissioner picks up the narrative:

"Usually an editor then stands up for the columnist and the paper's independence, citing a long tradition of press vigilance over entrenched political power and the glory of the First Amendment.

Not this time. Keep in mind that Bee big boss Rick Rodriguez is the only Latino to head a major newspaper in the U.S., and that the Latino Caucus is a powerful force in the state. The Bee responded to the criticism by putting its best writer under close watch and by publishing a clipping that can be sent over to the members of the Latino Caucus. The Caucus gets a scalp and the paper sacrifices its integrity. Along the way a promising innovation in journalism gets trimmed.

All because a lefty politician and his pals don't like what a columnist wrote. What was Al Franken saying about right-wing media? And the gents at FAIR? Too bad Weintraub didn't know it is only safe to blast Republicans and their supporters. If he'd played by the standing rules of print journalism, he'd still have the freedom to blog on and make news with every entry. "

It's in his Sunday entry (scroll down if you need to. Note to the Commish - try permalinks!).

The media's not really liberal, is it?

UPDATE: Instapundit has many other links re this story.

UPDATE II: And the Scholars add their own perspective, also well worth a read.

Clark

Sullivan writes about the cynicism behind Clark:

"[a liberal friend] explained that the white-hot rage at Bush had now tippled over into a cold determination to beat him, by whatever means necessary. I have to say I respect this kind of political argument. But it also strikes me that the left really cannot criticize Bush as a cipher for other forces aligned behind him, when they are doing exactly the same with a general they view as a purely Potemkin figure. 'Look, if it means we get Gene Sperling and Robert Rubin running the country again, I don't much care who they put up as a front-man,' one partisan gleefully explained. All of this reminds me of Bill Kristol's flirtation with Colin Powell as a Republican candidate a few years back. Why the Powell boomlet? He was black and could win. Er, that was it. Powell was a cipher to innoculate the Republicans from seeming too white-bread. Similarly, Clark is a perceived winner and a cipher to innoculate the Democrats from seeming ... what, exactly? Unpatriotic? Weak on defense? Out of the cultural mainstream?

Sullivan puts his finger on something that I've been groping for; so many Clark supporters remind me of friends who had stock portfolios full of dotcoms and high tech issues; they bought some Johnson and Johnson to diversify, but they didn't like it.

Clark seems like a liberal's idea of a palatable attempt to act realistic about the world outside our borders; like medicine doused in sugar. It barely goes down.

More as we go along.

Where Do You Want To

Where Do You Want To Feel Homicidal Frustration Today? - Right of Center, on ATMs switching to...

...Windows!

War Roundup - Porphyrogenitus rounds

War Roundup - Porphyrogenitus rounds up the latest war news.

One Step Up, Two Steps

One Step Up, Two Steps Back - I did some cleaning up in my blogroll today, whacking a couple of links to blogs that haven't posted in over a month, adding a few that I've started reading lately.

Out for the Weekend -

Out for the Weekend - I'll be going out of town for a bit this weekend. No blogging whatsoever until Sunday night if not Monday morning.

Enjoy the...er, sun and fun?

Wouldn't Be Prudent

Fraters'Saint Paul discusses some skirmishes in the culture wars that he feels augur well for conservatives.

The Saint notes that Dana Carvey is sounding more Republican these days:

When asked about politics, between the jokes, all of Carvey’s comments were conservative in nature. He strongly supports Schwarzenegger in the California recall, saying something about how it’s time to have someone fresh, with new ideas, in office, instead of another Orville Redenbacher look alike.

Saint, you sound surprised that Carvey would support Ahnold? An impersonator who built his career on equal doses of impersonating politicians ("Wouldn't be prudent at this junk-sher") and Ahnold ("We're going to pomp (clap) you opp!") smells like big opportunity for the down-on-his-luck comic. I mean, what future is there in impersonating Cruz Bustamante?

I know - the Saint's real point was:

Carvey went on to say a few other generally supportive things about George W. and his efforts to battle terrorism.

Just a few years ago it would have seemed unthinkable for a prominent minority athlete and a member of the Hollywood entertainment establishment to come out and support (even obliquely) conservative positions on national television. But in a one hour period on a Thursday night, I saw both. Which leads me to the conclusion, if Robert Smith and Dana Carvey be for us, who could be against us?

Don't forget Dennis Miller!

And Ted Nugent! And Charles Barkley and maybe Sarah Michelle Gellar...

And...er...Johnny Ramone!

Ask The Guy Who's Been There

Four leaders of "New Europe" - and four of the most remarkable men of modern times - Telegraph set their sites on their old enemy's protege. Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Arpad Göncz address Fidel Castro in this joint letter to the Telegraph:

Today, it is the responsibility of the democratic world to support representatives of the Cuban opposition, irrespective of how long the Cuban Stalinists manage to cling to power. The Cuban opposition must enjoy the same international support as political dissidents did in divided Europe.

It cannot be claimed that the American embargo of Cuba has brought about the desired result. Neither can this be said of the European policy, which has so far been considerably more forthcoming towards the Cuban regime.

It is time to put aside transatlantic disputes about the embargo of Cuba and to concentrate on direct support for Cuban dissidents, prisoners of conscience and their families.

More - much more - to read where that came from.

(Via Instapundit)

Cleaning the Attic

I tried to look at an archived post from a 56KBpS dialup connection last night. It took about two minutes to load the page of archives for the selected month.

Yow. I didn't know I was that prolific.

At any rate, I've decided to switch to weekly archives - but since I've been doing this for a while, that gives me a pretty long list. So I've rearranged my page layout a bit.

Hope it helps!

Pushing the Idea Across the Synapses

- Conservatism - and conservative beliefs - aren't for the casual thinker.

Notice that I didn't necessarily say "conservatives are smarter than liberals"; that'd be the type of arrogance that, if you're not careful, will turn you into Al Franken.

But conservative thought doesn't come easily. Many conservative beliefs take serious thought and effort to reall warm up to; the liberals' "Feed everyone, damn the cost" comes more easily than the conservative's tough love. Forcing everyone to be nice to each other through the force of hate crime laws seems more intuitive than allowing the marketplace of ideas to regulate behavior borne of free will in its own good time.

The concealed carry debate is one of those ideas that some people just can't push across the synapses, even if they're in an environment where they're getting the right information (for example, my dinner table). With trivial analysis, the notion of "letting people carry guns "pack heat" in public" seems counterintuitive. Like so many conservative issues, it takes time to move beyond the pat answers.

For a kid cut off in the wasteland of simple pat answers - the typical university - it has to be impossible.

King Banaian from the Scholars sent me this piece last night, from the Saint Cloud State "University Chronicle", by Amanda Deegen. I read the piece, and remember when I was 18, liberal, and the whole world seemed so simple...

...well, let's let Amanda take over here:

I was casually strolling through Crossroads Mall a few weeks ago when I noticed the Gap had a sign hanging up stating that they "do not allow guns on their premises." Unbeknownst to me, the state government had passed a law allowing the concealment of weapons in this state.

Unbeknownst?

The issue was debated in seven straight sessions, and was, after the budget crisis, the second-most-covered issue in the legislature last session.

Time to spend less time at the mall, Ms. Deegen, and put in some time in the library.

I digress:

Hallelujah! Now I know that I too can, without worry, carry a concealed 9mm pistol through the mall without worry of restraint, except the Gap. Let me hold your pistol while you try on some jeans?

Since Ms. Deegen managed to miss seven years of debate on the issue, I suppose it's a bit much to ask her to know the qualifications to get the permit (over 21, clean criminal record, passed skills course, no record of drug or chemical abuse or violent mental illness).

Which means, Ms. Deegan, that anyone carrying a gun in the Gap as you're trying on jeans is illegal, untrained, and very well may have a criminal record.

With this next bit, I can imagine the ghost of Skip Humphrey, smiling down from heaven, knowing that a liberal angel had gotten its wings with this bit:

I thought it was a well-known fact that one shouldn't carry a loaded, concealed weapon with them in public places, especially places like bars and taverns. I can somehow picture the horrible combination of drunk rednecks and firearms producing not-so-pretty results.

Memo to Matt Entenza: Well, you have to feel all warm and fuzzy right now, knowing that your carefully-spun propaganda had the desired effect with at least one young woman. Guns=lowlives, to Entenza, Moe, Skoglund...and Deegen.

Question: If someone with a degree in Literature who can play the Brandenburg Concertos on the cello from memory and can get around in four languages gets a concealed carry permit, is that person automatically a "redneck"? Are they drawn to alchohol, bars, and brawls through some unknown force?

And how many of the drunk rednecks that plague, er, the Crossroads Mall does Amanda Deegen figure have gotten carry permits?

Question: What is Amanda Deegen's major?

So I ask the good citizens and students of St. Cloud, what precisely is the point of having a concealed weapon anyway? Is it easier to sneak up on Bambi that way? I can't really see the purpose or necessity of such a law. Even if it's in the name of defense, how can any situation possibly have a more positive outcome when a gun is involved?

Education.

And picture the possible outcomes, Ms. Deegen: You're carrying a bag of new jeans to your car at the Crossroads Mall in Saint Cloud. It's late, cold, and the parking lot is empty. A car - let's say a car with a couple of "drunk rednecks" - pulls up next to you as you walk. A man opens the door, flashes a knife, and says "get in the car or I'll cut you, bitch".

One possible outcome - you get raped. They're bigger, stronger, faster, meaner - there's really nothing you can do about it. Think it doesn't happen?

Outcome #2 - You're armed, and you know what to do. Seem far-fetched? It's not. I know people - gays who've been bashed, women who've been raped - who carry religiously (illegally before, legally now). They'll tell you about "positive outcomes", if you want to hear about them.

I really have many more important things to worry about than whether or not the person next to me is packing heat.

Like learning current events, for one.

And developing a perspective on the issue; the "heat packer" you need to worry about doesn't have a permit in the wallet.

I can see my dreams of world peace slowly dissolve as I notice the new age militias stockpiling their weapons for the new threat of terrorism. Lord help us if we go into code "yellow," or whatever color represents America in fear. And I am finding that this country is becoming a scary place to live.

Again, Humphrey smiles from the great beyond. Criminals are OK - it's the law-abiding citizen that "scares" Amanda Deegen.

In my honest opinion, I think the second Amendment is outdated. Granted, the Constitution was a brilliant document, but I feel it still has its flaws at times. I understand the necessity of arming oneself back in the 18th and 19th century, when crime was less monitored and society was less organized, but in modern society, such weapons of aggression are unnecessary and can only be fatal for the wrong reasons.

Ms. Deegen needs to crack those history books; crime was lower in the 17-1800s. Society was rigidly organized; churches, towns and families exerted intense control over society.

And not only can a law-abiding citizen kill someone for all the right reasons - self-defense - they don't even have to kill anyone at all. Concealed carry deters violent crime. Criminals are less likely to commit violence in concealed-carry states. They tend to switch to non-violent crime.

Like shoplifting jeans from the Gap in St. Cloud.

P.S. - Open Letter to the Liberal Media - We need to talk about how you refer to the act of concealed carry. Note that I'm not trying to get you to change your minds about the issue; you've probably seen all the facts and figures people like me have been sending you for the past eight years.

No, I'd like to talk about your catch-phrases for carrying a pistol.

Here are some that need to go:

• Packing Heat - this is a piece of argot that hasn't been used outside of a gangster movie in over forty years. Why not say "packing a Roscoe" and really sound cool?
• Locked and Loaded - I know - it's got that cool, GI Joe tang to it. But all it means is that you have a round in the chamber and the safety catch is on; it's like referring to driving a car as "gassed and in gear".

Why not use, instead, less anachronistic terms like:

• Carrying a Legally-Permitted Pistol - Doesn't roll off the tongue, perhaps, but it's accurate.
• Strapped - If you must adopt some faux-gangster term, perhaps to live out your "Goodfellas" fantasies, at least pick something a bit more au courant. Strapped is what all the kids are calling it these days.

Handicapping Clark - I'm not

Handicapping Clark - I'm not of the opinion that Wesley Clark is either:

• The anti-christ
• not better than the Nine Dwarves.

I also don't think he's going to be a threat for the nomination, much less the Oval Office.

Ben Domench does a fine job of explaining why. Here's a good excerpt:

Clark fills a needed niche for the Democrats, but I also believe that he's doomed to lose this race for the nomination, for a couple of reasons:

-Clark is bad on the stump. He's wooden and looks short. He has all the marks of an inexperienced candidate, and he's doomed to make mistakes (the same kind he made as a talking head) when he has to respond to other wannabes.

-Clark has a genuine dislike for domestic policy. He just doesn't care that much about it, and he strikes me as a guy who will hate kowtowing to the activist groups that already love Dean and Gephardt naturally. And in the end, this campaign is not going to be about the war: it's going to be about the economy. On that ground, Dean is strongest (as an outsider with budget balancing experience), and he'll win every time they go toe-to-toe. The last time anyone won an election on foreign policy issues was (arguably) Nixon in 1968 - Reagan had the domestic policy villains of Carter and Mondale, Bush I had Dukakis' Massachusetts plan, Clinton had "the economy stupid," and Bush II had tax and education reform. War or no, recession or no, 2004 is not going to break the trend, and that's bad news for Clark.

Also, Clark is no Ike. While he's a relatively moderate, Catholic/Baptist/Jewish southerner, he has no lock on the military:

-Clark has made many, many enemies inside and outside the military. He has no natural base among military personnel, and there are a lot of four star generals who are retired now that will come out of the woodwork once Clark gains steam to criticize him and his skewed view of Iraq.

Finally - and this is from the "Truth Hurts" department - Domenech hoists Clark by the same petard that my own quixotic hope, Condi Rice, is on:

-Finally, the Presidency is not an entry-level political job. The last time we elected someone President with a resume devoid of elected politics was Ike - and Bosnia was not Normandy. We don't elect resumes, otherwise Dick Lugar and George Mitchell would've been elected President a long time ago. As much as we on the right like to gab about Condi Rice, the fact is that she wouldn't survive a race for President at this point. She needs to win something else first. Clark is the Dem version of Condi - a very smart person with an atypical and astoundingly good resume. But he'll end up facing the same result as McClellan [Union general George McClellan, who ran as a Democrat against Abraham Lincoln in 1864] in the electoral field.

Read the whole thing.

Bork Bork Bork - First

Bork Bork Bork - First they dump the Euro. Now, Sweden is thinking about following Denmark and Norway, and rolling back at least the worst excesses of socialism.

Blogger Edge of England's Sword has an interesting piece on Sweden's tentative steps away from the command economy and toward a free market:

The Swedish think tank Timbro serves as the epicenter of classical-liberal thought in the region. Under the leadership of journalist Mattias Bengtsson and Marxist-turned-libertarian Mauricio Rojas, the institute (which is funded mostly by large Swedish corporations) has pushed for welfare reform, free trade, and more capitalism. "We are working for a long-term shift in the public opinion in favor of free markets, entrepreneurship, private property, and an open society," Bengtsson describes his organization's goals.

What next? Germany swinging to the right?

Oh, yeah - that's happening too!

Contra Les Americains!

=Jay Reding on Fouad Ajami's excellent piece on the roots of French anti-Americanism.

It's not something we'll placate by just giving in to them, or the UN, or anyone.

Beating Martin - On a

Beating Martin - On a local email politics discussion group, I asked a local liberal "exactly what liberties have you, or anyone, lost due to the Patriot Act".

He responded with Martin Niemöller's famous aphorism:

First they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out ­
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the communists
And I did not speak out ­
Because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out ­
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me ­
And there was no-one left
To speak out for me.

Of course, Niemöller wrote this when citizens had to choose between life and death - a Nazi firing squad or surrender to moral turpitude.

In this context, of course, it's analogous to the activists who overuse the term "Genocide" or "Fascist", invoking them whenever they feel the need to play a moral trump card. The left - especially that part of the left that thought libertarians were a bunch of paranoid Freepers during the nineties, but have become stiff-necked Madisonians since January 2001 - trots out Niemöller whenever they're stumped for a genuine response to that question.

So, as my personal service to the American left, I'd like to give you this - my update of Niemöller:

"First they came for the Branch Davidians, and I didn't speak out, because
they were nutbars."

"Then, they came to blow up the Jews, and I didn't speak out, because everyone tells me Israel is the REAL terrorist"

"Then they came for the Iraqi and Iranian and Sudanese and Syrian citizen who'd fallen into disfavor with his or her government - and I didn't speak out because hey, we're not the world's policeman, are we?"

"Then they came for the refugees from North Korea, but I didn't speak out, because that'd be siding with the Bush Administration.

"Then they came for the people who had killed 3,000 of my countrymen. And I stood up and said "hey, visualize world peace, maaaan".

Circulate it to your liberal, newfound-libertarian friends.

You're welcome.

Writ Large

I have no sources for this. There is no corroborating evidence.

This post is based exclusively on a hunch. And I'm going to run with it.

Remember the last two elections in Minnesota? In '98, the polls showed Norm Coleman neck and neck with Skip Humphrey. Both were fairly confident in writing off Jesse Ventura.

The less said, the better.

More germane; in 2002, the Democrats polling showed them even with Tim Pawlenty in the gubernatorial race, and put Mondale ahead of Norm Coleman, before the Paulapalooza.

We know how that turned out.

The point being, the left was convinced that they were going to win; they lost, in many cases losing big. The gap between perception and reality was yawning.

Do Republicans do this? Maybe - but I don't remember anyone on the right seriously predicting a Dole victory in '96, and most serious conservatives were very worried about George HW Bush in '92 as well. I don't recall an election in my congnizant life where Republicans, on a wide scale, consistently mangled the tea leaves to mislead themselves the way so many on the left do today.

The left is latching onto the faintest scraps of news - a dip in the polls here, a bombing in Iraq there - and stitching it into an ornate scenario that ends with a Democrat victory in '04. Not to say that victory couldn't happen - the President is vulnerable - but none of these candidates are going to pull it off with any of the issues or conditions they find in place today. But it's fourteen months away!

Michael Medved says the stage may be set (as of now, anyway) for a set of historically-sweeping reversals for the left. Medved may be optimistic - it's 14 months away for us, too - but his case is a lot more convincing than a couple of polls and some short-term reverses.

We'll be following this for...oh, the next 14 months.

UPDATE: Yes, I do have some sources for this!

And yeah, anything can happen in 14 months, as we discovered in 1991. But the economy is improving (presumably over Paul Krugman's dead body), which is something George41 didn't have in his corner.

Quagmire Alert

From Instapundit, a report from a musician currently touring Iraq and Syria, on the state of the country from his perspective.

He says this about Syria:

If CNN hasn't gotten it, it appears that Assad in Syria has. The cabinet change was a big thing even though many hoped/expected that Assad would choose a non-Baathist over Otri. Still, they think a few of the new guys will be non-Baathists which would have been unthinkable before.

They sure need it-- the country is a beautiful basket case full of intelligent, kind people who could do something good if given a chance. On a more superficial, but probably important level as well, the kids military uniforms we saw last year are all gone, and a lot of the militarization you used to see in posters and monuments, etc. seems to have been toned down. The Lebanese paper, The Star, attributes this directly albeit grudgingly to the US being right next door.

Hm - sounds suspiciously close to what some of us were citing as a justification for the war - enforcing moderation on terror-mongering states like the Syrians and Iranians.

Read it all.

Liberal Blogosphere Tour, Part III

Liberal Blogosphere Tour, Part III - As part of my continuing tour of lefty blogs, I visited the Daily Kos.

Kos is better than the typical run of the mill lefty blogger; if nothing else, he hatched the "Political State Report", a very ambitious group blog that strives get at least one blogger from each party, from each state in the union. Naturally, since it's a Kos project, the contributors swing firmly left (I contribute occasionally), but it's a good effort.

But Kos himself continues to illustrate "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary" (see the top right of this blog) in this post, which quotes a cite from a post by Tom Tomorrow (a mediocre cartoonist whose blog is very popular on the left):

The Congressional resolution authorizing Bush's War required the president to certify to Congress that war was necessary. Part of that letter (the full one is at Tom's site):

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

In other words, Bush is certifying that Iraq had a role in the 9-11 attacks, thus justifying the subsequent invasion.

Remember Berg's Law: Liberals are incapable of addressing more than one of the justifications for war at a given time; in this case, Kos/Tomorrow don't even address one justification entirely. Iraq's involvement with Al Quada is irrelevant; their involvement with terror at large (not to mention WMDs, flouting of UN resolutions, and human rights record) were.

Kos goes on to print an email from a reader who defended (apparently reluctantly) the Bush statement. He responded:

It should be obvious (to me, especially) that the Bush administration is masterful at crafting language that seems to say one thing while saying another.

When you've already decided what the President is saying - as in, back in November of 2000 - then that's going to happen.

The Other Kennedy - Minnesota

The Other Kennedy - Minnesota Sixth District Representative Mark Kennedy recently visited Iraq, and writes about it in the PiPress.

Kennedy has lots of interesting observations - on the morale of the troops (not high, but workaday matter-of-fact, as is to be expected), the popularity of the UN among Iraqis (not very) and the meaning of it all:

"The most striking comment I heard was from the vice mayor of Mosul. He said that, for America, success in Iraq is a foreign policy issue, but for the radical Islamic fundamentalists, it is life and death. If we succeed, their worldview, like the Taliban's in Afghanistan, will be extinguished. They fear, and we hope, that democracy in Iraq will spread to its neighbors – Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and beyond.

The attacks against aid workers at the U.N. and the Shiite cleric will hopefully reinforce to Iraqis that Iraq and America have a common enemy — those elements in society that do not want Iraq to continue its progress toward a prosperous and democratic future."

Read it all - it's not very long.

"Repeal" Watch - The local

"Repeal" Watch - The local "Repeal Concealed Carry" movement is losing momentum faster than Britney Spears. And I don't think Madonna's going to give them a big smooch onstage to rev things up for them.

However, in the great North Dakota football tradition, I'm going to pile on; I'm going to make it a regular practice to fact-check some of the local conceal-repeal websites.

Let's take a look at repealconceal.com.

As expected, they covered last week's big "story" - the guy in Anoka that shot his brother's car 11 times. Let's go over what the website says about the story, and stop when we get to an egregious error:

Only eight days after getting his permit to carry a concealed handgun,

Well, that didn't take long, did it?

The permit was completely irrelevant to the story. The shooter - Damian Peterson - was on his own property. This sort of shooting happens all the time, in every trailer park, small town, slum and even places like Anoka. The only thing that makes this shooting remarkable - and the only reason it made the news - was that Peterson had a permit.

Had this shooting happened in the parking lot of a restaurant or the Metrodome, or someplace where a law-abiding citizen would not have been carrying a gun four months ago, then this story would have been news - and this blurb would have been at least incrementally more accurate.

Damian Peterson got into an argument with his brother, fired 11 rounds into a car, including one while it was fleeing the scene.

Nobody disputes this - including Peterson, who, unlike an actual criminal (the type that regularly carry firearms, permit or not) cooperated with the police.

He had also called the police (remember them? The ones we're supposed to trust to prevent crime?) and tried to get them to keep his drunk brother off the road. He shot the car (he says) to keep his brother from driving, not in some depraved road rage incident. The incident is proof only of Peterson's lack of judgement, not proof that he was completely off his rocker and shooting wildly. In other words - he was wrong, just not in the way that the Repealers wish he were.

This occurred in a neighborhood where families have children playing nearby.

If memory serves, the incident happened at night, in an area that was rather isolated from the rest of the neighborhood. There has been no report of children anywhere near the incident.

While either I nor, it seems, repealconceal can confirm or deny the presence of children, if children weren't anywhere nearby, this sort of statement could be fairly categorized as "cheap manipulation".

Despite receiving gun safety training, Peterson still believes he should still be legally entitled to carry his weapon in public.

According to Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now, "no one has ever claimed that permit holders would be perfect."

Quoted out of context. The rest of Olson's quote: ""But there are always exceptions, and this gentleman is a moron," he said. "There will be people who will do stupid and illegal things and the law is set up so they lose their permits, which sounds like it worked just fine in this case." The addendum is important - as we shall see shortly.

However, for years, Olson's website has led readers to believe that all permit holders are impeccable citizens with statements such as this: "Men and women issued permits are responsible, competent adults. They are the kind of folks who remain stopped at a lonely stoplight at 3am because they are habitually law-abiding."

And then repealconceal shows us nothing - besides this badly out-of-context case - to dispute that.

Read CCRN's website for yourself.

Beyond that, the site contains the usual phalanx of strawmen:

Concealed-carry laws have been passed in 34 other states, but Minnesota's flavor of concealed-carry is particularly extreme, especially with respect to businesses.

repealconceal then goes on to show exactly no reasons why our law is "extreme". Our law is thoroughly middle-of-the-road. Someone like repealconceal might consider Alaska or Vermont "extreme" (no permit is required at all), while concealed-carry activists think Michigan's law is extreme (lots of law enforcement discretion, selective and expensive training, etc). The "Our law is extreme" argument has never, to my knowledge, been backed up by a single fact or figure.

* Guns are allowed in parks.

But outside of manipulative strawmen like "CHILDREN play in parks, nobody has showed why this is a bad thing. People carry guns in parks all the time; it's just that very few of them have carry permits, and most of them have criminal records.

Let me put this another way; Concealed Carry activists fought hard over the past seven years to get a law that would specifically state where people could not legally carry their permitted firearms; without this specificity - if the law were written with lots of "oopses" built in, waiting to create a new class of inadvertent criminals - the law would be worse than useless. Opponents seem to feel we should have the opposite - a list of places we CAN carry (and that the list should include our basements and that's about it.

* Guns are allowed at the State Fairgrounds.
* Guns are allowed in city hall meetings.

Again - people carry guns in city hall meetings all the time. They happen to be criminals for the most part.

And if one of them - the criminals - opened fire, the permittee under Minnesota law would be crazy to return fire under most circumstances.

* Non residents can carry concealed guns.

Which is a matter of common sense; if a person is considered law-abiding, sober and sane, and has passed a skills course and background check, why should their permits not be recognized?

* Sheriffs may not deny an permit to somebody who has been acquitted of a crime. (This and the above provision mean that someone like O.J. Simpson could come to Minnesota and carry a concealed gun.)

I've pointed this little strawman out to the person who runs repealconceal. He knows it's wrong.

* Businesses can not prohibit guns on their private property unless they post signs at each entranceway and verbally notify each customer.

Another strawman. Businesses must post a sign (so people KNOW they're breaking the law) and verbally notify anyone that missed the sign.

An official legislative estimate states that this law will increase the number of people licensed to pack heat on Minnesota streets by 750%, from 12,000 now to 90,000.

Let's assume for a moment that 90,000 documentably law-abiding citizens with permits is a bad thing (and I don't assume this): the fact is, the number of permits issued so far is nowhere near that pace. The figure comes from an "official legislative estimate" that Wes Skoglund's been throwing around all year - but nobody has even once showed us where that figure came from. Saying "it's official!" doesn't mean it's accurate.

Even CCW activists admit the number of CCW permits will rise to about 50,000. Needless to say, gun sales are going to increase. Some portion of those guns will be stolen, and get into the hands of criminals.

Read: We need to base policy on the potential actions of deviants?

Here's the most important part of this equation: Most Minnesotans feel that this law will make Minnesota a more dangerous place!

So?

Most Alabamans in 1960 "felt" desegregation would make Alabama a more dangerous place. They were misinformed, weren't they?

Now, we get into the "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with skoglund" part:

This law circumvented most normal procedures in the legislature. It was tacked on to an unrelated bill.

Baloney.

It went through "normal procedures" every year for seven years. It went through committees for seven years. Every year, it gained votes.

And the writer of this website obviously assumes the reader doesn't know much about legislative process; legislation is "tacked on" to "unrelated bills" all the time - but it's done according to a procedure that ensures clarity and open debate.

It didn't go through the normal committee process.

Again, the writers states this as if it's an abnormality. It passed the committees it had to

Supporters did make a point of keeping the bill out of committee in the Senate, where all the relevant committees are controlled by metro DFLers with anti-gun agendas. When the likes of Skoglund and Ellen Anderson bleated "why can't we take this back to committee and talk about it", it was pure spin for public consumption; they knew as well as CCRN that it was a tactic to kill the bill, even though the votes were there to pass the bill, and had been for at least a session before the current one.

In other words, it was the Senate DFLers who tried to jiggle procedure to flout democracy, as they had for the previous seven sessions. This time, CCRN had lined up the votes to beat the DFLers' stonewalling...

...democratically.

It didn't have very much public debate.

The bill was debated publicly and exhaustively for seven years.

It was opposed by a broad base of organizations (over 300 groups, including churches, three major statewide police associations, city councils, and health and education groups),

Strawman.

The bill was opposed by a large number of groups representing a narrow band of special interests; liberal, anti-gun churches, politically-motivated police chiefs, DFL-dominated city councils, and unnamed "health and education" groups that were largely closely alighned with the DFL. To say that they represent more people than...

...the NRA, Concealed Carry Reform Now! and the Republican Party of Minnesota...

...is disingenuous to say the least.

The site also cites information from the Brady Factory Campaign that is years out of date, grossly factually-challenged - and very long. We'll deal with that in a separate post.

Opposition to concealed carry is the same now as it was then, and the same as it is for all gun-control legislation; a mile wide, and usually an inch deep. Except for zealots like Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota, most really don't see much impact from guns one way or the other.

The "Repeal" movement is, I suspect, likewise a group of people that is impressed enough with their own zeal (and relative clout at the Capitol) that they feel they're more powerful than they are.

Absence of Knowledge - Josh

Absence of Knowledge - Josh Marshall continues to confirm Berg's Law of Liberal Commentary on Iraq (see upper-right corner of this blog) in last Sunday's edition of his blog. The left continues to believe that the war on terror is really a war on Al Quaeda.

Marshall comments about Vice President Cheney's appearances on the Sunday Morning Pundapaloozas last weekend:

MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think itÂ’s not surprising that people make that connection.

MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We donÂ’t know.

But in the great scheme of things, it's all more or less irrelevant, because the war on terror is not just a war on Al Quaeda, as much as it pains the simple-minded lefties who display their "Bin Laden At Large 652 Days" counters on their Blogspot blogs. Iraq may or may not have been connected with Al Quaeda - but they're connected with Hamas, Hezb'allah, Jamiyat e' Islamiya, and the whole rogues' gallery. Drawing distinctions between one Islamofascist group and another is academically satisfying, intellectually pointillistic, and practically pointless; the intellectual link between kamikaze airliners, bombs on buses and people being fed into plastic shredders is as important as any meetings that may or may not (and most likely did) occur. And, remembering Berg's Law, keep in mind that there are all those other justifications:

• The Weapons of Mass Destruction, which everyone believed in until they didn't show up, when suddenly the whole American left lost their religion
• the vast, blood-gushing human-rights hemorrhage that was the Hussein regime
• The booklet of UN resolutions that needed to be enforced
• the large, compelling strategic reasons to have a force in being and a base in the region, whose worth is already becoming obvious to those equipped to see it, in the moderated behavior of the Iranians, Saudis, and even the mainstream PLO.

Marshall continues:

Even applying so low a standard as that by which we judge incidents with four-year-olds and cookie jars, Cheney's statement that "we just don't know" whether Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks is a lie.

Y'know what, Joshua Micah Marshall? If you want to define "we don't know the full story, in a context with many other variables (see the list above)" as a "lie", then fair enough. I'll use that standard:

Why do 69% of Americans continue to believe that Iraq may have been involved in 9/11? Many reasons. But one of the most important is that their leaders keep lying to them.

OK - and by Marshall's standard, the left is lying as well - by focusing exclusively on one single variable of the Iraq story at a time, without considering the broader context of the story; "The administration is lying about WMDs" the left will say, carefully ignoring the UN resolutions, human rights abuses, and Iraq's public ties with other terror; They'll solemnly yet gleefully intone "they lied about the Al Quaeda Connection", as if Al Quada were the only terrorists that mattered.

Do I think the Adminisration should dispel the public's notion that there's a definite link between Iraq and 9/11? Sure. And, lookie here, they're doing just that.

OK - one problem down; a list of strawmen (see above) yet to go. Your turn.

Rock on the Right? -

Rock on the Right? - You don't hear much rock and roll that makes you sit up and say "Jeez - that sounds downright Republican".

I was listening to the Franky Perez CD the other day. It took a few listens for this one to hit me:

...I won't lie for an honest buck
I'm a messenger in a pick-up truck
My old man ran in to hard luck
And passed it down to me...

...I won't stand in your welfare line
What I lack in cash I make up in pride
You get yours and I'll get mine
I got to feed my family

The government takes half our wages
Picket lines and classified pages
You can't count on the man to save us
So we take it to the streets

That's from "Cry Freedom", from his CD "Poor Man's Son", which I highly recommend. It's got some filler, but the high points are high enough to make me forget it. 0

Clark - All Wrong -

Clark - All Wrong - David Frum on all - or at least many - of reasons Wesley Clark is not only a bad choice, the but a spectacularly bad one

Democrats think they can inoculate themselves from the charge of being weak on national security by hiring a general to express their weakness for them. It’s an old antiwar fantasy. Back in the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party recruited a former Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to give speeches on the eve of World War II denouncing military preparedness as a capitalist racket. The idea was that by persuading an individual man of valor to propound shameful views , those views would somehow become less shameful. It didn’t work then. I doubt it will work now.

Especially since Wesley Clark is an odd person on whom to hang an argument against the Iraq war.

If any one figure sums up the illusions and errors of the 1990s, it is Clark. Clark was the general who led the U.S. into a purely humanitarian war in Kosovo – at exactly the moment that the Clinton administration was disregarding the gathering threat to the United States from Middle Eastern terrorism. Clark has criticized the supposed and alleged errors of U.S. planning in Iraq – notwithstanding that his campaign in Kosovo was based on an unending series of errors, above all his claim that his air campaigns could destroy Serbian military capabilities without harming the Serbian civilian population.

More - much more - to come.

Close. No Cigar - It

Close. No Cigar - It finally happened - the Stribgot into the blog business.

Sort of.

On the one hand; lots of links to blogs, including the Fraters and Lileks.

On the other hand; the bloggers are pretty universally slanted left (which is fine), and - worst of all - you have to register to leave a comment.

Boy - if the major media ever figure out blogs...

The Blogosphere's Best and Worst

The Blogosphere's Best and Worst of 9/11+2 - Lots of writing on 9/11. Although nobody asked me, I'm going to sort though my best and worst of 9/11 on the blogosphere. It's the least I can do.

The Best

• Lileks - Yep, on my list, same as everyone else's.
• Vodkapundit - Green writes the article I wish I'd written.
  

The Worst

• Josh Marshall: In which 9/11 is reduced to just another opportunity for partisan sniping (which, inevitably, a raft of star-struck lefty blogs carried with slack-jawed credulity). Money quote (in Confederate dollars): " I recalled the images of the president getting the first word from Andy Card about the attacks, the later ones of his touring ground-zero and talking to the assembled search and rescue crews. I found him an inspiring leader in those moments...I wondered whether those thoughts of mine would seep into the present to color what's happening today. They didn't." He goes on to say "What I felt wasn't continuity but the jarring contrast, the cheap, obvious lies, the hubris, the tough-talk for low ends, not so much the mistakes as the tawdriness of so much of what's happened, especially over the last eighteen months." What's happened - like a lack of any followup attacks? Hugh Hewitt gave the piece its deserved send-off: "you cannot help but feel sorry for Marshall and those who share his views. They are genuinely divorced from American opinion and American thinking. Citizens, yes, and patriotic in their way, but clueless and not likely to ever be other than clueless. If you cannot understand 9/11, then what can you understand? Nothing that matters, I think, and very little besides."
• Atrios Eschaton - No particular article - just a whole day worth of conspiracy-mongering of a Democrats.com level of quality.

More On Albright - The

More On Albright - The Commissioner of the Northern Alliance, Hugh Hewitt, adds to what I said below about Madeline Albright's contention that Algore would have headed off 9/11:

"Secretary Albright is peddling a book, and so interviews are to be expected. What isn't expected, or routine, is for a former Secretary of State to so stridently attack the sitting President, or to do so with transparent dodges and awe-inspiring rewrites of history. The most eye-opening line is: 'Frankly, if there was a President Gore, we wouldn't be in this particular mess,' but there is much, much more that is dishonorable, and a serious interview might have posed at least one hardball like: 'Do you regret clinking glasses with and bestowing legitimacy upon the murderous tyrant running North Korea even as he duped you and your colleagues?'

For years Secretary Albright was thought to be a serious participant in the foreign policy community. Now she's Carville with cute pins. Dinner to anyone who finds an interview with James Baker or Lawrence Eagleburger from the fall of 1995 or earlier in which either man launched wholesale, partisan attacks on Clinton."

Naturally, read the whole thing.

I think this thing could backfire on the Democrats - in fact, if I have anything to say about it (and I did, below), I certainly will.

Paging Orwell - Need a

Paging Orwell - Need a break that's both depressing and comic relief?

That's right - the Democratic National Committee has a blog.

More later.

Gored

As part of my continuing quest to, as Sun Tsu urged, know the "enemy", I've been trying to read more left-wing blogs. By the way, I say "enemy" with a wink and a nudge; I grew up among liberals, I get along with them just fine, and I believe this nation really does need to learn how to debate civilly, without resorting to the sort of trashy name-calling that some of the lunatic fringe on the left and right get into.

That being said - oh, Lordy, there are truly some moonbats out there.

I read the left-blog "Counterspin", written by a fellow named "Hesiod" (and what's with the left-blogger fascination for pretentious pen names? Hesiod. Joshua Micah Marshall. Kos. Atrios Eschaton. My, my. Speaking purely apolitically, give me the right's simple, direct noms de plume - names like Instapundit, Rottweiler, Hindrocket, St. Paul, James and so on. But I digress).

"Hesiod" is under the impression that everything would be soooo much better if only Algore had won. And he bases this on the testimony of...

...Madeline Albrecht. The worst Secretary of State since Warren "Run Away!" Christopher.

"Hesiod" starts:

"GOING NUCLEAR: I think it's time to take the gloves off with the Bush administration and the GOP. It's so vitally important that Bush lose next year's election, I think we have to start using the big guns.

And that big gun is...

What do I mean? Well...we need more rhetoric like Madeline Albright's assertion that 9/11 wouldn't have happened under a President Gore.

"...rhetoric like...". Good start.

Do I know this is true? I think, intuitively, that at the very least a Gore administration would have taken the Al Qaeda problem seriously from the beginning, and wouldn't conducted a ridiculous 'policy review' for 7 months.

That's right - Algore, the consummate wonk, the man of a thousand studies, the most risk-averse politician since Bill Clinton, would have drastically parted from his sugadaddy's foreign policy. You know - the one that let Bin Laden walk not once, but several times.

"Intuitively", "Hesiod" "knows" this about Algore. Why?

No answer.

I do think they would have warned airlines, and airports about possible kamikaze hijackings when they had some credible intelligence about it 30 days before 9/11.

That's right. After years of "credible intelligence" about potential attacks (the type of "credible intelligence" that currently has the Threat Level bouncing around like a toddler on caffeine in a Moonwalk), an Algore administration would have magically picked that precise set of "credible intelligence" - from the veritable flood of "credible intelligence" that warns constantly of every sort of potential attack - and picked the right course of action?

Like Algore and Clinton did with the "credible evidence" before the first WTC bombing, the Mogadishu incident, the Khobar Towers bombing, the bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the USS Cole?

All this is leading up to one inescapable conclusion; "Hesiod" - and by extension, much of the moonbat, tinfoil-hat left - thinks that not only is Algore clairvoyant - they apparently believe themselves to have extrasensory powers as well!

"Hesiod"'s "intuition" tells him that, in direct contravention of all evidence in the record about the administration of which Algore was the adjutant executive, Algore would have reached into the big revolving drum of "credible intelligence" and, voila, picked "Al Quaeda, 9/11, in New York, with the Airplanes"!

Indeed, the next paragraph shows that "Hesiod" is taking a hit from the same rhetorical bong that Dionne Warwick bogarted:

They may also have better prepared domestic air defenses by deploying more fighter jets for intercept duties around high probability target areas. New York being an obvious one.

"May" have.

Right. And he "May" have "intuitively" figured out who the attackers were going to be, and been waiting at Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11 at the head of his crack squad of terrorbusters.

Hey, "Hesiod" is crediting Algore with near-supernatural powers. Why is my scenario any less credible, or entertaining, than his?

Would that have prevented the 9/11 attacks? Maybe not.

The hijackings and the loss of those planes, passengers and crews were probably unavoidable.

But, in my opinion, it probably would have prevented the WTC hits and possibly the Pentagon hits. The pilots would've been less likely to follow the orders of the hijackers, and the jets would have been closer and more able to intercept and down the airliners.

So let's get this straight, here: President Algore would have:

1. ..completely reversed the Clinton Administration's idiocy about terrorists,
2. magically divined the correct warning from the avalanche of informaiton that the CIA, to this day, is incapable of fully processing,
3. Decided that the attack was going to be "planes, in the Northeast, in the fall of '01",
4. broken with the Clinton Administration's, and his own, personal ignorance, disregard and disdain for all things military, and increased NORAD's alert level and resources (more planes, higher alert levels), and
5. ...Given all that in place, had the nerve on the morning of 9/11 to order NORAD to shoot down four US jetliners? This from a holdover from an administration that ran like a scared rabbit from Somalia, after an otherwise successful raid that cost 18 American soldiers?

Clairvoyance! It's the answer!

In essence, we'd probably be mourning four flight 93 style hijacking events, as opposed to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Basically, you can make a case that Bush's negligence cost at least 2000 people their lives. Possible more.

Negligence? Or lack of superhuman perception?

And...since the GOP and the warfloggers have no moral prohibition about exploiting the deaths of those people to unfairly attack Democrats and Bill Clinton, why should we hold back such criticism from Bush...when it actually has some MERIT?

If I were as clairvoyant as "Hesiod", I'd probably know the answer to that.

I'm afraid I'd need to be clairvoyant to know why saying "Clinton let Bin Laden escape, both from the Sudan and from Quatar" is "Unfair", but saying "Bush let 9/11 happen" isn't. Anyone?

I say...repeat it loud and often. If nothing else it will drive the warfloggers and the GOP/Bush Fedayeen hacks bananas."

Actually, disposing of the "logic" behind "Hesiod" and Madeline Albrecht is fairly simple. What drives me "bananas" is that there is a large population of moonbats in this country that, like professional wrestling, Enquirer and Psychic Friends, think this sort of buncombe is in any way credible.

My own take on a hypothetical Gore Administration's hypothetical response to terror is no less fanciful, much more honestly sourced - and (if I say so myself) a much better read.

Your mileage may vary.

Not Blaspheming - Yesterday, I

Not Blaspheming - Yesterday, I wrote about Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame nominee Patti Smith "Easily the most overrated person in punk music; let's wait a year or two (although I think she did "Because the Night" better than Bruce, to say nothing of the dismal 10,000 Maniacs".

Email correspondent JS from Arizona writes:

Patti Smith's version better than Bruce's? In the words of Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers: Don't you blaspheme in here!

A fair point. I plead temporary, job-hunt-related insanity yesterday.

I should have said "Bruce's version is great - one of my five favorite Darkness-era songs, really - but it's pretty much Darkness-era Bruce whichever way you slice it, and there are times I'm just in the mood for Smith's more idiosyncratic take on the song".

Mea gulpa.

English Majors, Unite! - I

English Majors, Unite! - I love this one,, via Volokh:

"A man is on his first visit to Boston, and he wants to try some of that delicious New England seafood that he'd long heard about. So he gets into a cab, and asks the driver, 'Can you take me to where I can get scrod?' The driver replies, 'I've heard that question a thousand time, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive.'"

Sure, maybe a little inside. But I'm the guy who, when asked by my German professor to conjugate the German word for "to Stay", responded "Blieben, Blob, Gebloben", and have broken up in gales of laughter for the past twenty years every time I recall it.

I need a job.

Pucker Time - Waiting on

Pucker Time - Waiting on two jobs - or technically three. I interviewed for one job - let's call it "Job A" - last week with two separate, distinct sets of qualifications. For one set, my qualifications are stellar. For the other, not so much. We'll see.

The other two have been exercises in patience. One - we'll call it "Job B" - I interviewed for a while ago. Valentines Day, to be exact. I met the manager, who told the recruiter afterwards "This is the guy we need". There was, however, no open requisition - he just wanted to get a head start on interviewing for when the req did finally open. Seven months later, it may be opening soon. Maybe.

The other - let's call it "Job C" - is nearly perfect. It'd involve designing User Interfaces for mass storage, which I did for 2 1/2 years at another local company. I'm very good at it. My contact just needs to convince the Vice President that they need me. I have my fingers crossed.

Significantly, both jobs would be less than a ten minute commute, which will be a relief compared to the commutes to my last several long-term or full-time jobs (35, 20, 23 , 24 and 26 miles, respectively). This is becoming the make-or-break issue. I'm almost willing to trade money for short commute.

Almost, I said.

In the meantime, a contract gig that was supposed to pay my bills for the next month seems to have crashed.

Anyone need leaves raked?

Enter Clark - The near-left

Enter Clark - The near-left is singing the Alleluiah Chorus - Wesley Clark is going to enter the presidential race today.

His supporters claim his leadership experience as one of his main qualifications.

But while Clark (who came up through the Armor branch, and has commanded tank units from company through division strength) has an impressive record (including a combat tour in Vietnam, like most of his classmates that progressed beyond Lieutenant Colonel in rank), it's got its warts. They might be considered serious warts, for someone who aspires to lead the free world.

This BBC piece might call his leadership into question:

"But General Clark's plan was blocked by General Sir Mike Jackson, K-For's British commander.

'I'm not going to start the Third World War for you,' he reportedly told General Clark during one heated exchange.

General Jackson tells the BBC: ''We were [looking at] a possibility....of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.'' "

In fact, his main qualification to leadership, especially in the Kosovo campaign under President Clinton, may have been...

...his proximity to Clinton. David Hackworth notes:

"He's a boy from Arkansas who's connected to Clinton from '66 at Oxford. He has gone up the political route. He was Alexander Haig's aide-de-camp; he was a White House fellow. He didn't have the kind of assignments that a real muddy-boots grunt would have, someone like Schwarzkopf. If you had Schwarzkopf running the capaign, you would see a far different campaign, meaning you would hit their forces with overwhelming power, and thump the son-of-a-bitch in the head with a two-by-four on the first hit so he's seeing stars from then on."

In other words, General Clark is another Clinton hack (forgive the pun).

Hmmmm - Fraters' post yesterday

Hmmmm - Fraters' post yesterday sparked the "mad scientist" in me.

More on this tomorrow.

Let Them Eat Back-Issues -

Let Them Eat Back-Issues - Donald Luskin of Keep Them Poor And Stupid, and Silvain Galineau of Chicago Boyz both tear into Paul Krugman's latest smear effort.

Galineau starts by quoting Krugman:

" Think it's more than a bit of a reach to claim that the real objectives of conservatives and their tax-cuts are poverty, illness and ignorance? That's nothing compared to what Krugman says in his new book. There he states that the Bush administration is part of the rise of a 'revolutionary power' comparable to rise of 'totalitarian regimes in the 1930's' [page 5]. To the objectives of poverty, illness and injury Krugman adds, 'a country ...possibly -- in which elections are only a formality' [page 8].

Galineau continues:

I love the smell of liberal sweat in the morning. Well, not really, but you get my drift. And yes, Krugman does argue that the deliberate objective of conservative tax cuts are poverty, illness and ignorance for the masses. Which makes sense, when you think about it. You can make so much more money when everybody is poor, ignorant and ill; just watch all those businesses getting in line to move to Africa, for instance. Brings a tear of joy to the eye of every self-respecting capitalist. "

The frustrating part is that so many of my liberal friends still think of Krugman as a credible source of information on the economy. He's from Princeton and the Times, dammit!

But his stridency is starting to worry even a few of my friends that support him.

So let's keep paying out the rope. As long has he's pulling...

Is It Real... - ...or

Is It Real... - ...or is it ScrappleFace, yet again?

Art Parrots Life - HBO's

Art Parrots Life - HBO's new series, "K Street", stars James Carville as "James Carville", Mary Matalin as "Mary Matalin", and a cast of thousands as...themselves.

Says Timothy Noah in Slate:

K Street—the new HBO series from producers Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney—is something different, because its star, James Carville, is a real person playing a slightly fictionalized version of himself... In K Street, though, "James Carville" and his wife, Mary Matalin (who recently left the White House, where she was senior adviser to Dick Cheney), have decided to cash in on their bipartisan connections by starting a Washington lobbying firm. It's no small testament to the powerful lure of show biz that Carville and Matalin agreed to pretend on K Street that they're much sleazier than they are in real life.

I've stated elsewhere my worry that K Street will further glamorize Washington's influence-peddling racket and that it will lend too much credence to lobbyists' self-image as wayfarers through a thicket of moral complexity. The inaugural episode did not dispel that anxiety. It focuses on the decision by "Carville" to provide debate prep to presidential candidate "Howard Dean" (who appears as himself). "We're going to need some client shoring-up," a worried "Matalin" says, and dispatches an aide named Maggie Morris to soothe Republican Sens. "Don Nickles" of Oklahoma and "Rick Santorum" of Pennsylvania.

I don't have HBO. But I'd gladly pay money to see "Survivor: Talking Heads in Siberia".

Paging Richard Daley - From

Paging Richard Daley - From "the Corner", this outrageous quote from Jeffrey "What Plutonium" Smith:

"'Whether [Gen. Clark] runs or not, the views that he, Gen. Zinni and others have recently been expressing must be heeded. All of the men and women who now rest in national cemeteries demand it.'

Ranesh Ponnuru asks in response:

All of them agree with Clark, Zinni, and Smith? All of them want a draft? Was there a poll?"

Were they in Florida when they demanded it?

Intimidation - Christiana Amanpour said

Intimidation - Christiana Amanpour said that CNN was "too intimidated" by the Administration and by Fox News to do its job.

How, I ask, could CNN's ostensible competitor "intimidate" CNN?

Randal Robinson has the answers

"The Top 10 Ways Fox News Intimidated CNN:

10. Sent Greta Van Susteren to use a little muscle on Aaron Brown.
9. Fox and Friends urged viewers to egg Paula Zahn's house.
8. Neil Cavuto challenged Lou Dobbs to a Financial News Death Match.
7. Sean Hannity snapped Larry King's suspenders and raised a welt.
6. Brit Hume shaved off Wolf Blitzer's beard and held it hostage.
5. Fox anchors kept referring to CNN as the 'Commie News Network.'
4. Laurie Dhue's makeup tips caused Christiane Amanpour's skin to break out.
3. Geraldo Rivera threatened to nuke CNN's ratings 'back to MSNBC country.'
2. Painted Fox News helicopters black and had them hover over CNN headquarters.
1. Bill O'Reilly's mean smirks sent shivers of fear throughout CNN."

I guess given the favorable coverage the Bush Administration has gotten from the likes of CNN, Bill Clinton must have been holding news execs' children hostage, huh?

(Via Instapundit)

Tribute - Jay Reding starts

Tribute - Jay Reding starts his tribute to Flight 93:

"Just 90 minutes after the terrorists started their attack, they lost their first battle to a group of Americans armed with little else than their courage. This is their story."

Someday, Flight 93 is going to be to this generation what Davy Crockett and the Alamo were to previous Americans.

Wow - High Praise indeed

Wow - High Praise indeed from the Commissioner, in yesterday's installment of his blog:

A very fine interview of Powerline's John Hindrocket by Israpundit. Among other things, the Israpundit asks why Powerline has moved from triumph to triumph. JH makes nice comments about the many who have praised him and his colleagues, including yours truly, but his humility may obscure a key couple of points. Why has this blog become a must read? First, Powerline is a believer in freedom and a voice for many people and causes needing freedom. Point two: It is smart --recall the fisking delivered the Strib last year on its polling methodology. That is one of many, many examples of deep digging and analysis that accompanies smart but quick observations on the say's events. Finally, Powerline has a sense of humor. A very good sense of humor. All of the Northern Alliance blogs share this trait, which may have something to do with snow.

Refer to my posting below: Any paper in the Twin Cities with a sentient publisher would throw money at Powerline (and Mitch) to write for them. If circulation and influence mattered, that is.

Well, thanks, Hugh! And I'm certainly available...

It's certainly been interesting, being involved with a group like the Northern Alliance; anything where a hobby writer like yours truly gets mentioned in the same paragraph as people like Lileks, Hinderaker, Johnson, Banian et al is sort of like stumbling into my garage in the dark, turning the key, and finding myself at the wheel of a Ferrari.

Drink the Rich! - Pioneer

Drink the Rich! - Pioneer Press columnist Laura Billings still doesn't get it.

Today's column starts out discussing the "creative" ways school districts and cities have come up with to raise more money:

Here in the Recovery Belt, we know that drinking doesn't solve our problems — it only disguises them temporarily.

Yet, this lesson may be lost on our friends on the coasts, who seem to be turning to liquid refreshments to help them solve their liquidity problems.

So far, so good.

It's here, though, that the logic goes badly awry.

For the benfit of Billings' fans, I'll explain things as we go along:

In Seattle, where Puget Sound sophisticates have long known that espresso has no "x" in it, voters in today's referendums will decide whether to tax nondrip coffee drinks 10 cents a cup to raise money for early childhood programs and better salaries for day-care providers.

That's called a "tax increase".

As opposed to this:

...in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed that Snapple had paid the city $166 million to become the Big Apple's official provider of water, juice and iced tea.

This is called a "donation".

They are very different things. Ms. Billings may or may not know this:

backers of Initiative 77 — better known as the "latte tax" — say it could raise between $3 million and $7 million a year for the city's youth and won't impose any undue economic hardship on people who have already elected to pay more than $3 for a caramel mocha whip, along with a quarter or two in the tip jar for the attitude-dripping barrista who takes their order.

"If you can afford a caramel mocha, you can afford to pony up to support the Teachers' Union!".

The caramel mocha and the tip are both voluntary. The citizens of Washington are deciding if they want to put the burden of supporting the teachers' union and their immense public education infrastructure on the backs of people who drink chi chi coffee.

Call it what you want - it's a tax. More accurately, it's people who drink Folgers deciding that people who drink Starbucks should pay for the Folgers' peoples' services. To bastardize Alexander Tytler , ""A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from those who go upmarket from them."

Billings continues:

New York City's sweet deal with a juice company might not be as fruity as it sounds, either. Snapple will get exclusive rights to the vending machines in the city's 1,200 public schools, a deal that will eventually extend into city buildings and police stations, adding some 6,000 Snapple machines to the landscape. But at the city's insistence, the company also is creating four new drinks — 100 percent fruit juices — to comply with New York's new ban on soda, candy and other cavity-causers from school vending machines. Some $40 million in Snapple proceeds will go directly into public school coffers.

This, however, is not a tax. This is Privatization. Many people have proposed doing exactly this sort of thing to help stretch the educational tax dollar (or even replace it, in many cases). You'll find many, many people who'll enthusiastically support this sort of thing.

But brace yourself, Laura Billings; most of them are Republicans. And when we propose it, people like Laura Billings are the first to cluck about "commercialism in the classroom". It needs to be, I guess, a politically-correct company like Snapple making the proposal.

It's here that Billings veers into the weeds:

"Unfortunately, the creative marketing behind such campaigns can't disguise the lack of political courage that inspires them: the basic unwillingness of many of our public officials to admit out loud, 'Hey, we need more money for schools.''

Most of them do "admit" it out loud. And the voters have told them "No. The education budget in this state nearly doubled in ten years. Now, we want results. We want more reading, and fewer politically-correct mandates. We want kids learning what they need for life, not a bunch of PC multi-culti bathwash. We want to know our tax money isn't going down some institutional rathole, and until we do, taxes are staying firmly put. And you can wave 30-year old Time magazine covers in my face and whine about "the death of Minnesota Nice" until your arms and tongue fall off, but until you can show me that I'm getting my money's worth, especially when I'm not sure I'm going to have a job next week, you and your teachers' union friends can scrimp, just like I am.

After all, in a world where tax cuts are offered as the only solution to a sour economy and a shrinking job market (a 'solution' that, incidentally, hasn't worked), ...

Yet.

And when they do, Laura Billings, you'll find another rationalization. I'll count on it.

...few want to risk the political capital it costs to suggest that in such tough times, taxes for the things we claim to value might actually need to go up."

Laura Billings: the "things I value" are my children. Not the schools. Not our tax-supported institutions.

I value the schools that I send them to exactly as I value my car. I like my car; but if I'm getting nickled and dimed to death, I'll sell it to a Democrat and buy another one.

Just Like the Maltese Falcon

Just Like the Maltese Falcon - Today's Bleat closes with a bit of detective work, ending with:

So I’m going to call them back tomorrow, and ask them: “I’m curious how you matched a phone number, a specific name, an address, and referenced a particular conversation. Because if the Justice Department did to you what you’ve done to us, your breakfast would be running down your pants leg.”

Can't wait for tomorrow's denouement.

Newsroom of Whores - The

Newsroom of Whores - The media'd never knuckle under to a tyrant, would it?

Our fourth estate would never dream of taking the path of least resistance - no?

John Burns of the NYTImes says "not so fast">

Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.

There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.

For Burns, the terror is not merely the academic variety, talked about by the pampered, blowdried likes of most journalists. For Burns, according to his story, it was the real thing:

The reason they kept me here is that when the war starts, I could become a hostage.

Well, I stayed. On the night of April 1, they came to my room at this hotel and said, "You're under arrest. We've known all along you're a CIA agent. You will now collaborate with us or we will take you to a place from which you will not return." They stole all my equipment. They stole all my money.

Then they left. The hotel had no electrical power at the time. They said, "You stay in your room." I assumed they left somebody outside. I went out into the darkened corridor. There was nobody there, so I slipped into the stairway.

To tell you the truth, I didn't know what to do. As it happened, a friend of mine, an Italian television correspondent, happened to be coming up the stairwell. She asked, "What are you doing?" I replied, "I really don't know. I'm at wit's end." She said, "You come to my room. They won't attack my room." She is a former Italian communist who had not challenged them.

This form of reportage - taking the easy way - has real-world consequences:

I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.

For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone.

Burns' conclusion?

There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers.

Read the whole, dire, dismal thing. Please.

(Via Sullivan)

Strangely Appropriate - Is it

Strangely Appropriate - Is it real, or is it Scrappleface?

Rock and Roll Hall of

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - There's a whole new slate of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

• George Harrison - The only thing notable about this nomination is that is actually is happening after Lennon and McCartney got into the the R'nRHOF for their solo work; I think Harrison's solo career was better and more interesting than either of his bandmates (let's leave Ringo out for a bit)
• Prince- Here's hoping. Prince has descended into self-parody for the past decade, but his decade - from 1980 to about 1990 - was stunning; a brilliant, fearless, joyous, horny, sleazy, transcendent melange of funk, rock and everything in between. He'd better win.
• John Mellencamp - Mellencamp released a pair of albums - Scarecrow and Lonesome Jubilee - that were among the best American rock and roll records ever made. Both were simple, intense, wonderful records that seamlessly blended garage rock, hillbilly soul and fifty years of American folk music tradition into some of the most memorable music of the last twenty years. But I think he should wait until the second ballot, if only because his first several albums could suck-start a V8 engine.
• Jackson Browne - Zzzzzz. Oh, excuse me, we were talking Jackson Browne, right? Oh, I'm sure he'll get in; the R'nRHOF loves big political statements, and nobody made 'em bigger than Browne. The bummer is, Warren Zevon - who worked the same genre as Brown - probably contributed much more to the genre, and rock at large, than did Browne. It would have made sense to nominate Zevon while he was still alive - but instead, we get Jackson Browne.
• Sex Pistols - Since the Clash got in last year, and the Ramones the year before, it only makes sense; the Pistols weren't as important or as good as either of their contemporaries. But since the serious business is done, oh, why not?
• Black Sabbath - I hated Sabbath when they mattered. Now that they're just a segment in Ozzy Ozbourne's VH1 "Behind the Music", I really fail to see why they matter.
• Lynyrd Skynyrd - People underestimate Skynyrd. Their trailer-park cachet and redneck roots, and the caricature that "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Freebird" have become, conceals a lot of great music, some fabulous musicianship (the used those three guitars!) and an approach that gave up nothing to the punks in terms of commitment. It's their time.
• Gram Parsons - I'm amazed he wasn't inducted already. Do it.
• Patti Smith - Easily the most overrated person in punk music; let's wait a year or two (although I think she did "Because the Night" better than Bruce, to say nothing of the dismal 10,000 Maniacs version)
• The Dells - Definitely.
• The "5" Royales - Like the Dells, these guys deserve it if only for the people they influenced.
• Bob Seger - He released three absolute classics - Night Moves, Stranger in Town and The Distance, all among the best American rock and roll albums. But I think he deserves at least one more year in limbo for "Against the Wind"
• The Stooges - First the Pistols. Then the Stooges. And only if they renounce the accolades the French have been giving them.
• Traffic - Enh.
• ZZ Top - Erf. They always bored me stiff. I can think of many people to induct before them. Which means, I'm sure, that they're shoe-ins.

So we'll see.

Cowboys vs. Bureaucrats - Mark

Cowboys vs. Bureaucrats - Mark Steyn has this superb piece on what the Anna Lindh murder says about Swedish, Euro and American society:

You can blame it on a lack of police, as everyone's doing. But Lindh's killer didn't get away with it because of the people who weren't there but because of the people who were: the bystanders. When I bought my home in New Hampshire, I heard a strange rustling one night, and being new to rural life, asked my police chief the following morning, if it had turned out to be an intruder whether I should have called him at home. ''Well, you could,'' said Al. ''But it would be better if you dealt with him. You're there and I'm not.'' That's the best advice I've ever been given.

This isn't an argument for guns, though inevitably Sweden has gun control, knife control and everything else. It's more basic than that: It's about the will to be a citizen, not just a suckler of the nanny-state narcotic. In Lee Harris' forthcoming book Civilization And His Enemies, he talks about the threat of societal forgetfulness: ''Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.''

Lindh would have thought that was just American cowboy talk: too raw, too primal to be of relevance in Europe. But I don't think so. On 9/11 the only good news that lousy day was that the fourth plane never got to slice through the White House. That's because a bunch of passengers decided they weren't going to follow FAA regulations and outmoded 1970s hijack procedures but instead rose up against the terrorists. ''C'mon, guys, let's roll!'' said Todd Beamer. They could have used him in that department store."

Appease them, and they'll go away.

In The Control Room of

In The Control Room of the Beast - I'm pondering getting involved with a local non-profit communications group. I went to an orientation meeting the other day, and was amazed by the ways in which the group's governing body - which is famously left-of-center - tiptoed around the idea of exerting agenda-based control over the group's output.

Whenever I confront this sort of things, I go to SCSU Scholars; the subject seems to be one of their most reliable threads.

Sure enough - yesterday, King Banaian was talking about SCSU's new speech codes.

The piece is a Brinks truck full of money quotes - read it all. I suppose if you're involved with non-profits, academia or education, this is all head-thumpingly obvious stuff. For me - getting back into it for the first time since my last involvement with a crushingly-liberal non-profit in the early nineties - it's a continuing, er, re-education.

Toward Genuine Education- This post

Toward Genuine Education- This post involves a meeting of very different -yet similar - minds.

It's clear that something needs to be done about education in this country. Perhaps that answer is to privatize it. I agree, in the same sense that I agree we need to abolish the progressive income tax; it's a cool idea, and it'll never happen.

I'm as conservative as the day is long. So it mystifies people, and sometimes confuses them, when I tell them that I generally think the "Shut up, keep your buttin your desk and learn what we tell you to learn, when we tell you to learn it" model of education does at least as much harm as good to children. The more I hear from friends about the Sudbury school model, the more impressed I am. Don't be put off by the hippiedip language on the website; the beauty of the system is that it not only talks with kids about personal responsibility, it makes them live it from day one. The school talks about freedom - but freedom's companion, responsibility, is right there, too, and I think that's one of the greatest lessons any school can teach.

But back to the world I live in, where I'm underemployed and my kids attend the public schools. And like most conservatives, I'm all over the idea of reforming our schools; the schools seem to be more about serving as social service laboratories than places for kids to learn. Yet you don't have to listen to talk radio very long to get depressed about the right's standard notion for reforming schools, as you hear the umpteenth voice demanding "Focus on Readin', Writin' and 'rithmetic", and "Telling those kids to sit their asses down in those seats and pay attention." Inevitably, calls for "accountability" turn into calls for testing.

And testing students against artificial criteria is just about the worst way to tell whether they're learning, even under the best of circumstances. And best circumstances aren't on the radar these days.

Nat Hentoff writes in the Voice

In the October 25, 2002, Voice, I wrote about disturbing early signs of educational dysfunction in the new chancellor, Joel Klein. In a September 25 front-page story in The New York Times, Klein had been quoted as saying briskly: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators." That alone was an ominous augury for the future, but then Klein actually said that he had no objections to teachers "teaching to the test. . . . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability and we need to conform our efforts."

In other words, it's not about teaching kids - it's about making the numbers.

No "better" than any stock trader (Think that analogy would horrify half of the American Federation of Teachers?).

Of course, there are two ways to raise an average; increase the higher numbers...and decrease the lower ones:

In The New York Times' invaluable series (July 31 and August 1) on the many thousands of public school students being pushed out of school because their test scores would reflect poorly on principals and superintendents, Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina omitted Klein's specific contribution to the growing number of push-outs.

That's right - the New York schools "fired" students that weren't putting up the numbers!

"Diplomas are for closers!"

No, the Glengarry, Glen Ross comparison isn't entirely humorous:

Writing in the October 25 Voice ("The High-Stakes Testing Trap"), I noted that Klein was "already making a significant mistake by deciding to give superintendents bonuses of up to $40,000 based on improved test scores in their districts. Before that [with Klein's support] principals have been getting $15,000 bonuses for higher test scores in their schools. But what of the many kids who will still fail the tests?

I think we know the answer to that.

In the series on New York City push-outs in the Times, Don Freeman, who retired last year as principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, said something Joel Klein should have heard before he assumed he was knowledgeable enough to run the city's school system:

"Ten years ago you could focus on the kids. The pressures were not the same, and you could take some risks. Now you're supposed to focus on the numbers."

Now, finally acknowledging how many students have been told that, in essence, they're too dumb to stay in school, Klein has told principals:

"It is a disservice to students and ourselves . . . to rely on shortcuts or play numbers games in order to make things look better than they really are." He says he is now monitoring that "disservice." With what punishment for the perpetrators?

OK, so things are bad in New York.

So how is the system in Minnesota any different? The new standards in Minnesota, which are all about "accountability", measure "accountability" with...

Yep. Tests. And numbers. Numbers which are held over the heads of principals and superintendants whose numbers don't improve.

"Budgets are for closers!"

Of course, rather than the frantic chase for numbers, educations should be about learning to understand the things one needs to survive and thrive in the world around one: how to communicate, function, interact, think critically, reason, know something of the background of the culture that is their home. Neither the left's fascination with sociological tinkering nor the right's fixation with numbers addresses all of those.

In the meantime, Katherine Kersten of the Center for the American Experiment writes an interesting essay about the future of civic education:

The heart of civic education is the study of American history and government. In recent decades, however, our schools have fallen woefully short in these areas, as evidenced by the abysmal results from the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, on which more students scored "below basic" in American history than any other subject.

A glance at the textbooks that dominate U.S. history and government classrooms suggests why. Today's standard texts are dry, lacking in detail, monotonous, and politically tendentious. Such books could never inspire students to cherish their heritage of freedom. To foster democratic citizenship, we must fundamentally change the way our schools teach history and government. We must work to tell America's dramatic story in a way that engages young people's imagination, excites their gratitude, and reveals what is at stake in the American experiment.

America's story has two major themes: principles and people. Our challenge is to bring both to life for students. In teaching principles, we should make liberal use of original documents, as well as the stirring rhetoric of the Revolutionary and Civil War eras. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the great speeches of Washington, Patrick Henry, and Lincoln-all eloquently capture the essence of the American creed of liberty and equality, of majority rule and minority rights.

And we're not teaching any of that, presently. In fact, the multiculturalist's assertion - that Western culture is no better than any other culture in the world by any subjective criteria - seems to hold sway at the moment in the schools.

More to come.

Segway or the Highway -

Segway or the Highway - Saw my first Segway the other day, while driving up Fairview Avenue in Highland Park.

I guess I'll think about getting one when I see how they are merging into freeway traffic...

Feds: Recall Nixed, Ari Deep-Sixed,

Feds: Recall Nixed, Ari Deep-Sixed, Ahnold Perplixed - The Ninth Circuit has just delayed the recall until March 1:

"A federal appeals court postponed California's Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall election, ruling Monday that the historic vote cannot proceed because some votes would be cast using outmoded punch-card ballot machines."

Lots of peoples' 15 minutes of fame just got extended by six months.

UPDATE: Powerline has the usual high grade analysis:

There are several ironies here. The Democrats' most recent ploy has been to disparage the recall as the latest in a series of "undemocratic" efforts by Republicans to overturn the popular will. (How an election can be undemocratic is unclear, but never mind.) It will be interesting to see how they react to something that is truly undemocratic; i.e., a court's order that an election called pursuant to state law not take place.

The implications of the court's order are unclear. Is the court telling us that it is unconstitutional for any county in America to use punch card machines? Or just these counties in California? Was every election held over the last 100 years unconstitutional? Or is the Constitutional right to non-punch card voting machines one that just now came into being?

Also, the court's solicitude for the possibility of punch card error is ironic in the context of the massive voter fraud that afflicts American elections. If voters are Constitutionally entitled to elections free of punch card error, are they also entitled to elections that are free of voter fraud? Or, more precisely, if counties are Constitutionally required to use the most up to date technology to reduce the relatively remote chance of machine error, why aren't they also required to use the most up to date technologies to reduce the much greater risk of voter fraud? And if punch cards are unconstitutional, why aren't Motor Voter laws?

And isn't the court's rationale - that minorities are more likely to screw up with punch-cards - an odd thing to say to minority voters.

SON OF UPDATE: In the quote above, Hindrocket asks "Was every election held over the last 100 years unconstitutional?".

As if on cue, Scrappleface says "9th Circuit Court Reverses Elections Since 1964".

Truth is stranger than satire these days.

Among the True Believers -

Among the True Believers - The Fraters beat me to yesterday's Pioneer Press cover story, a report from inside an Iraqi guerrilla group, and did a great job commenting on it. Read their piece; it's a good one.

My first question was "why did the "guerrillas" allow an American correspondent (Knight-Ridder's Hannah Allam) to talk with them in the first place?

In neither instance did the fighters attempt to prevent the journalists, an accompanying translator or their driver from seeing the route along which they were taken. But during the trip to the camp, the journalists' satellite telephones were confiscated and turned off, out of concern, the intermediary said, that U.S. forces would trace the phones' signals to pinpoint the camp's location.

Both cell leaders said they were willing to talk because they didn't want the story of what was going on in Iraq to be told only from the American military's standpoint. Abu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn't consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of "U.S. imperialism."

Of course, it's not the journalist's place to note that the men were fighting on behalf of a regime that behaved vastly worse than "imperialistically" to its own people.

But in a conflict that seems to be striated on sectarian (Sunni versus Shi'a) and ideological (foreign pan-Arabist and Ismlamofascist, versus native Iraqi) lines, it is her job to give us some background on her interview subjects. Are these typical Iraqis in the street? Sunnis with a vested interest in Ba'athist control? Foreigners?

Allam hints at some answers [with my comments in brackets]:

The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers [who were overwhelmingly "reliable" Sunnis and predominantly Ba'athist] and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters [which might tend to imply the guerrillas are Sunni].

The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam's elite Fedayeen militia force [Foreign zealots] as well as foreigners who slipped across the country's long and porous borders to battle American troops, they said. Abu Abdullah, who directs the camp near Baquba, said he came to Iraq shortly before the United States invaded it last spring.

The anti-American forces appear to be more organized than some U.S. intelligence and military officials thought. Cells receive orders and intelligence from Diyala, which lies within the northern "Sunni Triangle" of danger. According to the fighters, the Diyala leadership oversees about 100 guerrillas, including an all-women's unit, and is backed by private donations as well as Syrian funding, according to the two cell leaders.

Ms. Allam doesn't specify exactly how organized the US intel and military officials thought they were in the first place, of course. What she describes is pretty much "Guerrilla Warfare 101" - small cells that operate in isolation of one another, with knowledge strictly compartmented to avoid losing too many people if one is compromised.

It'd appear the war's not going that well for the "guerrillas":

His thin frame slumped under the weight of a Kalashnikov and a military-style vest packed with hand grenades and ammunition. His hands shook, and he explained that he was nervous because U.S. raids were growing closer to the Diyala leadership. Raids in recent weeks had resulted in the arrest of one member, he said, and two others had narrowly escaped capture.

Fear of informants restricts recruiting to family members, close neighborhood friends and military buddies, he said.

Earlier in the piece, the reporter tells us that the interview subject, "Abu", went from being a raw recruit to leader of a 20-person cell within a matter of scant weeks. Unstated: was this because "Abu" is a brilliant guerrilla commander, or because of casualties in the cell? Given the nerves shown above - not inconsistent with someone who's been on the wrong end of a few ambushes - it's worth asking.

Here's the big question; is this group of "guerrillas" on the level? If these people are serious resistance fighters, then for what reason are they talking with reporters? Is it a sign of some grossly undisciplined troops? Or that someone up the foodchain from "Abu" and his group is savvy enough to want to get the guerrillas into the international spin market?

Ms. Allam is at least honest enough to answer - she's not sure, and can't really confirm or deny what they are:

It is impossible to verify the claims of the two men. But Abu Mohammed described two fatal ambushes of U.S. convoys that matched times, dates and locations of recent incidents recorded in American military accounts. And an explosion nearby lent credibility to Abu Abdullah's claims after he hurriedly broke off an interview, saying his men had been ordered to ambush a U.S. convoy that had moved within range. A security report by international agencies later listed an attack on U.S. troops at about the same time and place as the explosion. One American soldier was reported injured.

The paper disclaimed the story in an afterword:

The interviews for this story were conducted in clandestine meetings in Baghdad and at a camp in a rural area north of the city. They provide a chilling insight into a shadowy organization responsible for at least some of the attacks that have killed 70 Americans since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. The story may disturb some readers who will believe that American journalists should not talk with the enemy and that American newspapers should not publish anything they say. But the story provides important information to help the public understand something of the nature of the enemy that U.S. troops are facing.

True - and kudos to Ms. Allam for what must have been quite a piece of reporting work.

But the "...important information ...of the nature of the enemy that U.S. troops are facing" that the Knight-Ridder editor appended is all between the lines. And while it's not Ms. Allam's job to spell this out, it is mine.

Watch for the left-wing blogosphere to latch onto this - especially the parts that could be, by accident or design, labelled "Sympathetic" - as a sign that the liberation of Iraq is a going badly.

I think that's the wrong interpretation, of course. My speculation (and I'm clearly labeling it exactly that): If we extrapolate this report into a cross-section of the Iraqi guerrilla/terrorist movement, they are:

• Sunni
• Either Ba'athist, or with close personal Ba'athist ties, or
• foreign Islamofascists or Pan-Arabists (or both)
• under enough US pressure to make them nervous at the very least

It would also seem (by inferring between the lines) that the "flypaper" school of US strategy - using Iraq as a lure to draw Moslem terrorists from around the world to their eventual destruction - might be working.

Conjecture? Sure. Got another thought on it? Let me know.

Karaoke in the UK -

Karaoke in the UK - According to Ananova, via Powerline, these are the favorite Karaoke songs in the UK:

1 Daydream Believer - The Monkees

2 My Way - Frank Sinatra

3 I will Survive - Gloria Gaynor

4 New York, New York - Frank Sinatra

5 Angels - Robbie Williams

Least favourite:

1 Barbie Girl - Aqua

2 Bat Out Of Hell - Meatloaf

3 My Heart Will Go On - Celine Dion

4 I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston

5 The Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler"

Now, one thing I direly miss in my life is playing in a band. I played in a zillion bands from age 15 until...oh, I guess last year. Whether playing in a garage or at the First Avenue mainroom, it's always been the place I've been happiest. And since I don't have a band, Karaoke is a reasonable substitute, in the same sense that watching "Basic Instinct" is a reasonable substitute for sex.

So my own, personal Top Five - the songs I most love to sing at Karaoke night:

5. Pretty In Pink - Psychedelic Furs

4. Cleveland Rocks - Ian Hunter

3. I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones

2. Jump Around - House of Pain

and my favorite song to sing at Karaoke night,

1. Born to Run - Bruce (what? You thought it'd be the Frankie Goes to Hollywood version?)

And the least favorites I hear from other people who've had eight to ten drinks too many? Heh. That's even easier to list:

5. Friends In Low Places - Garth Brooks

4. I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor

3. Love Shack - The B-52s (easily the worst new-wave band ever)

2. Two Out of Three Ain't Bad - Meat Loaf

and the worst song other people sing at Karaoke night,

1. American Pie - Don MacLean - all 27 eight minutes of it.

And yes, I SWEAR I wrote this before I read today's Backfence (courtesy Fraters, who are providing me tons of material today)

Ya Sure, You Betcha -

Ya Sure, You Betcha - If there's one thing I really, really hate, it's the way local media reflexively cite "Minnesota Nice" as an all-purpose description of our culture, and the constant referral to that groll-farbed 1973 Time magazine cover of Wendell Anderson holding that damned fish.

Yeah, I know that's two things. That's how bad I hate it. And on this, the thirtieth year since that issue hit the stands, the local media have been obsessing about it; does, indeed, Minnesota still measure up to...whatever Minnesota was thirty years ago? The question is inevitably couched in partisan rhetoric, of course; had Roger Moe won the gubernatorial election and continued the Ventura spending spree, I'm sure we'd not be hearing word one about it.

I'm not surprised to find I'm not the only one that feels this way. I am surprised that one other person that does is PiPress stentor Nick Coleman.

In 1973, I had never heard of Thai food, the 12 steps, Woodbury, Garrison Keillor or Eurasian milfoil. I had never met a Somali, a Hmong or — even more exotic — a transplanted Californian. In 1973, life was simple and sweet: My father and my grandparents were alive, I still was dating my high school girlfriend (she married another guy in 1974), and I was a cub reporter for The Minneapolis Tribune, getting paid $147.50 a week and driving a Chevy Nova I had purchased off the showroom floor for $2,150. Cash.

Ah, yes. Minnesota was pretty decent back then, what I can remember of it. And dull.

And worse than dull, for some:

Life was good in 1973, for the right people. Minorities were still fighting for a place at the banquet table. Other than a reference to Indians living in "the only really shabby area" of Minneapolis, the Time article that gave Minnesota a big head skipped over the grinding poverty on the reservations: the tarpaper shacks, the lack of running water and electricity, of jobs, health care and education. And the bigotry that Indian people faced.

I don't remember many Minnesotans complaining back then about the not-so-good life that Indians were experiencing. Today, though, it's increasingly common to hear grumbling from many quarters about the money generated by casino gambling on a few of the more fortunately located reservations in the state, as well as crude griping about the public resources that are spent on immigrants and other new arrivals to Shangri-La.

Yeah, Coleman uses this column, like so many others, as a vehicle for bitching about Minnesota's swing to the right. And the sun rose in the East, I'm told, this morning. Still, the column is a great one - a message I wish the rest of the regional media would pay attention to.

The column focuses on Minnesota's Native Americans - and with good reason:

The gaming revenue [from Minnesota's first Indian gambling establishment] even helped pay for a lawsuit that forced Prior Lake, which had annexed all the land surrounding the Shakopee tribe's small reservation, to permit Indians to vote in municipal elections.

Yes, folks: The 8th District of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that our Indian neighbors in Prior Lake had the right to vote. The year was 1985. Aren't we proud?

Largely worth a read. Especially if you're one of those people who waves that damned Time magazine in peoples' faces...

The Peace of the Dead

The Peace of the Dead - Ian Buruma in the Financial Times, on why the best recruiting tool for modern conservatism may be - modern liberals.

A cash drawer full of money quotes in this rather long piece - but here's the best one; after noting of western critics of the liberation of Iraq...:

What is astonishing here is not the naivety, but the off-handed way well-heeled commentators in London, California, or New Delhi, talk about the suffering of the very people they pretend to stand up for. Vidal dismisses it as "not my problem". Tariq Ali calls for more violence. And Arundathi Roy prattles about civil society.

...he adds:

More significant, by far, is the backing for Bush received from Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and especially Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner from East Timor. These are men, who, unlike most commentators in London or New York, know what it is like to live under the cosh. They paid the dues of voicing dissent when it was a matter of life and death. Havel and Michnik were subjects of Soviet imperialism. But the case of Ramos-Horta is more interesting, since he opposed a US-backed government, General Suharto's Indonesian regime. East Timor was a cherished cause for Chomsky and others on the left.

In an article published just before the Iraq war started, Ramos- Horta recalled the suffering of his people. He wrote: "There is hardly a family in my country that has not lost a loved one. Many families were wiped out during the decades of occupation by Indonesia and the war of resistance against it. Western nations contributed to this tragedy. Some bear a direct responsibility because they helped Indonesia by providing military aid." Thus far, none of our left-wing critics would disagree. The split comes in the conclusion. Ramos-Horta remembers how the western powers "redeemed themselves" by freeing East Timor from its oppressors with armed force. Why, then, should the Iraqis not be liberated too?

Ramos-Horta respects the motives of people who demonstrated against the war, although he wonders why, in all these demonstrations, he never saw "one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurdish people". He knows that "differences of opinion and public debate over issues like war and peace are vital. We enjoy the right to demonstrate and express opinions today - something we didn't have during a 25-year reign of terror - because East Timor is now an independent democracy. Fortunately for all of us, the age of globalisation has meant that citizens have a greater say in almost every major issue. But if the anti-war movement dissuades the US and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead".

This from the leader of a nation that has suffered, proportionately, as much from genocide as any nation on earth.

Read the whole thing - it's long, but excellent.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

36 - With Thursday's override

36 - With Thursday's override of Governor Bob Holden's veto of Missouri's concealed carry bill, within thirty days Missouri will become the latest "shall issue" state.

The Senate's 23-10 vote to override the veto met the bare minimum required for a two-thirds majority.

The House voted 115-43 Wednesday to override Holden's veto. The Senate's concurrence today means the measure will become law in 30 days without the need for Holden's signature.

Missouri becomes the 45th state to allow concealed guns in some fashion, although nine sharply restrict permits, according to the National Rifle Association.

The fight to legalize concealed weapons has been long and bitter in Missouri. Lawmakers had been rebuffed for years by former Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan when they finally agreed to put the issue to a statewide vote in April 1999. The ballot measure -- the first ever in the nation on the issue -- was rejected by 52 percent of the vote, with strong urban opposition overcoming rural support.

As Kim DuToit notes:

Just out of interest, here are some statistics concerning CCW in the United States:

• "Shall Issue" states (must issue the permits if applicant is not legally disqualified): 36 states, 60.1% population, 60% Electoral College
• "May Issue" states (issuance is at the discretion of law enforcement): 9 states, 28.1% population, 28% Electoral College
• "Will Not Issue" states (forget it): 5 states, 11.8% population, 12% Electoral College

  Sounds to me like The People have spoken -- whether on a popular basis, or on a representative one.

And the train keeps rolling - Wisconsin looks very likely to repeal it's "No Conceal" law, opening the way for a very strong "Shall Issue" proposal very shortly. And Ohio's proposal seems to be proceeding as well.

Meantime, Minnesota's left is pulling out whatever stops it can to try to repeal our three month old law. More on these people and websites shortly.

(Via Spoons)

Locheim! - Our comrades in

Locheim! - Our comrades in the Northern Alliance, Powerline, have been declared IsraPundit's Site of the Week.

testing the post to the

testing the post to the future feature on Friday, September 12.

An Ex_Terrorist - So is

An Ex_Terrorist - So is Bin Laden alive?

The Chicago Boyz opine:

"So, nu? That's it? Osama walking on some rocks, with a voice over? Riiiiight.

This convinces me Osama's friggin' dead, or so beat to sh*t that they don't want to put him on TV. It would have been nothing to just have him look at the camera and say 'Paul Bremer will drown in fire and his own blood' or some such Islamo-flavored threatening bull pucky. That would absolutely prove he's alive, now, today. But nooooo."

I'm continually amazed that anyone still thinks he's alive - and that the left is still trying to ding Bush for not finding a man that hasn't been confirmed seen in nearly two years.

Didn't We Get Rid of

Didn't We Get Rid of Him? - Bill Maher has a blog

Granted, you have to beat the bushes among some of the tinfoil-hatted moonbat lefty blogs to find any links to it, but it's out there.

Here's some typical fare:

It’s time for new animals to symbolize the democratic and republican parties. Forget donkeys and elephants.

Personally, I think democrats should be dogs. Dogs slobber all over you as long as you keep them fed. They’re also great at rolling over, playing dead and begging. Just like democrats.

Cats are supercilious self serving pricks who thank you for feeding them by shitting in your house. Just like a republican.

This from a guy who said he really, truly wasn't biased.

Hu-whaaa? - This anti-Bush blog

Hu-whaaa? - This anti-Bush blog - oh-so-cleverly called "smirkingchimp.com", which is itself a commentary on liberals' alleged intellectual power - has nothing really to recommend it; there's less there there than in most blogs. The site really just recycles anti-Bush pieces from the media, both major and moonbat.

But here's the part at which I shake my head in wonder:

Donations needed! Our expenses now approach $1,000 a month.

$1,000 a month? They say recycling is expensive, but I thought that was just for newspapers and bottles.

I'm at a loss to think of how I could spend a grand a month on a blog even if I tried.

Here's an interesting experiment, though; try reading the comments on a conservative blog, and compare them with the general tenor of the comments on a moonbat blog like this. Conservatives are often angry. Liberals are more often direly smug and self-adulatory. Here's a game to play; see how many times commentors on a moonbat site say "Conservatives can't read!"

"Ooh, That's an Ugly Bomb"

"Ooh, That's an Ugly Bomb" - Pioneer Press media critic Brian "The Press Isn't Liberal!" Lambert exhibits his keen understanding of weapons of mass destruction:

ABC's "bomb" — a "device" so nasty and obvious-looking you'd swear Bullwinkle's nemesis, Boris Badenov, wired the thing together — is a 15-pound chunk of depleted uranium with wiring and assorted mechanisms in a briefcase. While too small for a nuclear bomb, 15 pounds of uranium would be more than sufficient for a dirty bomb.

Aaah.

We need to train the D of HS to look for "nasty" weapons. I guess everyone coming into the US wearing a colostomy bag is in for a tour in Guantanamo.

Doesn't Add Up - Last

Doesn't Add Up - Last week, ABC was whacking its audience over the head with "controversy"; radio promos for its story about its' smuggling of "Depleted Uranium" into the United States from Indonesia, to test Homeland practically crowed about how "controversial" the story was, even before it aired.

Something stuck in my craw (ouch); Depleted Uranium has very low, almost nonexistent, radioactivity. It's not the same as trying to find weapons-grade Uranium with a radiological detection device - depleted uranium is radiologically more similar to lead than weapons-grade material.

Didn't really look into it last week, of course, although ABC thought they had the story dead to rights:

The ABCNEWS project involved a shipment to Los Angeles of just under 15 pounds of depleted uranium, a harmless substance that is legal to import into the United States. The uranium, in a steel pipe with a lead lining, was placed in a suitcase for the shipment.

"If they can't detect that, then they can't detect the real thing," explained Tom Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which lent the material to ABCNEWS for the project.

Cochran said the highly enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons, would, with slightly thicker shielding, give off a signature similar to depleted uranium in the screening devices currently being used by homeland security officials at American ports.

Clayton Cramer has the rebuttal I'd have liked to have written. Read it, of course.

Let's Hear It For The

Let's Hear It For The Rodents! - On the N.Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, I'm currently ranked #632 among participating blogs - which puts me in the "Adorable Rodents" category (as compared with the likes of Instapundit (#1) and Lileks (#10), who are considered "Higher Beings"

The rest of the Northern Alliance fares quite well, with Powerline coming in at 303, the SCSU Scholars at 849, and Fraters at 854 out of the roughly 4200 blogs currently ranked.

The ecosystem ranks blogs in terms of incoming links (a total of 58 blogs link to Shot In The Dark, which amazes me).

So thanks for reading!

Irresistable Force, meet Immovable Object

Irresistable Force, meet Immovable Object - The Star-Tribune "Minnesota Poll" has some "surprising" opinions about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. The poll was taken right about the time the law passed its third month anniversary.

shows that Minnesotans who fear that the newly liberalized law will make the state a more dangerous place still overwhelmingly outnumber those who think it will be safer,

But the biggest change in public opinion since a Minnesota Poll in April, before the new law took effect, is an increase in those who foresee no change in overall safety - to more than one-third of the state's adults.

The percentage saying that the new law will make Minnesota safer fell 6 points since April, to 11 percent. The percent saying that the state will be more dangerous stood at 51 percent; in April it was 55 percent. The percentage predicting no effect from the law rose 10 points to 35 percent.

So after seven years of uninformed demigoguery and chicken-littling by the media dn the likes of Wes Skoglund (DirtbagFL, Minneapolis), and a solid year before any meaningful statistics are available, the percentage of Minnesotans who buy into the hype from the left is dropping, while the number of those who fall in somewhere near the truth is rising. OK, not bad.

Now, here's a suggestion for the folks behind the Minnesota Poll; do a survey of Minnesotans who actually know that the law doesn't "put a gun in the hand of every gang-banger" (as Skoglund has put it) or "allow every Minnesotan to pack heat" (a favorite of Matt Entenza); poll people who are actually well-informed about the issue, who have actually learned the truth about the law.

See if the numbers aren't pretty much inverted; 51% predicting no change to slight drop in crime, 11% predicting rising crime, the rest predicting some improvement.

Think we'll see that poll any time soon?

The Republican War - Via

The Republican War - Via Sullivan, a fascinating piece by Lawrence Kaplan on why the war on terror seems to be an exclusive Republican effort.

Money quote:

Does this mean that all Americans have reverted to pre-September 11 type?

Not exactly. Fear of terrorism cuts across all demographic sub-groups. Yet a willingness to do something about it, to adjust our priorities, does not. The latest Pew survey, which asked respondents whether the president should focus on the war on terror or on the economy, reveals a puzzling trend.

Evangelical Christians, whites, residents of rural areas, southerners, and self-described conservatives evince more concern about the response to September 11 than do secular Americans, African Americans, residents of cities, non-southerners, or self-described liberals. In fact, the very city dwellers most at risk tend to attach the least importance to the war on terror. If these results seem more suited to a gun-control survey, consider another way of reading the same data. A Newsweek poll in November 2002 found that respondents who cited terrorism as the nation's foremost priority voted Republican by a margin of three-to-one. In a similar vein, the Pew survey finds that Republicans split evenly on the question of the war on terror versus the economy, while only 18% of Democrats profess more concern with terrorism.

It hardly comes as a surprise, but the emergence of a partisan gap on a matter that supposedly transcends politics has come awfully quickly. All the more so, because one of the most popular analogies generated by the September 11 industry likened the new unity of purpose to that which prevailed after Pearl Harbor.

Read it all, naturally.

Thin Film of Common Sense

Thin Film of Common Sense - Note to people flogging ultraliberal causes: when even the Strib Editorial Board comes out against you, you should probably reconsider your strategery.

Minnesota's two biggest public employee unions are talking strike again. Their last strike - weeks after 9/11 - was memorialized in an editorial Saturday:

"Minnesota's two biggest public employees' unions are not known for possessing keen public-relations instincts.

Two years ago, they conducted what was arguably the worst-timed strike in state history. The picket lines went up just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, amid a blizzard of private-sector pink slips and a precipitous drop in economic activity. The work stoppage lasted two weeks, ending in a split-the-differences settlement that just about covered the wages foregone during the strike -- but contributed to layoffs within their ranks, and cost the unions valuable public good will.

AFSCME and MAPE employees will be voting on the state's "Final" offer in about ten days. The unions' leaders are apparently leaning toward rejection.

So what is the meat of the deal? The Strib takes up the story:

Single state employees would still see their monthly premiums fully paid by the state. Family-coverage premiums would rise to $93.22 per month in 2004. Copayments for office visits, other than preventive visits, under the least-costly plan option would rise from $5 to $15.

Even when I was working and had insurance, I didn't get premiums like that. I've been paying copays of at least $15 for years.

Deductibles will rise - again, to the sort of levels that most Minnesotans are very used to.

So most Minnesotans, I think, won't feel all that sympathetic - but the feelings of the Minnesotan on the Street have never mattered to the Strib editorial board before.

So reading something like this:

The unions should recognize that their best interests would be served by a negotiated settlement that averts a strike, and avoids the spectacle of union workers refusing benefits many private-sector workers -- not to mention unemployed Minnesotans -- would gladly accept.

...should make any union leader blanche in horror. Even the Strib has jumped ship.

Weekend - Have a good

Weekend - Have a good one. See you Monday with a whole bunch of stuff (much of which, due to the miracle of "Post to the Future", was written yesterday!).

The Unbiased NPR - Instapundit

The Unbiased NPR - Instapundit cued me into something I'd almost forgotten about - an interview I heard Thursday night on "The World", with Terry Gross interviewing Ann Garrels, NPR's woman on the street in the Bagh for much of the past year or so.

NZ Bear covers the story like I wished I'd have remembered to do at the time.

Money quote:

Gross asked a simple question, Garrels answer to which speaks volumes:

Terry Gross: Could you describe what you consider to be the emotional high point and low point for you during the war --- as a reporter and as a human being being there?

Anne Garrels: I think a curious high point was in the weeks afterwards when I realized that all the months of staying there had really been worth it because Iraqis had so accurately predicted what was going to happen happen; Iraqis knew themselves and made it very clear. So in a perverse kind of way I guess that was a high point. I was astonished at how ill-prepared the Bush administration was for the aftermath from the very beginning. And that continues to this day.

Think about this. Garrels witnessed the fall of one of the more evil regimes of the past century. Even for the most staunch opponent of the war, the end of Saddam's power and the beginning of the Iraqi people's freedom must be recognized as a hugely achievement event for human decency.

But what was Garrels emotional high point? That's right: when she felt reassured that yes, things really are going badly for Iraq -- and the U.S. When her view that America was screwing things up was confirmed.

It is human to want to validate one's own actions; to feel some smug self-justification if events do indeed turn out badly when one has been predicting they would. But in Garrels situation, with all the things she must have seen and experienced, to declare that feeling to be the high point?

It is honorable of Garrels to admit this honestly. But that doesn't make it any less pathetic.

Pathetic isn't the word I'd use. I'd pick "depressing" or "infuriating".

Bear's story includes the entire depressing thing in RealAudio.

Confessions - I'm a pretty

Confessions - I'm a pretty regular guy. I live in St. Paul, not Edina. I drive a Saturn, not a Lexus. I shop at Cub, not Whole Foods (although there's no beating the produce at Mississippi Market.

But I don't like much of your regular, American, good-ol' Macrobrew beer. It's not a snob thing; my first exposure to beer was in Europe, and when I came back to the US, the stuff here just didn't taste good.

That's why this poll is so garshfarled irritating:

"The campaign by August Schell Brewing Co. to revive Grain Belt Premium beer gets a boost from the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

The venerable brand earned the title of 'Hot Retro Brew' in the 2003 Hot List of the Sept. 12 issue, which features Britney Spears on the cover.

The magazine calls the beer a 'big gulp of authentic Americana.'

Even by the dubious standards of low-end, $5 a case American brew, Grain Belt is "a big gulp of cattle urine."

Yeah, yeah - when it's hot out and I've been painting or something, a cheapo beer can taste as good as a Summit or a Newcastle. But even then, I'll take a PBR or a Stroh's, maybe even Old Milwaukee, over Grain Belt.

Unless...you know...someone's buying.

When Statists Melt Down

Read this online debate on the Cato website - actually an exchange of emails - between Johan Norberg and Robert Kutner, on the history of capitalism.

Watch Kutner slowly start to lose it. I expect to read about him sitting on a clock tower with a high-powered rifle by the end of next week.

(Via Instapundit)

Yesterday By Day - I

Yesterday By Day - I liked this episode.

Rolled - Woo Hoo! Powerline

Rolled - Woo Hoo! Powerline has finally blogrolled Shot In The Dark (along with our friends the Fraters and the Scholars). Thanks, guys!

First Instapundit, then Hewitt, now Powerline...hm. What next?

Ah, yes. Vodkapundit.

My sights are set.

ALSO: Hey, SCSU Scholars - Happy First Blog Birthday on Wednesday! I had no idea until yesterday, and then, well, other things were happening. Congrats!

Absence Noted - Elder from

Absence Noted - Elder from Fraters attended the 9/11 memorial last night, and I have to commend his memory; he noted that the bagpipers were the Minnesota Pipes and Drums, remembered that that's my band, and mentioned my absence.

Which is true; I'm not a piper yet. Just a student, honking away on the chanter, learning by far the most complex of my ten instruments.

I'll say this; it's on occasions like 9/11 that the bagpipes come into their own. They combine the best of both worlds; the starkness of the pipes' mournful keening (listen to "Amazing Grace" or "Flower of Scotland" and not feel choked up) catalyzes the emotions; on the other hand, when they switch to more martial music (listen to any the hundreds of jarring, asymmetric-sounding martial airs that have been written for the instrument), it provokes an urge to club the enemy to death with your shoes, grocery bags, whatever is at hand - the pipes are incendiary. Which is why all the Scottish regiments in the British (and Canadian, and Indian and even Pakistani) armies still play them.

Next year.

Level the Peaks, Fill In

Level the Peaks, Fill In The Valleys - Frabjous day, callooh, callay; Blogger has just made all their "Blogger Pro" features available to freebie users like me.

What does this mean? Well, for me, it means that I can start to level out my output. Some days, if I'm feeling a little slow or have nothing in particular to say, I don't blog a whole lot. Other days I make up for it, posting dozens of column-feet of material. I've always wanted a "post-to-the-future" capability, so that I can bank posts for later in the week, or into the next week, so that I have a more constant output. At least, that's what it means in theory.

In practice, of course, it means that I've spent a good chunk of the morning scattering posts all over the next week or so, just to test out Blogger's new

Now, when should I post this? Hmmmmm...

2003 - Doublespeak Finally Adopted

2003 - Doublespeak Finally Adopted - The Star-Tribune editorial board outdoes itself with today's editoral, begging the question: do they carry the Democrats' water in a big jug, or in individual bottles?:

"Almost immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration began building a case for taking down the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. President Bush gave two principal justifications: Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that were a threat to the United States and the world, and had close links to Al-Qaida -- to which he might pass some of his WMD stores. It was a mantra repeated again and again, to the point that some polls now show 70 percent of the American people believing Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Perhaps, but also irrelevant.

Whether there was a link between Saddam an 9/11 or not, there are unquestionable links between the Hussein regime and terror in general. To draw an artificial, legally-pointillistic distinction between Al Quaeda and any of the tongue-twisting array of other butchers - Hamas, Jamiyat-e-Islami, the PLO, the Islamic Jihad - is the sort of speciousness that explains why the likes of Bill Clinton and David Lillehaug are so popular among DFLers.

That is false. There were no links between Iraq and those attacks, and no evidence has surfaced that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The Strib is lying.

If there was "no" evidence, then why was the entire world, including the UN, worried enough about it to pass resolution upon resolution?

The inescapable conclusion is that at the time of the U.S.-British attack on Iraq, that country posed no terrorist threat to the United States and no threat of attack with WMD.

I'd like to ask the Strib Editorial Board - what's the threshold for something to be considered a "threat"?

Remember - while building an atomic bomb or Sarin gas for the first time is a Nobel prize-winning effort, after a few dozen or hundred or thousand have been built it becomes more a matter of craftsmanship - having the right skills and equipment - and information. Since the information needed to build a bomb or refine Sarin from pesticide can be burned onto a single compact disk, which would be very difficult to find in an area the size of California (assuming ten low-key militants didn't simply pocket CDs and flee to the four corners of the world), the Strib's point is specious; information and knowledge are themselves threats in this age, when the precursors for WMDs are mere commodities.

That was then; this is now: In an address on Sunday evening, President Bush asserted that Iraq is 'the central front' in the war on terrorism. He may well be right. If so, it is a situation of his making. He confronted an Iraq that was no threat and succeeded in converting it into one.

Orwell was 19 years off, but Doublespeak has finally arrived. Hussein was benign; a free people are malignant. When a nation that has a long, bloody history of committing and supporting terror has free reign to develop, buy and distribute any weapons they want, any way they want, it's no problem; when US troops control the place, it fullfills the prophesies of terror. Liberation is terrorism. Freedom is slavery.The Strib continues:

But look at the damage created along the way:

• By going into Iraq against the wishes of most U.N. Security Council members, Bush squandered the remainder of post-Sept. 11 international goodwill for the United States. Most of the world now regards the United States as an arrogant cowboy nation that believes its military and economic might gives it the right to behave as it desires anywhere.
• By going into Iraq almost alone, Bush guaranteed the United States would bear most of the burden in reconstructing Iraq. And that burden is proving huge, in lives and treasure.

Let's assume, for a moment, that France's "goodwill" was completely on the level (and that is to say the least questionable): "Goodwill" doesn't protect you from terror (and France's "goodwill" ended long before Iraq became an issue in the war on terror).

And are we alone? Troops from nearly three dozen nations are with us in Iraq now; moreover, they're from nations that have an interest in preserving freedom; from nations just getting free of totalitarians as bad as Hussein (Poles, Albanians, Czechs, Bulgarians) and from others that remember all-too-keenly the horrors of dictatorship, and have quietly vowed never to forget (Norway, the Netherlands).

Does the Strib editorial board honestly believe that the military effort will be better served by adding troops from Fiji, Ireland and the Philippines?

Worse - does the Strib pay any attention to history at all? The UN's efforts at military intervention have not only almost uniformly been disasters, the very names of the interventions have come into the language as synonyms for bungling, bureaucratic inertia, lethally inept micromanagment; Congo. Brazzaville. Biafra. The Golan Heights and Lebanon. Somalia. Srebrenice. The Congo again. Rwanda.

The Strib continues:

U.S. assessments of the state of the infrastructure in Iraq were inexcusably worthless,

...for the simple reason that we've only liberated one totalitarian dictatorship before.

Under dictatorships, there is none of what we Americans call "process". The people who run the infrastructure tend to accumulate the knowledge of how to do it, and keep it amongst themselves as institutional knowledge, almost like ancient tribal bards who kept collective history in the form of songs and stories, long before there was such a thing as written communication. The Germans were at least fanatical keepers of records; the Iraqis were apparently not. In addition, while the US allowed ex-Nazis who were not associated with war crimes to man key infrastructural posts after the war, we've barred Baathists from those same positions - justifiably, but in so doing we've also barred their specialized knowledge of how things run from the process as well. It'd be as if KSTP fired Paul Brand from Auto Talk; the Rookie could probably host the show, but it'll take years to develop the expertise about cars that'd make the transition complete.

The Strib goes on:

The belief that American soldiers would be joyfully greeted as liberators has turned into a grim reality of being greeted by rocket propelled grenades and homemade bombs.

The belief that they woudn't be greeted as liberators in the vast majority of the country was a more malignant fantasy still. And the notion that they'd be greeted as they were after World War II, with rapturous crowds in the villages, was a simple-minded bit of spin on the left's part anyway; after the UN-brokered betrayal of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs in 1991, Iraqis were justifiably cautious; as the Zogby Poll from Tuesday shows, they also appreciate being liberated.

A corollary notion behind the invasion of Iraq is that the United States would awe the Arab world with its military strength, contributing positively to chances of a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, and setting off a wave of reform in the oppressive Arab world. But it hasn't worked out that way. Instead, the United States has given the world a fascinating glimpse at the limits of American power.

Really?

I guess that explains all the terrorist attacks we've had in the past six months, right?

Belatedly, and half-heartedly, the United States has gone back to the United Nations -- but not hat in hand. The Bush administration can't seem to set aside its arrogant approach to the world body. As someone said, the Bush administration is now in the position of asking for rescue but insisting it will dictate the terms.

The Strib's editorial board has it backwards.

The UN demanded its piece of the liberation, even though it was not only unprepared to do the work involved in achieving it (even assuming that the bulk of the UN wanted to pursue any but another pusillanimous set of wrist-slapping resolutions), but actively impeded it.

Bush is now telling the UN to put up or shut up. Arrogant? Perhaps. Justifiable? Damn right.

If anyone thinks that litany is recounted with glee, they're mistaken. The United States can't afford to lose in Iraq. It must stay there and finish the difficult job it has begun.

True, and we will, even despite the best efforts of people like the Strib editorial board.

And it must mend its relationship with the world community.

The Strib still doesn't get it. The only thing that mends relationships, when you're the big dog on the block, is success. Being seen as the only (rational) game in town will buy us a lot more international approval than decades of kowtowing to the Distinguished Representatives from Bumfungle, Buttlustistan and the Hellspawn Islands.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is now beating the abusive drum that criticism of the president is unpatriotic and undercuts the American effort. He couldn't be more mistaken. Americans owe it to their nation, and to the men and women who serve in its military, to ask the difficult questions.

Commensurately, we owe it to our nation to ask you, the news media, equally difficult answers, and questions of our own.

To wit:

The most important questions are these: Wasn't there a better way? And what can we learn from the past two years that will help make Sept. 11, 2004, an anniversary of both remembrance and relief?

OK, Strib; you've asked your tough question. Now, I'm going to ask mine.

What is the "better way" you'd like to see? Spell it out, in concrete detail - and I mean, every bit as concrete as the reality we currently face. Don't give it to us in terms of Hallmark-y platitudes about international goodwill; spell out the specifics in terms of efforts and strategies, of this "better way", and then spell out what you believe are the most likely consequences of your approach, especially in terms of eradicating terror.

And do it now.

If you work at the Strib - and according to my hit log, there are at least three of you, sometimes more - please pass this up to your editorial board. I hereby challenge them to debate this issue, in any forum of their choosing.

RIP Johnny Cash - Johnny

RIP Johnny Cash - Johnny Cash passed away, surviving the his wife, the late June Carter Cash by four months.

Cash, Zevon, Strummer, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Stuart Adamson, Ben Orr, George Harrison - it's truly been a dismal couple of years for music fans.

The Latest - The Minnesota

The Latest - The Minnesota Poll has tended to be as accurate as Baghdad Bob, only not as entertaining.

You remember the Minnesota Polls before the 2002 midterm elections? The Democrats and the Strib certainly hope you don't.

The Strib is at it again, saying the Economy takes its toll on Bush:

"A new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found Bush's job approval rating stands at 49 percent, down from 63 percent in April, when Minnesotans, along with the rest of the nation, rallied behind a president leading a nation in wartime. Bush's approval rating now is 1 point below the rating he received in February, but far lower than his high of 87 percent after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

As it has been throughout his presidency, Bush's approval rating is lower in Minnesota than it is nationwide. An ABC News poll this week found that 56 percent of Americans approved of the way he is handling the job of president.

Look for the Democrats to latch onto this like it's the last bag of Cheetos at a Dave Matthews concert.

As the presidential campaign gathers momentum, the new poll numbers potentially pose a peril for Bush. Support for his performance is relatively weaker among women, and Bush appears to have alienated a substantial number of the conservatives who form the core of his support.

Bush has been alienating conservatives since his name was first broached as a potential candidate for the presidency!

The poll - and the Strib - get two things wrong here:

• Bush has been adept at defusing conservative ire (for better or worse) throughout his political life, and
• The GOP, being a genuine big tent party, will differ on things - and then make the necessary compromises to live in the big tent and win the election. Which is not to say that Bush is a conservative's dream; far from it. But this sort of fractiousness, which would have paralyzed a Democrat (or DFL) effort, will be sorted out by election time.

'This is the same trend you're seeing in most places around the country,' said Larry Jacobs, a University of Minnesota professor who specializes in public opinion polling.

'This is just a snapshot, and it may work out for him 14 months from now, but at this point, he's got a problem,' Jacobs said. 'He's in dangerous territory, because 50 percent approval is where the alarms go off.'"

Unstated by Jacobs; Bush's biggest problems at the moment is that He's been on vacation. When he's in Crawford, the Democrats have the media all to themselves. His numbers always take a hit. Always.

Watch for the spin - and then put it in perspective.

Coulda Been - We came

Coulda Been - We came so close...

GORE'S TERROR POLICY "THIS CLOSE"

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters) - President Gore says passage of his landmark anti-terror legislation is "this close", after a frantic week of negotiations with a Congress he's simply not been able to conquer since the 9/11 attacks.

"After two years of intense, but cooperative strife, we are nearly finished in finally providing this nation the anti-terror legislation we need for the children, to prevent any further tragedies like the one that happened two years ago yesterday", the President said to a gathering of abortion fundamentalists in San Francisco.

Gore used the speech as an opportunity to castigate not only the Republicans, but members of his own party as well. "This strife has been carried out for the children with an eye toward leveraging America's rich social diversity", Gore said, "although some Senators have used this as an opportunity for grandstanding for risky schemes".

The legislation - which would create an interagency task force to investigate and prosecute the 9/11 crimes, would grant sweeping new powers, not only to federal law enforcement, but elsewhere in government.

The task force, consisting of FBI, CIA and representatives from many state and local police departments and social welfare agencies, would be granted wide-sweeping powers to serve subpoenas and summonses worldwide. In addition, it would provide so-called "Terrorguard" grants to state social service, transportation and welfare agencies to help upgrade services. Critics have noted that the upgrades don't necessarily need to have anything to do with terror.

The opposition to the bill has come from both sides of the aisle. Rep. Maxine Waters introduced a controversial amendment that would have declared America a terrorist state, "since America is designed to terrorize minorities". The amendment would have required the anti-terror task force to first investigate allegations of terrorism on the part of the US and several state governments "before wasting time overseas", according to Waters. The amendment delayed the passage of the bill during the crucial mid-term elections last year.

Senator Hillary Clinton held up, and nearly killed, the bill last spring with her controversial-but-effective "It Takes a Terror-Free Village" effort. The amendments, which declare hunger, large class sizes, right-wing talk radio and restrictions on late-term abortion "domestic terror", was finally allowed into the bill as a compromise last month, and accounts for 55% of the bill's $300 billion price tag.

More troubling in the run-up to the 2004 election is Republican criticism of the Administration's rejection of military force against the terrorists. "Republican criticisms of my military record are pure partisan politics", Gore said, noting that his February, 2002 cruise missile strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan, Somalia and the Sudan may have killed as many as a dozen terrorists "who may have been linked to the attacks".

"Above all, critics who say I'm 'weak on terror' only do so by ignoring for the children the raid in Islamabad", Gore said, referring to the January, 2003 raid by FBI, CIA, BATF, NRO, AFL-CIO, FWPS, NEA and NARAL agents on gathering of bankers that had had dealings with terror organizations that claimed four bank employees and 16 US agents.

Secretary of Defense James Carville responded to the critics more forcefully. "That's a dog that don't hunt", he said to a group of evangelical Unitarians. "Down in Louisiana, we'd take them critics out behind the barn and make 'em squeal like a pig". He added "Tarnation, we increase the defense budget, and the Republicans are killing children anyway"

House minority leader Dennis Hastert noted that the bill would not increase funding for military combat units, but rather triple funding for diversity training and add $300 million for the Hillary Clinton-sponsored "War against Terror against Military Women and Children" initiative, which calls for a creation of a separate uniformed branch of armed services.

Gore, hampered by his very slim electoral margin of victory in the hotly-contested 2000 election, has had a hard time, critics say.

"Taking two years to pass a response to 9/11? That doesn't bode well for the Democrats in '04", says commentator Rush Limbaugh, currently being held without bail at the US Maximum Security Prison in Marion, Illinois, after the sweep of conservative talk radio hosts under the "Vast Conspiracy Act" passed in October of 2001.

OK... - ...now, I'm really

OK... - ...now, I'm really taking off to get ready for the interview.

Prayers and other karmic infusions gratefully accepted as always.

Good News, Bad News - If I read correctly, we had both in the St. Paul School Board primary last night.

The bad news? Tom Swift - Occasional "Shot" contrib and firebrand Republican who's been a much-needed gadfly to the School Board's relentlessly liberal mien - didn't make it into the top eight.

The good news? Either did Uber-Green Richard Broderick, who we've written about several times in the past. We have three years before we have to worry about someone using the schools to indoctrinate little Greens with the help of Friends for a Non-Violent World again.

UPDATE: Ooops. I read the chart wrong. Broderick made the cut, although he was second from the bottom.

Republican Georgia Dietz, however, made the cut.

Tick Tock - Ripped from

Tick Tock - Ripped from the headlines:

"The government of Iran has begun preparations to resist a military invasion by the United States scheduled for the year 2015. The attack will come after 12 years of attempts to get Iran to cooperate with United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding its nuclear program...

...A high-ranking Iranian official said his nation's war plans are based on a study of the history of U.S. and U.N. policy toward Iraq.

'We know the clock is ticking,' said the unnamed source. 'We only have so much time before the international community takes action against us.'"

Sometimes it's hard to know where Scrappleface ends and real life begins.

Vital Music News - Elder

Vital Music News - Elder from Fraters Libertas worries about my post ribbing JB Doubtless' taste in music:

"Does this mean that my dreams for a Northern Alliance band (JB on geetar, Lileks on keyboards, Atomizer on triangle, and Mitch on everything else) are dead?

Of course not. What would the Beatles have been without the dissonance between Lennon and McCartney? Would The Who have been better had Daltrey and Townsend not come to blows constantly? Where would Sinatra have ended up without the Gallo/Gambino feud? Where would the E Street Band ended up if Springsteen had gotten along with Vinnie "Mad Dog" Lopez, instead of firing him in 1974?

No, the Northern Alliance Band (JB on guitar, Lileks on keys, Atomizer or "A-Dog" on triangle, and me on guitar, bass, drums, mandolin or harmonica or whatever needed) will surivive a little cognitive dissonance.

On some matters, anyway:

I wonder if it's too late to return my 'Colonel' outfit.

There, we could have problems.

So it's "Gabba Gabba Hey", and let's conquer the day!

Wednesday - Big interview at

Wednesday - Big interview at 1PM. I may also hear about another job I interviewed for a while ago.

On Valentine's Day. No, seriously - the requisition may finally open today.

And they say American business isn't cautious enough.

No Doubt - To balance

No Doubt - To balance this morning's screed about Fraters' JB Doubtless' attack on Zevon unfair, let me join with Doubtless in urging you to tune in Medved today, as he tangles with Al Franken.

I may roll tape.

Battle for the Heart -

Battle for the Heart - Powerline refers us to a fascinating article by Karl Zinmeister, whom they describe thus:

the editor of the American Enterprise magazine and an enterprising journalist. He served as an embedded reporter with the 82nd Airborne; his new book about the experience, Boots on the Ground, has just been published.

The piece has fascinating insights on the Iraqi view of their liberation.

If you believe the left's cant, the war for the Iraqi heart and mind is already lost (as it was, they said, long before the first tank rolled); ipse yesterday's NYTimes editorial:

The United States has no clear exit strategy from Iraq or immediate hope of a turnaround in a violent, complicated and expensive commitment. The hard realities of postwar Iraq have convinced Mr. Bush that he needs the United Nations support he snubbed before the invasion. But even there he is avoiding the hard choice of acknowledging his error and ceding real authority to other nations. Diplomats are wondering, with good reason, whether Mr. Bush is embarking on a new era of international cooperation or simply giving them permission to clean up his mess

So Zinmeister (whose book will have a spot cleared for it at the top of my reading list this fall) and his article come at a perfect time.

He starts with the observation:

We all know that journalists have a bad-news bias: 10,000 schools being rehabbed isn't news; one school blowing up is a weeklong feeding frenzy. And some of us who have spent time recently in Iraq--I was an embedded reporter during the war--have been puzzled by the postwar news and media imagery, which is much more negative than what many individuals involved in reconstructing Iraq have been telling us. Well, finally we have some evidence of where the truth may lie.

...and then moves on to the evidence:

The results show that the Iraqi public is more sensible, stable and moderate than commonly portrayed, and that Iraq is not so fanatical, or resentful of the U.S., after all.

• Iraqis are optimistic. Seven out of 10 say they expect their country and their personal lives will be better five years from now. On both fronts, 32% say things will become much better.
• The toughest part of reconstructing their nation, Iraqis say by 3 to 1, will be politics, not economics. They are nervous about democracy. Asked which is closer to their own view--"Democracy can work well in Iraq," or "Democracy is a Western way of doing things"--five out of 10 said democracy is Western and won't work in Iraq. One in 10 wasn't sure. And four out of 10 said democracy can work in Iraq. There were interesting divergences. Sunnis were negative on democracy by more than 2 to 1; but, critically, the majority Shiites were as likely to say democracy would work for Iraqis as not. People age 18-29 are much more rosy about democracy than other Iraqis, and women are significantly more positive than men.
• Asked to name one country they would most like Iraq to model its new government on from five possibilities--neighboring, Baathist Syria; neighbor and Islamic monarchy Saudi Arabia; neighbor and Islamist republic Iran; Arab lodestar Egypt; or the U.S.--the most popular model by far was the U.S. The U.S. was preferred as a model by 37% of Iraqis selecting from those five--more than Syria, Iran and Egypt put together. Saudi Arabia was in second place at 28%. Again, there were important demographic splits. Younger adults are especially favorable toward the U.S., and Shiites are more admiring than Sunnis. Interestingly, Iraqi Shiites, coreligionists with Iranians, do not admire Iran's Islamist government; the U.S. is six times as popular with them as a model for governance.
• Our interviewers inquired whether Iraq should have an Islamic government, or instead let all people practice their own religion. Only 33% want an Islamic government; a solid 60% say no. A vital detail: Shiites (whom Western reporters frequently portray as self-flagellating maniacs) are least receptive to the idea of an Islamic government, saying no by 66% to 27%.

The article goes much farther, of course; if you are tired of the left's chicken-little cant on Iraq, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

The article is, above all things, realistic; it notes the difficulties ahead, as well as some areas where the US didn't come out quite as well.

None of this is to suggest that the task ahead will be simple. Inchoate anxiety toward the U.S. showed up when we asked Iraqis if they thought the U.S. would help or hurt Iraq over a five-year period. By 50% to 36% they chose hurt over help. This is fairly understandable; Iraqis have just lived through a war in which Americans were (necessarily) flinging most of the ammunition. These experiences may explain why women (who are more antimilitary in all cultures) show up in our data as especially wary of the U.S. right now. War is never pleasant, though U.S. forces made heroic efforts to spare innocents in this one, as I illustrate with firsthand examples in my book about the battles. Evidence of the comparative gentleness of this war can be seen in our poll. Less than 30% of our sample of Iraqis knew or heard of anyone killed in the spring fighting. Meanwhile, fully half knew some family member, neighbor or friend who had been killed by Iraqi security forces during the years Saddam held power.

Don't just sit there. Read it.

Sleep When I'm Dead

Don't get me wrong - Fraters Libertas is one of the best blogs in the Twin Cities. It's on my daily read list. It should be on yours.

But...how do I say this diplomatically? - JB Doubtless is to music what Al Franken is to hockey, as we found yet again in yesterday's slime-job on the late Warren Zevon.

Again, don't get me wrong - JB writes some great stuff, too - as long as he steers clear of music. He made his debut with the Fraters last winter by puking on the grave of Joe Strummer (in a piece I misattributed to the Elder), followed up by condoning Norah Jones' beating Springsteen for the Grammy...and now this:

I’ve been reading quite a bit in the last few days about the death of Warren Zevon and What His Music Meant.

As we all know, he was diagnosed with cancer last summer and told he had two months to live. Knowing his time was almost up, he made a memorable appearance on Late Night where Letterman gave him the entire hour. He then gathered his friends and made one last record, finishing it just months ago. Now he’s dead, proving that doctors don’t really always know what’s going on.

Just like Charles Schultz, who died the day the final episode of "Peanuts" ran; ones life's calling can frequently keep one alive. Many artists and authors have defied the odds of their illnesses to complete one last big work - and thankfully, Zevon's one of them. His final album, "The Wind", is stunning - but more later.

To be sure, he was a gifted musician and songwriter, but I don’t like what is says about our culture when someone this dark, this nihilistic is hailed as a musical saint.

Two things to say, here:

• The darkness and "nihilism" was usually delivered tongue in cheek - unless it really mattered (like Zevon's illuminating but teeth-clenched work after he quit drinking. In any case, ignore Zevon's rip-roaring sense of humor at your own peril. Zevon got tarred, unfairly, with the "dark and tortured" label in the same way Richard Thompson always has; both men are intensely witty men whose humor can run dark, light, sweet, bitter and everything in between.
• Had he not written a wonderful album about death - a topic rock and roll has played with innumerable times, but never lived through - the sainthood would be a lot more hollow. As it is, Zevon's done something very few artists have done; approached a "non-rock" topic and made a wondrous piece of art about it. Sprinsteen's "Rising" was another - both great albums, both good popular art, both about subjects vastly more mature than rock and roll usually gets credit for (death and 9/11, respectively).

Doubtless continues:

But Doubtless, you say, how can you write such things about such a great man? Hey, I Iike the guy too, but this idea of Artist As Suffering Soul has to be defeated and I’m just the guy to do it.

No, Zevon's the one to do it - and he always did. Nobody took the "suffering soul" image less seriously - or poked more holes in it - than Zevon.

Mr. Zevon’s songs paid tribute to murderers, mercenaries, drug dealers, werewolves and assorted other miscreants. Violence, death and suicide were frequent themes, as was love among the desperate and downtrodden.

Sounds great, don’t it?

Sounds simplistic. Zevon's oeuvre was much more varied than that. At his best, he wrote playful songs about violence; hilarious songs about depression; affirming songs about suicide; above all, beautiful and genuinely lovely music about love, both desperate and redeeming.

I’m afraid Zevon suffered from one of the great conceits of his generation; the assumption that there are two groups of people in the world--the squares: suburban, gainfully employed, happy-go-lucky, and the realists: artists, drunks, people that would rather feel pain than what they thought the squares were feeling (nothing). And they felt it was their job as the feeling artists to let the squares know How It REALLY Was.

I'm afraid Doubtless suffers from the conceit of the...er, Doubtless. There may not be an artist anywhere, ever, that has documented more thoroughly the emptiness and self-betrayal of the artistic stereotype. Many artists make the value judgement Doubtless describes; Zevon wasn't one of them.

Although Doubtless tries to pin the rap on him anyway:

Zevon says as much in the song Aint That Pretty At All:

Well, I've seen all there is to see
And I've heard all they have to say
I've done everything I wanted to do . . .
I've done that too
And it ain't that pretty at all
Ain't that pretty at all
So I'm going to hurl myself against the wall
Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all

Unstated by Doubtless; the song is as ironic as they come. The song mocks the self-absorbed nihilism of its protagonist.

Better yet, his classic "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead", from "Stand In The Fire", one of the three best live albums in rock history:

So much to do, there's plenty on the farm
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Saturday night I like to raise a little harm
I'll sleep when I'm dead

I'm drinking heartbreak motor oil and Bombay gin
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Straight from the bottle, again and again
I'll sleep when I'm dead

Well, I take this medicine as prescribed
I'll sleep when I'm dead
It don't matter if I get a little tired
I'll sleep when I'm dead

I've got a .44 Magnum up on the shelf
I'll sleep when I'm dead
And I DON'T intend to useit on myself
I'll sleep when I'm dead

Homage to self-destruction? If you read the lyrics in isolation...sure. If you hear them in context - delivered by a guy who was living their hollowness - it makes more sense.

Doubtless continues:

Fusilli goes on to make the point about dark music I’ve heard dozens of times but I still don’t understand:

"Like one of his literary heroes, Ross Macdonald, Mr. Zevon saw the dark side of life on the outskirts of Los Angeles and, chronicling it, revealed universal themes that transcend time and geography."

How? This is never explained. How. How does writing about murder, suicide and wretchedness reveal universal themes? Does jumping into a latrine help one to understand shit? Does sleeping with the homeless help you understand alcoholism and mental illness? And what are the universal themes? Original sin? Hatred?

Read Crime and Punishment lately? For Raskolnikov's redemption to mean anything, one has to understand the darkness, the murder - the sin! - that he's been redeemed from!

Or to put it in Zevon's oeuvre, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead or Carmelita ("Now I'm sitting here playing solitaire with my pearl-handled deck/the county won't give me no more methadone, and they garnished your welfare check/Carmelita, hold me tighter, I think I'm going down/and I'm all strung out on heroin, on the lonely side of town") is a necessary prologue to Accidentally Like A Martyr, where the darkness parts and forgiveness happens:

The phone don't ring, no no
And the sun refused to shine
Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly
For what was already mine
For such a long, long time

{Refrain}
We made mad love
Shadow love
Random love
And abandoned love
Accidentally like a martyr
The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder

{Repeat refrain}

The days slide by
Should have done, should have done, we all sigh
Never thought I'd ever be so lonely
After such a long, long time
Time out of mind

Doubtless continues:

To me, there’s way more than enough darkness in the world.

And some of us defeat it with art that explores it!

I don’t need it in my pop records, books, movies or personalities. Declaring those who toiled their entire lives in this darkness to be geniuses steers our culture toward a path that is dangerous for our souls.

Doubtless misses the point; Zevon worked in darkness, pushed little corners of it back from his life, poked ribald fun at the rest, and in the end created some art that brought light and dignity and humor to some dark and humiliating and harrowing situations; recovery from addiction, confronting imminent mortality.

I'll take "the Wind" over the entire Frank Sinatra catalogue (and before Doubltess doubtless brands me a musical philistine - I get around on ten instruments, have played classical cello for 30 years now, and have forgotten more music in more genres than most people will ever learn).

And someday when I have the mental energy, I'll address Doubtless' assertion that Norah Jones' upset win over Springsteen at the Grammies wasn't a crime against humanity.

UPDATE: It's not just mortality. Emailer PB writes Zevon was, and is, also great for:

Or just getting through the rain. Since 1976, Zevon has always been the music I turn to on dreary, rainy days. It meets the mist head on, and shows it to be a wispy vapor that is temporarily hiding the bright sunshine a mere mile above. I always feel better after listening to Zevon in the rain, and a bit embarrassed for letting myself accept the dreary viewpoint. Life doesn't have to be dreary. It can be a wacky funfest. Zevon let us know that with both barrels.

PB is right, and I hope JD is getting this.

Busy Morning - Some domestic

Busy Morning - Some domestic BS, plus I have to do some research for a second interview tomorrow.

Pointers to information on Rational Unified Process, UML and Use Case Modeling will all be gratefully accepted.

Profiles In Cluelessness - There's a little current among the tinfoil-hat left that the US should leave Iraq, and pay Britain and the UN to finish the job; we just can't do it, so they say.

I saw this - from a purveyor of that notion - on a local politics discussion group the other day:

The U.S. soldier is well armed, well fed, comparatively well paid, and well trained. They do not appear to know spit about counterinsurgency warfare. TV cameras show them bunching up on patrols and crossing bridges. The British don't.

So - these people get their knowledge of infantry tactics by what they see on CNN?

I'm still shaking my head.

Broderick, Again - Richard Broderick

Broderick, Again - Richard Broderick - a Green candidate for the St. Paul School Board - is at it again with his latest press release:

Of the key proposals I have presented in my race for the St. Paul School Board none has generated more excitement than my call for the development and implementation of a comprehensive, district-wide, K-12 peace curriculum to be accompanied by the creation of student-run committees for -violent conflict resolution in every junior and senior high school.

Mr. Broderick is the same guy who said, a few months ago, that he'd use the School System to essentially indoctrinate students with a Green worldview:

"The core principles of the Green Party -- ecological wisdom, grassroots
democracy, social justice, and non-violence -- are all rooted in a categorical
rejection of exploitation and domination as acceptable means to our ends in
life," Broderick said. "In order for our society to adopt these values (as it
must, if we are to survive on this planet), we need to nurture the instinctively
Green consciousness of our young people through the comprehensive application of
these principles to curriculum, instruction, administration, and district-wide
decision-making processes.

Scary enough yet?

No. It's not.

Here are excerpts from Broderick's latest press release:

Briefly, upon winning in the general election I will establish and chair a task force made up of volunteers from the school district as well representatives from organizations like Friends for a Non-Violent World with a proven track record in training people in the theory and techniques of non-violence. At the end of the current school year, I will gather recommendations from this task force -- recommendations that will cover course content, budgeting, and a time table for implementation -- and embark upon a campaign to raise money from one or more of the many foundations dedicated to shaping a more peaceful world in order to hire professional curriculum writers to develop a peace curriculum for St. Paul's public schools. Cost to the district? Zero.

In other words, the St. Paul Public Schools' curriculum will be even more devoted to pacifism than it currently is.

At "no cost".

Meanwhile, come January I will ask FVNW to work with individual schools to provide training for students involved in conflict resolution committees. These committees will differ from the peer mediation groups that now exist
in some area schools in that they will involve the entire student body, be transparent rather than working behind closed doors, and -- a key contrast -- be proactive, addressing the underlying sources of conflict, from racial tension to taunting to disrespectful behavior in and out of the classroom, before the conflict has a chance to simmer over into violent confrontation.

First - this sort of involvement can be useful - in schools that are genuinely democratic (and by that I'm referring to Sudbury-model schools, which democratize the entire education process, down to the curriculum). In schools that are fundamentally authoritarian (as all traditional schools are), I have to wonder, especially about the "These committees will differ from the peer mediation groups that now exist bin some area schools in that they will involve the entire student body, be transparent rather than working behind closed doors, and -- a key contrast -- be proactive, addressing the underlying sources of conflict" bit.

"Be proactive"...how? Sending troops of students through the schools to root out evidence of "violent" badthink?

The Hitler Youth were proactive, too.

In a world of increasing levels of interpersonal, intercommunal, and international violence, the creation of a district-wide peace curriculum is not only the right thing to do morally, it is also a perfect example of "practical idealism." In addition to providing students with the tools they need to confront conflict without violence and to help create a more peaceful future, a peace curriculum will also end up saving the St. Paul school district money and resources at a time when it faces critical budget shortfalls.

Unstated - they'll "save the money" by importing an ideology from an organization from "Friends for a Non-Violent World", a group with a very strident agenda. Can you imagine the school district getting curriculum help from Gun Owners of America (the people who think the NRA are too mushy)? It's analogous!

By providing students from kindergarten on with the techniques, theories, and ethical principles of non-violence, a comprehensive district-wide peace curriculum will cause an immediate improvement in classroom demeanor.

This, I'm afraid, is completely wrong.

I'll say this now; a little "violence" in grade school prevents a LOT of violence later. Roughhousing can be scary, but it teaches people - especially boys - the limits of their inherent aggressiveness. If those limits aren't learned early, then the child grows up not knowing them at all - and violence becomes serious business, rather than something the child learned to eschew the hard (and direct) way.

I suggest to you that the current discipline problems in the classroom are associated with the feminization of education, and the artificial focus on "non-violence" that it has bred.

I am writing Mr. Broderick right now to ask for clarification. In the unlikely event I get any, I'll let you know.

Immigrant-Bashing Immigrants - Immigrant bashing.

Immigrant-Bashing Immigrants - Immigrant bashing. Ethnic stereotyping. Absolute intolerance of real diversity.

Isn't that what the Democrats way Republicans are all about?

Sergeant Stryker reports on a Nuremburgesque pro-Davis rally, starting with a Davis quote:

"'You shouldn't be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state,' in an apparent reference to Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent.
The theme was picked up later in Alhambra at an Asian American rally against the recall. An appointee to the Workforce Investment Board, Sukhee Kang, suggested that Schwarzenegger's accent hindered his governing abilities.
'He can't even speak English well. How can he govern the state of California?' said Kang, who emigrated from South Korea in 1977 [emphasis added - Kang arrived in the US nearly a decade after Scwartzenegger], as he warmed up the crowd before Davis arrived.

The Sarge expresses my own disgust:

Uh...I'm sorry, my shallow reserves of wit fail me. I'm just trying to figure out what kind of a state I live in where Democratic picnics sound like neo-Nazi rallies and Korean immigrants bash on other people for not speaking English well. Greetings from the Hotel California. "

This recall is turning into a referendum between someone who's renounced his family's Nazi past, and those who are embracing something almost as bad.

(Via Powerline)

The Conscience - Oliver Willis

The Conscience - Oliver Willis channels Jonathan Alter, who notes Britney Spears' vacuous quote from last week:

Britney Spears, best known recently for a lip lock with Madonna, is hardly an authority on the political ramifications of September 11. But Spears has a bankable feel for the popular pulse, and her comments last week reflected a good chunk of public opinion on the subject of patriotism: "I think we should just trust the president in every decision he makes," she told CNN, "and we should just support that, and be faithful in what happens."

...and draws the conclusion...

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, most of them Republicans, define themselves politically and define others patriotically by adherence to that simple Spears standard. The Bush White House will do everything it can to identify those voters; play to their sometimes sublimated emotions of fidelity and fear, and turn the first Tuesday in November 2004 into a referendum on the second Tuesday in September 2001. Stay Proud. Stay Safe. Vote Bush.

To which Willis adds:

Britney Spears: the political conscience of the right.

Hm. Fascinating.

As John at Freespeech.com says:

Which of course suggests that you or I or anyone is free to point out any arbitrary liberal media starling as the political conscience of the left.

Which is it? Johnny Depp? Harrison Ford? Alec Baldwin? Barbra Streisand? Larry Flint? Can you think of other famous people who say vacuous things that we can arbitrarily declare the political conscience of the left?

Hm. A list is in order, here.

I'd like to get celebs, and their vacuous quotes.

THE POLITICAL CONSCIENCE OF THE LEFT

1. Cher - famous for "And the Beat Goes On" - said about the President "I don't like Bush. I don't trust him. I don't like his record. He's stupid. He's lazy..."If you think the president is an ass, fine – after four years you can vote him out. But the Supreme Court – that's 30 years! The Jerry Falwells of this world will be right in your back pocket. You won't have one f--king right left."
2. Jennifer Aniston - known for a haircut and a husband, mainly - on the President ("Bush is a f*cking idiot") and on Jenna Bush ("We'd [Brad Pitt and her] pass her in the hall and Brad would say, 'Heyyyy, Jenna, wanna beer? I got one in the truck!"").
3. Whoopie Goldberg - famous as a has-been comedian: "I don't agree, you see, I don't really view communism as a bad thing."
4. Woody Harrelson - whose greatest intellectual achievement has been appearing in an Oliver Stone movie - said "“I read in a paper here [England] about a woman who held out the part of her taxes that would go to the war effort. Something like 17%. I like that idea, though in the US it would have to be more like 50%. If you consider money as a form of energy, then we see half our taxes and half the US government's energy focused on war and weapons of mass destruction. Over the past 30 years, this amounts to more than ten trillion dollars. Imagine that money going to preserving rainforest or contributing to a sustainable economy (as opposed to the dinosaur tit we are currently in the process of sucking dry). (Is Mr. Harrelson aware that mammary glands are a feature of mammals?)

We can (and will) go on...

So with a nod to Jon "The East Is Red" Alter, I need to rephrase him just a bit:

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, all of them Democrats or Greens, define themselves politically and define others patriotically by adherence to that simple Alter standard, "whatever we say or do, we're smarter than Republicans". The left will do everything it can to identify those voters; play to their almost-never sublimated emotions of arrogance, superiority, entitlement and fear of their fellow citizen, and turn the first Tuesday in November 2004 into a referendum on the first Tuesday in November 2000. Stay Proud. Stay Perpetually but Inarticulately Outraged. Never Park the Bus. Vote Anybody But Bush.

It may not roll off the tongue, but...

Drift - David Warren, on

Drift - David Warren, on his switch from the Anglican/Episcopal Church to the Catholics.

Midwest Conservative Journal has been admirably and productively obsessed with what it calls the Episcopal Church's drift away from Christianity, also.

Some fascinating reading. I'll have to finish writing my own shot at theological exposition...

Hasten Down The Wind

We knew it was coming.

It doesn't help.

Warren Zevon died yesterday afternoon at age 56:

"In a macabre songbook that includes 'Excitable Boy,' 'Lawyers, Guns and Money' and 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,' Zevon presented a world of the undead and the unethical on the rampage in a mercenary world. In 'Mr. Bad Example,' an altar boy grows up to be a vagabond con man: 'I'm very well acquainted with the seven deadly sins/I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in/I'm proud to be a glutton and I don't have time for sloth/I'm greedy and I'm angry and I don't care who I cross.' "

Now that he's dead, he'll probably start getting his due.

UPDATE: Powerline, who've covered Zevon's illness as well as any bloggers, wrap it up with style.

RIP, Exciteable Guy.

The Speech - The President

The Speech - The President took back some of the momentum with last night's speech.

This part was key:

Second, we are committed to expanding international cooperation in the reconstruction and security of Iraq, just as we are in Afghanistan. Our military commanders in Iraq advise me that the current number of American troops ? nearly 130,000 ? is appropriate to their mission. They are joined by over 20,000 service members from 29 other countries. Two multinational divisions, led by the British and the Poles, are serving alongside our forces ? and in order to share the burden more broadly, our commanders have requested a third multinational division to serve in Iraq.

Some countries have requested an explicit authorization of the United Nations Security Council before committing troops to Iraq. I have directed Secretary of State Colin Powell to introduce a new Security Council resolution, which would authorize the creation of a multinational force in Iraq, led by America.

I recognize that not all of our friends agreed with our decision to enforce the Security Council resolutions and remove Saddam Hussein from power. Yet we cannot let past differences interfere with present duties. Terrorists in Iraq have attacked representatives of the civilized world, and opposing them must be the cause of the civilized world. Members of the United Nations now have an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation.

Third, we are encouraging the orderly transfer of sovereignty and authority to the Iraqi people. Our coalition came to Iraq as liberators and we will depart as liberators.

As we come up on the second anniversary of the launching of the Third World War, it's worth remembering what brought us here.

And how we'll leave:

Fellow citizens: We have been tested these past 24 months, and the dangers have not passed. Yet Americans are responding with courage and confidence. We accept the duties of our generation. We are active and resolute in our own defense. We are serving in freedom's cause ? and that is the cause of all mankind.

Note to the Dems: It's going to take more than prescriptions and handouts to get the momentum.

Sullivan has a great piece - on the "State of the War" speech.

Money quote:

Critics will say that the Iraq-terror connection, brutally outlined in the Washington Post yesterday, is a result of the war and didn't exist beforehand. They're wrong. The links between Baathist remnants and al Qaeda are obviously stronger now than the links between al Qaeda and the Saddam regime a year ago - but they all always had a common goal: the prevention of the liberalization of the Arab world and the defeat of Western interests through terror, both state-sponsored and otherwise. We've flushed them out but we haven't yet destroyed them. Now we have a chance to go in for the kill. If Bush can successfully persuade people that violence in Iraq is a) unavoidable and b) an opportunity, then he will be far more persuasive in the coming months. And we all need him to be.

To deny the ideological link - as Josh Marshall seems to in the article I addressed yesterday - is the sort of Clintonion pseudological pointillism that may make legalists warm and fuzzy - but in the amorphous world of terrorism, makes no sense.

Art of War - A

Art of War - A fascinating piece in Chicago Boyz about Steve Mumford, an artist currently drawing post-war Baghdad.

It's a fascinating piece - both the Boyz' bit and the original Artnet piece. Read 'em both. Engrossing.

"Drawing here takes a little getting used to. The Iraqis are intensely interested in most things western, so the presence of an American sitting on a stoop or at a cafe making a drawing always elicits an avid audience. Every brushstroke is watched, and people have many questions. The Iraqi sense of personal space is very different from a westerner's; here people crowd in so close they're touching me, and men feel free to stab at the paper to point out someone I've drawn whom they know. If an onlooker blocks the view, however, he'll be shouted at to get out of the way. Sometimes a passage is greeted with a round of 'tsk, tsk, tsk,' which in Iraq doesn't necessarily connote disapproval as much as interest (I think). "

Verdict?

In general, Baghdad seems to me to be better than it was two months ago, despite the rise in bombings. Many of the huge mounds of trash are cleaned up, the curbs repainted, less gunfire at night. The endless gas station lines are much shorter, the traffic snarls less intense and there's more electricity at night, although still far from enough. Most importantly, the Iraqis of Al Wasiria seem to like these Americans, often calling out to them by name as they're on patrol.

About that last point; when discussing the issue with liberals who've bought the Dean/Kerry/Scheer/Dowd cant that Iraq is a quagmire, I've taken to responding "Let's revisit the question in a year".

History tends to be kinder to conservatives than liberals.

Mumford's drawings, by the way, are very interesting. I hope he has an installation around the Cities sometime.

DuToit Connects - With a

DuToit Connects - With a post I could have written at any point in the past fifteen years.

Lupino, Bergman, Bacall, and the list goes on.

Sharon Stone? Sarah Jessica Parker? Pfft. This is one of few areas where the world has not improved one iota.

Powerline Contra Marshall - Interesting,

Powerline Contra Marshall - Interesting, I think, that Power Line gets an entirely different take on the Washington Post Al-Quaeda story:

"Read David Horowitz's Washington Times column 'How to look at the war on terror' together with the Washington Post's story 'Al Qaeda plans a new front.' "

One article. Two completely different analyses.

UPDATE: Sullivan, too -although his permalink isn't working as this is written (scroll down to see the article entitled "FLYPAPER - IT'S WORKING".

I'm picturing a Josh Marshall writiing in November, 1944; "Why the Normandy Landings Were Bad Strategy".

Massage Not Lest Ye Be

Massage Not Lest Ye Be Massaged - The story from the left is this: The Bush Administration made up a bunch of things about Iraq, and will keep looking until it finds proof to match its preconceptions.

To reach this conclusion, Josh Marshall - the current darling of the blogging left - is...er, looking until he finds proof to match his conclusions.

This is one hell of a story in Sunday's Washington Post. The outlines of the tale are ones we've known for a while now: Iraq had little or nothing to do with al Qaida before the war. But the war itself -- the supposed remedy for the tie between Iraq and al Qaida -- ended up making the Iraq/al Qaida mumbo-jumbo into a reality.

In this paragraph, Marshall leads his little Republican Democrat Guard of strawmen into battle:

• The war was never a "supposed remedy for the tie" between Hussein and Bin Laden, but rather addressed quite a number of issues (WMDs, links to terror, human rights abuses, disobedience of UN resolutions).
• The piece to which Marshall links - which is indeed interesting, even if it's the usual "unnamed sources" providing the beef - doesn't come anywhere close to proving there was no Al-Quaeda connection with Iraq before 9/11 - and let's leave aside for a moment the fact that focusing on Al-Quaeda is itself myopic, in a world in which terror groups are amorphous and interrelated.

No, the piece shows merely that Al-Quaeda-affiliated guerrillas are flocking to Iraq. Which, if I recall correctly, was not only something we conservatives were predicting, but in fact hoping for ("Bring 'em on").

We return to Marshall:

You knew that in general terms. But here are the particulars. One confluence of events seems key. By the middle of 2002 al Qaida was seriously damaged, its infrastructure disrupted, many of its soldiers and key leaders dead. The mix of damage to the organization and increased security in the United States made new mass-casualty terrorism in America all but impossible. The organization had to fall back on smaller-scale attacks mainly in Muslim countries, carried out by local affiliated groups.

But the Iraq war -- and the onset of the occupation -- provided the organization (or its remnants) with a new opportunity. It was both a new vehicle to galvanize followers and operating there meant fewer logistical difficulties since it was close by. Even just before the war, in February of this year, key al Qaida operatives started planning the move toward Iraq as the new front.

Again, ask yourself (or better yet, Marshall) how this proves what Marshall "already knew" - that there was no pre-9/11 connection?

Marshall's not dishonest; he just works context like an old-world craftsman. It doesn't always work. Marshall says:

Also key is the role of Iran, which, according to the Post article, provided key members of the damaged al Qaida organization with a safe-haven during the period between their expulsion from Afghanistan and the opening of their new front in Iraq.

...which he notes in his next post, is a squishy theory.

Marshall continues:

A story like this, culled together from different sources, many of whom are no doubt interested parties, is only a first run at the truth. Points will be refined; major elements of the story may change. But I think this story and those that will follow it will be a major point of discussion for some time to come.

Note the careful double-standard; the left's anti-war cant is allowed to evolve into, apparently, the "final draft" truth over time; the case for war was allowed no revision or room for adaptation.

While I've been tempted to read exhaustively through Marshall's archives to figure out the gestalt of his Iraq coverage, others have done it before. Hugh Hewitt writes in the current edition of his blog:

Joshua Micah Marshall was on the program yesterday, and we mixed it up over Joshua's refusal to articulate any short-term standard against which the occupation of Iraq can be judged. Marshall's entry today is another amusing brew of unattributed insider knowledge, rim-shots off of newspaper stories, and wild rumors: "What changed, apparently, was that the Joint Chiefs went over too Powell's side." Ah, Seven Days in May must be on Josh's bedside. How breathless. How dramatic. How completely absurd: "Colin, this is Dick Myers. I've got Peter Pace with me here, and we want to come over to your side."

Marshall's article points to something I've noticed in the left's entire case against the war Administration, all along. It's led me to a realization, that I think I can postulate in the form of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis I will henceforth call Berg's Law. To wit:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive.

Think about it; when was the last time you saw a left-of-center commentator note the UN resolutions when jawing about the disappearing WMDs? Can you show me a liberal blogger who's talked about WMDs and still noted the UN resolutions that Iraq flaunted? Has anyone on the left spoken of the technicalities of the resolution-enforcement process while noting the WMD allegations and the pre-war evidence of terrorist (not just Al-Quaeda) connections?

Ask around. I'd love an answer to this.

The First Bonehead - The

The First Bonehead - The anti-gun left smells blood. The fact that it's just ketchup escapes them and their pals, the media.

The Pioneer Press reported the story of a guy in north-suburban Anoka County who got into a stupid incident with a gun. Unmentioned in the story - it's the type of story that would have never been widely reported under normal circumstances; it's the type of thing that happens constantly in trailer parks and Frogtowns nationwide.

The only thing abnormal about these circumstances is that the guy has a newly-minted Concealed Carry permit.

An Anoka County man, who shot 11 bullets into the hood of his brother's car in an attempt to "kill" it, may be the first Minnesotan to have his gun permit suspended under a new state law that allows holders to carry handguns in most public places.

So far, so good. In fact, so far, exactly to specs; we concealed-carry supporters never said the law-abiding citizen was perfect - merely that he or she was, statistically, incredibly trustworthy. Joe Olson, of Concealed Carry Reform Now, commented accurately on the story's importance (near the veeeeery end of the PiPress' piece):

Joseph Olson, president of the Minnesota-based Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, said, "No one ever claimed permit holders would be perfect." Information from other states shows that permit holders are more law-abiding than the population in general, Olson said.

"But there are always exceptions, and this gentleman is a moron," he said. "There will be people who will do stupid and illegal things and the law is set up so they lose their permits, which sounds like it worked just fine in this case."

Exactly. The guy screwed up - and is paying the consequences.

Of course, the anti-gun movement as manifested by Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota's Rebecca Thoman, see goblins in the dark:

[Thoman] said the case shows why her group opposed the law.

"This is an obvious case of a man turning to a gun in the heat of the moment," she said. "It also goes to the poor training that this law requires. It's not appropriate to use a gun to protect property. It wasn't a situation of his life being threatened."

The story - by Mara Gottfred et al - didn't mention that the guy did feel he was protecting lives; he was trying to shoot out the engine, to keep his drunk brother from going out on the freeway and endangering others. This, of course, is not allowed under Minnesota's paternalistic self-defense laws, where until recently one had a "duty to retreat" as far as possible before defending oneself (a provision that KSTP host Ron Rosenbaum says has been changed, although I've not been able to confirm that).

So what does this story tell us?

Only this: In a year that has featured a rising number of shootings carried out by "people" who do not qualify for carry permits - demi-human vermin who kill cabbies for money, who blast indiscriminately at drug-industry competitors on residential streets without regard for who's in the houses they're drilling, the Victim Disarmament movement is really desperate for some "good" news from its perspective its it's going to yap about this case.

New Year - It's my

New Year - It's my tenth autumn here in the Midway.

I first moved to the Midway in 1987 - and with about a two-year gap from '89 to '91, I've lived here ever since.

I moved into this house ten years ago next month. Now, I spent ten years, maybe eleven, in my father's house in North Dakota, so we're rapidly approaching a personal record, here. It feels strange, given that between college and my first years in the Twin Cities I moved about 12 times in five years.

The rhythm of life here in the Midway has markers not all that different than the ones I grew up with in North Dakota, at least conceptually. The rhythm is the same; the details aren't.

Winter is winter, of course - sleet, then snow, then the months of gazing out at the cold wet blanket from the safety of the warm living room, cocoa in hand, watching the Hamline students trudge past. Spring is marked by the return of bikes to the bike paths, and the shortening of sleeves. Summer? Halter tops.

But fall is the one that hits you. We have three colleges or universities within a mile of my house - Hamline is a block away - and the sights and sounds of college kids moving into the dorms, trying out their stereos, throwing their first tentative parties, warming up the boom cars with the big, beginning-of-the-year displays of audio bravado color the nighttime soundscape. The first slicks of vomit are also turning up in the gutters.

On my block, it's really the beginning of the New Year. The little cold tinge in the night air still gives me that 20-year-old feeling, time to start packing up, vestigial but still there.

Unlike most of the Hamline kids, I was here four (and eight) years ago, and I'll probably be here four years from now, if not forty years from now. I love this place - the trees arching over the streets (the 'hood has finally recovered from the Dutch Elm Disease that made the main streets so sere and barren-looking even 15 years ago), the neighborhood stores, the neighbors themselves...

...and every fall, when most people would start feeling blue with the reminiscences of the end of summer, we have the loud, crass, baggy-pantsed reminders of renewal here among us; walking through our yards, puking on our boulevards, tossing beer cans in our gutters, and reminding us of what we were not that long ago, and sometimes, on wistful nights like this, making one take stock of what parts of that part of our lives need to be exhumed and re-examined and maybe revived just a bit.

Happy New Year.

Couture du Trashe Blanc -

Couture du Trashe Blanc - When I was a kid, tattoos meant one of two things:

• One had been in the service, where tattoos have always been a sort of rite of passage, or
• One was sort of a low-life.

Things, of course, have changed.

I was at a swimming beach on an east-metro lake the other day. While I know that tattoos are much bigger business than they used to be, I was amazed - it seemed like we non-tattooed people were the minority.

And I figured - as I often do in thses situations - "we need some sort of taxonomy, here".

Submitted for your approval:

• Barbed Wire around the Bicep - Voted for Ventura, doesn't really remember why.
• Celtic band around arm - Votes DFL, plays Hackey-Sack
• Big Phoenix or other bird at Small of Back - Tendency toward overdramatic expression of opinions over trivial things.
• Rose or Mercury Wings Tattoed on Ankle - Tends to binge-drink with friends.
• Postage-stamp sized Kanji glyph between shoulder blades - On male: Fussy. On female: Sexy.
• Poster-sized Kanji glyph between shoulder blades - Prone to binge-drinking in tattoo parlors.
• Small rose on ribcage - On woman: sexy. On man: sign of glaucoma.
• Dragon, Barbed Wire, Phantasmal Creature or anything that looks like the cover of a Molly Hatchet album covering one breast and sticking out over average neckline - On woman: Sign of serious issues. On man: Check criminal record.
• Cross - Check church record.

Hamfisted, but I suspect largely accurate.

Yes, I nearly got a tattoo, once. It was 20 years ago, and it was a near miss. Subject for a later blog, I'm sure.

Or not.

I'll be back online this weekend, to make up for the lame week. Stay tuned.

Still Working On It -

Still Working On It - the computer, that is.

I'm having a very arcane hardware problem. I'll probably catch up on posting over the weekend.

Travails - More computer trouble,

Travails - More computer trouble, plus a possible phone job interview later today - we'll see.

More posting later, when we'll try to answer the questions: Will Fraters and Hugh patch it up? Is Sullivan going to the dark side? Is Layne OK?

Why? - Electric Venom states

Why? - Electric Venom states the resentful feminist case against the Islamic fundies.

Nothing new - but lots of old stuff you may have forgotten, in one convenient package.

(Via Instapundit)

Good Vs. Evil. Then Shopping

Good Vs. Evil. Then Shopping - Virginia Postrel starts the discussion about the gross misapprehension of America's real values:

Americans had forgotten bourgeois virtue. Freedom and affluence had made us soft. We were self-indulgent moral nihilists -- materialistic, selfish, and impulsive. We might have been having fun, but we’d created a culture no one would fight for.

At least that’s what the wise men said.

On September 11, 2001, they shut up. Ordinary Americans, it turned out, were not only brave but resilient and creative, even lethal, when it mattered.

Her conclusion?

Buffy was right all along.

ScrrrrraaaaAAAAAAAATCH.

Buffy?

Nope, I've never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then again, I've never watched Friends, Will and Grace, Frazier (maybe twice), or much of any other "Must See TV".

But Postrel states an eloquent case for the WB's flagship show:

The mere existence of Buffy proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex and evolving characters. Playful language. Joy and sorrow, pathos and elation. Episodes that dare to be different -- to tell stories in silence or in song. Big themes and terrible choices. In the show’s most wrenching moment, Buffy kisses her one true love and saves the world by sending him to hell.

Buffy assumes and enacts the consensus moral understanding of contemporary American culture, the moral understanding that the wise men ignored or forgot. This understanding depends on no particular religious tradition. It’s informed not by revelation but by experience. It is inclusive and humane, without denying distinctions or the tough facts of life. There are lots of jokes in Buffy -- humor itself is a moral imperative -- but no psychobabble and no excuses. Here are some of the show’s precepts, a sample of what Americans believe:

Postrel (who vaguely resembles Buffy, actually) then lists the precepts. Read 'em - it's fascinating stuff.

So maybe I'll check out the DVD after all.

Women Glow and Men Chunder

Women Glow and Men Chunder - Daughter is feeling fine today, but son and I are both home, sick as the proverbial dogs.

Blogging will either be nonexistent or obsessive, depending on how this headache plays out.

Notice is Served - People have ribbed me via email, noting that I occasionally respond to quotes in my blog with the single-word "Indeed", a la Glen Reynolds. The emailers ask if I'm not copying the Professor a bit blatantly.

Buncombe. I've been using the word "Indeed" as an all-purpose, non-committal response for at least twenty years, and I have college pals who'll back me up on it.

I was Indeeding when Indeeding wasn't cool.

Yes, I feel like a pioneer. What's it to you?

"Saint Paul DFLer Sentenced for

"Saint Paul DFLer Sentenced for Bank Robbery Murder" - Wouldn't that have been a wierd headline?

Of course. To have put out such a headline about the sentencing of Kathleen Soliah would have implied that Soliah's politics were an element of the crimes for which she was sentenced.

You ask "So what?"

Tim Graham in The Corner notes:

Am I the only one to find it disturbing that NBC/MSNBC is routinely referring to abortionist-killer Paul Hill today as an "anti-abortion activist," as if he's comparable to Chris Smith or Phyllis Schlafly?

Indeed.

How many criminals have their vocations or avocations tied to their sentencing?

The headlines did not scream:

PAINTER EXECUTED FOR LINDBERG KIDNAPPING

or

PLUMBER SENTENCED FOR ROBBERY

because the occupations of the perps aren't generally elements of the crime.

Referring to Paul Hill as a "Murderer" or "Zealot" or "terrorist" would be both true and germane to the crime for which he was executed. Calling him - not just occasionally, but as a general thing - an "anti-abortion activist" links Hill's crime with the efforts of everyone who actively opposes infanticide.

)Via Jeff Fecke)

Museum of Communism - Radley

Museum of Communism - Radley Balko at Fox News writes about the struggle to create a memorial to victims of Communism:

"Most of us are justifiably revolted at the sight of a teenage kid wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika. But glimpse the same kid in a shirt featuring a sickle and hammer, or a portrait of Che Guevara, and many of us will find him quaint, perhaps idealistic -- at the very worst, naïve and misguided. In New York City, you can get tipsy at the KGB Bar, a chic spot featuring Soviet-era symbolism and paraphernalia. Imagine what might become of the entrepreneur who tried to open a nightspot themed with Nazi regalia.

It become fashionable of late for celebrities to make high-profile pilgrimages to Cuba, to be wined and dined by Fidel Castro. In the time it takes to extol the virtues of universal health care and education, you can bet at least a dozen Cubans have risked their lives to get out. Iconic director Stephen Spielberg was the latest to make the trip. You’d think the man who so eloquently documented the brutality of totalitarianism in "Schindler’s List" would know better than to cozy up to tyrants.

This isn't merely tongue in cheek; there actually is an effort underway to create this memorial.

It's running into struggles, though:

One such project is already underway. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has been raising money toward a museum for several years now. The organization plans to build an online “virtual” museum first, then a standing memorial in Washington, D.C., with a final eye toward a bricks-and-mortar memorial similar to the Holocaust Museum.

But there’s a problem with the project’s funding. Project Director Jay Katzen says that although initial plans called for the museum to be funded entirely with private donations, the challenges of private fund raising has led the group to seek public dollars.

Balko continues, talking about the irony inherent in that resolution.

Read the whole thing - as well as George Mason University's "Museum of Communism" site.

(Via Tocquevillian)

Quote Of The Day -

Quote Of The Day - Lileks, natch:

That’s the good thing about the Dark Side.

Eventually, your eyes adjust.

Even working on a .NET project looks good right now.

The Weekend - The irony

The Weekend - The irony of being a long-term unemployed (that's what the Department of Labor calls me now!) on Labor Day weekend didn't escape me.

Still, it was a great weekend. Saw Franky Perez at the Bandshell on Saturday night at the Fair. Now, the Bandshell crowd has to be one of the toughest crowds out there; a mixture of people from stroller-bound toddlers to septuagenarians and everyone in between, all footsore and gassy and worn out after a day of violent rides and greasy food. Of the several hundred people there, it's a safe bet that only a thin film of them have any idea who you are. And if you're a club animal like Perez - who puts on a kinetic, old-school raveup of a show that's tailor-made for a club (or at an outdoor gig full of rock and roll fans, like last July at the Block Party - that has to be hard. The show was good - but you can tell when a hyperkinetic stage animal like Perez just isn't feeling the love. A group of maybe forty fans dancing around the foot of the stage picked things up. Here's hoping he has another local club gig soon.

More job leads. Sigh. I've been playing the numbers game all along; I've sent hundreds of resumes, had dozens of interviews of various types, and have probably 5-6 serious job leads right now. Eventually, the logic - my logic, anyway - says something's gotta break. Right?

Speaking of breaks - thanks to everyone that made this past month a record month for donations. I think Amazon delays telling me about gifts for at least thirty days, so - if you donated money via my Amazon link about this time last month, thank you very much! This site continues to be completely self-supporting, which in these times is pretty encouraging.

Due To Gun Control, Part

Due To Gun Control, Part CVI - Spoon has a long, fascinating post on the ramifications, not only of Chicago's unconstitutional gun ban, but of the consequences of the gun-control "moderates'" favorite solution, registration.

It seems the last-registered owner of a pistol used in a murder sold the firearm to a couple of policemen who ignored the law. The result? He's in jail on $100,000 bond:

"Got that? This poor mope, Beuck, legally buys a gun, probably some time around 1966-67. He keeps the gun for 15 years or so, without incident, at which time he promptly complies with Chicago's unconstitutional gun ordinance and registers his gun with the City in 1983. He keeps the gun for another decade or so, until 1994, at which time he legally sells it to a cop. Nine years later, and after at least two police officers have ignored the gun ordinance, a career violent criminal (in violation of a half dozen state laws and City ordinances) somehow gets ahold of the gun and kills several coworkers. The cops track down Beuck, now homeless, and ask him about the gun. Beuck cooperates, tells the police what he knows, but because this homeless man cannot now produce records regarding the sale of his gun nine years ago, Beuck gets sent to Cook County Jail on $100,000 bond!

You gotta wonder what would have happened if the authorities had shown as much interest in locking up the murderer, Tapia, after any of his more than a dozen arrests as they did in locking away a 58 year old homeless guy who couldn't come up with the paperwork documenting a gun he sold nine years ago."

And the left tries to ridicule the pro-Second Amendment movement's reference to the slippery slope...

It's The Terror, Stupid -

It's The Terror, Stupid - Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Spectator (via Sullivan), on the intellectual self-destruction of the Left after 9/11, over the only issue that really matters: Terror.

Remember - Wheatcroft's no dittohead:

"Two years later, the sorriest consequence of all this has become much clearer. Because the critics of the Bush administration and Blair government made themselves so ridiculous in the aftermath of 11th September, the proper case against the Iraq war was subsequently much weakened. Sane critics of Bush and Blair must have been embarrassed by the sheer emptiness of the Voices for Peace, one of the instant books which came out in autumn 2001, in which Mark Steel, Ronan Bennett, Annie Lennox ("I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it"), George Monbiot ("Let’s make this the era of collateral repair"), Anita Roddick ("We must shift from a private greed to a public good") and other usual or unusual suspects were rounded up, along with Adrian Mitchell (yes, also still with us), who rather lamely reprinted his old favourite "Tell me lies about Vietnam," which must have taken a few wrinklies back to the 1960s.

These unthinking "radicals" provoked more than just amusement mixed with irritation—they induced a sense of despair. They simply had nothing to say—as they showed when they were asked for more practical advice. If Alice Walker’s suggestion that Bin Laden should be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done was one of the most remarkable entries in this whole sottisier, it wasn’t much different in kind from the fatuities on offer elsewhere. Paul Foot led the way by telling Bush, "first, cut off your aid to the state of Israel." This was like saying, first, conquer the law of gravity, or, first, fly to Venus.

Intellecual vacuity, of course, is far from international. One had only to watch any of the Twin Cities' left's pro-Hussein anti-war rallies to see that ofay symbolism has replaced rational thought with all too many on the left (and on too many issues, as you notice if you work on the Concealed Carry debate too long).

This is an interesting topic, one I'm planning on exploring more. If you ask the left (see Josh Marshall), the left is just about to hit its stride. And yet as the Dean candidacy unfolds, and General Clark's mendacity is exposed to daylight, it looks like the sort of stride you see in a Three Stooges episode, only better, because the slapstick humor is unintentional.

Crossfired - I cut my

Crossfired - I cut my political teeth watching "Crossfire". Back about the time I was converting from liberalism, the show crackled with energy. Original hosts Tom Braden and a pre-boogeyman Pat Buchanan attacked their topics and guests with a flood of overtly-partisan but unabashedly articulate barrage of rhetoric. It was, of course, all opinion and no fact - which, in the years before Al Franken, was something we weren't used to getting overtly from the major media.

Then, I didn't watch it for about 15 years, and was shocked to hear that it's a prime candidate for the tank. I had no idea.

David Frum explains it well:

Is it possible that the brilliant original formula that made Crossfire a success in the 1990s--all opinion, no information--is out of date in a world in which Americans are threatened by dangers about which they crave information. You can learn things by listening to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, or by watching the Fox News Channel or CNN's Aaron Brown. But who has learned anything from Crossfire" recently? It may be that the show has failed by doing something that TV executives used to sneeringly insist was impossible: by underestimating its audience.

So it seems.

Krusing and Boozing

Colleen Kruse used to be a modestly serviceable comic. The bulk of her schtick has always (as I remember it) been to beat her audience over the head with PC cliches about...Colleen Kruse "Teenage Single Mom! Waitress! Woman in a Man's Racket!". As the City Pages said about her, The comedian is a product of working-class East St. Paul, teenage single motherhood, and a tour at Mickey's Diner. Those experiences have put her, as she declares onstage in thigh-high boots, "in touch with her inner motherfucker." Whether talking about her young son's pride in his erect penis or her day job in restaurants, Kruse is more interested in observational storytelling than one-liners". In other words, humor tailor-made for "This American Life".

She's managed to insinuate herself into the local writing crowd; she's reviewing books for the Strib now.

I can't tell what stands out the most about her review of Al Franken's new book, Icky Poopy Conservatives and Why I Hate Them: Ms. Kruse's fluence with strawmen, or the casual stupidity of her hatred.

Both are in evidence: Fluency with strawmen:

There's an adage generally attributed to Mark Twain: "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on." (He would have loved AM talk radio.)

and casually-stupid hatred:

On the other hand, if you play your Friday night game of cribbage with Grandma using an FBI's Most Wanted Deck just in case, you're going to want to fire up your Hummer 2 and motor on down to the union-busting mall bookseller, plunk down your $24.95 and see what you're up against. Because you've got to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Oh, yeah; Kruse thinks Franken is a cogent, on-point commentator:

Franken has been keeping a very close watch on his opponents, including Fox News shouter Bill O'Reilly, instapundit Ann Coulter [Note to Ms. Kruse: vide Instapundit. Don't make me come back there], former CBS correspondent turned media critic Bernard Goldberg, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch. With detailed, and often searingly funny footnotes, he deconstructs their writings and public utterances for maximum embarrassment value.

He catches O'Reilly boasting that the tabloid TV show "Inside Edition" won two prestigious Peabody journalism awards while he was on the staff. Never happened. He dings Coulter for research methods that wouldn't fly in a community college debate class.

Ms. Kruse; I'll toss O'Reilly over the transom if you do the same for Begala or Carville.

I'll be waiting.

Franken is brilliant at converting actual, factual quotes from our very own public servants and powerbrokers into wry commentary by simply affording them the relative calm of the printed page, rather than shouting over a media host's screaming agenda.

Where I come from, we call that "Taking the writer out of context". Note to Ms. Kruse; Franken's famous for it.

Of course, Franken's fact-finding can be fallible, too. He makes a mistake when he attributes an article that appeared in the Star Tribune to "Mpls./St. Paul Magazine (the weekend magazine of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)" But that's error, not deliberate deception.

Right.

And Franken's reflexive support of a president that lied under oath? That was...hep me, here?

Readers who pick up "Lies" simply expecting a laugh will find the joke's on them. The joke is, this is no joke. Franken's sardonic critique of our culture of political disinformation is serious business, and there's a lengthy chapter on the Wellstone memorial controversy to prove it.

Ms. Kruse: What Mr. Franken proves is that he's as bald-faced a spin doctor as a Carville, without half the entertainment value.

Like any pro comic, Franken doesn't shy from any subject. He's thoughtful and thorough, and not always side-splitting.

He's a cheap shot artist who specializes in out-of-context japes that, often as not, fall apart under detailed scrutiny, not that anyone cares to scrutinize the pathetic, publicity-whoring has-been.

By the way, Ms. Kruse; about your writing. I read this bit here, and I'm getting concerned:

But a lot of the time, he is. Enough of the time, he is.

Much of the time, you're better than that. Some of the time, you're better than that.

It would have been unseemly for him to have paced his laughs in any other way. They would have become the point of the book rather than its highlight and saving grace. Franken has built this finger-pointing book to be sturdy and interesting, no matter which side of the capital-gains tax break you butter your bread on.

Actually, I rather suspect you'd have to be sitting on Ms. Kruse's side of that issue, holding a wedge of Brie and a glass of Chablis with her and Al and Lori Sturdevant for all I know, to find it (if my skimming is any indication) anything but a has-been's painful attempt to cash in on a brief flash of outsider-hip cred.

But then Colleen Kruse probably thinks Molly Ivins is an incisive commentator, too...

Sundaze

Lori Sturdevant wrote a great column on Sunday.

There's a timelessness on Machinery Hill. The visitor notes the timelessness of the 4T Program message - Tractors, Transmissions, Tarnation, Tranquility - and the clusters of genuine young 'uns gathered around their mechanics projects. These are the "Family Mechanics" of the future - the people who'll run our family garages and farm equipment dealerships, carrying on this state's proud traditions...

Or perhaps this:

Standing around the 4R booth - the R's stand for Radio, Ratings, Rip and Read - one can see what 101 constant years of constant, generation-to-generation commitment (in terms of state subsidy) that the program has brought to the youth involved. The children - who will carry on Minnesota's "Family Radio" tradition - benefit - and so do we all...".

Of course, I'm lying. Ms. Sturdevant really wrote this:

There's a soothing timelessness inside the 4-H Building at the State Fair. The eye can rove from the 1930s group photos and 1958 ribbons in the display case to the clusters of real young people around beribboned exhibits, and admire what 101 years of constant commitment has produced.

The eye can be deceived. Courtesy of state budget cuts, change is coming to 4-H, and to its parent organization, the University of Minnesota Extension Service.

Sturdevant's column noted that funding cuts to the U of M Extension Service's "4H" program will spell the instant death of the family farm - or at least the Norman Rockwell-y image of the Family Farm that the DFL continues to flog.

She says:

County 4-H program coordinators -- along with the once-ubiquitous county extension agents -- will soon be gone.

And along, it should be added, with the tiny-town family farm life, which has been on the ropes for thirty years, and is pretty much a dead issue.

Time was that farm life in the Upper Midwest was centered around hundreds of small towns - each with a grain elevator and a rail spur, a grocery store, a church or two or three, about the same number of taverns, an extension/4H worker and a high school.

Today, the schools are consolidated, farmers think nothing of driving two hours to shop. The elevator is closed, the spur shut down years ago, the store and the taverns folded, the school consolidated with four others - in a bigger town 20 miles away - and the small towns are basically nursing homes with freeway exits.

There's a new structure coming: 18 regional offices with 18 regional extension educators, coordinating the work of volunteers and of as many paid county 4-H staff members as the state's 87 county boards of commissioners care to hire.

Where county elected officials are willing to raise and spend property tax dollars, 4-H will flourish. But in counties where 'no new taxes' is the rule, whither 4-H?

Whither the Young Ford Dealers? Whither Future Guitarists of American? Whither indeed the Editorial Columnist Kids club?

Whither indeed; nobody has decided that it's worth taxpayer dollars to create the next generation of car salesmen or musicians or journalists.

So - can 4H be saved? How important is the question?

Sturedevant found a patsy - a rural DFLer - to answer that:

State Rep. Al Juhnke, DFL-Willmar and a 4-H parent, spoke for the pessimists: 'Minnesota's 4-H programs are in trouble!' he warned, as he argued at a press conference for restoration of $850,000 lost to 4-H through state budget cuts this year. 'We are at risk of losing 4-H and all the good things it does for rural kids.'

But that's not the point. Why do rural kids rate a special subsidy? So we don't lose the seed art at the State Fair? Why?

Did voters in Jackson and Martin counties in 2002 understand that 'no new taxes' could mean a smaller 4-H program?

'I don't think so,' Harries said.

It should dawn on them before the next State Fair rolls around."

Or perhaps it will dawn on Lori Sturdevant; Rural Minnesota's kids will pay their "First-ever" membership fee, if 4H is important to them. If it's not...

...it'll go the way of Future Whalers of America.

Need a Kleenex?

Real, or Satire? - Which

Real, or Satire? - Which is satire, and which is reality: A, or B. Remember - no fair peeking:

A - "U.N. Troops to Lead 'Operation Haughty Weasel':"It's really a goodwill gesture," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "We want to let the Iraqi people know that even though we opposed their liberation, we still love their petroleum. So...you know...no hard feelings."

B - "The UN declared Aidid an outlaw and, using troops (and US helicopters) ill-equipped for such a mission, began trying to track him down. The UN raids resulted in many Somali deaths, which had the effect of uniting Aidid's clan behind him. So when Clinton reluctantly agreed in August to send Task Force Ranger, an elite force of commandos backed by US Army Rangers, to accomplish the job more professionally, the stage was set for "Black Hawk Down".

All right, dumb question.

But the UN's record at fighting terror - from Mogadishu (where they set the stage for the Black Hawk Down incident) to the Congo (where they set the stage for as ghastly a genocide has has ever happened) is as worthless as the Democrats need it to be.

Manic Tuesday - Very busy

Manic Tuesday - Very busy day today - job interview, plus getting the accursed computer working again.

More about the Labor Day weekend, my computer woes, plus notes on America's Next Third Party, the Democrats, either tonight (if I'm lucky in the computer department) or tomorrow (if I'm not).

Hopefully back to full-speed blogging this week.