Shot In The Dark

Wow. Wotta Day - So

Wow. Wotta Day - So many blessings:

• New contract
• Big news in the extracurricular world, of which more later
• More big news in the extracurricular world, of which never you mind
• Comment from Day By Day's Chris Muir
• The thread about the fight at Lucy's Bar finally dropped off the bottom of the blog
• Kids are enjoying their first-ever night of trick-or-treating without Dad along.

It's been a great Friday, all in all!

Have a great weekend!

BCCI In Record Jump! -

BCCI In Record Jump! - The Berg Consumer Confidence Index jumped a record 60 points today, on the news that the economy is growing at a 7% annual rate, and the acquisition of a three-month-to-open-ended consulting contract with a possible permanent hire option.

"This may be the best news we've gotten all year", says Mitch Berg, chairman of the eponymous index.

While experts caution against irrational exuberance, the mood on Minnehaha Avenue has improved considerably over the gloom-and-doom at the bottom of the BCCI's crash, last April.

Experts familiar with the BCCI say that while the US economy stands to grow 7% this year, the Berg Family economy should experience a roughly 180% growth as compared with the first quarter of 2003.

"This is great news, not only for the nation, but for the Berg kids", said Schlomo Goldstein, analyst for "BCCI Industries", a Wall Street firm specializing in BCCI analysis. "While we need to keep our eye on things, this is definitely a good day".

Fix

Hey! Plain Layne is back!

Again!

For like the third time this year!

Zell Up - Reader PZ

Zell Up - Reader PZ wrote me the other day to note Zell Miller's crossover endorsement of President Bush. I've been way too busy to give the story its due this week.

Fortunately, Commissioner Hugh is on the case. He links to this proudly confessional piece by Roger L. Simon

: Let me begin by saying that there is not a great deal of domestic policy about which I agree with George Bush...Still, if the election were held today, like Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller, I would vote for George W. Bush without a second’s hesitation. That’s how bad I think the Democrats are on foreign policy, by far the most important issue of our day.

True!

And, according to Simon, not emphatic enough:

I will go further. They are one of the sleaziest collections of low-down opportunists I have ever seen on one stage together short of that crowd of tobacco executives who testified “No, sirree, I didn’t know that nicotine was addictive.” These dudes and one dudette (Mosely-Braun) are downright dangerous. (Okay, Lieberman can be sane, but he doesn’t seem to have a chance in that bizarre atmosphere). And here’s why I think they’re dangerous—they’re acting like we’re still in Vietnam when we’re in a real war of civilizations. We’re on the right side this time. Haven't they seen the videotapes of Baathists chopping their own countrymens' heads off and pushing them off roofs? Haven't they seen the unmarked graves of children? What’s going on with these people? Do they think suicide bombers driving into the Red Cross are pacifist Buddhist monks?

Read the whole piece. It's not only fantastic - I think it's the tip of an iceberg that's going to sink the Democratic Titanic as the Nine Dwarves frantically move the deck chairs to the left...(WARNING: EXCESSIVELY STRETCHY METAPHOR. METAPHOR ABORTED) it's a warning to the Dems; Howard Dean is going to send half of this nation's moderate, responsible Dems, the holdovers of the Scoop Jackson faction - maybe even the part of the Clinton faction that supported Clinton's relative moderation - gingerly over to the Bush side next fall.

Day By Day - Ed

Day By Day - Ed Driscoll as an interesting interview with Chris Muir, cartoonist of Day By Day.

And topical is key. "Syndicated cartoons are drawn four to eight weeks before publication. I do mine one hour before uploading them, day by day. (Ha!) The process keeps me sharp, though I probably will build up some inventory in case of future time conflicts."

What's next for Muir? He plans to "improve the art and writing, set up merchandising, and probably do a synchronized campaign with my readers to break into syndication and publication."

Day By Day is the darling of the conservative blogosphere. The writing is sometimes a little inconsistant - it could use a little buffing up some days - but there's a lot of potential.

And Sam's way hot.

Too bad she doesn't have kids or anything.

UPDATE: Reader JB writes "Mitch. You just hit on a cartoon character".

Gaaah. Yes, I guess I did. When you're 40 and single, someone like Sam - capable, balanced, Libertarian-Republican - is a near-chimerical vision. But dating women who don't have kids has been a near-unremitting buzzkill.

And what's wrong with cartoon characters? The first time I was single, I thought Calvin's mom was pretty happenin', too...

I'm officially pathetic, aren't I?

Carrot, Meet Stick- Governor Pawlenty

Carrot, Meet Stick- Governor Pawlenty came out storngly in favor of a .08% Blood Alcohol Level standard yesterday., says the Strib:

"The move to tighten Minnesota's standard for drunken driving received a high-level boost Thursday when Gov. Tim Pawlenty vowed to push aggressively for a legal threshold of .08 percent blood-alcohol concentration.

The governor said Minnesota, which currently has a .10 standard, should unquestionably follow the route taken by the 45 other states that have adopted the tougher threshold and reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 5 to 12 percent.

This is yet another of those issues where emotion always trumps reason.

You can throw the facts at people and their lawmakers all day long - most drunk driving accidents and fatalities are caused by people who are far beyond .10, and the vast bulk of the problems are caused by repeat offenders who are most likely above .08 BAC at work. But all Mothers Against Drunk Driving has to do is march the Parade of Victims past the media and the legislature, and it's all over.

But there's a bigger reason for Pawlenty's very un-conservative stance:

The change, which he called a 'key initiative' of his administration, also is necessary to spare the state from losing up to $57 million in federal road construction money, Pawlenty said. The federal dollars hinge on passage of .08 legislation by Sept. 30, 2007.

'Minnesota should have been a leader on this,' said Pawlenty, a former state representative who coauthored House legislation that called for lowering the blood-alcohol standard.

The other states that still have a .10 standard are Colorado, Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia.

So now, the police will be busy chasing people who had three beers instead of two, while the guy with 10 hits under his belt sneaks past.

But then, MADD is only intermittently about safety on the roads these days; they are more concerned with incipient prohibition.

School Dazed - The SCSU

School Dazed - The SCSU Scholars quote from a report on Saint Cloud State students' attitudes toward campus behavior:

"What became clear in the discussion was that student conceptualizations of their relationships with SCSU were inappropriate. They seemed to consider the student-SCSU relationship as if SCSU were their employer or (entertainment?) service provider. Many strongly argued that SCSU has no legitimate interest in their non-classroom behavior just like they believed that an employer or business has no interest in non-work or non-customer related behaviors.

These problematic student conceptualizations could explain many problems."

I can hardly picture how things have changed since I graduated from college in 1985. And no, that was not that long ago.

When we started at Jamestown College, it was made very clear; alcohol on or off campus was a $50 first offense, and it went up sharply from there. Being in the dorm room of someone of the opposite sex after 11 (1AM on weekends) was a disciplinary infraction. And stuff you did off campus - drinking, fighting, crime - was the business of the school, and to hell with any kid who had a problem with it.

Granted, the rules didn't stop one iota of drinking, fraternizing or hooliganism. But nobody was under the illusion that being a student put us above the campus' rules.

Novel Idea - I went

Novel Idea - I went to a National Novel Writing Month ("NaNoWriMo, or just Nano_ meeting tonight. It might have been mistaken for a Star Trek convo, or maybe an offseason RenFest get-together.

It was a lot of fun. The goal, of course, is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November - essentially, to keep up a 1,300 word a day pace for 30 days.

Now, that seems like a lot of writing - and it is. But last month, I downloaded the "Shot In The Dark" archive into a Word file - and it turns out I've been averaging over 650 words a day since the beginning of this blog, and that includes a lot of the short days of posting before Garrison Keillor launched me into "Huge Fargin' Blog" status about a year ago. I imagine that during my slowest work stretch last spring, I may have averaged well over 1,300 words a day, easily.

I have three possible novels to write:

• The sleazy action-adventure novel I've been outlining for the past two years
• A novel about the Norwegian Mafia - working title "Gøödfellers". Never heard of the Norwegian Mafia? Heh. That's how ruthless they are.
• "Crime and Punishment" from the landlady's perspective

Maybe I'll combine all three...

My biggest question at this point: Will I do more actual writing of the novel, or blogging about my fellow NaNo writers?

At this point, it's a tossup.

Bull Commons - Powerline leads

Bull Commons - Powerline leads us to this piece in the Times by Nick Kristof, who is espousing a very old idea - give the Dakotas back.

Hindrocket, by the way, says about the column:

As a native of South Dakota, it's easy for me to go along with the proposition that North Dakota should be given back to the buffalo. But certain questions nag at the back of my mind.

Tsk, tsk.

Congratulations to Mr. Hindrocket on escaping SoDak, "The Appalachians of the Great Plains", but let's deal with Mr. Kristof, shall we?

As Hindrocket allows, Kristof is one of the NYTimes' better columnists. And this column captures some key facts about life among North Dakota's dying small towns.

And it misses just as many.

He starts in what is by no means an uncommon sight in North Dakota - a town that 80 years ago had a high school, a post office, a main street and a town band and maybe 200 people, but now has a tiny handful of residents, mostly in walkers. It could be Pingree or Edmunds or Bordulac or Drayton, or a hundred others. In this case:

This forlorn farm town — Rawson, population 6 — is a fine place to contemplate the boldest idea in America today: rescuing the rural Great Plains by returning much of it to a vast "Buffalo Commons."

The result would be the world's largest nature park, drawing tourists from all over the world to see parts of 10 states alive again with buffalo, elk, grizzlies and wolves. Restoring a large chunk of the plains — which cover nearly one-fifth of the lower 48 states — to their original state may also be the best way to revive local economies and keep hamlets like Rawson from becoming ghost towns.

Let's reserve judgement - whether this is good or bad - until later in my article. For the moment, let's just hang on to this idea: turning most of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Oklahoma into a vast nature preserve.

Kristof describes the decline of towns like Rawson - a story that may strike his east-coast audience as sad or pathetic:

Rawson used to be a bustling town with a railroad depot, two stores, a hotel, a bank, a post office, a gas station, a Lutheran church, a lumber yard, a grain elevator and a school. It had its own newspaper, The Rawson Tribune, and its slogan was "Rawson, where opportunity awaits you."

It has been downhill ever since.

Well, yeah. It has.

And there was a time when towns like Rawson were the engines of growth in the nation's interior; they sucked up the flood of immigrants and East Coast economic refugees who the railroads fed out onto the Plains in seach of their 160 acres of homestead. At a time when over 3/4 of the United States lived on farms, and that farmland was getting tired and farmed out, the Great Plains were where the nations food was going to come from!

This was at a time when a farmer could feed, statistically, a few other people at most, and when worldwide surpluses of food- to say nothing of massive exports - were unheard of.

In fact, there was a time when each farmer, statistically, could feed maybe one other person; during all of human history through the Middle Ages. When agricultural technology consisted of branch plows and windlass-powered irrigation, 95% of humankind worked the land. And then, over the last few hundred years, a dizzying chain of advances - the metal plow, the internal combustion engine, genetic breeding of seed stock, herbicides and pesticides, massive and relatively inexpensive irrigation - meant that fewer and fewer farmers could feed more and more people.

1000 years ago, over 95% of the population supported the thin crust of merchants and royalty that lived in the cities - nearly 100% of peoples' resources (time more than money) went to feeding themselves, and famines were common. 100 years ago, 70% of Americans lived on farms or in small towns that served farmers. Today, a total of 10% of Americans are involved in Agribusiness, and that includes as many cubicle dwellers at Monsanto and Cargill as it does actual farmers. The Department of Agriculture estimates that fewer than half a million of us actually earn all of our income by working on farms. And each working farmer feeds hundreds of other people, working on highly-mechanized farms of thousands of acres. When I was a kid driving across North Dakota, all the land between Bismark and Fargo seemed to be cultivated - and even though you could see thirty miles from horizon to horizon, you could see the lights of 2-4 farmhouses glowing in the distance. Today, while most of the land is still either under the plow or has been set-aside in one government surplus reduction plan or another, any given vista will show you maybe one or two farms, if any. Fewer farmers - bigger farms.

Kristof says:

It sounds cruel to say so, but towns like Rawson are a reminder that the oversettlement of the Great Plains has turned out to be a 150-year-long mistake, one of the longest-running and most costly errors in American history. Families struggled for generations to survive droughts and blizzards, then finally gave up and moved on. You can buy a home out here for $3,000, and you can sometimes rent one for nothing at all if you promise to mow the lawn and keep up the house.

So where did those refugees from the land around Rawson go? Did they starve and die in the snowbank?

No. They went to Fargo.

During the heyday of towns like Rawson (and Kensal, and Ypsilanti, Fried, Kief, Tokio, Ellendale and Windsor and more), farmers weren't mobile; they rode horses, or balky cars on wretched trails. "Going to town" took all day, even if "town" was five miles away. Today, the worst roads are a very navigable gravel, and nobody is more than two hours from a city with a mall and enough supplies to run a thousand farms.

Some demographers have said that in fifty years, North Dakota will consist of eight cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Devil's Lake, Bismarck, Minot, Dickinson, Williston, and my hometown of Jamestown) - and not much else. Small towns will either have died off, or become (like Rawson) retirement villages with their own highway exits - or have found some other means of livelihood, like Carrington (pop 2000, whose farmers built a co-op pasta factory) or Valley City or Wahpeton (with thriving state colleges and small industries). The net population will shrink, but not by much; there will still be farmers, and someone will need to sell them seed, fertilizer, draperies, videotapes and Kix. Someone needs to load the grain onto trains and trucks.

Was this an "error"? Then I have two questions for Mr. Kristof:

• If it was an "error", then why do 1.3 million people still live in the Dakotas? They're free to leave - right?
• If we define "error" as "an area's inability to prosperously sustain the same number of people that it did 100 years ago", then aren't the Appalachians, the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, and every single steel town also errors? Isn't every inner-city in America an "error"?

By Mr. Kristof's logic, should buffalo be roaming most of Manhattan north of 120th Street?

Kristof follows this:

The rural parts of the Great Plains are emptying, and in some cases reverting to wilderness.

...with this:

So it's time to reach for something bold, like the Buffalo Commons idea, proposed in 1987 by Frank and Deborah Popper, two New Jersey social scientists. This would be the biggest step to redefine America since the Alaska purchase. Pushing it would give the environmental movement a chance to be known mainly by what it's for instead of for what it's against. But it would take close cooperation with the people with the most at stake: struggling farmers and ranchers, who for now are irritated by East Coast city slickers trying to turn their land into a buffalo playground.

To the extent that the Plains ever were over-settled, it was as a result of government social engineering in the 19th century.

Most importantly - as noted by Kathleen Norris in her wonderful book, "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" (an essential book to understand the place, even if you grew up there, and especially if you didn't) - parts of the state are doing that, more or less, already. On their own, without the need for "social scientists from New Jersey" or, worse, the government to do it again. The market will level things out; the government will only make things worse.

Kristof notes:

Some journalists reach judgments about a place after interviewing just a few inhabitants; I boast that I talked to half the town.

Three people.

Did he talk with anyone in nearby Williston? In Bismarck, 200 miles away? Did he note that Rawson is west of the Missouri, a part of the state that was sparsely-populated even in the best of times? That the land west of the Missouri was never good for farming (unlike the east, especially the Red River Valley), that it's always been cattle country, and that ranching is the most unstable of agricultural businesses?

Kristof notes that the Ogalala Aquifer, which provides much of the state's irrigation water, is drying up over time. He fails to note that the project that would have prevented this - the effort to divert water from the Missouri River for irrigation - was derailed by environmentalists in the '70s and '80s.

Despite his best efforts, Kristof created a cartoon of life on the desolate plains, for the benefit of an audience that largely has no idea what state the Dakotas are in.

The market will decided the future of the Dakotas - in fact, it has been ever since the beginning. The people who can earn enough of a living to make it worth the while will stay. The people who can't will move on.

Just like I did.

UPDATE: The NYTimes' copy-editing continues to suffer; As I write this, in the last graf of the column Rawson is spelled "Rawlins".

What Hath the MP'nPOA Wrought?

What Hath the MP'nPOA Wrought? - Reader James Phillips, from Cali, writes:

Was just at the Mall of America and saw the no Weapons, guns, firearms signs at every entrance. Took about a half hour to calm down. I know it is redundant, but why are liberals seemingly so stupid? who is that sign for? The gangbanger/criminal who would never get a permit in a million years, and who would simply ignore the sign (if not laugh out loud at it)? Or the law abiding honest citizen? Since the signs were never there before I have to assume that in the past the MOA management was quite comfortable with people illegally carrying weapons. I wonder why they feel that way?

I have been trying to find that out from liberals ever since I got on the concealed carry bandwagon.

For some, it's purely emotional; they just don't like guns! For others, it may be a misplaced sense of how things ought to be; good people don't hurt people. It's Romper Room writ large.

For some - and I mean, few? It's how government and people are supposed to interact; as a service provider and boss, in relation to employees.

None of them makes sense to me.

Anyone?

Hack - Volokh encounters just

Hack - Volokh encounters just plain bad journalism in Slate's "Bushisms" column.

Here's what Slate highlighted:

"[A]s you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say."—Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2003

...and here's the quote in context:

Look, we are -- we're arming, raising money to wage a campaign. And there will be an appropriate time for me to engage politically; that is, in the public forum. Right now, I'm -- yes, no question, I'm going out to our friends and supporters and saying, would you mind contributing to the campaign for the year '04? To me, that's -- and that's a part of politics, no question about it. And as you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say.

Volokh notes, correctly, that there is no reasonable doubt who the "you" is in the "Bushism".

I wonder how many of Molly Ivins' "Bushisms" would disappear if they were pounded back into context?

O Blogger, Where Art Thou

O Blogger, Where Art Thou - If you can read this, then Blogger.com isn't messed up again...

Miller Time? - Is it

Miller Time? - Is it time for California to send Dennis Miller to Washington?

"IS CALIFORNIA READY for Dennis Miller as its next United States senator? Laugh if you like, but some Republican strategists (including a few who just sent a certain movie star to Sacramento) see Miller, the sardonic comedian whose late-night talk show lasted just a little longer than Wesley Clark's Iowa campaign, as wholly capable of defeating incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer next year."

I liked Dennis Miller when he was a liberal.

I like him now that he's a new-found conservative.

As a Senator? Pinch me, I'm dreaming...

But there's just no way. You can't say things like this...:

"You know, Jay, I used to be a liberal. You look at what happens in the state of California with untethered liberalism. Everybody in this state in charge now is a Democrat. It's no longer the San Andreas Fault, it's Gray Davis's fault. This is what happens when you elect lawyers. Shakespeare said: 'First, kill all the lawyers.' I've been doing some thinking, I think we could get away with it because if you kill all of them, at our murder trial, we wouldn't have adequate representation."

...without the media pinching a hissy.

I remember when a faction of the Minnesota GOP was pondering drafting former KSTP talk show host Jason Lewis. The man's conservative credentials were impeccable, he was a very solid thinker...

...and he had eight years of program material that could be spun against him with the general public.

Would Miller fare better?

One can hope.

Expanding the Base - Jeffrey

Expanding the Base - Jeffrey Bell says Al Qaeda has a new base:

for the first time since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, major elements of al Qaeda seem to have acquired a new home. The address is eastern Iran.

This fact, and the nature of the debate surrounding it, was revealed in a thoroughly reported front-page article by Douglas Farah and Dana Priest in the October 14 Washington Post. According to a consensus of American, European, and Arab intelligence officials, the article said, the "upper echelon" of al Qaeda--including a favored older son of Osama bin Laden and the group's de facto secretary of war and secretary of the treasury--"is managing the terrorist organization from Iran."

The intelligence agencies, said the Post, have known about the relocation at least since May, when it was learned that the May 12 Riyadh suicide bombing that killed 35 people, including eight Americans, was conceived, planned, and ordered by high al Qaeda officials in eastern Iran. Around the same time, Saad bin Laden, Osama's son and heir apparent, operating from Iran, was linked to the May 16 bombings that left 45 dead in faraway Casablanca, Morocco.

Chilling stuff - worth a read all the long way through.

Hewitt says about this piece:

By keeping a focus on Al Qaeda, and its ties to the Baathists of Iraq and the Mullahs of Iran, the Standard is filling in for larger media outlets that can't spare a reporter from the quagmire beat to report on the ongoing efforts to kill Americans in their beds or at the places of work.

Note: Hugh is referring to the same media, of whom some wags keep a count of the number of days Bin Laden has been "at large". So where is the coverage?

Pledge This - Mitch's Office.

Pledge This - Mitch's Office. 7:15 last night.

Rrrrrringggg

"Mitch Berg".

"Good evening, sir, I'm calling from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers' Federation. We're doing our annual fund drive, and we'd like to know if we can count on you for your support..."

"Sure, I'd love to..."

"That's great, sir..."

"But, I'm sorry, in all conscience I can't. The MP'nPOF went on record opposing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. There's no way I can support a group that favors victim disarmament, and that doesn't trust the law-abiding citizen with the means to defend themselves."

...er...I'm sorry?

"So am I! I believe in so much of what the MP'nPOF does! But honestly - until they reconsider this position, and their continuing opposition to concealed-carry reform, I'm sorry, there's not way I can support them financially. Or any other way."

(Nonplussed). Er...OK...So then...

"You have a nice night, and thanks for your call!

Click

Closerrrrrrr - So a reaaaaly

Closerrrrrrr - So a reaaaaly nice contract is in the "checking references" phase.

For the second week.

Experts say that if this opportunity remains in the "checking references" phase much longer, the BCCI could be adversely affected.

Fat Is Thin, Winston -

Fat Is Thin, Winston - Lileks notes something about the Atkins diet that I'd always suspected.

Music - Over the weekend,

Music - Over the weekend, Infinite Monkeys focused on music.

RobbL Monkey asked:

Here's a challenge for those of you who can even listen to hip-hop long enough to compare it to real music. Name the hip-hop equivalent of these records:

1. The Velvet Underground - "Loaded" (i.e. the "commercial" album by a critically acclaimed band that you really liked the best, but told everybody you liked "The Velvet Underground and Nico" because it was cooler to like that record)

Easy: A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory.

2. The Clash - "London Calling" (i.e. album by a previously good and critically acclaimed group that was now "firing on all cylinders")

Too simple: It Takes A Nation of Milions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy. It's an angry, acidic, eclectic classic. R.B. compared it with the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks..., but NWA compares better with the Pistols; NWA and the Pistols were creations of mad impresarios (Eric "Easy E" Wright and Malcolm MacLaren respectively) while the Clash and Public Enemy were much more organic creations. And Professor Griff is the hip-hop Tony Grimes.

3. R.E.M. - "Murmur" (i.e. debut album that caught everyone off-guard and effectively started a completely new "scene")

Again, easy: LL Cool J's first album, Bad. It marked the commercial divide between old and new school.

4. The Beatles - "Let It Be" (i.e. absolutely wretched excess that effectively ended the career of a previously magnificent group)

That's the problem with hip-hop; artists never really get to develop their careers to the point where they actually have anyplace to fall to. Maybe the Run-DMC album where they tried to go Gangsta, and failed miserably - the name eludes me, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Although Snoop Dogg is showing signs of having a "Let It Be" in him.

5. Joy Division - "Closer" (i.e. album by a group that everybody pretended to like, but were actually complete crap, unless you were one of the five people on earth like Paul Morley who had some kind of gnostic experience causing them to worship Ian Curtis as the new messiah of rock)

Anything by Digital Underground, in my book.

In the meantime, R.B. Monkey had an interesting potpourri of opinions about a lot of music. He was doing well, until he hit this part:

I might be able to go on with the rest of my life never having to hear "Walkin' On Sunshine"

Step off, dude. While WOS got overplayed pretty drastically, Katrina and the Waves were an amazing band. The worst thing about "Walking..."? Its runaway success meant that a lot of people never even heard their real greats - "Red Wine and Whiskey", "Going Down To Liverpool" (forget the Bangles' cover, the original was better), and a slew of good, greasy power pop that owed as much to the guitar of Kim Rew (formerly and currently of the Soft Boys) as to Katrina Leskanich's voice.

Kids today. Sheesh.

Overpowered By Scheer - The

Overpowered By Scheer - The Star Tribune Editorial Page is at it again - this time chiding Colin Powell:

One of the puzzles of America's war in Iraq has been the role of Secretary of State Colin Powell. When President Bush took office, many thought that Powell -- with his moderate views on social issues, his experience as the nation's top general and his leadership skills -- would be willing and able to dull the extreme worldviews of the more ideological people in the administration like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

And here we see the beginning of the new Democrat tack for the next few months: "The Administration is Extreme".

An administration that has triangulated much farther to the left than Bill Clinton ever did to the right, which has embraced Ted Kennedy and

He may have tried, and may still be trying, judging from the cat fights now taking place within the administration. But few can forget Powell's presentation on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council. He sounded so sure, and seemed to offer quality evidence. Many believed him -- and thus believed Bush.

This from an editorial board that believed Bill Clinton implicitly when he made exactly the same claims!

The paper begins deploying platoons of strawmen:

Hardly had Powell finished speaking, however, than large holes began to appear in the case he'd laid out. Over time, it has proven to be a case based on imagined dangers and flawed and exaggerated intelligence -- no case at all to justify a war. Why did Powell let himself be used in this way? Because he's a good soldier? In a case so crucial as Iraq, that won't wash. Because he was duped? That's hardly more flattering to Powell.

Of course, the Kay report tells us that the notion of "imagined dangers" was itself, perhaps, imaginary. The "exaggerations" in intelligence were those shared by Clinton, the UN, the French and Germans - everyone that mattered. Funny how the only way anyone knew the intel was "exaggerated" was when the US military proved it!

Now the Strib cuts to the chase:

Now comes more news that suggests Powell isn't the man many thought him to be. It's a yearlong State Department study that anticipated difficulties the United States would encounter in Iraq. Indeed, it anticipated many of the problems that have arisen during the U.S. occupation.

It was ignored.

Indeed? And why was it "ignored"?

We'll get to that.

Asked about the report during a TV interview, Powell said it was "a good, solid piece of work that was made available to the Pentagon." But what parts of the report the Pentagon put to use, Powell didn't know. Reporters would have to ask Rumsfeld about that.

Powell is secretary of state; the study was prepared in his department on his watch. He had more obligation than just to "make it available to the Pentagon."

Really?

What was Powell's "obligation?" To storm the Pentagon at the head of a team of crack State Department Report Enforcement Commandos?

More strawmen:

If Powell believed Rumsfeld was about to make mistakes that would put U.S. prestige and American troops at risk, he had an obligation to ensure everyone knew of the dangers that were being ignored. It appears that Powell failed to protect the country from what he knew was bad prewar intelligence and bad postwar planning.

"If" Powell believed..."

"It appears that Powell failed...

The Strib's editorial board's case is built on presuppositions that may or may not have any bearing on reality.

Back in July, an excellent Knight-Ridder article reported how badly the Pentagon planned for postwar Iraq. The small circle of Pentagon officials who dominated the discussion, it said, "didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader. Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had no backup plan."

And so the US troops, without a backup plan, fled the country in panic. And the US abandoned Iraq to its horrible fate!

No, wait, they didn't! They adapted, and changed "the plan" that they had, and the political leaders maneuvered to reinforce their strengths and buttress their weaknesses - and six months later, while the likes of the Star Tribune Editorial Board continue second-guessing issues warmed over from June, the country at large is heading in the right direction and the guerrillas are limited to militarily and socially-insiginficant raids designed more to inflame the media than unseat the liberators.

Rumsfeld is an ideologue wearing blinders. At times, even his military commanders have had to go around Rumsfeld to make the point that the secretary's approach wasn't working.

Er, what part's not working?

Two wars in two years, won at staggeringly low cost in lives and materiel. Two nations liberated. Two years of no significant terrorist attacks on US soil, and only spoilers worldwide (albeit some of them costly).

But Powell isn't an ideologue. He was one person everybody hoped would serve as a consistent, moderate counterbalance in this administration. Again and again, however, he has failed to do that, to the nation's great regret.

Really?

The Nation's Great Regret?

Indeed?

OK, I'll appeal to my own readership; please show me this outpouring of "national regret" over Colin Powell's "failure" to rip the "ideological blinders" from Donald Rumsfeld?

And a note to the Strib Editorial Board (and I get lots of hits from the Star-Tribune offices, so I know someone over there is reading me) - did you write this? Or did you let one of your ninth-grade kids take a whack at the Editorial Machine over the weekend?

Anti-American? - Flag burning is

Anti-American? - Flag burning is like abortion - I believe one thing in my heart - and think our society may just need to do another thing.

A Small Victory has a take on the issue, in the context of yesterday's anti-war anti-liberation Pro-Hussein Anti-"occupation" rallies:

Debate is healthy. Even protests can be a great form of getting a collective voice heard. And we all have the right to hate the president, challenge his ideology or scream at the top of our lungs that his policies are unfair. But don't stand there and tell me that I'm wrong for calling these people anti-American. When you burn the flag, that automatically puts you in the position of being against the country. It is an act of defiance, an act of hatred. When one burns an effigy of a person, they are, in essence, burning that person. So when one burns a symbol it would have to be assumed that you are burning what that symbols represents. Oh, I'm not saying that the flag-burners don't have a right to their views. I'm not even saying that they are bad people for burning the flag. I just want them to be honest, and I want the people who defend them to be honest. They are anti-Americans. "

My head - especially the part that wonders about how you govern a country of nearly 300 million people and maintain a First Amendment - knows you have to allow it, and opposes any attempt to regulate it.

My heart notices that so many flag-burners will respond "It's just a symbol, a piece of cloth!" The next time I hear this, I'm going to say "Damned straight it's a symbol. An upturned middle finger is just a symbol, an ounce of bone and skin. A swastika is just symbol - eight black lines on fabric. No Irish Need Apply and No Coloreds were just symbols - ink on signs. So do symbols still not have meaning?"

I wonder - would it break the law to go to a protest with a fire extinguisher, and put out any burning flags? And when the mob of fly-bitten miscreants attacked, sue them for civil rights violations?

After all - if fire is speech, so is a fire extinguisher. Right?

You Know Who You Are,

You Know Who You Are, Part IV - You're the guy I interviewed with in August.

I came to the interview at your company on a day's notice, on a 95-degree, swelteringly humid day. I tried my damnedest to keep from wilting in the heat, as I walked across the eternal parking lot to your office.

Once inside, I met you. You were clearly uncomfortable talking with people over whom you exert no control, as of yet. You ushered me into a room with four of your subordinates.

And oh, lordy, what subordinates they were; a cardigan-clad academic washout who fairly screamed "ass kisser", a woman who sat and said not a word in 45 minutes, a man who seemed content to sit and smirk, and a woman whose main goal seemed to be to trip me up on abstruse academic questions delivered with passive-aggressive glee.

By the way - although I was clearly battling the heat (including that found in your fetid, ill-ventilated conference room), nobody asked me if I'd like a glass of water before the interview. The interview couldn't have been any less pleasant if there'd been a 100 watt bulb hanging over my head.

As I left, you seemed distracted as I tried to get a few questions in. "Give me a call or an email if you have any questions", you said as if from a recording. And I did. In the past two and a half months, there have been three phone calls and two emails - none answered.

So I'll leave it at this; the next slump, it'll be you out looking for the job (judging by the caliber of from your group that I met, you're certainly not getting by on managerial talent).

In the meantime - you could stand to lose a few pounds, and pick up some social skills.

That is all.

J'Ecris Ton Nom - Matt

J'Ecris Ton Nom - Matt Welch sounds off with a fascinating piece on Sabine Herold and what her movement may mean in the next year in France.

Interesting quote:

"'I think one of the big problems in France is that we are anti-American without knowing why,' she says. 'It's just kind of a natural thing. I mean so many people I meet are anti-war, and they'll just say that Bush is stupid and the Americans are awful imperialists. It's just their typical answer, and they never think of why. That's crazy. I think it's because we're all being brought up like that, especially at school. It's incredible how we're taught about America -- they're always explaining, for example in geography or history courses, how Americans are imperialistic.'"

Read it all, of course.

(Via Instapundit)

See No Eva, Hear No

See No Eva, Hear No Eva, Speak No Eva - I'm a leading theorist in the area of human behavior!

No, really!

Well, according to one local activist, I'm being credited with developing a major theory of how people behave.

I participate on a few political email discussion groups (although to be perfectly honest, the rationale for these groups, and my interest in them, fades daily; they are the opposite of the libertarian blogosphere, riven with hive mentalities and groupthink; life's too short). On one, which discusses Saint Paul issues, there was a discussion of the incident at Lucy's Bar, a lesbian hangout in St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood.

Now, in the St. Paul Issues discussion group - which is dominated by people from the left of center - quite a few participants felt that the allegations of conduct against Sgt. Loretz were enough to convict him, in their minds. The original Pioneer Press story relied heavily on quotes from patrons whose involvement in the brouhaha was never really made clear. The paper followed up with a piece about the officer's side of the story, as well as several other related pieces.

I mentioned that there were several reasons to tread lightly on this story - that while the allegations against Sgt. Loretz may well be true, we dont' know - and Lucy's DOES have a reputation, and bar patrons are the LAST people to get the "truth" from after a bar fight, and that some lesbians are by no means averse to violence.

Eva Young is a local pundit without portfolio. She's involved in the Log Cabin Republicans.

She posted this email to several local discussion list-servers - but, I need to stress, not the one that the original discussion took place on! She posted the email, below, to several email addresses, including:

Minnesota Log Cabin Republicans
• the Gay Twin Cities discussion group,
• The USA Queers discussion group
• the Gays for Bush discussion group
• Homocons - a gay conservative group
• Conservative Think Tank discussion group
• The "Stop The Gay Agenda" discussion group.

She also emailed it to Andrew Sullivan, the KSTP morning show, and another private party unknown to me.

Note that, as I'm not a member of any of those discussion groups, I am unable to reply - however, every member of each of those groups now has my email address.

Here's the posting - subject line, "Blogger Berg Opines with his Lesbians are Violent Theory"

Mitch's blog is at: http://www.mitchberg.com/shotindark/

This is part of the discussion on the St Paul Issues list (lists.minnesota.com), discussing the recent allegations that Police Chief Finney's son, Loretz roughed up bar patrons at Lucy's Bar (a Lesbian Bar) in St Paul.

I thought I'd give Berg's blog a bit more publicity, and hope that he opines in more detail on this theory in his blog.

The theory goes:

There is dispute on this point, but lesbians seem
to be statistically at least as disposed to violence
as any other group, and some would say more so.
This has been my experience. This is not a knock
on lesbians - but there does seem to be a physically
aggressive streak among a sizeable minority.

If you wish to send Mr. Berg comments about his theory, write him at: [snip]@mitchberg.com, or add comments to his blog.

I love it - this isn't meant to be a knock against Lesbians. Then what is it meant to be.

Eva Young

Note that Eva in fact did leave a comment - under a utterly unrelated topic, below.

Goodness, where to start with this?

• Eva misrepresented me pretty completely. She calls the idea that lesbians have a higher propensity toward violence than the general population "my" theory - it's not.
• She also called on the readers of those SEVEN other mailing lists to post comments on my blog - even though until this post there has been no discussion of the Loretz case on this blog. In other words, she was hoping to get a phalanx of people to bum-rush the comments section with unrelated chatter. That's not much different than spam, and will be dealt with accordingly (although now that I've posted on the topic, it's fair game)
• I'm a conservative, Christian Republican. I've also been very moderate on most gay-related issues, including civil unions/marriage. Eva, however, tries to make me look like a gay bashing thug. I am quite literally the opposite.
• She posted my email to a bunch of email discussion groups to which I'm not a subscriber - ergo, I have no ability to respond.
• She sent my email address, as well as the pointer to this blog, to the entire membership of each list. Note that she did NOT post anything about this to the original mailing list, until I started raising a stink about it!

It'd seem that my gravest sin to Ms. Young was intimating that lesbians might possibly not be perfect, eternal victims; Here, word for word, is the point that seemed to get her so exercised, copied from my original email:

There is dispute on this point, but lesbians seem to be statistically at least as disposed to violence as any other group, and some would say more so. This has been my experience. This is not a knock on lesbians - but there does seem to be a physically aggressive streak among a sizeable minority.

Leave aside that singling out that paragraph - as Eva did, both above and in her comments on my blog - leaves out a lot of conversational context; what's the beef?

That some lesbians are violent? As I said - some of it is personal experience. Some of it is bits and scraps of different theories I've accreted in my consciousness over time. I'm apparently not alone:

• Gays and lesbians seem to be no less prone to domestic violence
• >A wide variety of sources echo the notion that lesbians are, at the very least, no less violent than straight males.
• That violence among lesbians has some different precursors than violence among straights - but then, violence is violence, right?
• Claire Renzetti's Violence in gay and lesbian domestic partnerships (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1996) claimed to find a higher statistical incidence of violence among lesbian couples than among straights or gay male couples.

Is that the definitive answer to the question? Of course not - and I never claimed that it was. In fact, in my original post, the one that has Ms. Young so exercised, I specifically said "there is some dispute on this point". No, I said merely that those who were calling for Sergeant Loretz' head based on the post-fight statements of other bar patrons, and assuming that the patrons were hapless victims of a big, bad male cop, may have been acting unfairly and prematurely.

We don't know. And by "we", I mean "you, either".

Oh, yeah - and clearly, the theory that lesbians may have violent tendencies isn't "mine".

What Eva Young seems to want is that, when lesbians are concerned, we see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

OK. Let the further misrepresentation begin!

UPDATE: A day late - and after I registered complaints - she posted to the original Saint Paul discussion group. If you're coming here from there - welcome!

Power Roll - Powerline has

Power Roll - Powerline has been on a roll, with a great piece on the gathering appreciation of Winston Churchill - one of my personal heroes - and this piece on positive news from Iraq as well as among Native Americans.

If you're not reading Powerline daily, you may still be a good person, but I won't let you babysit my kids...

Wrong - The National Review

Wrong - The National Review is calling for the ouster of General Boykin.

They're wrong:

During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to attack Manchuria, and he let that be known to everyone who would listen. That was not U.S. policy, however, and President Truman promptly sacked the great man.

True enough, and...well, more later.

During the Cold War — in fact often pretty hot — NATO general Edwin Walker was instructing his troops in the theorems of the John Birch Society. That the U.S. government was 60 percent under Communist control was not the view of the Kennedy administration, and Walker was gone.

Again true, and again...well, we'll get back to that.

Flash forward to today. A three-star general, William "Jerry" Boykin, has been lecturing, in public and in uniform, to the effect that we are in a war with Islam, than whose god his God is bigger, that this is a war against Satan, of whom he has a photograph in the sky above Mogadishu.

Again, true. And again...well, again, we'll get to it.

President Bush has made it national policy that we are not in a war with global Islam. Furthermore, it is hardly good for the morale of troops to understand that their commander is a wacko who goes around photographing Satan zooming overhead. General Boykin is manifestly insubordinate, and should be sacked. Yesterday.

The comparisons to MacArthur and Walker are wrong. Boykin is not advocating any change in the government's strategic or operational policies; in fact, he is a key instrument of them.

And he is not directly instructing his troops in any "wacko" ideologies, as did Walker. Boykin's theology is not part of his troops' training.

As to the "wacko" claim - was Patton a wacko? After all, he said:

• •Perpetual peace is a futile dream. Think Patton would have lasted long under Bill Clinton?
• As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest mother fucker in the valley!- NOW might have had trouble with that.
• It has come to my attention that a very small number of soldiers are going to the hospitals on the pretext that they are nervously incapable of combat. Such men are cowards, and they bring discredit to the Army and disgrace to their comrades, whom they heartlessly leave to endure the dangers of battle, while they, themselves, use the hospitals as a means of escape. - Can you imagine an officer saying such a thing today? Yes, of course Patton's war career was shunted aside over this incident - but not permanently.
• One can only conclude that where the Eighth Army is in trouble we are to expend our lives gladly; but when the Eighth is going well, we are to halt so as not to take any glory. It is an inspiring method of making war and shows rare qualities of leadership, and Ike falls for it! Oh, for a Pershing! - Insubordinate? Beyond doubt! And yet - he was right.

But here's the most germane Patton quote of all:

•There's a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.

Taken in context, Boykin said nothing that fits any definition of "insubordination". For the President or Rumsfeld to sack one of the world's leading practitioners of his art of intelligence and special operations because of the media's trumping up of bogus chargers of crusaderism would be to violate Patton's dictum, putting the dreaded "chilling effect" on officers who lead, as Patton led, by creating a larger-than-life example of the warrior ethic, especially the Christian Warrior ethic.

Don't do it.

UPDATE: Apparently the Boykin editorial was a mistake - fallout from a debate among the National Review's editorial staff. It made it into print due to a production error.

Which doesn't change my opinion about the notion of sacking Boykin one bit, whether broached from the left or the right.

The Porter Incident - The

The Porter Incident - The City Pages are like country music; every part of it I don't love, I pretty much detest. There's not much middle ground.

Music reviews? Awful (at least where Melissa Maerz is involved). (Note to Greil Marcus: Your writing is both wonderful and wretched. Too many of your reviews rely on the comparison of polar-opposite attritutes, and yet too few do - the comparison leaves the reader at some nonspecific middle ground, and yet it doesn't. When I read your work, I'm tempted to cry, but also I want to laugh. I'm tempted to thank G-d for Anthony DeCurtis in comparison - but then...well, actually, I still do that).

Theater Reviews? Wonderful!

Local Music 'n Arts scene coverage? For most arts? Great! For music? Like a high school newspaper where the reporters write endlessly about what their friends are doing.

Movie Reviews? Fine!

Editorial and Opinion? Dreadful.

Restaurant Reviews? Excellent!

News?

Well, there are times when the Citiy Pages astounds. G.R. Anderson Jr. And Mike Mosedale have an excellent report in this week's CP about the Stephen Porter case.

The case - which involves Abner Louima-like charges by an Afro-American man that Minneapolis cops sodomized him with a toilet plunger during a drug bust.

"Stephen Porter maintains that police detained him in a separate room for a long period of time during the bust at 2519 Third Street. Witness accounts seem to support that, and the timeline of events is consistent with it. (Porter was eventually booked into the Hennepin County Jail at 6:53 p.m.) Earwitnesses from inside and outside the house say they heard blows and/or screams of pain. (Though little is known about the medical report from Porter's subsequent examination, the Star Tribune did report that 'sources familiar with the medical report filed by a doctor who examined Porter on Monday night said his injuries were consistent with his report of soreness and tenderness of the rectum,' a characterization that is consistent with Porter's story--but also consistent with his past practice of hiding drugs inside his rectal cavity.)

Here are Porter's own words about what occurred, from his Wednesday press conference: 'Officer Jindra gestured to Officer [inaudible] to go get something out of the bathroom. So when he returned, he had a plunger... Officer Jindra tried to stick it up my butt four times. I felt it twice go in. I got teared [sic] tissues in my back--my butt.'"

But wait. The story goes on from there, covering the nuances in the story - from both sides - that the major media never got around to.

Definitely worth a read.

It's A Friday - I'm

It's A Friday - I'm one of those people who should have been born in London or Aberdeen (Scotland, not South Dakota) or Seattle. Rainy days perk me up. Maybe it's because I don't feel so guilty about working indoors all day.

I'm pecking away at a number of projects right now. It's odd; while I've been doing one form or writing or another for some form of living since I was 16, this last month has been strange - the first time I think I've ever written too much. I wouldn't call it "burnout", but the whole process of trying to write...something is mentally fatigueing right now. I wonder how people like Lileks do it, sometimes.

It's felt like a slow news day today, for some reason. But I know it's not. It's just that none of the topics out there really do anything for me today. The lynching of Boykin? Well, the lines are drawn, we're right, they're wrong, next story. Another Lori Sturdevant editorial that begs fisking? Oh, there's a shock. The hubbub at Lucy's, and the confluence of stories about police brutality? Oh, what, again?

Yes. I need the weekend. I'll see you Monday!

Signs Of The Times -

Signs Of The Times - We're coming up on the first anniversary of the death of Senator Paul Wellstone.

The signs are popping up all over Saint Paul today:

Wellstone
Don't Stop Fighting!

I saw a row of them on Summit Avenue today. It dragged me back to some of the conservative protests while the late Senator was alive; some misbegotten signs pasted Wellstone's head on Lenin's body, to low comedic effect. Wellstone was no Lenin - I never heard him advocating re-education camps. But the year since his death has seen the rise of a cult of personality among his most fervent supporters; every variety of Wellstone sign dots nearly every street in St. Paul (the tonier the neighborhood, the more signs; Wellstone was the intellectual granddad of Howard Dean's lilywhite legions), benignly reminiscent of the inescapable posters and signs found in countries ruled by other, more malignant personality cults.

Many of us local conservatives were up-front about our admiration for the man, as a person. While this blog spends a lot of time caricaturing the narrow-mindedness and even rank, hateful bigotry of many of Wellstone's more emphatic (I won't say "Fanatical") supporters, many of us on the right genuinely admired Wellstone. Not merely for the passion he brought to the job (every moonbat of every political stripe oozes passion), but for the fact that he treated political differences, by all accounts, as fodder for civil debate. Not the false civility of forced acquiescence - nobody could accuse Wellstone, the lonest wolf in the Senate, of that - but passionate disagreement that didn't extend to the personal realm. Wellstone attended Barry Goldwater's funeral; can anyone see Barbara Boxer or Charles Rangel doing that?

Here's the real point; I heard Paul Wellstone spout an endless litany of ideas I considered dumb. But I never once heard him impugn the character of those with whom he disagreed.

Which is more than I can say for many of his supporters. Paulapalooza - the Wellstone memorial turned partisan commercial that left some of us feeling nearly ill at the gall involved in hijacking Wellstone's legacy and memory - reeked with anger at those who opposed the Senator. And his followers have gone on in rare form; we've been accused of making the state a meaner, dumber, colder, uglier place, in ways big and small.

We've seen bumperstickers that ask "what would Wellstone do?" Well, we can rule that out, I suspect.

As much as we admire Paul Wellstone as a human, we need to remember this: Had Paul Wellstone's (and Maxine Waters', and Dennis Kucinich's, and Michael Moore's for tha matter) ideology prevailed over the past fifteen years:

• The Berlin Wall might still stand
• The people of Afghanistan would still be subject to the Taliban
• The people of Iraq would still be getting fed into shredders, gang-raped, murdered and disposed in the night at the behest of the government
• The concentration camps of North Korea would be excused - ignored, while waiting for the pusillanimous "international community" (how's that for an oxymoron") to decide whether to cower, or merely appease.

And that doesn't even count domestic issues.

So to paraphrase - OK, to hijack the sign that's popping up all over Saint Paul today:

Mourn Wellstone.
Keep Fighting His Politics.

With all due respect to the man's legacy - and as a human being, it was and is a great one - I'm going to keep doing just that.

The Tenth Candidate - Seems

The Tenth Candidate - Seems plausible; Niagara Falls Survivor Jumps Into Presidential Race:

Mr. [Kirk] Jones, a former auto-parts salesman, said he's "eager to take the plunge into politics" and will meet with former President Bill Clinton over the weekend to find out where he's going to stand on the issues."

As always; is it "Ripped from the Headlines", or is it Scrappleface?

May on Boykin - Clifford

May on Boykin - Clifford May discusses the Gen. Boykin flap.

The point that the media - and the left blogosphere - never seems to get:

But did Boykin actually say anything that should offend Muslims? Was he even talking about Islam — or was he speaking of terrorists who claim to act in the name of Islam? And can we not yet perceive that there is a huge difference between the two?

Start with the remark that has drawn the most ire: Boykin's reference to a "spiritual enemy...called Satan." The Washington Post suggested that reference was "inflammatory, if not illegal."

How do they figure? Boykin was clearly speaking here about mass murderers such as bin Laden. If they are not evil, then there is no such thing as evil. But if they are evil, it can hardly be outrageous to describe a war against such evil as a struggle against a "spiritual enemy." Isn't that what evil is?

As for Satan, he is the personification of evil. What's the charge, here, officer? Reckless anthropomorphism?

In fact, can't we agree that suicide terrorists who kill in the name of a jihad against infidels are — by their own definition — spiritual enemies not just of Christians and Jews but equally of moderate Muslims?

Worth a read.

Accounting - Rich Lowry NRO

Accounting - Rich Lowry NRO read Hillary!'s new book, so that you don't have to:

"One of the more unpleasant parts of writing Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years was reading Hillary Clinton's Living History. But I had to do it "

He then does it. And it's good stuff.

Fascinating info to toss at your DFLer friends at parties. Assuming your DFLer friends invite you to parties.

Mistaken Identity, Misbegotten Fury -

Mistaken Identity, Misbegotten Fury - Last April, City Pages writer Brad Zellar wrote a piece about his distaste for children, and drew parallels between his dyspepsia about kids and his views of the coverage of the war in Iraq.

I blogged about it. I made no secret of it - I found his views tendentious, specious, and not the work of someone who really had a valid perspective on the topic (at least as far as children went).

He responded in his blog . He took a couple swats at me (I don't care), and at his views on my parenting (I doubt his perspectives matter much) and my kids (I do care). I wrote about it, earlier this week, commenting unfavorably about Mr. Zellar's ethics (and yes, the background and thought process of someone with attitudes like his - although not about anything that wasn't observable in his writing).

Zellar left me a couple of comments - including, to be fair, a shot at some of my readers who may or may not have acted inappropriately - and posted this on his blog on Monday - headlined "There's Nothing Like A Pissing Match With A Guy Who Has A Bum Prostate Where His Brain Ought To Be".

And it's in this post that we get to the nub of the gist of the crux:

I think it might be fair to point out that this character --if it's the same guy I'm thinking of-- has had it out for me since he falsely accused me of stealing his harmonica on a camping trip in 1979. And the sad part of it was that we were like brothers until this unfortunate misunderstanding.

Ah. There's the rub.

Bradley:You have the wrong Mitch Berg. I never went camping with you, or anyone else, in 1979. I play the harmonica very well - and have never had one stolen. I doubt you could find where I was in 1979 on a map. I certainly have no idea who are are or where you're from.

Check Your Facts, Brad.

Now, I don't care that Brad Zellar attacked my character (or some Mitch Berg's character, anyway) on his blog. I don't care that he's had fun with the little tidbits of the job-hunting life and dating fiascoes that have dotted this blog. It's bad Karma for him, but it has no effect on my life.

I do care that he riffed on my kids, though - or anyone's kids. And I care that he did it on a blog that is an official organ of the City Pages, an actual "old-media" newspaper that, as I've allowed many times in this space, is home to quite a bit of superb journalism. A publication where people should have a higher sense of simple ethics than, say, Hesiod or Aurabass.

And that is all.

More on the Rummy Memo

More on the Rummy Memo - Sullivan sums up my reaction better than I do:

It's the most reassuring statement on the terror war I've yet read. The important thing about any administration in its third year is that it not be complacent, that it not be in denial, and that it ask tough questions of itself. Rumsfeld sure is no McNamara. And if I were a terrorist, I'd be alarmed at how earnest the U.S. government now is about tackling the threat. Of course, a MoDo column ridiculing this is now inevitable. Which is more indication that it's an encouraging sign.

Exactly.

The fact that at this point a senior administration official is honestly appraising the situation - the bad and the good - is a sign that this isn't some transient political quick fix. Whether the memo was or wasn't an intentional leak - and I see good arguments favoring both - it means that this administration can be trusted to be sober, industrious and self-critical in its foreign policy, in a way that the opposition simply can't.

Let the Dems spin this any way they want (and most of the major lefty blogs seem to be silent - I've found very little comment on credible blogs outside of Josh Marshall, below); this is good news.

UPDATE: Jared Keller has an exhaustive and excellent take on this.

Right There, Right Out -

Right There, Right Out - I remember the baby-boomers yowling in horror when Nike rented the rights to the Beatles' "Revolution" for a commercial.

"It's desecrating our religion", said some. Well, not really, but it came very close; the cult of Lennon was particularly strong among the Baby Boomers (which always confused me, but I always preferred Davies and Townsend). I rolled my eyes; "Oh, those solopsistic boomers, demanding the world revere them and their icons again".

Now, of course, the worm has turned.

K-Mart is using a pseudo-gospel cover of Jesus Jones's 1991 one hit wonder "Right Here, Right Now". And I'm a little steamed. No, not as steamed as the baby boomers were; Mike Edwards and Jesus Jones were icons to nobody. But the song - a wonderful little power-pop nugget - captured the headiness of the fall of the Berlin Wall like no other song of the era.

I saw the decade in, when it seemed
the world could change at the blink of an eye
And if anything
then there's your sign of the times

I was alive and I waited waited
I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now

"Big Deal", say the Boomers. Well, yes. It was.

In 1991, my daughter had just been born. And my life's most fervent prayer - that my kids would not grow up under the threat of nuclear annihilation that I did, among the missile fields of North Dakota - was answered. Seeing the Cold War end was more than just current-events fodder. The little piece of my consciousness that always kept itself ready to try to respond, somehow, to the sirens, whether by fighting for life or by trying to adjust my eyes to the incoming flashes, was freed up for other, more productive things.

And while Mike Edwards and Jesus Jones are barely footnotes in pop history, that song is the soundtrack for that epiphany in my life.

And now, it's being used to flog the Blue Light Special.

In my own defense, this doesn't horrify me in the same way that the Nike travesty gut-shot the Boomers. It's pop culture. It's inevitable. Nothing's sacred.

So excuse me while I grit my teeth quietly, and remember a better time.

Airbrush - Walter Duranty wrote

Airbrush - Walter Duranty wrote one of the best introductions to the history of philosophy that I've ever read. And yet even as I read it, I was keenly aware that the man was flogging an agenda.

It was about this time that the move to strip Duranty of his Pulitzer began in earnest. It's coming to a head, as aleading academic has advised the Pulitzer Committee to revoke Duranty's Pulitzer.:

"'They should take it away for the greater honor and glory of The New York Times,' [Professor Mark von Hagen of Columbia University, a leading Soviet History expert] said. 'He really was kind of a disgrace in the history of The New York Times.'

That The Times regretted the lapses in Mr. Duranty's coverage was apparent as early as 1986, in a review of Robert Conquest's 'The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine' (Oxford University Press). In the review, Craig R. Whitney, who reported for The Times from Moscow from 1977 to 1980, wrote that Mr. Duranty 'denied the existence of the famine in his dispatches until it was almost over, despite much evidence to the contrary that was published in his own paper at the time.'"

The Times' management. while not excusing Duranty's offenses, has a different tack. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger responded:

While careful to advise the board that the newspaper would "respect" its decision on whether to rescind the award, Mr. Sulzberger asked the board to consider two things. First, he wrote, such an action might evoke the "Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories." He also wrote of his fear that "the board would be setting a precedent for revisiting its judgments over many decades."

In an interview last night, Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said he concurred with Mr. Sulzberger.

"It's absolutely true that the work Duranty did, at least as much of it as I've read, was credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda," said Mr. Keller, who covered the Soviet Union for The Times from 1986 to 1991.

And yet, Mr. Keller added, "As someone who spent time in the Soviet Union while it still existed, the notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps."

News flash: Sulzberger and Keller are right.

To erase Duranty's Pulitzer, as some favor - to airbrush him from the record - would erase one of the great cautionary tales in the history of the media. It would remove an inconvenient tale from the story - as anathema to a real journalist as any of Duranty's abuses.

Duranty's Pulitzer should get an asterisk in the record; the tale of his Pulitzer should include, forever, the ignominy of Duranty's dishonesty. It should indict not only the long-dead Duranty and the blindness of the Pulitzer Committee that honored him and the Times that employed him, but serve as a warning to future journalists; history will not ignore your transgressions.

Just tell the whole story.

What do you think the LA Times would think about this?

(Via Instapundit)

How's That? - Pioneer Press

How's That? - Pioneer Press columnist Edward Lotterman may or may not know much about economics - but like most PiPress columnists, he can be expected to carry water for the DFL, as he does in this column about Gov. Pawlenty's proposal to import Canadian prescription drugs.

The hits start coming early:

Remember the Hessians, the mercenaries from Germany that King George III hired to help put down the rebellion in the 13 colonies?

The king did not want to cause domestic political problems by sending English boys off to die in a distant, unpopular war. So he got his German relatives to do the dirty work.

King George's resort to a proxy army is a good analogy for Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht's enthusiasm for retail imports of prescription drugs from Canada.

No, it's a lousy analogy.

A better one would be Americans attending minor-league baseball games when the price of major-league baseball tickets climbs out of control; without the majors, minor league ball wouldn't be nearly as interesting to watch, but the minor-league game is a lot friendlier on the pocketbook.

Sure, the analogy is strained. But it's not as bad as Hessians...

Both officials hail from the conservative wing of a political party that historically has expressed deep opposition to any interference by government in the free enterprise economy.

True, if you assume - as I'm sure Lotterman does - that "Republican" and "conservative wing" are the same thing.

If you're a Republican? Pawlenty and Gutknecht are, and have always been, from the pragmatic center of the party; to the right of Dick Day and Sheila Kiscaiden, to the left of Brian Sullivan.

Implementing Canadian-style negotiated drug prices would violate GOP principles. So, these modern Republicans want to enlist Canada as a drug-pricing mercenary to do the dirty work that they won't do themselves.

Alternate explanation; since Canada's drug industry essentially works out a low-priced deal for the products whose development is paid for by American consumers, Pawlenty wants to draw the Canadian system into the free market - with its commensurate sales pressure. Can the strictly structured Canadian system stand up to the market pressure of providing a genuine free market with drugs?

See how well their market for surgical services has done?

Both speak favorably of the Canadian system and see it as a means of helping households that face high prescription costs. The governor, in particular, sees it as a way to mute state employee discontent over paying larger portions of their health care costs.

Neither official, however, seems willing to call for implementing Canada's system in Minnesota or in the United States as a whole. Yet both are in excellent positions to do so.

Except that's not the point.

Pawlenty would be crazy to "admire" the Canadian system beyond the verbal blandishments he currently heaps on it. The system provides inexpensive drugs - which may be its only success.

By the way, Mr. Lotterman:

As governor, Pawlenty has the right, indeed the responsibility, of proposing new measures to improve the well-being of Minnesota citizens.

No. He has the responsibility of enforcing the state's laws.

So does it violate free market principles? Or will the market naturally gravitate to the prices - as opposed to the system - that are the most attractive. The big question - will the tightly managed Canadian system be able to absorb un-managed demand?

My Evil Twin - Atomizer,

My Evil Twin - Atomizer, from Fraters, writes about fellow Frater Elder's foray to Twin Cities Public TV to watch a taping of Jesse Ventura's America.

He observes in today's installment:

"Last week, the advance team of the Elder and myself scoured the studio for signs of suspicious activity and, having found none aside from a shifty eyed audience member that we pegged as Mitch Berg's evil twin, have deemed that the coast is clear for the arrival of Saint Paul and JB Doubtless."

My evil twin?

Hm. Leave aside that I don't know that any blogger but Lileks has ever met me in person (although Plain Layne once enigmatically noted that we have a mutual friend), and the only hint of my appearance is the grainy, four-year-old pic of me and the kids on my masthead. The thought that I might have an "evil Twin" at TCPTV is disconcerting to say the least.

I've been inside TCPTV (and MPR, for that matter) and most of the men there look like:

• Eskaloid caricatures,
• Ponytailed young Macalester grads who think Phish "sold out"
• Fiftysomething Highland Park retro-hippies who exude Volvo-driving, "What Would Wellstone Do"-ing self-righteousness like some people exude BO,
• Vance Opperman.

So if that's my public image, then I clearly have some work to do.

Day Late, Dollar Short -

Day Late, Dollar Short - The Pioneer Press is running the "Rumsfeld Memo" story...

...roughly a day after the entire blogosphere identified and jumped on the story's spinning and inconsistency. There are enough links to this "controversy" in that link to keep you busy reading for hours.

UPDATE: Lileks, of course, has it pretty well dialed in:

The memo itself is not that surprising, given the source. I’d be more alarmed if the memos consisted of back-slaps and promises off shiny medals for all. As I wrote to Hugh Hewitt today: this is the difference between American military culture and Middle Eastern military culture. Saddam would never have wondered whether he was doing the right thing, because everyone in his chain of command would have assured him that they were 110% successful 24-7. And no one who got Rumsfeld’s memo worried that it would be followed by a bullet in the head for giving the wrong answer to question #17.

How about the left?

Some bloggers get it. Josh Marshall gets parts of it right:

There is something oddly refreshing about hearing the Sec Def think out loud...In a similar way, there’s something appealing about listening in on his brainstorming.

...and parts of it wrong:

what’s troubling about this memo is that it really does seem to be a candid appraisal meant only for his top advisors. And even in that context there’s apparently no sense that any of the key strategic decisions in the war on terror might have been flawed or misguided.

...and parts of it seem to speak from Marshall's partisan myopia:

Here’s the line: “Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course?”

Couldn't we just build a super-strong ladder up into space instead of using those rocket?

You’d think the madrassas backed by the America-funded Madrassa Foundation (administered, no doubt, by General Boykin) might take a bit of a hit to their legitimacy. But, you know, I’m a details man. And why quibble with a bold idea …

Like the, ahem, Marshall plan? The one so many of Marshall (Josh)'s intellectual cohorts poo-poohed sixty years ago, in the same way Josh Marshall quibbles about our current involvement?

Note to Marshall: If you're a "detail man", you certainly know that there are ways that sort of funding can be insinuated into the Arab world without having "USA!" printed all over it.

He Was A SEAL, Ya

He Was A SEAL, Ya Know - Elder, from Fraters, has this hilarious account of his visit to a taping of "Jesse Ventura's America".

Enough money quotes in there to pay off the entire Mexican police force. You owe it to yourself to read it!

Writer's Cramp - I've spent

Writer's Cramp - I've spent the week so far plowing through a couple of very large projects, which involved about 12-14 hours a day of sitting at the computer. I'm also working on a new project that, while insanely speculative, has some potential.

My blog output suffered, as you can see below.

I've written an awful lot of stuff (and, it might be said, a lot of awful stuff) in nearly two years. At the end of September, I dumped all my archives into a Word file, and it covered nearly 1,600 pages. And in writing that much stuff, I've developed a following at least an order of magnitude greater than I'd espected when I started this blog.

I'm not under the illusion that I'm an Andrew Sullivan, who can take a month off from blogging every summer and come back to an undiminished audience. But I do need a bit of a change of pace.

So here's the plan: for the month of November, I'm going to slow down a bit. Instead of posting 5-6 articles a day, I'm probably going to stick closer to one or two, hopefully good posts.

I'm going to use the time this frees up to:

• possibly, hopefully, start a job. The news is decent, if coming very slowly - and
• Participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a project that involves writing a novel in thirty days.

That's the current plan, anyway.

Come December, the blog will be back to its regular pace, or something close to it.

Lamberted - Brian Lambert doesn't

Lamberted - Brian Lambert doesn't believe the media is liberal.

I just thought I'd mention that as context for those of you who aren't familiar with the work of the St. Paul Pioneer Press' broadcast critic. His own biases are evident from reading a selection of his columns.

Now that we all understand this, you can figure out what's behind his latest column, in which he almost perceptibly palpitates at a "study" that claims Fox News viewers are less-informed than NPR listeners:

Since June, PIPA has been refining data that showed disturbing misperceptions related to the following three questions:

• "Is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization?"

• "Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?"

• "Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the U.S. having gone to war with Iraq, do you think the majority of people favor the U.S. having gone to war?"

Naturally, being a dead-tree columnist, Lambert doesn't link to the "PIPA" study.

I will.

So read the questionnaire. The questions, as you'd expect, gauge how closely the responants' answers hew to the mainstream media line on Iraq and foreign policy. So Fox viewers apparently don't regurgitate the expected answers. Shocking.

Here's the part I thought was interesting:

It is probably no great solace to NPR and PBS that 16 percent of listeners glued to them also believe the Saddam-Osama link. But last time I checked, 67 percent was more than four times greater than 16 percent.

Brian Lambert, a former Twin Cities Reader writer, is apparently not one for details. If he'd read the report, he'd have noticed that while of those listing a primary news source 18% cited Fox News, roughly 1% listed NPR and 2% named PBS. 3% of the people who listed a primary news source.

The study claimed about 3,300 respondents. That means the poll result behind Lambert's sweeping, smug generalization is based on the opinions of 100 respondents among over three thousand people questioned!

Note that the study results don't seem to list a margin of error. But I'd suspect that 3% iisn't too far off, wouldn't you?

So - of people listing Brian Lambert as a source of information about conservatives, 100% were misinformed.

The Bovious Instalanche - Bovious

The Bovious Instalanche - Bovious turned up on Instapundit the other day with this question:

Q: "What's the quickest way to shut Noam Chomsky up?"

A: "Ask him a linguistics question."

Then, he adds:

Now, my assertion seems to have at least some validity: although I'm not qualified to comment on Chomsky's linguistics work, it would appear that at least some of his linguistics work bears remarkable similarities to his political discourse...

...Chomsky quote edited - read the post.

But if you studied linguistics in college, you probably remember Chomsky's linguistics work being at least as out on the logical limb as his politics.

Denied - A fair chunk

Denied - A fair chunk of the blogosphers - especially some of the most popular sites, including the Northern Alliance's own Powerline - were hamstrung by a Denial of Service attack yesterday. The attacks are apparently traced to Al-Quaeda-linked hacker sites, according to this series of pieces on Winds of Change..

Check out the graph here; it took a huge gouge out of Instapundit's traffic.

Small Victory posts this.

UPDATE: Brian Jones says:

Now, I considered a posting yesterday in which I referred to the hackers as "pig-fuckers," which means that Lileks & I are thinking much the same thing. However, I'm not as nervous as he is. Unlike the radar blip in Alaska, a remote outpost in a '50's sci fi movie, this is obviously aimed directly at the pro-Israeli site. This is the invasion, not a precursor.

Whoop te do.

I agree. my initial post on the subject this morning was more a way to break writer's block than a serious analsysis.

This is the sort of thing that reminds me more of a "riot" on the "Arab Street" than an "invasion". It seems to be a bunch of Islamofascist-leaning script-kiddies wielding falafel-cutter viruses, the equivalent of throwing turd-bombs at Starbucks; eventually it'sll stink the place up, but no serious damage is done.

Points For Style - A

Points For Style - A Michigan judge dismissed a case against rapper Eminem...

...in the form of a rap:

"In her poem, excerpts of which were published in Tuesday's editions of the Detroit Free Press, Servitto said Eminem broke no laws with his song about Bailey.

'The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact/They're an exaggeration of a childish act,' she wrote.

'Any reasonable person could clearly see/That the lyrics could only be hyperbole.'"

Welcome to Karaoke Court.

The General Fades - Power

The General Fades - Power Line links to this piece by Dick Morris, on Wesley Clark's sputtering campaign.

Interesting piece, and you should read it all.

This part was as interesting to me as it was the Powerline gents:

"'Even with massive financial support, one cannot simply begin to run for president in the California and New York primaries in early March. Dean's financial and political momentum will be too forceful and massive for Clark to pull it off. The hill is too steep, the slope too sharp, and the king of the hill (Dean after the early victories) is too deeply entrenched for Clark's strategy to succeed.

'Indeed, Clark's failure to grasp the political reality of the Internet recalls Hubert Humphrey's failure to adjust to the primary process when it was first established in most states in 1972.'

Everything about Clark seemed like an artifice from the beginning. I'd not be at all surprised if Morris and Powerline were right about this.

Busy, Busy Day - Posting

Busy, Busy Day - Posting will be very light until late afternoon.

After that? Stay tuned.

Thanks For Your Patience -

Thanks For Your Patience - I'm blessedly swamped with work these days; it should be enough to keep the wolves from the door the rest of the year, with more potential work waiting in the wings.

Blogging will be relatively light today and tomorrow. Later in the week? Back to normal.

Cleanup time; Rachel Lucas is taking yet another hiatus from blogging (how does she keep her audience, on a diet of dog pictures for weeks on end, anyway?), and Plain Layne is history. On the other hand, it's a gross oversight that I haven't blogrolled "A Small Victory" yet.

So justice will be served!

Hate Digest - Howard Kurtz

Hate Digest - Howard Kurtz of the WaPo brings together a number of currents in the Bush Hatred story.

He interviews our old friend, Jonathan Chait from the New Republic:

Has this unassuming man in a rumpled sports shirt lifted the lid on a boiling caldron of anti-Bush fury in liberal precincts across America? Or is he just an overcaffeinated, irrational liberal, venting to a minority of like-minded readers?

Ramesh Ponnuru, a soft-spoken conservative at National Review, pays Chait a backhanded compliment, writing that 'not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly.'

Ponnuru calls him 'smart, funny and completely misguided.' Since the president is so likable, he says, the outbreak of Bush hatred 'just makes you scratch your head.'

Chait, a doctor's son from suburban Detroit, obviously didn't create the Bush-bashing debate. But his recent 'Bush Hatred' cover story helped bring the subject out of the closet, where it can be dissected and diagnosed as part of the lefties-are-from-Mars, right-wingers-are-from-Venus shoutfest."

Kurtz's article exposes and dissects and digests many of the currents in this, perhaps the most important thread in American current events.

The Connection? - Winds of

The Connection? - Winds of Change's Dan Darling wonders about meaning of an undefined hole in the Iraqi Intelligence Service's organization chart:

Initially Unit 999 had five battalions of 300 men apiece, and more recently another battalion was formed to counter Iraqi opposition groups.

* 1st "Persian" Battalion [Iran]
* 2nd "Saudi Arabia" Battalion
* 3rd "Palestine" Battalion [Israel]
* 4th "Turkish" Battalion;
* 5th "Marine" Battalion [sea-borne operations, mine warfare, etc]
* "Opposition" battalion

In 1994, following the founding of the Iraqi National Congress [INC] opposition group, the Istikhabarat was assigned the role in monitoring and countering the opposition to the Saddam regime. The "Opposition" includes comprises sections dealing with Kurds in the north and Shias in the marshes of the south.

Most of these battalions can be linked up with known Iraqi-sponsored terrorist groups:

* Persian = Mujahideen-e-Khalq
* Palestine = Palestine Liberation Front/Abu Nidal Organization
* Turkish = PKK/KADEK

That accounts for all of the groups of foreign terrorists except one: the Saudis. What Saudi terrorist group was training at Salman Pak? Well, according to the testimony of an Iraqi lieutenant general and Sabah Khodada, I think that we can draw a fairly straightforward conclusion.

Remember - it's just a blank that needs filling in.

Flit, which referred me to the piece, asks the vital question:

So what about the mystery 2nd battalion, called "Saudi Arabia"? It's the only country oriented battalion not to be officially linked to any terrorist groups. The obvious conclusion is that this is the unit that maintained the elusive Iraq/Al Queda relationship. But let's say that's wrong. If it wasn't Al Queda that was being trained by the Saudi Arabia Battalion of Unit 999 then who were they training? Why is the documentation of the other units so clear and this one so murky?

Like the man says - it's a mystery; just a hole in an org chart. It's something we need to see filled in.

Will the press step up and try to fill it in?

Old Buddy! - The other

Old Buddy! - The other day I did a little vanity-Googling. I found this.

Read it. There'll be a quiz afterward:

"Berg and I aren't on the same page on a lot of issues, but that's a beautiful thing, really. That's what's great about America, as folks like to say. Berg's one of these guys who's somehow managed the miracle of procreation, to the tune of three wonderful kids. All of them, I understand, well-adjusted, possessed of a sophisticated understanding of the causes and consequences of war, and raised on William Bennett's Children's Book of Virtues. I envy Mitch, but I envy his kids even more. It must be swell hell to have such a clueless whack-job for a father. If they haven't already started breaking into his rootbeer schnaps and quaffing garfong out in the garage, I guarantee it's only a matter of time. And if sacrificing other American's kids --including apparently young men who had to die to become American citizens-- is the price we have to pay to safeguard the free speech rights of an entertainer like Mitch Berg, I'd say that's a damn fair trade-off for America."

OK. Was the author of this piece

1. A moonbat lefty blogger writing with lots of the courage that anonymity gives the hack, or
2. A moonbat who works for a mainstream alternative weekly paper in the Twin Cities?

The answer, of course, is "2" - Brad Zellar, from the Twin Cities' upmarket tabloid City Pages, home of some excellent journalism, funky personal ads, the worst music criticism this side of a dormitory bull session, and a lot of writers who mistake hipster condescension for profundity.

I'll let you be the judge. This is Zellar's little outburst, while this is my post from last April that got him so exercised, which was itself a response to this whiny, self-righteous screed.

Flip through his "blogs." Your mission: Identify the "clueless wackjob".

By the way, Bradley:

when Mitch threw me a little bone yesterday I was delighted to discover that traffic on my site experienced a bit of a bump. By midnight Berg's plug had resulted in three hits, which is a modest indication that my little stumbling donkey of a blog is quite possibly going places.

Or not. My blog got about 400 visitors that day. That "Blog By Zellar" cachet just doesn't draw 'em, I guess.

Bradley! You're not only a crummy excuse for a psychologist and the most tedious, self-indulgent local "alternative" writer since Margaret Grebe. You're also the sort of yellow, cowardly hack that "real" journalists giggle about when they snigger about bloggers.

And someday, when the City Pages decides to hire a new crop of fashionably-depressed hipster pseudojournalists, you'll be asking my kids if they want their order supersized.

Old buddy!

Choice Interrupted - Planned Parenthood

Choice Interrupted - Planned Parenthood supports a woman's right to choose.

The ChiTrib's Steve Chapman notes:

As Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Gloria Feldt puts it, "We stand for the principle that women--in consultation with their families and their physicians--should make their own reproductive and health decisions. Not politicians and not the government."

But this week, they changed their minds.

Not about abortion. On that intimate issue of women's physical autonomy, they still believe the government should get out and stay out.

That's right. The woman's right to make their own reproductive decisions apparently has limits:

But when it comes to breast implants, they think women can't be trusted to decide for themselves. On the former question, they sound like hard-core libertarians. On the latter, they are models of intrusive paternalism.

The piece shows the dichotomy, noting:

In 1999, a committee of experts commissioned by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a report saying, "Some women with breast implants are indeed very ill, and the IOM panel is very sympathetic to their distress. However, it can find no evidence that these women are ill because of their implants." The only real safety problems, it found, involve ruptures, infections and hardening of breast tissue--problems that also exist for saline implants, which were not banned.

The exonerating evidence ought to satisfy reasonable people. But when the government reopened the issue, the Feminist Majority Foundation objected: "Another generation of women should not suffer because the FDA has bowed to pressure from manufacturers and plastic surgeons." The federal government, it said, "must protect women from silicone gel breast implants." The National Organization for Women raised the same alarm.

You thought medical choices should be left to patients and physicians? You thought it was a woman's body and a woman's choice? When it comes to implants, those hallowed principles are nowhere to be found among "pro-choice" activists.

It's an interesting read...

One Less Blog on the

One Less Blog on the Required Reading List - Plain Layne has decided to bag the blog.

It's shame. It was the only interesting diaryblog in the entire world.

Bummer.

Unconscionable - 51 Senators voted

Unconscionable - 51 Senators voted to convert aid to Iraq into a loan.

Dumb.

The vote - almost a straight party line, with a few GOP "moderates" like stealth Democrat Olympia Snowe - is a bald-faced attempt to hamstring the President's policy toward Iraq, and make it that much harder to "win the peace" that so much of the opposition claims to be so concerned about.

Norm Coleman voted against this provision, while Mark Dayton voted for it.

Bomb Plot? - Gertz has

Bomb Plot? - Gertz has details of a potential Al Queda "dirty bomb" operation:

A key al Qaeda terrorism suspect was in Canada looking for nuclear material for a "dirty bomb," The Washington Times has learned.
Adnan El Shukrijumah is being sought by the FBI and CIA in connection with a plot to detonate a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material.
According to an FBI informant, El Shukrijumah was spotted last year in Hamilton, Ontario, posing as a student at McMaster University, which has a 5-megawatt research reactor. U.S. officials believe El Shukrijumah, whose photograph was posted on the FBI's Web site in March, was in Hamilton trying to obtain radioactive material.

So why Canada?

According to the officials, the al Qaeda members were sent to North America and assigned with making the bomb from materials acquired there, rather than trying to smuggle conventional explosives and radioactive material into the United States.

Chilling, if true.

As they say - read the whole thing.

Half Her Brain Tied Behind

Half Her Brain Tied Behind Her Back - Ann Coulter shreds much of the gleeful Limbaugh-bashing we've seen in the media this past week.

Money quote:

"When a conservative can be the biggest thing in talk radio, earning $30 million a year and attracting 20 million devoted listeners every week – all while addicted to drugs – I'll admit liberals have reason to believe that conservatives are some sort of super-race, incorruptible by original sin. But the only perfect man hasn't walked the Earth for 2,000 years. In liberals' worldview, any conservative who is not Jesus Christ is ipso facto a "hypocrite" for not publicly embracing dissolute behavior the way liberals do.

And this...

Liberals can lie under oath in legal proceedings and it's a "personal matter." Conservatives must scream their every failing from the rooftops or they are "liars.") "

Read every word. It's a classic - maybe one of her best.

As much flak as Coulter took for Treason, it's a mistake to call her a right-wing Michael Moore (as I myself mistakenly did). She's at least right more often than not.

(Via Powerline)

Boykin - As Hugh Hewitt

Boykin - As Hugh Hewitt reports, NBC and the LATimes have launched a jihad against General William Boykin. Boykin, a newly-nominated lieutenant-general and Deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence for intelligence and war fighting, has apparently made explicitly Christian statements that some find divisive.

There are many issues in this story - pick-and-choose journalistic ethics and selective theology being top on my list.

There is already quite a bit of commentary about this story; Hewitt himself covers the Los Angeles Times' unusual path to break this story, while Lileks briefly touches on the rather gaping journalistic ethics problem in the LATimes story (by their intelligence specialist, former Army intel analyst William Arkin).

NBC's Lisa Myers (and the Associated Press' Matt Kelley)highlight a quote that seems to be part of the problem from some of Boykin's critics:

"Boykin's church speeches, first reported by NBC News and the Los Angeles Times, cast the war on terrorism as a religious battle between Christians and the forces of evil.

Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian. ... And the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Some critics, including Moslems, are upset. Perhaps undertandably so, to a degree:

A Muslim civil rights group on Thursday called for Boykin to be reassigned.

"Putting a man with such extremist views in a critical policy-making position sends entirely the wrong message to a Muslim world that is already skeptical about America's motives and intentions," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But according to Frontpage's Lowell Ponte, the general is being taken completely out of context:

Only days after this Oregon speech, for example, Boykin addressed a prayer breakfast at Fort Dix, during which, according to the base newspaper, the general “compared the radical Islamic fundamentalists to the radical ‘hooded Christians’ [apparently Ku Klux Klansmen] of the United States.

“’There are Muslims who worship here and support the United States,’ he said, pointing out that those who act violently in the name of their religion do not reflect the principles of Islam,” the base newspaper report continued.

“Nor do they reflect the principles of the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States, he said.

Another quote from Arkin and Myers which has whipped up a lot of righteous fervor:

During a January church speech in Daytona, Fla., Boykin recalled a Muslim fighter in Somalia who bragged on television the Americans would never get him because his God, Allah, would protect him: “Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”

Again, there's a context here. According to Boykin's biography (note the bio's author), Boykin was the commander of Delta Force during the 1993 Mogadishu raid.

And this introduces an understanding of comparative theology that NBC and the LATimes either missed, or found inconvenient.

Ponte notes (with my added emphasis):

It was in this context that Boykin denounced one underling of a Somali warlord as idolatrous for following a path of violence that violated the most fundamental tenants of Islam.

It would make no sense to a genuine Muslim for Boykin to proclaim his Christian God bigger – because Muslims of this region regard themselves as descendants of Abraham and worshippers of the One God of Abraham, the same God worshipped by their fellow “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians.

Boykin’s statement about his God being bigger (pushed by Leftist media critics as if it were an insult to Islam) has meaning to a Muslim only if intended to convey that this one person [Aidid, and other Wahabbists] was in fact a pagan idolater pretending to be a Muslim while violating the Koran.

So Boykin's remarks have to be strenuously divorced from their genuine context (uttered by a man with a profound understanding of the issues, both military and theological) in this war) to make them as insulting to Moslems as the media are trying to do.

So let's recap:

• A general with decades of profound understanding of the Wahabbi sect and its actions, and with immense intelligence in this area (Delta force doesn't just hire killers; you have to be highly intelligent to make it into the unit, particularly as an officer; Boykin served in the unit for 12 years, then commanded it, before commanding all US special forces!).
• Comments delivered completely deprived of the genuine intellectual context in which the general discusses the issue; damning, seven-second soundbits excised, Maureen-Dowd-style, from decades of intensely knowledgeable commentary and action on the subject
• Dubious journalistic ethics (note Lileks's commentary)

...equals the appearance of being another LATimes smear campaign against the President, of course. The media's been unable to impugn the President on the motivations for war (Yellowcakes fell flat; their "imminent threat" trope is imminently cold); and the truth about the situation in Iraq is finally starting to leak out; it may be that the Democrats' best hope left is to try to portray the Administration as extremist ideologues in the eyes of...

...Who?

This is the fascinating question, to me. The media are trying to smear one of our top officers as a simple-minded bigot, by way of impugning the president's emphasis on simple faith.

Is it because the media believe that there's a groundswell of anti-Christian backlash waiting to erupt among the electorate? Or are they as out of touch as they seemed to be during the California recall (when, according to some observers, most of the LATimes' newsroom believed Bustamante would win up until the election results actually started shaping up)?

Comments? Please. I don't have the answers here.

UPDATE: In the comments, PJZ adds:

As someone though who enthusiastically supports the War on Terror/Islamofascism I LOVE IT when our leaders (especially the guys running the campaign) speak in terms of Good versus Evil rather than the phony nuances of multicultural relativism because it shows me that THEY GET IT!

About twenty years ago, there was a really bad business-management book that was, probably accidentally, a great book on leadership; "The Patton Principles" by Porter Williamson. It explained a lot about the "warrior" frame of mind exhibited by someone like a Boykin, an old-school, "lead from the front" officer - the only type that are tolerated in Special Forces.

The book introduced me to a simple fact that Patton understood intimately - and that Boykin must, as well; when you're leading men in action - and by action, I mean "where people are shooting things at you that can rip off your limbs and leave your guts spraying out of your stomach as you watch in mute horror" - it's no time for Clintonian shadings and nuances and parsing. All things - your cause, your buddies, your enemy's turpitude - are absolute. You don't ask men to die for nuance - something Bill Clinton never understood.

And yet if you examine the context and history of the General's remarks, his absolutes are also honest (which is also an essential for a good leader); Aidid and Bin Laden do follow a sect of Islam that most of the world's Moslems find foreign if not abhorrent. And whatever the surface faith of the terrorists, they were motivated by what most Christians - even ultra-liberal anti-American ones - would have condemned, and called "evil", had the terrorists not been Moslems.

Fundamentally Unfair - The current

Fundamentally Unfair - The current style among younger women involves low-rider pants, high-cut tops, and bare midriffs.

Even though I'm 40, single, and live a block from a college, I have no problem with this. I can put up with it, in fact; call it my contribution to the First Amendment.

However, it illustrates a fundamental unfairness of life. When a 40 year old guy rides around on a bike wearing pants that are too low in back (not writing autobiographically, here), it's called "Plumber's Crack". When a 21-year-old girl does it, it causes cars to swerve onto the boulevard.

Another Wimpy Day - I'm

Another Wimpy Day - I'm going to be on a client site today.

More posting tonight.

Jimmy Stewart Calling - I...I...I

Jimmy Stewart Calling - I...I...I don't, um, listen to much...much....much...um...mid-day radio these...these...these days. There's...there's...not, um, much time for that in my...my...my...my...current, rather, um, busy schedule.

So, I...I...I, um, never got to listen to...to...to...Rush Limbaugh very much. He's...he's...um, on at a time of...of...of...day that I just...just...um, don't get on the radio much.

I'll...ah, tell you this much. I...I...I...er, can't stand listening to...er...Roger Hedgecock. He's...he's...er, irritating to listen to, and his...his...his...call-handling...er, um...skills aren't much better than...um...Katherine Lanpher's. And...um...Walter...er, Williams may be a...be a brilliant man, but he's...he's...he's...nearly unlistenable.

So during my...my...my...my...er, rare moments of mid-day radio listening, I...I...I...er, have been catching...er, catching up with...um, Dennis Prager. The...um, the man is...is...is...um, intellectually...er, fascinating.

But...er, but the man has...has...has...has...has...um, a few verbal tics that may...may...may...may...may...may...drive me to um...um...distraction if I'm...I'm...I'm...I'm...not, um, careful.

Whine and Cheese - The

Whine and Cheese - The Strib's editorial page is at it again, this time whining about the settlement that the state's public employees were "forced" to take:

"Leaders of Minnesota's two largest state employees unions had no other choice: They had to swallow hard and accept a new contract that will cut the compensation received by most of their members.

If I understand correctly, this statement is hogwash. The public employees will be paying more of their fair share of their own health care benefits. Ironically, the fact that public employees have had a free ride on health care is in some part responsible for the high cost of health care for the rest of us; when people can go to the doctor for free for every hangnail, it drives up the demand, and hence the price, for all the rest of us copay-paying (or uninsured) consumers.

But the Strib gets this right:

The 27,000 members of AFSCME Council 6 and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE) are well advised to do the same. The alternative is a politically unsustainable strike that could lead to disaster, not only for the strikers' household budgets, but also for the future of collective bargaining by Minnesota's public workers.

A strike would not be well received by Minnesotans. It would be seen -- and spun, by allies of Gov. Tim Pawlenty -- as a union attempt to gain more generous benefits than many similarly occupied workers receive in the private sector.

Say what you will about the Strib - they're not stupid.

Just disingenuous:

Minnesotans are a fair-minded lot. They do not begrudge public employees decent compensation.

Notice the way the Strib keeps calling it "compensation" - as if they're getting their take-home pay cut!

State workers ought to complain about paying more for health care. The willingness of employers to transfer an increasing portion of health coverage costs to employees appears to be unlimited.

Quick - note the levels of disingenuity in this statement!

• The state employees' copays and premiums, even with the new contract, are vastly lower than those paid by private-sector consumers!
• The Strib mentions the "willingness of employers to transfer an increasing portion of health coverage costs to employees" as if it's an evil thing. It's not! And in fact if health care was all privately paid, it would likely be vastly more affordable than it is.
• The desired end result, of course, is between the lines; put it all back on the employer; mandate health care. And when that proves unsustainable, make it all "single-payer".

That - government-rationed health care - is, of course, the Strib's goal. They put it in code, of course:

[Unions] can galvanize grumbling resentment into political pressure for a solution to rising health care costs that does more than shove an increasing burden onto already overloaded shoulders.

Any questions?

Of course, there's a political motivation:

Public employees are also well positioned to help Minnesotans understand the full cost of a 'no-new-taxes' policy. The take-home pay they will sacrifice under the proposed contract is lost to them for good -- and lost now, when it is badly needed, in additional consumer spending to stimulate the state's economy.

Two possible answers to this:

• As if government employees are the only consumers!
• Government employees have in their hands the same solution to this "problem" that the rest of us do; don't go indiscriminately to the doctor! Take care of yourself!, and that means you, 300-pound municipal court employee and pot-bellied water-department worker and martini-swilling Attorney General's Office employee! It's what the rest of us do!

The Strib continues:

More than that, the compensation crimp will take a long-term toll on the willingness of talented people to choose public service as a career.

Oh, dear.

The crimp in compensation certainly drove "talented people" out of the buggywhip industry. Does that mean we should cave in to the BWMA's demands?

Support

Two months ago, I postulated "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary":

No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the President's justifications for the War in Iraq at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive

Andrew Sullivan adds evidence to my theory in today's posts.

He notes the radical inconsistency of many opponents, as exemplified by Maureen Dowd:

Here's Maureen Dowd on March 9 of this year:

The case for war has been incoherent due to overlapping reasons conservatives want to get Saddam. The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis...[snipped]...

And on June 4, only three months later, we discover that

For the first time in history, Americans are searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over... Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam's poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction."

So what was it? An incoherent set of multiple reasons or a single, crude one, i.e. self-defense against the "imminent" threat of WMDs? It doesn't really matter to Dowd, of course.

Read the whole thing (actually two posts); it sums up not only the problem with the opposition to the liberation of Iraq, but the problem a conservative faces in so many arguments with the left (including the ones I'll be talking about later, in re the St. Paul School Board election).

Cubless - Too depressing to

Cubless - Too depressing to comment on.

Five'll get you ten the Bosox buy it, too.

The Answer - I got

The Answer - I got a reply to my letter to St. Paul Green Party School Board Candidate Richard Broderick yesterday. And it was a doozy.

And it's going to take me a day to write about it - it appeared in an email discussion forum, and was accompanies by quite a bit of commentary from other forum members. It's going to take some writing.

Which I'm going to do. Because if you're a Saint Paul voter, this is important.

Busy Day - Off to

Busy Day - Off to work at another of my little short-term clients, on a rush job that shows all the signs of being a star-crossed death march.

Yippee!

No, I'm being sincere. When you're a contractor, as long as the death march is someone else's fault, you wind up billing tons of hours while you wait for the client to get their act together. Cha-Ching!

(No, I really am an ethical guy. But I'm being realistic here - I'm looking at two days of broken-field running).

Meanwhile the BCCI crept up overnight - one potential employer is currently checking references. That's usually a good sign. Knock wood.

Anyway, blogging will be light until tonight at least. Enjoy the day!

Open Letter To Richard Broderick,

Open Letter To Richard Broderick, Part II - On September 9, I wrote an email to Richard Broderick, Green Party candidates for the St.Paul school board.

I never got a response.

He has a website, now - and on it he says that, in addition to all his earlier statements (use the school board to "nurture kids' intrinsically Green consciousness", build a "Peace Curriculum", yadda yadda), he also wants to use his position on the School Board to "...help lead the fight to remove the many destructive provisions of No Child Left Behind and to repeal Minnesota's new Conceal-and-Carry law - a major safety threat to students and teachers alike."

Yet again, Mr. Broderick never responded to my email.

So I just sent him another.

Mr. Broderick,

My name is Mitchell Berg. I'm a St. Paul resident, and father of two St. Paul Public School children.

On September 9, I sent you an email with three questions addressed to your campaign. I haven't received an answer yet - and in the intervening five weeks, I've come up with another question.

I believe these are questions on the minds of a number of St. Paul parents, and I'd like to try again here.

1) On your website, you say you want to create a "Peace Curriculum". What is YOUR vision for the "Peace Curriculum", as reflected in how children study, say, world history or current events?

2) You plan to have "organizations like Friends for a Non-Violent World
with a proven track record in training people in the theory and techniques
of non-violence" involved in creating this curriculum. Leave aside for a moment that FNVW (and most other such groups) have a very defined political agenda (can you imagine someone proposing bringing in the NRA to help with a curriculum?), I have to ask: are you going to have any countervailing opinion involved? In what way do you plan to seek balance from the broader community in creating this curriculum?

3) In your press release announcing your candidacy, you said "...we need to nurture the instinctively Green consciousness of our young people through the comprehensive application of these principles to *curriculum* [my emphasis], instruction, administration, and district-wide decision-making processes."

To a non-Green observer, that sounds like you plan to use the school system to indoctrinate students with the Green worldview. Could you please elaborate on this statement?

4) Finally, on your website you say "I will help lead the fight...to repeal Minnesota's new Conceal-and-Carry law - a major safety threat to students and teachers alike." Two questions, actually:

* How do you answer someone who asks why you'd
use School District time and resources to
try to affect legislative business - effectively
turning the School District into a PAC (for
non-school-related issues)?

* Could you please document instances of
*legally-permitted* people (as opposed
to people without permits) in any of
the 35 other shall-issue or no-permit
states committing ANY crime, much less
a shooting, against "students and
teachers?"

Again, I eagerly await your response.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Berg

Again, I'll be waiting to see if he responds.

Dream On, Guys - The

Dream On, Guys - The Fraters and the Monkeys have been having an extended discussion about carving up and partitioning North Dakota. The Fraters' Elder started the discussion:

I say enough is enough. I know that life in North Dakota is harsh and hopeless (I lived there for five years after all) and that they have come to Minnesota in search of a better life for themselves and their families. And it's true that talk radio is a menial job that most native Minnesotans consider beneath them. But I believe we're starting to lose our cultural identity as the latest wave of North Dakotans seem less and less inclined to assimilate. Today Marlsand was talking about baking bread on his show, a decidely unMinnesotan (at least for males) hobby shared by one Mitch Berg. What's next? An hour on the proper way to prepare lefsa?

The time has come to send a clear message to huddled masses in North Dakota, waiting for their chance to come to the promised land. Minnesota is full. Stay home. Especially you talk radio hosts.

Well, the secret's out - yes, I am an economic refugee. I came here for a...well, not so much a "better life" as a life where garage bands could have a chance for a better life.

But we North Dakotans are like the people from India that currently dominate American technology - we're hard-working, industrious, and we apply ourselves to things in a way that Minnesotans don't seem to anymore. That's why we have such commanding numbers in the fields of talk radio, technical support, newspaper columnists and special ed teachers.

Elder posted yesterday:

While we're at it why not merge North and South Dakota? I mean really what's the point of having two Dakotas anyway? It's confusing to the media on both coasts and is just a duplication of resources. One Dakota. One big empty expanse of land. Dakota for the Dakotans I say.

A lot of people have noted that "East Dakota" and "West Dakota" make a lot more sense - divide the states at the Missouri River and the Time Zone Line.

But that's neither here nor there: the Elder has bigger plans yet:

If Rick is indeed willing to return to defend his homeland, then perhaps my plans could be amended to include a Free Otter State, running from just west of Alexandria to Rothsay (home to the world's largest prairie chicken) with its capital at Fergus Falls. It would of course be a vassal state to Minnesota but could serve as a critical buffer and first line of defense against the Dakotans.

Don't bother defending yourself. A Dakotas nation would nearly-perfectly reflect the great Scandinavian tradition - nearly bipolar passive-aggression. Minnesota'd push the Dakotas...the Dakotas'd give, and give, and give a little more...

...and suddenly a wave of old-yet-well-maintained F-250s loaded with normally-taciturn, flannel-clad guys would sweep across the border and be grilling their venison at the gates to Minneapolis before the Minnesotans would have their feasability study on defense finished.

The Dakotas aren't a sleeping giant, to be sure. They're more like the handyman that never says much, until he gets shorted one too many times, and then hauls off with the pipe wrench.

Don't mess with North Dakota, bucko.

Can't Hardly Wait - Paul

Can't Hardly Wait - Paul Westerberg's writers' block is over.

The City Pages devotes a couple of stories to the former Replacements star in today's issue.

I liked this part:

It's not surprising that Westerberg has turned exclusively to laying down tracks as a one-man band. He's a self-described misanthrope, though to judge from his rather tender interactions with fans in Tremble, that self-appraisal is an exaggeration. What's a bit strange is that he's making music--blues and various strains of the Chuck Berry tradition--that's rarely played in this solitary manner. Not that there's anything unusual about making organic-sounding rock one overdub at a time, and John Fogerty, a better drummer, set a precedent for playing this brand of boozy roots music all by his lonesome. Still, there's something funny about a presumably sober guy holed up in his basement looking for ways to make a song called "Hillbilly Junk" sound like it's being played by a pack of hillbillies strung out on junk.

That, of course, is the way I write and record music - alone, in my basement. Partly because I have no time to cultivate relationships with other musicians, partly because at the end of a day of job-hunting and chasing kids around, the music I write just isn't fit for human consumption.

I'm glad to hear him back. Along with Springsteen, Richard Thompson and Joe Grushecky, Westerberg was the songwriter I most consciously aped when I was writing music. While many of the old-time Replacements fans have fallen away as Westerberg's style diversified (some would say softened), it's fascinated me; Westerberg has gotten into his forties with a lot more style than his contemporaries (heard Grant Hart or Larry Sahagian lately?), and even with the ebb and flow of the muse, continues to write fascinating music that's as emotionally crisp as it is technically sloppy.

The autumn just got a little nicer.

Gaining Momentum - Infinite Monkey

Gaining Momentum - Infinite Monkey James' campaign to become the leader of the Black Community is gaining momentum.

The Fraters say so!

Seriously - I'm all for it. Let's get out the vote!

Fisking Grow - Brand new

Fisking Grow - Brand new Minnesota blog Mr Cranky tackles Doug Grow. Give it a read, and please support your new local blogs.

This is a good thing - it takes some of the load off the Fraters and I...

The Harder They Fall? -

The Harder They Fall? - File this under "Mixed Feelings".

Ruminator Books in Saint Paul is in serious financial trouble.

The store has been a Grand Avenue fixture for over 30 years, and, since the death of Odegaard Books, is easily my favorite book store in the Twin Cities.

Which is not to say that I'd be their favorite customer. The store, next to MacAlester College and deep in the heart of the Mac-Groveland neighborhood (so far to the left that you can still find people who think Kathleen Soliah was framed) fairly oozes oppressive hipness. But the store supports local authors, and is still a genuinely fun place to shop for books.

Like the late, great Odegaards, bad management calls seem to be the culprit:

David Unowsky, owner of the St. Paul store for 33 years, has attributed his troubles to competition and to the loss he took on a recently closed store at the Open Book literary center in Minneapolis. Inventory at the store has dwindled, and his payroll in the past two years has shrunk from 27 mainly full-time employees to 14.

"We've been through tough times lately," he said Monday. "We lost a lot of money, tried some things that didn't work out very well -- in some ways a failure of our own management skills. But we're still here."

Ten years ago, it was sad watching the once-magnificent Odegaard chain (which had stores on Grand, Uptown, and, in a move that led to the chain's undoing, Edina) spin from magnificence into oblivion. There, too, the problem was bad management - and, no doubt, a lot of less-dedicated book customers going to the then-new Barnes and Nobles and Borders that were just starting to spring up.

I hope Ruminator can hang in there. If nothing else, the store and the neighborhood whose intellectual lynchpin it is make for great inspiration for a conservative blogger.

And they have cool books, too.

Someday... - There's this street

Someday... - There's this street a block from my house where, every fall, all the trees on a two block stretch of street simultaneously turn the most gorgeous, vivid shade of yellowish orange.

The best part about it is than when you walk out on that street in the afternoon, when the sun is at just the right angle, the leaves filter the light into the most stunning, ethereal shade of orangish-pink that I've ever seen. For those few moments of the day during that one week of the year, standing on that street (especially the two street corners involved) is like standing in an orange dream, as the light around you makes it feel like the whole world has turned color, and it even feels like it's soaking into you just a bit.

Someday, I'm going to find a camera and film good enough to capture the sight. Although I don't know that anything can capture the feeling.

Faith In The Courts -

Faith In The Courts - DJ Tice at the Pioneer Press has an excellent article on what partisan furor over court decisions means for faith in the legal system:

Many pundits have concluded, casually and comfortably, that the initial ruling from a reputedly liberal panel of the circuit court represented some sort of retaliation for Bush v. Gore. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, for example, wrote a column terming the ruling "revenge for an act of judicial activism" (that is, for Bush v. Gore). He added, "even if the three 9th Circuit judges are overturned, they have already made their point."

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times perceived "irony blazing" as the circuit lobbed the Supreme Court's own arguments back at it. She quoted a political consultant saying, "It was beyond delicious … that the Supreme Court be hoisted on its own petard."

What an image of jurisprudence. Do federal appeals court judges really make decisions in order to wreak political vengeance on other courts? Do they issue rulings interfering in elections merely to make a point?

These are shocking suggestions, or anyhow they should be shocking.

Then, he calls for a dispassionate review of Bush v. Gore. Which is, of course, where the problems always kick in.

Worth a read.

BCCI Update - The index

BCCI Update - The index has been slipping a bit since its high at the weekend. I've been waiting three days now to hear about a potential job, for which I had a great interview on Thursday.

Still working two little projects - for the first time in nine months, I'm actually overemployed, which is kind of a nice switch.

Landing the other contract would finish out the year nicely.

So - if we can just get them to pop the offer...

Coal To Newcastle - Algore's

Coal To Newcastle - Algore's proposed TV network won't be liberal.

Former vice president Al Gore and a group of investors have plans to launch an all-news channel, but it won't be a liberal alternative to Fox News. Instead, it will be aimed at the under-25 crowd.

"Liberal TV is dead on arrival," said an insider advising Mr. Gore and his team. "You just can't do it."

Unstated; even if the new, "young, hip" news channel apes the biases of the mainstream media, it's still...what? I don't want to keep seeing the same hands, here, people.

Some observers feel that despite the change in tack, a network led by Mr. Gore will not be able to erect a firewall thick enough to insulate it from his Democratic Party affiliation.

"If there is any transparency to Gore, then it will be identified as a partisan operation, which will alienate advertisers," said the sales executive.

"The problem with being associated as liberal is that they wouldn't be going in a direction that advertisers are really interested in," said Paul Rittenberg, senior VP-advertising and market research, Fox News. "We don't get business for being conservative, we get business because the ratings are good and we believe that we're fair. If you go out and say that you are a liberal network, you are cutting your potential audience and certainly your potential advertising pool, right off the bat. "

And it would be redundant.

UPDATE: Read the story above, then read this, and tell me which is the satire...

The Ethereal Party - "OK,

The Ethereal Party - "OK, so Bush never said anything about Weapons of Mass Destruction. But he implied it."

"No, we can't find any examples of any right wing talk show hosts actually advocating harm to anyone. But they create a climate of hatred".

"So what if all the empirical evidence shows that shall-issue concealed carry laws are a good idea. Emotional responses are just as valid as your data!"

Arguing with liberals can be a tough row to hoe. The minute you get them on empirical grounds (and you usually do), they switch to emotions, perceptions, things that have no material, empirical existence.

For example, Bush's supposed claim that Iraq posed an "imminent" threat. Andrew Sullivan has been tearing bloody holes in the argument that the President ever said there was an "imminent" threat from Iraqi WMDs - to the point that the major media, after weeks of trying to turn it into a meme among the less-literate, is finally starting to back off the claim.

The claim's been replaced, of course, by the argument favored by that class P.J. O'Rourke calls "everybody's first wife"; "You didn't say it, but you felt it".

Fraters writes about the imminence scam today - but their paragraph applies to so many Democrat and DFL positions:

The beauty of that argument is that it's almost impossible to refute. Since the act of implying is mostly a subjective rather than objective process, it is very difficult to prove that a particular implication is not accurate. In a way implying is almost like feeling. And we all know that you can't tell someone how they should feel. Or prove that their feelings aren't valid.

It really should come as no surprise that the left has once elected to shrink away from logic and fact based arguments and instead hide behind their old friend feelings. At this point it's the only thing they have left.

I doubt it'll work for the Democrats - not that playing to peoples' feelings isn't a great campaign strategery (the New Deal was as much psychotherapy as actual economic reform), but the empirical case is getting strong enough that even the less wonky among us can see it; the economy's picking up, the Kay report says there are many nuances yet to work through before we declare Iraqi WMD claims false, and bit by bit the justifications for war in Iraq, even some very subtle ones, will become apparent.

Is It News? - Some

Is It News? - Some days, I swear you get more, better news from ScrappleFace than you do from CNN - or at least better analysis.:

"Compared with the the last full year of the Clinton administration, in three years under Mr. Bush the DOE budget for elementary and secondary education has increased a mere $12.6 billion. However, during the eight boom years for education (1993-2000), Mr. Clinton succeeded in boosting that part of the DOE appropriation by a whopping $9.2 billion."

Satire? Yes, but also facts that never make it to print elsewhere.

It's like flipping on "Whose Line Is It Anyway" for the straight poop on Iraq - and getting it, and more reliably than at CNN.

We Learned More From A

We Learned More From A Three-Minute Record... - Joanne Jacobs thinks kids should be doing more homework, and fewer extracurriculars.

She's partly right, at least in the stereotyped world of the SUV-mounted, "Achievement"-oriented caricature of the 'burbs:

Compared to the past, children spend much more time in scheduled, supervised, after-school sports, lessons and other activities. Few middle-class kids are allowed to do what we used to do after school. Nothing. With no adults hovering over us...Working parents have to make sure their kids get from soccer to Scouts; SUV-driving moms spend their afternoons driving back and forth to recreational sites. By the time they get home to microwave dinner, they're in no mood to help their kids build a molecule out of styrofoam or fake a Pilgrim's journal about The First Thanksgiving.

Well, there's a point there. Kids - especially in the caricature society Jacobs describes - don't have a lot of "free" time. Kids in that world rarely get to plan for themselves, very rarely seem to have to learn those most valuable of all skills - managing your own time and entertaining yourself, rather than depending on others for both.

But Jacobs then goes on to ask:

So. Is soccer really more important than studying? Should teachers eliminate math homework so kids can spend more time practicing karate kicks?

Allow me to answer an absurdly-phrased question with an absurd answer? Yes. Yes, teachers should give less homework.

I can hear my conservative friends' jaws dropping. Bear with me.

Jacobs says, by way of showing her motivations:

Homework is must-do only for a small minority of hyper-motivated students [emphasis added].

American teen-agers average no more than five hours a week on homework, according to a new report, which summarizes four earlier studies, by the Brown Center for Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. A RAND report, "A Nation at Rest: The American Way of Homework," agrees: Middle and high school students aren't working any harder now than in the past.

Note Jacobs' use of the term "hyper-motivated"; ask yourself - hyper-motivated for what?

Why, to play the academic paper chase, of course:

Both Paly and Lynbrook educate high-achievers who take multiple Advanced Placement classes, and stress out if they get an A- instead of an A. But, usually, it's not the academics that overwhelms them. Based on my daughter and her friends, three hours a night is typical for top students. What wears them out is the imperative to be well-rounded. It's doing the homework and editing the newspaper, competing on the Mock Trial team, singing in the choir, running track and volunteering for a cause that will impress a college admissions official.

So is that the object of having children? To impress admissions officials?

Jacobs concludes:

Middle and high school students learn more, especially in math, when they study more. They also prepare to learn independently -- if Mom and Dad back off and let them do their own work.

Limit after-school activities. Turn off the TV. There's plenty of time for homework -- if it's the top priority.

I have to confess; it's not.

The "top priority" for me is raising kids who will have not only the ability, but the desire and the knowledge, to decide where they want to go in life, and who have the intellectual, social, moral and physical tools to do go there when they know where "there" is.

Jacobs is focused on the academic paper chase; get good grades, get into a good school, and then...

...what? When they get into college, and they're on their own, and have genuine free will for the first time in their lives, what do they do? They may or may not have good, homework-bred work habits (or they may have just learned how to provide the kind of paperwork that teachers like to see), but will they have learned to think, to communicate, not just in the form of term papers, but in the real world of interacting with other people? In the rush of finishing up the avalanche of homework the likes of Jacobs demand (she seems to think three hours a night is acceptable), will they have learned to think about what the purpose of it all is?

That's not idle pseudo-intellectual noodling. Learning to play the academic game is vital for those who aspire to academic careers - medicine, the law, academia. And Jacobs is right about TV - it's a waste of time, valuable only in the mental vacation it gives a kid, in moderation.

But do you honestly think the kid who spends two hours a day honing her soccer kick or his curve-ball or her skills on the saxophone or the debate team isn't "learning good work skills?" Do you think that people aren't smart enough to apply "work skills" learned editing the school paper to work later in life?

I'll go as far as to say this: For many, if not most, kids, once they get past learning to read, write and do basic math fluently, they learn more of use to their lives, no matter what they go into, outside of traditional classroom work than in it.

Personal, anecdotal examples: As a child, I excelled at math, history, writing, foreign languages and music. I excelled at four of them, not because I did an hour of each for homework every night, but because I intrinsically loved them, and did what I had to do to learn them.

Math, on the other hand? As the homework piled up, without any commensurate reason to become and remain interested in the subject, I drifted away from the subject. I do fine, not only at math, but at the logical skills at which endless math homework is supposed to train kids (and which foreign languages and music may be better training!). Between the homework and a series of teachers who seemed dedicated to making math onerous and irrelevant, I lost interest. The best the schools can claim for my continuing love of and success at music, languages and history is that no teachers screwed any of them up for me. I have great "work habits" - and they come from teaching myself eight musical instruments, not from any homework I did.

The "More Homework" movement - and it's attendant "Just Teach the Three R's" bleat that you hear endlessly on Garage Logic, are lousy ideas, that accentuate one of the greatest failings of our school system - that they glorify the academic, "paper chase" path to the detriment of all other life paths. In schools today, if you're not on the college track, you're regarded as something of an embarassment. Yet there are scads of kids for whom kicking a soccer ball or repairing a car or learning German or the Bass Guitar is not only more fun than traditional academic work - it's better academic preparation, too, because it better teaches how to work, manage ones' own time and expectations, and just plain how to think!. The kid who trains her mind to solve problems by learning the piano will learn the logical tools needed to become a doctor just as effectively as the child who's drawn to math (as indeed happened with a high school friend of mine).

The best thing education can do for kids is give them the tools they need to exercise their natural curiosity - and then let them exercise it.

Sorry, Kos 'n Jeff -

Sorry, Kos 'n Jeff - Liberals up and down the food chain - from the Daily Kos (whose obsessive poll-watching is a matter of looking at his website) to the pretty-good-guy Jeff Fecke - have been rendering themselves frenzied for weeks as the president's poll numbers have eroded from their euphoric, post-9/11 highs.

I always figured, "let 'em cheer - they gotta have something to feel good about".

According to Powerline, those days may be coming to an end; Bush's poll numbers may be levelling off and rebounding, as I predicted they would.

Hindrocket notes:

"I assume that by now just about everyone has absorbed the facts that people are still getting killed in Iraq, and we haven't yet found significant quantities of WMDs. So the President's stabilized ratings are a good sign. It seems likely that the next movement will be positive, as word spreads about the progress being made in Iraq and as ongoing signs of the economy's strengthening get more attention."

There was no way the President could have maintained the numbers he had a year ago. The fact that his numbers are still pretty universally above fifty percent, two years into the emergency, is itself pretty amazing.

The left seems to be holding on to one other semi-historical hope; the precedent set by the President's father, who fell from astronomical popularity in 1991 to defeat in 1992. But the economy isn't sliding into recession, as it did when the tanks stopped rolling in 1991 - indeed, things are picking up at a rate guaranteed to give Paul Krugman indigestion. The news is leaking out - the liberation of Iraq is going well, and outside the Sunni Triangle (where the major media rarely travel) it's going very well to all rational accounts. And we've gone 25 months since a major terrorist attack on the US.

Rumors of the President's political demise are - I'll be charitable - greatly overstated.

The Babykiller - There is

The Babykiller - There is so much about this story to make any rational person cringe; two weeks ago, a 14 year old girl gave birth to, and then strangled, a baby. The baby's father was a 22-year-old man who the girls parents had allowed to live in the house with them, and who'd started having sex with the girl two years ago, when she was 12 years old.

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner is seeking to try the girl as an adult. She's charging the "boyfriend" with statutory rape - which is a charge you file when people have sex with people who aren't of age to consent yet. In other words; the girl didn't have the adult faculties it takes to consent to sex, so the guy gets charged; but she's adult enough to stand trial in adult court?

The Pioneer Press' Ruben Rosario discusses the case:

No question, it's a horrible act. Who in their right mind would commit such an atrocity? This kid obviously needs help. But is adult prison the answer?"

Of course not. Society recognizes the diminished capacity defense, although it makes it appropriately hard to use. If you're not capable of rationally knowing what the problem is with a crime, it's a mitigating circumstance at least.

And who could possibly have a more diminished capacity than a girl who'd not only been raped (statutorily, anyway) for years, but did it with the tacit approval of her parents (or their negligent indolence, which any child that age will consider approval)? Can you figure out a better way to permanently warp a kid's sense of right and wrong?

If there was ever a textbook case for why we have a

juvenile justice system separate from the adult one, not to mention a diminished capacity defense, this is it.

It all goes back to Susan Gaertner. The woman be Ramsey County's home-grown version of Mike Hatch, always looking for the angle to get the political headway.

In Ramsey County, if your kid is late to school more than six times in a semester, Susan Gaertner's "Truancy Intervention Project" (Motto: "providing work for lawyers who can't get real jobs") intervenes - for the childrens' own good, of course. And if heaven forbid a parent falls behind on child support payments - Gaertner's minions are always ready to pounce. If someone should use a gun to defend his property or her life; for you, justice in Ramsey County is Susan Gaertner's sensible pump, on your throat, forever...

...but now, when you have a set of parents that failed to a criminal extent at the most important job they have - where's Gaertner? The parents whose negligence allowed this whole sordid incident to happen have apparently not been charged with anything.

Gaertner is in the unenviable position of having the left as well as the right taking shots at her; her record on gun owners rights and inserting the County Attorney's office into the dumbest places makes her persona non grata among Republicans, while trying to charge this girl - no, as a conservative, I think I can get away with calling the girl a "victim" - as an adult will now offend at least some of her DFL supporters (the ones that aren't frantically trying to portray themselves as "Not Soft On Crime!", anyway).

Posted by Mitch at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)

The Jokes Write Themselves These

The Jokes Write Themselves These Days - G. Pascal Zachary thinks the Bay Area should secede from the Union:

"We, the people of the Bay Area, need to leave the United States. We are held prisoner by a foreign power, colonized by an alien civilization. We require cultural and social self-determination. We demand, in short, a declaration of independence -- and our own nation."

It's hilarious. No, not in that intentional, Scrappleface kind of way. No, this is very different:

Maybe Lincoln would have been an even greater president if he had let the South leave the Union in 1861. In the absence of Southern racists in Congress, the North would have become an industrial democracy of the European sort. American global power would have been moderated, humanized and democratized -- because urban voters in the industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York would have insisted on solidarity with workers of the world. Our roster of presidents would have included the populist William Jennings Bryan, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the one-worlder Henry Wallace. A more compact, social-democratic America would have still struggled mightily with the legacy of slavery and discrimination against African Americans, but a movement for racial equality would have begun decades earlier.

"Slavery, Schmavery - we could have had socialized health care!

Might the liberation of the Bay Area unlock similar positive change? Think of the model social legislation that a Bay Nation could enact: bans on guns altogether, full legalization of same-sex unions, an expansion of public television and radio, complete decriminalization of marijuana, basic health care for all, environmental protections that would be the envy of North America.

I just can't add anything. What'd be the point?

Hesiod has met his match.

UPDATE: And then, when I think I can't find anything as wierd as the above, I run into this via Sullivan; Edward Asner talks about his admiration for Joseph Stalin, to Ed McCulloch in WorldNetDaily:

"I think Joe Stalin was a guy that was hugely misunderstood," said Asner. "And to this day, I don't think I have ever seen an adequate job done of telling the story of Joe Stalin."

Literally - you can't make it up fast enough these days.

The Twin Cities Needs This

The Twin Cities Needs This - There is nothing in the world I miss worse than plaing in a band.

I never told my parents this, but the real reason I moved to the Twin Cities in 1985 was because I was going to be the next Paul Westerberg. I made a pretty good run at it for a while, too; "Tenant's Union" played the First Avenue and opened for some national acts, on the strength of a bunch of songs I wrote that, in a few cases, didn't suck; "Joe Public" put out a five-song cassette that some people didn't hate; "The Supreme Soviet of Love" played one set at the Turf Club that is still one of the favorite nights of my life.

But it's hard to find the time, to say nothing of energy, to get a band going these days. So I've taken to the next best thing on occasion - getting up in front of a crowd (or not) in a bar and singing karaoke. I'm not bad; the host usually tells me I'm the only person he's ever met with the balls to tackle Sprinsteen; and once crazy night, I had the whole house hopping to "Jump Around" by House of Pain.

And yet, it's not the same. It's not a band. Singing along with a tape track - almost invariably cut on a MIDI computerized music setup that plays music with crushing Teutonic efficiency - doesn't have the glorious give-'n-take of playing with 3-5 guys on stage.

But now, Lex Green from Chicago Boyz tells us, there's hope for the rest of us:

"The Hideout features live band karoake -- which is pretty damn cool. You get on stage with a real band behind you and belt one out -- you are Angus Young, or Johnny Rotten, or Paul Rodgers, or whoever, for three glorious minutes. "

I'm all tingly thinking about it.

Open letter to Twin Cities bars: Add "Live Karaoke" to your entertainment, and I can almost guarantee I'll come and buy a drink. Or two.

Infantilization - Emily from Give

Infantilization - Emily from Give War a Chance touches on a subject for which I excoriated the Strib's editorial team last week - the Democrats' infantilization of the voters.

As she was reading through some anti-recall campaign literature, she found this:

I caught a quote, though, as I was reading through this sample ballot that struck me hard, and summed up in very few words exactly why it is that I loathe the ideas of the Democrats:

"What if our children could recall their parents every time they made a tough decision?" -William Jefferson Clinton
Since you asked, William Jefferson Clinton, I will tell you exactly what would happen.

Seeing as how children are uncivilized, uneducated savages in training to become otherwise, the world would probably plunge into utter chaos. Think Lord of the Flies. Cubed. Now that you mention it, they probably wouldn't stop at a recall. They'd execute parents for making kids do their homework instead of watching cartoons.

This is a theme I've been harping on for years; even in private, relatively unguarded conversation, many Democrats I know regard government as a "parent" whose job it is to keep the kids from beating the stuffing out of each other.

And I keep trying to ask them "doesn't this strike you as the most caustically un-democratic notion you can have in a country built on the notion that we are a free association of equals, not a collection of subjects?"

In too many cases, the eyes lapse into that "does not compute" trance.

The Arnold Effect - It's

The Arnold Effect - It's too early to tell, of course - but it's possible that Arnold may have a every bit as great an effect on politics in Europe as in California:

The straight-talking Hollywood action star's election win in California has had an electrifying impact on Germany, leading to calls Friday for top politicians to voice clear ideas in simple language or be swept away at the polls.

"The more confused we are by what they say, the greater our longing for a man or woman with simple words," wrote Bild newspaper columnist Franz Josef Wagner. "The only problem is that it's the wrong ones who usually master simple language."

Schwarzenegger's victory in the California race for governor has led to editorials calling for German politicians to abandon their barely comprehensible speaking style in favor of "Klartext" (straight talk).

He's right - political German is like sitting at a county water board session on easements; dry and technical, it is to German as educationese is to French.

Of course, there's baggage with that approach:

But Wagner and others also warn of the dangers of falling for simple remedies from loud Austrians who enthrall the masses. Austrian-born Adolf Hitler still casts a long shadow in Germany.

Celebrities, columnists, ordinary citizens and even some politicians have joined the chorus of calls for less talk and more action to get Germany moving again after years of economic stagnation and political standstill.

"My first thought was 'Oh my God, not another Austrian emigrant -- the first one caused enough damage"' wrote Peter Boenisch, a former government spokesman and newspaper editor, in an analysis on Schwarzenegger for the tabloid Bild.

Nice to know they're watching for that sort of thing these days!

"But Germany urgently needs something Schwarzenegger-like: a can-do spirit, unconventional thinking, courage, strength and vision. We're facing the worst crisis since the war," he wrote.

It's interesting to see that such a person could make an impact in German politics - and, by extension, perhaps the bureaucratic, exclusive world of politics in the entire European Union.

Of course, the other extreme is alive and well, as we see in our next article...

From The Top - The EU is working on a European Constitution. Says the relatively-conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine:

We, the people“ - these are the opening words of the most successful and durable constitutio-nal creation of modern times, the U.S. Constitution of 1787. The European convention's tome of several hundred pages, however, is a far cry from the straight precision and pleasant pathos of this exemplary document. Its preamble starts with the somewhat pompous statement that the European continent is a pillar of civilization, the cradle of humanism, and it concludes in all seriousness by thanking the convention members.

Worth a depressing read.

The Weekend - Posting will

The Weekend - Posting will be light this weekend, as I ponder re-creating a pathetic simulation of a social life.

Will it work? Well, count the posts between now and Monday morning...

Class - Limbaugh's statement on

Class - Limbaugh's statement on his addiction.

Here's the money bit:

I am not making any excuses. You know, over the years athletes and celebrities have emerged from treatment centers to great fanfare and praise for conquering great demons. They are said to be great role models and examples for others. Well, I am no role model. I refuse to let anyone think I am doing something great here, when there are people you never hear about, who face long odds and never resort to such escapes. They are the role models. I am no victim and do not portray, myself as such. I take full responsibility for my problem.

I've known a lot of addicts over the years. Many of them toss the blame for their condition off on somone...anyone but themselves. It's always someone else's fault.

Limbaugh does not seem to be doing this.

As to the legal issues:

At the present time the authorities are conducting an investigation, and I have been asked to limit my public comments until this investigation is complete. So, I will only say that the stories you have read and heard contain inaccuracies and distortions, which I will clear up when I am free to speak about them.

Sorry, liberals; five'll get you ten Limbaugh can plead guilty, get treatment as a first offender, and he'll never darken a courtroom door again. Just like he majority of pill addicts, of all races, classes and paces, that enter the system.

(Via Infinite Monkeys)

Classless - They think they smell blood.

The Daily Kos: "Addiction is never a good thing, but for Rush Limbaugh, it is karmic payback. Now an honest, rhetorically consistent Rush would have no choice but to surrender to the authorities and plea bargain himself a significant jail term...Now that he has been found, there's nothing left than to convict him and send him up the river." Riiiight. Just like the majority of other first-time offenders with no criminal record and zero flight risk.

"Atrios" sounds just a little too excited. And like he's been watching too much "Court TV": "I just got the tail end of it, but apparently Rush was having his drugs Fed-Exed to him. If they were crossing state lines..."

And Aurabass from Rushlimbaughtomy, who seems to have learned writing from a tribe of hereditary Tourette's sufferers...well, I won't bother linking to him. Too depressing.

Enjoy it while you can, kids. This, and your whining about Arnold, the War, and the Economy, is all going to be a benefit to Bush next year.

Josh Marshall: and Cal Pundit: Hey, they had enough class to avoid the subject - so far!

Catapulted Miles From The Tree

Catapulted Miles From The Tree - When I was in elementary school, I was a tall, skinny, uncoordinated, greasy-haired dork who was cursed with the reputation as the "School Brain". Some things never change.

Wednesday, I volunteered to help chaparone my son's fifth-grade class on a field trip to Exchange City (a Junior Achievement model city, where kids learn what adults do all day by doing adult-ish jobs).

They were short of volunteers, so I helped out the three fifth grade girls who were in the "Distribution Center" - a little warehouse, where they took and filled orders and made and collected invoices.

"You're Sam's dad?" two of the little girls asked, as if they'd run into Lance Bass' father, doing everything short of squealing like Davy Jones was in the room. "Where is he working?"

It should go without saying that Sam didn't inherit my looks; he's very tall (like me) and while he looked like Calvin when he was six (and acted like him, too), he's become a little blond fifth-grade dreamboat, and he's loving it.

He's on the phone with one of the girls from the Distribution Center right now.

This could be very, very dangerous...

Schwarzenegger, The Strib, and the

Schwarzenegger, The Strib, and the Seven Deadly Sins - Today's Star/Tribune editorial about the California Recall goes beyond the usual Strib fare.

We're used to the smug, classist little diatribes the Strib inflicts on the readership. Today's piece is very, very bad; in it, the Strib editors exhibit not only preening entitlement and smug arrogance, but also rank hypocrisy. We'll get to that in a bit.

But today's piece is worse. Much worse. I wrote a long, detailed "fisking" of the editorial - and realized that it didn't go nearly far enough. Today's editorial goes beyond bad - to the point that we have to use metaphysical units of measurement to judge it.

For today's editorial exhibits all seven of the deadly sins - Pride, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, Greed and Sloth.

Follow me, here:

Greed - The article starts badly:

Most parents have witnessed a version of the Toys "R" Us scene in which a child, caught up in the frenzy of toy overload, cries out, "Mommy, I want it, and I want it now!"

California politics, always a raucous affair, has become over the last 30 years more shrill, impatient and petulant, more of a toy-store experience. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ascendance to California's governorship is the latest episode. Voters in the largest state knew what they didn't want -- more Gray Davis, whom they judged an unlikeable, indecisive politician of the worst sort, who had made a mess of things, although they weren't sure quite how.

Leave aside the preening sense of superiority (we'll get back to that under "Pride", below); the Strib has it backwards.

The voters aren't the children; the government of California is. It's a child that spent its already-too-large allowance, and lied about doing its homework. And the parents - the people - after years of permissive overindulgence, finally lowered the boom, and grounded little Gray.

The Strib Editorial Board acted the same way during last spring's budget wrangling at the Capitol; they joined institutional government in stomping its feet and screaming "give us more money. NOW!" And it's not working.

And boy, the spoiled little brat is howling away in his room!

Lust - Lust is extreme covetousness - and the Strib covets having things both ways, on two different fronts.

In the editorial, they invoke...De Tocqueville!

The best profile of today's angry American voter may have been best described 170 years ago by the astute observer Alexis de Tocqueville. He noticed a rising class of "eager and apprehensive men of small property [who] continually and in a thousand ways feel they might lose [it]."

Let's forget for a moment that the Strib's editorial board detests the notions of limited government that De Tocqueville so admired about American society in the early 19th century.

And the Strib's view of the "men of small property" varies - depending entirely on their choice at the polls. As we'll see in our next entry...

Anger - The Strib is comfortably smug that it knows what's good for the little guy: "Society's real have-nots tend not to vote, and when they do, as in Tuesday's election, tend not to vote for candidates like Schwarzenegger." But when the little guy - the "men of small property" that De Tocqueville referred to - get all uppity and start calling talk radio stations or recalling incompetent (Democrat) politicians? It's time to open a can of righteous patrician whoop-ass on the proles!

In modern terms, it's people who believe (often mistakenly) that they've made it wholly on their own and that, except for government's interference, everyone would follow their example. Government, thus, joins a lineup of villains that includes immigrants, terrorists, liberals and other bogeymen who conspire to take away the essence of American success.

California's ground is especially fertile for anger politics. Its cyclical economy, its über-populist system of initiative and recall, and its media-driven political discourse all combine to make the state increasingly ungovernable.

Did you get that, Little Guy? Vote for the Democrat, and you're a noble "have-not". Vote for a Republican, though, and the Strib will lump you in with the Birchers and the Montana Freemen!

And what's this "increasingly ungovernable" bilge? The recall initiative followed state law, and resulted in the orderly transition of power. No tanks in the streets. No firing squads. Of course, what the Strib means is "ungovernably by the Democrat".

This is the sort of bigotry that springs from hatred - the ultimate anger. And it's no less deadly a sin when you couch it in the condescending, patrician terms the Strib uses.

Envy - Even as the Strib insults it's opponents, it wants what they have:

Schwarzenegger is the latest successful product of the anger industry that now runs American politics...

"Dammit - if only our anger industry were winning!"

Gluttony - The Strib is a glutton for punishment:

[Minnesota's] sizable deficit would have been half as large had legislators of both major parties listened to Jesse Ventura.

Minnesota's deficit would have been nonexistent if they'd listened to the Republicans and held the line on squandering a decade's worth of surpluses on permanent spending!

Sloth - In this case, intellectual sloth:

Still, we wish Schwarzenegger well. Perhaps a rebound in the high-tech economy will do most of the work for him. Minnesotans know that celebrity hulks don't necessarily make bad governors.

Many states have budget problems -and an economic rebound (the one the Strib so fears) will fix most of them. Gray Davis added rapacious spending, a dose of lying to the people, and a "tax 'em all, let G-d sort 'em out" arrogance to the suppurating stew - and the people called him on it.

And it's also intellectually slothful to call Schwarzenegger a "Celebrity Hulk". He made a fortune in action movies, sure. He also made himself a quarter-billionaire as a businessman. Dismissing Schwarzenegger as a "celebrity hulk" is more or less like calling a successful businesswoman a "hot broad" - myopic and intellectually lazy for most, misleading and biased for a news organization.

Pride - Pride comes before all other sins; the Strib marinades in misplaced self-glorification:

It's the contradictory part that explains both Schwarzenegger's victory and his probable failure as governor: People pass measures that demand more government accomplishments, then eliminate the revenues to pay for them. Only in a movie -- or perhaps a political campaign -- could Schwarzenegger promise to erase a possible $27 billion deficit without a contribution from Tocqueville's class of middling and eternally fearful stakeholders.

So in this paragraph, the Strib:

• declares itself prescient to the point of clairvoyance
• calls itself wiser than the combined electorate of an entire state (again! Remember the tut-tutting when we elected Tim Pawlenty?)
• Seems to believe that it can revoke economics (as if lowering taxes in a rebounding economy won't in the end prove a net gain!)
• Psycholanalyzes the majority of this nation's voters - are they really all "middling and eternally fearful", or do they merely have a different idea on how their state - their state! - should work?

Are these not, in fact, the very definitions of excessive pride?

So as we see, the Star Tribune editorial board has sinned mightily. Repentance is the only answer!

Any bets on when we see it?

Leadership

Yo, wazzup, ma hizzomies and hizzos? OG Mitch B kicking da noyeeeze...

...er, sorry. I, like many of the kids today, have been sucked up by the commercialization of gangsta culture. It's pretty irresistable - watching MTV and BET, seeing the rappers with the cars and the women and the goodies - as ridiculous as some of it looks, it's hard to rizzist the sizzeductive call of babes, money, guns and cars, nowumsayin?

People - especially black kids - are being sold a glorified bill of goods. What's the natural response?

Go after a stupid game.

Black leaders - or perhaps the term is "black leaders" - are up in arms over Ghettopoly, a ghetto take-off on "Monopoly" (duh):

Black leaders are outraged over a new board game called "Ghettopoly" that has "playas" acting like pimps and game cards reading, "You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50."

Black clergymen say the game, the brainchild of a Pennsylvania man, should be banned, and have called for a boycott of Urban Outfitters unless the company stops selling Ghettopoly in its chain of clothing stores.

Urban Outfitters has not publicly commented on the issue, and did not return a call seeking comment on Wednesday.

James, from the Infinite Monkeys - who, sources tell us, is black - has the solution to the problem:

"In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, everybody acts as if they're in a rap video. It's beyond caricature, man. It's satire. It's so satire, it's beyond satire, and into something deep and meaningful: and that is, the truth.

And the truth is Black Leaders , you're barking up the wrong tree. Like you always do, Black Leaders. Reflexively lashing out at Urban Outfitters, when they're not even the purveyors of the 'ghetto thing'...Black people have turned making stereotypical images of themselves into a multi-million dollar industry.

And you're complaining about a board game. See, that just shows how out of touch you are, Black Leaders. I didn't vote for you guys and you guys don't speak for me, and to be frank, I don't particularly like you either.

Anyhow, the whole point of this post, I've decided to take inspiration from my home state of California, and I'm starting a recall of Black Leaders. All of them.

The way we'll do it is, we'll start with Jesse Jackson and move our way down. There'll be some I'll keep around. Like the Rev. Al Sharpton. Because, y'know, he serves my purposes. But believe me, after the Democratic Primaries are over, he's a goner too."

I doubt I can vote, but I'm here to lend moral support.

I've always wondered - how do black Americans feel about their self-appointed leadership? I know that locally, not every Afro-American is thrilled about being "represented" on the state level by the likes of Randy Staten and Spike Moss.

Anyone?

Hatred - I can write

Hatred - I can write for days over the course of a year and a half about Democratic hatred of the President.

And then Ott writes this and I hardly need say more.

We All Scream for Ice

We All Scream for Ice Cream - Star Spangled Ice Cream - "ice cream with a conservative flavor" - is now on the market, selling ice cream via the 'net.

That’s good news for gourmet ice cream fans, and for Gun Owners of America – because from now straight through to the start of the 2004 Fall hunting season, Star Spangled Ice Cream will donate $1 to the educational work of the Gun Owners Foundation Gun Safety Project every time a quart of our politically incorrect flavor GUN NUT is purchased over the Internet....GUN NUT is not endorsed by some of America’s biggest celebrities -- Barbara Streisand, Rosie O’Donnell, Al Franken, Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin and the Dixie Chicks, to name just a few, have enthusiastically avoided buying our ice cream.

Tempting. Very tempting.

Flavors available:

• Gun Nut (Coconut Ice Cream with Almonds & Chocolate Chips)
  
• I Hate The French VANILLA (Real American Vanilla, NOT French Vanilla)
  
• Iraqi Road (Chocolate with Roasted Almonds and Rich Chocolate Chips)
  
• Nutty Environmentalist (Rich Buttery Ice Cream with Roasted Pecans)
  
• Smaller Govern-MINT (White Mint with Rich Chocolate Chips)

After I get a job, I'm going to order some. Maybe in time for my housewarming/Loya Jirga.

(Via Spoons)

Intelligence Revisited - Austin Bay

Intelligence Revisited - Austin Bay with a fascinating piece - the second of three parts - on the history of intelligence in Iraq. It covers successes and failures, and the majority in between.:

One of many fascinating excerpts:

"A major mistake occurred in 1996. Clinton directed CIA to back anti-Saddam dissidents. In August 1996, however, Saddam's forces struck northern Iraq and killed Iraqi dissidents. The United States failed to stop the assault, and the policy of 'protecting Kurds' was damaged. Some dissidents called it a 'little Budapest,' alluding to the U.S. failure to support the Hungarian revolt against the USSR in 1956. Many nations concluded the United States wasn't serious about toppling Saddam. The 1991 coalition, already frayed, unraveled some more.

Yet Clinton's 1998 Desert Fox air campaign, unleashed after U.N. inspectors withdrew, now appears to have severely damaged Saddam's weapons programs. But in 1998, the degree of damage was tough to ascertain. Without U.N. inspectors, Iraqi defector allegations and electronic intelligence became 'best' sources. Both indicated Saddam pursued illegal programs. Defectors, however, have their own agendas."

Worth a read.

(Via Instapundit)

Follow The Bouncing BCCI -

Follow The Bouncing BCCI - The Berg Consumer Confidence Index took a quick tumble yesterday on news that the interview last Friday had come a cropper.

Although things were still basically healthy (on the strength of two current contracting jobs), the BCCI (like the stock market itself) is all about psychology. So while I headed to yet another interview yesterday, all the ingredients were there for a major drop:

• The position had been sold to me as being not quite what I want to do - more like what I did seven or eight years ago.
• The money, while not bad (especially after nine months of un/underemployment, isn't stellar.
• I got to the interview realizing I had no money for parking, and had to wing it in the middle of the Warehouse District.
• It was explained to me as a "part-time" gig - paying enough to keep me off enemployment and giving me time to work other gigs, which is fine, but tiring.
• I was very tired, having been up working most of the previous night on one of my other projects.

So it didn't seem all that promising.

Boy, was I wrong. Cool interview, great time, and it could turn into an amazingly cool job - one of those "Jack of all trades" things I love so much. And it's in the Warehouse District of downtown Minnepolis, which after nearly ten years of almost invariably commuting to Eden Prairie or Chanhassen or Minnetonka or Maple Grove (from my place in St. Paul), is almost dreamy.

So the BCCI could spike one way or the other fairly shortly here.

Quagmire - Elder from Fraters

Quagmire - Elder from Fraters Libertas, gritting his teeth and talking through PTSD thick enough to choke a water buffalo, on another quagmire, long ago:

"Somehow I ended up with one of my friends and we pathetically slogged our way through snow drifts looking not unlike the Grand Armee retreating from Moscow. Soon we were crossing over the same English Coulee that had demarcated our earlier triumphs. This time there was two instead of two hundred. And we weren't on a bridge but on the barely frozen ice of the stream. Barely frozen enough so that we each fell through a number of times before reaching the other side. "

Read it all.

If only they'd planned to win the peace.

And by the way - nobody did snowballs better than Watson Hall at Jamestown College.

Take that, Kroeze Hall! Eat hot...er...snow.

Crazy Day - The BCCI

Crazy Day - The BCCI has been bouncing around like Pee Wee Herman after a couple of Vente Frapuccinos.

Decent, although not show-stopping, interview last Friday for a six-month contract gig. Not supposed to find anything out until "later this weeK", says the vendor. That same day, landed a little 20 to 40 hour gig (with a company that I interviewed with last May, and could be considered a "tryout" for a fulltime gig, although there are no guarantees). Then, late yesterday, I got a call for another of those little one-week contracts that paid my bills so handily through the summer. Plus an interview for an interesting-looking part-time job that'll pay my "must-pay" bills (or hugely supplement the income from the above contracts) for the next 3-5 months, if I get it.

So I'm as busy as a ferret on Peruvian flake right now - not unusual, except I'm being paid for it, which is a nice switch.

Blogging may be a tad light until tonight.

No Bias Here. Move Along

No Bias Here. Move Along - So read this paragraph:

"A campaign that began with the late-night comedian may be notarized by him. And so we've had our little revolution and the new emperor is Der Gropenfuhrer, which, in Austrian, means:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger."

So where did that graf, with all its atrocious invocation of naziism, come from? Some extremist lefty blog? Indymedia? MoveOn?

No, silly. It was Steve Lopez in the LA Times.

You Know Who You Are

You Know Who You Are - You belong to a political party that claims to represent the average American - but when they vote for Republicans anyway, you declare that most Average Americans are morons.

You believe the media are really, really conservative.

You believe that Bush was "selected, not elected", and that if only [insert conspiratorial Republican-dominated body] not interfered with the recount, Bush would have won.

Voters, media, institutions - you think the whole world is a conspiracy of dunces, who are thwarting your righteous mission to create a better world!

And it's your opponents who are paranoid.

Piled Higher and Deeper -

Piled Higher and Deeper - The Coalition of Black Churches has succeeded in scuppering the nomination of David Jennings for Minneapolis School Superintendant.

The group scuttles away from the "race card" label - and it's probably fair that they do.

But their real reason is almost as bad:

"Terrill said that in the end, the Jennings controversy was not so much about race as it was process and qualifications. Jennings does not have a Ph.D., and search guidelines say superintendent candidates should have one.

'I'm sick and tired of people trying to make this a race issue,' Terrill said. 'It's not. If they put forth a black candidate that was as unqualified as Mr. Jennings, we'd have the same problem. But if they put forth a white candidate with a Ph.D. who is qualified, we will support that candidate.'"

Jennings "only" has a Bachelors' Degree. That seems to be a sticking point.

Personally? I think the Minneapolis district in particular would be improved if they found a solid administrator who was capable of making tough decisions and facing down the most rapacious demands of the teachers union, degree be damned. Remember - the PhD they're talking about is Education. Read a few episodes of the St. Cloud Scholars for background; the more PhDs in Education I meet, the less qualified I think they are to teach, much less run school districts.

Move Out - Classically Liberal

Move Out - Classically Liberal took off on a point I started, analysing the history and hypocrisy of "MoveOn".

The piece starts with a fascinating study in two-facedness - and ends with this:

So, "voters" see the need for change. But not MoveOn -- no, they just spent $500,000 in support of the status quo in Sacramento. This is the most banal, insipid response I can possibly imagine. "We lost the battle, but we still hate Bush, so we haven't lost the war." Makes me wonder if MoveOn, blinkered from reality in their popular opinion distortion field of the Bay Area (see previous election map of California), can muster any support for its platform beyond the normal partisan Bush haters. This gets back to the point Dan Weintraub made in his blog about the recall -- there is something significantly wrong with the state of affairs in California -- and the Democrats still don't get it.

Give it a look...

Couldn't Have Said It Better

Couldn't Have Said It Better - I keep going back and forth about commenting, even a little, on the opinions found on left-leaning blogs.

On the one hand, it only encourages them.

On the other hand, there is a serious current of contempt for the voter (or at least the voter that forsakes the One True Faith Party) that bubbles out of the "moonbat" realm and infects Democrat thought at large.

I noted the comments of my "favorite" lefty blog, "Hesiod", earlier today in my rundown of leftblog reactions to the Schwarzenegger landslide. Apparenlty, "Hesiod" added a further, even more churlish and snide comment.

Jay Reding covers it. Give it a read.

So There's Hope - At

So There's Hope - At least in theory...

Take Toys. Leave Sandbox. Go

Take Toys. Leave Sandbox. Go Home - Arnold won, and won big.

The Democrat party in California has been given a rebuke that may, possibly, foreshadow the one the party is going to get nationwide in 13 months.

The left of the blogosphere is not happy about it.

I went through some of the foremost, and other, lefty blogs to survey opinion.

"The Daily Kos" says:

In the end, it doesn't look like it was close. Arnold is the new governor of California.

For six months.

Puh-leeze. Stephen Green had the best response to this:

Will there be a recall petition against Arnold? You bet there will be, just as there has been against every California governor since, approximately, the Mesozoic Era.

And yet this is the first time it's worked. If nothing else, voter fatigue will scuttle any further such effort going anywhere beyond Democrat die-hards.

But the die-hards are out there. Kos prints an email from a correspondent that signifies the denial some of these people are in - my comments are inset in italics:

Democracy is a funny business. [Those peasants sure pull some fast ones when you aren't watching them, don't they?]

A robust majority of likely voters disapproves of Gray Davis. Still, Davis would probably win a head-to-head contest against Schwarzenegger, Bustamante, McClintock or anybody else on the ballot today.

How can this be? [Read: "I'll do anything to avoid facing the facts facing me right now]

...Davis probably prevails in a Condorcet election, or an IRV election, or a "Cajun primary" election, or a traditional party-nominee general election. Davis probably wins any election except today's election. [Read: I'm going to toss out unfalseable, unproveable hypotheses and wonky fantasies until I feel better]

Understandable from a site run by a guy who works for Howard Dean ,perhaps.

We move on. Calpundit's Kevin Drum starts out reasonably enough, taking on Kos' whine:

With all due respect, can I beg everyone to please not go there? Trying to mount a recall against Arnold would be bad for California, bad for the Democratic party, and only distracts attention from the bigger task at hand: electing a Democrat to the White House in 2004. It's time for the circus to stop.

This is one time that we should accept defeat graciously [That's Calpundit's strike-out] and turn our attention to more important things. Remember, anger is only useful if it's focused and channeled on something worthwhile, and recalling Arnold isn't it. Let's not blow it.

So far so good. But read the comments - it's scary. There are people out there who believe with a straight if beet-red face that:

• Bush dragged Gore to court in 2000
• Gore won the recount - every recount
• That Republicans play dirty tricks - but Begala and Carville were boy scouts.

And of course, through it all - fear, paranoia and hatred of George W. Bush, along with a creeping realization that yesterday's election was a major shot in Bush's arm. Which it was.

Howard Dean's campaign blog is, as Hewitt says, in deep denial:

"Today's recall election in California was not about Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. This recall was about the frustration so many people are feeling about the way things are going. All across America, George Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy are undermining state budgets, causing cutbacks in services and increases in local property taxes. Were recalls held in every state, it's quite possible that 50 governors would find themselves paying the price for one president's ruinous national economic policies.

Right. That's why Californians not only elected a governor that largely mirrors Bush's "ruinous" policies, but voted him in by a landslide.

Josh Marshall is apparently drowning his sorrows, and hasn't posted on the results as of 2:30AM.

Atrios (once again - liberals, what is with the pretentious noms de plume?) asks the same question we Republicans were asking on election night, 2000:

Hey, maybe he won, but the media could have waited...you know.. until F*****G ONE PERCENT OF OFFICIAL RETURNS WERE IN. Just to pretend.

...jokes aside, this is really serious. I mean, they may truly have enough information to make this call - I have no idea - but I have *never* seen an election called when zero percent of the returns were in, particularly an election with so many absentee ballots. What the hell?

I'm not in denial here, I'm quite ready to accept the Gubernator, but this is about responsibility in an issue that the media spent years agonizing about.

The comments on Atrios are as manically-depressed as on CalPundit's site.

"Hesiod"- a man who veritably defines "moonbat" - is just plain above it all:

:COUNTERSPIN CHALLENGE: OK. I'm willing to be convinced that the voters of California are not the biggest idiots on Earth. If you voted for Arnold, post a comment on this thread. Explain why you did. And don't tell me things like "Gray Davis and Bustamante sucked."

Explain why they "sucked," and then tell me how Arnold is going to be BETTER. Please be specific on that last point, by the way.

Back up all your claims with quotes or links, if possible.

And...please no pie in the sky baloney about how Arnold will "shake up the system," or "get things done" in Sacramento. "Reasons" like those PROVE my theory that the voters are a bunch of ignorant knuckleheads.

"Davis Lost because Voters are Stupid!" Please, Democrats - run with this!

Oliver Willis' post on the subject combined small doses of denial ("Arnold is a movie star. End of story.") with some common sense:

The California GOP is Still Lost In The Woods
They needed Arnold Schwarzenegger and a gubernatorial recall to win a major seat in the state. Unless Arnold works a miracle, the next governor will be a Democrat and the state will remain firmly in the hands of the Democrats, alleged 60% GOP notwithstanding. President Bush, however, is advised to spend as much money in that state as possible.

Which was on the plan, I'm sure, in any case. The key point being, it might even be worth spending; California, along with Minnesota, could conceivably generate some serious votes, even electoral ones, for Bush next year (Minnesota being rather more likely, which is why yesterday's election was so interesting.

Finally, the barely literate fellow behind "Rushlimbaughtomy":

Out of the frying pan and into the fire: Grey Davis was by all accounts a miserable governor, but the major problems in the State of California were not his doing. Enron was more responsible for the problems than Davis, but the people of California were fooled by Dan Issa, Bill Simon, Pete Wilson, and the remainder of the Republican corporate machine into the belief that their candidate for Governor would be the 'answer' to the problems caused by Enron.

The disconnect between reality and imagination in California is apparent in the election of Governor Gropenator. Style won over substance - myth turmped truth - money & corporatism bought people.

I'm not sure which is funnier - reading another "If Californians were as smart as us..." screed, or reading it from this particular writer, whose dalliance with literacy would seem to be occasional and unsuccessful (read the blog, you be the judge).

So. This is what we face over the next 13 months. Take a deep breath...

UPDATE: Reynolds quotes Weintraub.

Davis in his concession speech showed class, congratulating Schwarzenegger and promising to cooperate with him during the transition. But his supporters were angry and nasty and in no mood to concede anything.

I understand the bitterness, but I’m disturbed by its depth. Several of the Democrats I spoke to were in strong denial about the message sent by the voters, the message being that they, and Davis, have been poor stewards of state government. They see this is an isolated event, a venting, that will quickly pass while they fight to maintain everything they have done the past five years. My gut tells me they are wrong, that there is something deeper here, a desire for fundamental change in the way the state does business and in the way politics works, or doesn’t work, in California.

Although he's linking to a great piece by Weintraub, Reynolds has the money quote:

I suspect that national Democrats will respond to this by becoming still more bitter and shrill, that being the response that we've seen to other reverses lately, which won't help things either. But maybe not.

Well, the response from the blogging left does nothing to shake that idea.

So far.

Words Fall Short - There

Words Fall Short - There is nothing I can add to this.

Read the names. Two virtually complete families are on the list.

Note to Nancy Pelosi: Did any of these people "know that the threat was imminent?"

Move Back - The Kitchen

Move Back - The Kitchen Cabinet picks up on something that'd been rattling around my head since my last URGENT BULLETIN from moveon.org:

"I do find it hilariously ironic that the group moveon.org is targeting Schwarzenegger: 'the truth about his character is only now starting to get out. We have just a few days to make sure everyone in California knows who this man is.'

This is the group whose very name was based on the notion that allegations about Bill Clinton's appalling treatment of women were a waste of time from which we should all 'move on.' Guess it all depends on which party is doing the pawing and groping."

Guess what! We've "moved on!".

Hope they're satisfied!

With Balance Like This... -

With Balance Like This... - The slow slog toward balanced coverage in Iraq seems to be gathering the strangest bedfellows. Even the Guardian's Julie Flint, famous for her hilariously-slanted reporting before the war, is getting on board.

Oh, it starts rough::

Half a century ago, in a blistering denunciation of the Korean war, the British war correspondent Reginald Thompson wrote: 'It was clear that there was something profoundly disturbing about this campaign and something profoundly disturbing about its commander-in-chief.' Thompson's words could equally well apply to the US-led campaign in Iraq and its commander-in-chief: George W. Bush, head of a cabal that seeks to install a client regime in Iraq as a first step to bringing the region under American-Israeli control.

But she gradually cuts to the chase:

But there is something disturbing, too, about the way that post-war Iraq has been portrayed. Visceral distrust of Bush/Blair has created a disregard both for fact and for the victims of Saddam. Arab commentators have had no shame in urging Iraqis, exhausted by three wars and more than a decade of sanctions, to launch a new war 'of liberation' against their liberators. Western commentators have luxuriated in the setbacks of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), as if wishing failure upon it - and by extension, the Iraqi people.

Disaster has been prophesied, self-servingly, at every turn: the war would be long (it wasn't, and most Iraqis had no direct experience of it); tens of thousands would die in the battle for Baghdad (they didn't); there would be a fully-fledged humanitarian disaster (there wasn't). Now, we are told, Iraqis fear the very real prospect of civil war. Not those I know. Not yet. Nor those polled in Baghdad last month by Gallup: 62 per cent thought getting rid of Saddam was worth the suffering they've endured; 67 per cent thought their lives will be better five years from now.

The article is interesting -partly for its facts, partly for the gyrations Flint goes through to fit snippets of her leftist views into the piece at the most incongruous turns.

Worth a a read, anyway.

False Sanctimony - A group

False Sanctimony - A group of liberal churches has filed suit against the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, claiming the law violates freedom of religion and property rights, as well as the constitutional process.

The suit - filed by former US attorney and former would-be Senatorial candidate David Lillehaug, a parishioner at the church that has led at least one legal action against the MPPA - probably has a slim chance of succeeding:

"David Gross, a former Minneapolis city attorney now in private practice and a member of Concealed Carry Reform Now, said he doubts that the argument will succeed in court.

'They [gun law opponents] may not like it . . . but it is my understanding that the Minnesota House was well aware of the requirements of the Minnesota Supreme Court,' he said. 'They [House members] were following the recipe that the [court] has laid down.'

Gross also said he doubts that the religious groups can prove the new gun law deprives them of such a significant use of their property as to be found unconstitutional.

'The state, in those same parking lots, now regulates the minimum parking space size and [provision] of handicapped parking,' he said."

The local anti-concealed carry sites repealconceal.org and Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota haven't addressed these suits yet.

Maybe that's a good idea.

Tomorrow - I'll be doing

Tomorrow - I'll be doing a post-recall survey and analysis of leading leftblogs.

I'll be trying to gauge the overall tone of their proceedings - about which I will attempt no prediction whatsoever.

Moron Today - Er, I

Moron Today - Er, I mean, "Moore on Today".

The lying liar author and filmmaker appeared on the Today show a few minutes ago, with Lester Holt, pimping his new book, Icky Poopyhead Republicans Dude, Where's My Country?". First the surprise - Holt threw Moore a couple hardballs, or at least a few questions that had more stuff than the usual agent-friendly pap that greets Moore on these press tours.

Moore set the tone right off the bat:

"This is all about regime change on Pennsylvania Avenue...I have such faith in the American people that once they realize that they been lied to - people dont' like being lied to - when they find out they've been lied to, it won't be about Republicans or Democrats any more.

So unlike last fall, when the Republican pretty much had their way, and Moore was in a petulant tizzy about it.

Holt asked Moore how he felt, given the sometimes hostile receptions he's gotten lately: "I don't consider that. I just speak my mind, even when it's uncomfortable for me, even if I'm not in the majority at the moment". He contradicts himself later, of course - but we'll get to that later.

Holt tripped onto my favorite topic - the "climate of hatred" that Moore is creating and exploiting - in this case, hatred of George Bush.

"It's not hatred - I don't think he wanted this job to begin with. He's there to finish his Dad's unfinished business, which is to enact the the policies, and put the people there, who make sure the rich get away with as much money as they can."

All starndard-issue cant so far - the kind of stuff you can hear at any coffee shop in walking distance of Macalester College..

But then Moore swerved off the deep end.

Holt: "Let's talk about the war on terror."

Moore: "We being manipulated with fear... There is no terrorist threat to this country."

Holt: [looking mildly dumbfounded, but quick on the uptake]: "Well, there's a body of evidence that suggests you're wrong - about two miles from here."

Moore: "It was a horrible tragedy, but there's been no threat since then."

Holt: "Well, does that mean we're winning the war on terror?"

Moore: "There will always be bad people. [Moore cited an incident in Michigan in the 1920's where a man blew up a school, killing nearly 40 students and teachers - as if a madman with dynamite is the same as hijacking planes and ramming them into buildings]. They'll always be there. But we can't undo our constitution because there's an occasional horrible incident..every time you use 9/11 that way, you dishonor the dead"

Words fail me. Draw your own conclusions.

Holt continued:

Holt: "Are you out of touch with the way America is thinking today?"

Moore: "No, the right is way out of touch".

Holt: [trying to get an answer] "OK, but are you out of touch on the left?"

Moore: "Look, if you go down the list of issues [which Moore proceeds to do, reading off a list of un-checkable statistics on the American peoples' approval for various liberal pet causes], the American people are very liberal. I'm the mainstream!...Americans just don't like liberal leaders. The look at Gray Davis and go Jeez, is this the best we can do? The majority of Amercans are liberal!"

So, is Moore really in the majority, or is he actually just speaking his mind no matter what?

It's going to be a crazy year.

Education Standards - I was

Education Standards - I was going to write a long screed about the new Social Studies standards, including the Strib's editorial yesterday by Jim Davnie - but King from SCSU Scholars beat me to it.

I'm going to add more about this in the future, of course - until I can afford private school, I certainly do have opinions about what they teach and why - but until then, the King sorta sums it up.

Prediction - The recall will

Prediction - The recall will pass, albeit not by a complete landslide.

McClintock's vote, like Tim Penny's in the 2002 Minnesota gubernatorial race, will come in about half of where it polled two weeks ago, as people opt to make their vote count.

Arnold will win. I think Hewitt was right - it'll be an eight-point margin.

More Things The Left Hasn't

More Things The Left Hasn't Told You... - ...about the Kay Report, courtesy Tim Blair:

David Kay’s interim report on Iraq’s concealed WMD was filed after only about 8% of weapons storage areas was searched (which is much less, obviously, than 8% of total areas within Iraq where evidence of WMD may be hidden).

8% of storage areas.

The search is apparently far from over, and the "No WMDs Yet" answer apparently far from definitive.

Blair continues:

As Kay tells Fox News, “This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.”

But not on the major networks.

Bias Alert Redux - Wishful

Bias Alert Redux - Wishful Thinking? - This story appears on Yahoo news:

"California's recall election looked too close to call hours from the start of polling on Tuesday in a race for governor in which Republican muscleman-turned-Hollywood-film-star Arnold Schwarzenegger sought to unseat technocrat Democrat Gray Davis.

Too close to call?

The Stanford-Hoover/KnowledgeNetworks poll says:

The latest findings are based on interviews conducted between Sept. 26 and Oct. 4 with likely voters in California. The survey was done by Knowledge Networks (http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp) in collaboration with the Stanford-Hoover group.

The poll showed continued support for the recall with approximately 59 percent still in favor of the recall and support for Schwarzenegger increasingly slightly to 43 percent.

Too close to call?

Sure - anything can happen. Elections are unpredictable. But I've seen nothing that could rationally, empirically indicate that the election is "too close to call". The Yahoo story shows us nothing to change that.

The Yahoo story continues:

What began as a Republican-led protest vote over Davis' handling of the state's economy and recent energy crisis has become a referendum on Schwarzenegger, especially his alleged groping and sexual harassment of women."

Has it?

I'd suspect that for the majority who'd seem to be getting ready to vote to recall Davis, it's about anything but "alleged groping".

Just a hunch, of course. We'll know tomorrow.

Bias In Action - The

Bias In Action - The LATimes had been working on its dirt bomb against Schwarzenegger for weeks, says the LA Weekly - under intense security:

According to a well-informed source at the paper, the story, which hit the political world with a thunderclap, never appeared on the paper’s internal or external publication schedules. Indeed, project editor Joel Sappell and the three reporters working on what the Times has described as a seven-week-long investigative project were very tight-lipped about both the scheduling of the piece and its contents. They discussed the story only with the paper’s senior editors. Although the story did not appear on the schedule, it was reportedly placed in the "write basket," in which other Times editors and reporters can look at upcoming pieces, after hours last Wednesday night, just a few hours before it appeared on the Times Web site.

So the paper's working a big scoop, and it's keeping it under wraps.

No big deal, right?

Except...:

Even with utmost secrecy surrounding the piece, senior Democratic strategists with long-standing ties to Davis knew not only when the story was coming but also the particulars of what was in it. These strategists felt that the story held the possibility of tipping the election away from Schwarzenegger and of defeating the governor’s recall.

But the press isn't biased.

The other day, when talking about Maureen Dowd's hatchet job in the Sunday paper, I wondered out loud if there weren't a source in California that told her to have the goods ready to roll in time for the weekend. Doesn't seem so implausible to me right now.

Limbaugh and the New Media

Limbaugh and the New Media - The Rolling Stones "jumped the shark", as far as I'm concerned, when their lifestyles became a bigger story than their music. It was subtle, but somewhere between 1975 and 1980 the Stones became more important as celebrities than as musicians. In short - they became just too plain big.

It could be said the New York Times jumped the shark this past year - although we'll need some years to know for sure. Still the signs are ominous for the standard bearer of the old media. Over the weekend, Powerline on the the NYTimes's having to correct its obit of Edward Said:

"Earlier this week the Times belatedly admitted having been suckered once again--how many times is that?--by the bald-faced lies of a leftist:

'An obituary on Friday about Edward W. Said, the Columbia University literary scholar and advocate of a Palestinian state, misidentified the city that was his childhood home and misstated the date of Jerusalem's partition into Jewish and Arab areas. Although Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem, in 1935, his family's home was Cairo; they did not move from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was partitioned in 1949, not 1947.'"

The NYTimes has been caught in a lot of these things since the emergence of the blogosphere: Andrew Sullivan's famed dissections of Paul Krugman (who's become ever-more desperate and irrelevant since then); the blog-centered underground of samizdat news coming from Iraq before the war, and now Iran; the toppling of Jayson Blair (and then Howell Raines), which started among the blogs; the gradual growth in the "US Successes in Iraq" story in the past month or so. I think a case can be made that all are comments on the growing power - and credibility - of the blogosphere.

And who are the last people to be in on the story? The major media. The Times.

I bring this up because of the Rush Limbaugh flap. You've all heard the story; the muted head-shakings of Limbaugh's conservative base, the gleeful whooping of his detractors who are happy for no reason more than they sense a "payback" for the Clinton years, and suddenly feel there's genuine moral equivalence, although they're wrong. Lileks said it well:

my gut says guilty. I am also sure that upon hearing the news, Al Franken spronged sufficient wood to knock the table over. In terms of his credibility with his followers, I think Rush just had his Aimee Semple McPherson moment. The faithful will be divided. Short term? His 4Q ratings book is going to rock.

I have had deeply mixed feelings about Limbaugh for fifteen years. His version of conservatism is one sired by convenience as much as by Hayek and Goldwater. And his entry into the syndie market helped screw my nascent talk radio career in the late eighties, when a lot of stations that used to hire 24 year old kids to work their mid-day shifts suddently discovered they could get Limbaugh, a national show, for free via satellite. In a matter of a few years, Limbaugh slashed the guts out of the market for entry-level talk show hosts.

And yet, beyond the sheer joy of watching the apoplexy Limbaugh gives to fundamentalist liberals, Limbaugh's important for a couple of reasons; he's a transitional figure for the new media, and he might be the first of the transitional figures to flame out.

Before Limbaugh, talk radio was:

• Controlled by the same people that controlled the major networks; ABC TalkRadio, NBC TalkNet, Mutual
• Really dull
• dominated a hierarchical system where scores of local hosts tried to scramble their way up the organization to a job with one of the big networks - who were the only real gateways to wider audiences.

Limbaugh changed that, ushering in the private syndication deals that dominate so much of radio today. The talk radio market started democratizingitself overnight.

There are parallels.

At the dawn of the computer era, a few large corporations and universities dominated the computer industry. They had to - nobody else could build or program them! And so from the late 1940's to the late 1970's, companies like IBM, Univac, Sperry, Burroughs and other giants built all the computers, big mainframe behemoths that needed to have buildings (or at least large complexes of rooms) built around them, and cost an arm and a leg to run. The big companies lived large - and developed the bad habits of the people who did that sort of thing.

Then, in the early eighties, the personal computer began distributing the power of the big mainframe computer - and eventually, the network that had linked the big computers together. It revolutionized the way data was gathered, refined and processed.

Maybe the media are starting to see the same thing; for centuries, the press was free, as long as you owned a press, or a transmitter or network of broadcast operations. And big media developed all the habits - institutionalized arrogance, inbred excess - that had plagued Big Computing, Big Steel, Big Mining before all were overtaken by their more agile competitors. Watching Dan Rather reading the evening news reminds me of watching Keith Richard, bloated and wacked out of his mind, being led out of a courtroom after one of his many drug trials, awash in dissipation, teetering on the brink between relevance and the Classic Rock circuit. It's the look of a person (or in this case an industry) at its peak, with noplace to go but down.

Today, the internet makes everyone a publisher. A small, lean, frazzled publisher to be sure, but a good blogger can put out an excellent niche product, the same way a good open-source programmer can make a contribution on their home PC far out of proportion to what his uncle could have done from his workstation hooked up to a network mainframe 30 years ago.

So Limbaugh made the institution of the creaky old talk networks obsolete - and took a big gouge out of the edge of the liberal media oligarchy they belonged to. In doing so, he became an institution himself, with all the entropy that goes along with becoming a monolith in a competitive society.

Perhaps something growing among us today will one day send the big, top-down syndication system the way of the dinosaurs, too. Will it be the blogosphere? Smaller, more regional syndication deals? Internet radio?

Limbaugh's alleged drug habit is a personal tragedy - and in a larger sense, maybe a sign that the world of the media (or the alternative media) is evolving.

Krugman Alert - A look

Krugman Alert - A look in Sunday's Book events calendar in the Strib shows that Paul Krugman will be appearing at Ruminator Books in St. Paul this Saturday night.

This begs the question - anyone want to put in an appearance?

Regular reader SS writes:

perhaps Mr. Krugman could get a "warm" reception from the Northern Alliance. What better time to come together? If he's actually reading, or
even talking about his book, you could do the "hold a newspaper up in front of you" thing, or the less obvious "turn your back to the speaker" thing. Then there's always the "golf clap" or to hiss and boo at him and throw tomatoes at him as he is doing his Bush-bashing shtick. Maybe he's just in to sell books and sign them for the prematurely grey haired Birkenstock wearing Volkswagen driving intellectual crowd, and not to talk, but I bet you could bait him into a shouting match very quickly.

Hm. No tomatoes, thanks - but some sort of appearance might be in order.

So I'll put this out to my fellow muj in the Northern Alliance - any ideas? Could be a fun excuse for that Loya Jirga we've been batting about...

Arnold Speaks - Hewitt puts

Arnold Speaks - Hewitt puts out the audio file of his interview with Schwarzenegger. [click here for the link to the audio file]

Interesting stuff.

Oy Vey - Three weeks

Oy Vey - Three weeks ago, I installed a hit counter (at the bottom of the Archives list in the right margin).

Sometime in the next hour, it'll pass 10,000 visitors. Yow. I had no idea.

Thanks, everyone!

Cry Quagmire! - Didn't the

Cry Quagmire! - Didn't the Administration plan for this?

Riots shake Minnesota State University, Mankato: "James Franklin, Mankato's public safety director, called the disturbance 'almost a classic textbook case' of 'riotous behavior.'

He said it lasted about five hours, from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., and Mankato police were unable to contain it early on. Franklin cited the heavy drinking as the primary cause.

University President Richard Davenport told a news conference on Sunday afternoon that some students might be suspended, but Denise Schlake, vice president of student affairs, said some might face expulsion.

Some witnesses accused police of taking too long to act forcefully, while others accused police of overreacting.

'We had to use force only and when the situation was totally out of control,' Franklin said, adding that police donned riot gear only after the crowds got out of hand and fires had been set in the street.

Most of the arrests were in connection with disorderly conduct and obstructing legal process, but one person was arrested on a charge of third-degree riot. Authorities released no names but said only 20 of the 45 people arrested were students at Minnesota State University, Mankato, formerly known as Mankato State."

It's clear that the state's policy in Mankato is unravelling before our eyes. We need to bring in the international community, since our government is clearly incapable of maintaining order in Mankato.

The left warned you!

What Country Is That In?

What Country Is That In? - South Dakota Politics points out an example what what is either bad fact-checking or coastal myopia about "flyover land":

"Firing [Governor Davis] would be a remarkable step, a notion that has been lost in the hurly-burly of the headlong campaign. California has never recalled a governor. In the history of the United States, it has happened only once, in 1921 in South Dakota."

SoDakPol points out, as I did last week - it was North Dakota.

Note to the LA Times; one is north of the other. The other is to the south. And for whatever reason, despite their location and similar spelling, they are indeed two states separated by a common name.

Man Wrenches Arm Patting Self

Man Wrenches Arm Patting Self On Back - A few weeks ago, I posited a theory, which I called "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary". It said:

No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications for the war in Iraq [WMDs, defiance of UN resolutions, Human Rights, links to terror] into an argument at a time. To do so would introduce a context in which their thesis can not survive".

Looking back, I thought too narrowly. If you look at foreign policy in a broad sense, my theory still holds up.

The left often goes through intense gyrations to rationalize their history on foreign policy. They have to - their history for the last forty years has been atrocious:

• Kennedy turned Vietnam from a special forces operation into a full-scale conventional war, largely to draw attention away from the debacle at the Bay of Pigs
• At the same time, his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis was, in the long view, a bobble. He gave away too much to the Russians, for very little in return (although sympathetic commentators, enamoured with Camelot, didn't go into much of that at the time, or since).
• LBJ's handling of Vietnam was a disaster on every front: Militarily (drawing down forces in Europe rather than call out the Guard, incompetent micromanagement of operational, even tactical matters) as well as politically.
• The left's hypocritical assaults on "right wing" dictators, while simultaneously coddling and ignoring the sins of vastly more murderous tyrants of the left (which continues today)
• Carter's mangling of policy in Central America and the Middle East
• Carter's neglect of the military (although many useful reforms that helped lead to our current military strength started on Carter's watch)
• The left's complete collapse on dealing with the USSR during the Reagan administration
• Clinton's poll-prodded pusillanimity in dealing with terrorists, from Mogadishu to letting Bin Laden slip away twice, to gundecking the investigations of the first WTC bombing and the terrorist ties to the Oklahoma City bombing
• The Clinton Administration's zeal for military action where there were no apparent US interests.

If you leave all of that out, the Democrats are historically just fine on foreign policy.

I mention this because the left seems to have found a way to pat themselves on the back in reading (VERY carefully) the Kay Report. Jeff Fecke cites this entry on Gregg Easterbrook's blog on the New Republic Online.

Easterbrook begins:

Here's what everyone has missed about the David Kay report of Iraqi arms: Kay finds the Iraqi atomic weapons program, always by far the greatest threat posed by Saddam, stopped in 1998. (See his statement here; I am directing you to the CIA website!) But what happened in 1998? The "Desert Fox" joint United States-British strike on Iraq. If Desert Fox stopped the Iraqi atomic weapons program, this means the Clinton administration's Saddam containment policy was far more effective than anyone, even Bill Clinton, previously realized.

While this is a plausible explanation, Easterbrook sells it as a definite cause-effect result - which the Kay Report does not.

Easterbrook also lends evidence to my theory; his point can only stand if you ignore the rest of the Kay report.

Easterbrook continues:

Recall that in 1998, Saddam had thrown out U.N. inspectors. The United States and United Kingdom threatened airstrikes; most other Western nations waffled or counseled appeasement. In December 1998, U.S. and British aircraft bombed Iraq weapons facilities for several nights, while 400 cruise missiles were fired into Iraq. At the time, many conservatives and Republicans denounced the strikes as pinpricks and called for much more dramatic action. Clinton's decision to do everything from the air was derided as liberal fear of casualties.

Yet now it appears Desert Fox was a resounding success. Among the Iraq facilities pounded in 1998 was the Al Zaafaraniyah atomic weapons and missile complex. Al Zaafaraniyah was not bombed during the 1991 Gulf war, because the United States did not then know much about it. U.N. inspectors found the facility in the aftermath of the 1991 war; in 1993, Clinton ordered Al Zaafaraniyah hit with cruise missiles to stop Iraq atomic-weapons research; in 1998, Al Zaafaraniyah was reduced to rubble.

So far, so good. And in fact, as far as it goes, I'll say the unthinkable: Kudos, Clinton. You did good...as far as it went.

But then you have to read the rest of the Kay report.

1998 seemed to be a tipping point on another front: from that point on, the Iraqi program went from being a large, static, industrial program to a knowledge program - what people in the manufacturing industry would call a "Just In Time" operation, where rather than building large, vulnerable stockpiles of weapons in big, static factories, the Iraqis opted instead to switch to the ability to build WMDs in small, dispersed facilities, from stockpiles of nominally-innocent precursors. This was the Kay report's conclusion that has drawn the right's attention, and I think it's a valid one. Remember - while building an atomic (or radiological) bomb or a tank of Sarin or a batch of aerosolized Botulinum the first time is Nobel Prize material, the second time it is merely craftsmanship.

It would seem, if you follow the whole Kay report, that Hussein opted to give himself a plausible, large, capability to produce WMDs in a hurry, rather than giving himself bunkers full of weapons, with all their attendant political and military risks.

Of course, considering that part of the Kay report cuts Easterbrook's point off at the knees.

Easterbrook continues:

Set aside the question of whether the United States should have invaded Iraq in 2003; history may still judge this decision favorably, as a liberation of the oppressed. But if most of the Iraq atomic weapons program stopped in 1998, as Kay concludes, then Clinton administration policy on Iraq was far more effective than once assumed; then the WMD case for invasion this year was even weaker than now assumed;

Note the leaps in logic: Easterbrook artificially limits the discussion to "atomic" weapons, while chemical, biological and radiological weapons are equally important and were little effected by Desert Fox. And he assumes, in contravention to the Kay Report's findings, that the program "stopped" in 1998, rather than redirected itself into a more decentralized and tenable form.

The devil is in the details. And most liberal arguments in this area just don't get along with the details very well.

The Mower County Charges -

The Mower County Charges - The American Bankers story is back in the news - and it's weirder than ever.

I explained the American Bankers and Insurance settlement last summer in a five part article that drew the untold story from sources close to the events. To sum it up:

• The Ventura administration's Commerce Department, under Jim Bernstein, tried to settle with American Bankers and Insurance. No settlement was ever signed.
• In the summer of 2002, American Bankers hired lobbyist and Mike Hatch pal Ron Jerich, who promptly cut checks to both the Republican and DFL parties. While the check to the DFL apparently went, as required by law, to the Democratic Governor's Conference, the check to the Republicans went directly to the state party - which promptly sent the check to the Republican National State Elections Committee, as required by law. A computer generated a form "thank you" letter to Ron Jerich. The letter found its way to Mike Hatch under circumstances that seem just too convenient.
• Mike Hatch may or may not have proposed allowing American Bankers to settle the action, with no publicity, in exchange for a large donation to a charity. This would have violated state law. According to Tim Pawlenty's Commerce Commissioner, Glenn Wilson, Mike Hatch sprang this plan on Wilson by surprise, the day after Tim Pawlenty's inauguration last January.
• The investigative machinery, in the form of the Legislative Auditor's Office, reached a decidedly mixed conclusion that chided the Commerce department for its procedures, and stopped barely short of criticizing the Attorney General's ethics.
• As if by magic, the media learned the story - or at least a version very amenable to Mike Hatch - at a time when the arrangements were known only to very few people.

Powerline comments on the current iteration of the flap:

"Here are the facts: in the 2002 election, American Bankers Insurance Co. wanted to support both Republican Tim Pawlenty and Democrat Roger Moe. It therefore donated $10,000 to both national parties, with the understanding, apparently, that the money would be spent to support the candidacies of Pawlenty and Moe. (It is legal for corporations to donate to the national parties, but under Minnesota law it is not legal for corporations to donate to the state's parties.) American Bankers mistakenly sent the Republican contribution to the state's Republican Party headquarters, and Eibensteiner forwarded it to the national party. That's it. Oh, one more thing. Ron also wrote American Bankers a letter thanking them for their contribution. I don't know where American Bankers mailed its contribution to the Democrats, but that check presumably found its way to the national Democratic Party as well, where the money was spent to benefit Moe.

Just to clarify on the behalf of Powerline: According to sources at the DFL, the check was apparently never recieved locally. Their $10K apparently adhered to state law.

And if you believe Ron Eibensteiner, he didn't "write" the thank-you, merely signed it.

The indictment is, of course, ridiculous. Mower County, located in extreme southestern Minnesota, has nothing to do with the events in question other than the fact that it has a Democratic county attorney who is willing to do Hatch's bidding. The indictment was triggered by a 'complaint' by a Mower County resident whose identity Flanagan refuses to divulge. (He apparently didn't complain about American Bankers' contribution to the Democrats.) Ron did nothing wrong, let alone criminal."

Here, the Powerline guys are correct. I'm going to do a little digging and see if there's any more backstory we're not getting here.

The big question - what does Hatch expect to gain from this ridiculous action?

I'll see what I can find out.

Trivial Pursuit - Fraters and

Trivial Pursuit - Fraters and the Infinite Monkeys are proposing an intramural trivia smackdown between the Patriot Allstars (Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager and David Allen White, and the Northern Alliance Muj - the Fraters, Powerline, the Monkeys, Spitbull and myself, with Lileks' allegiance uncertain.

As long as the subject steers clear of old movies and sports stats, I'm fine. In the realms of history and post-1954 pop music, I'm mighty good.

Save me a ticket. I'm in.

And Kathy Wurzer is a

And Kathy Wurzer is a Harley Chick - NPR can't tell the difference between Hugh Hewitt and Howard Stern:

"SHOCK JOCK? Shock jock? Yes, that's how NPR referred to me this morning in an account of Arnold's campaign trip yesterday: 'AM radio shock jock Hugh Hewitt quickly prompted the crowd to see what they thought about the Los Angeles Times.'"

By NPR terms, a "shock jock" is anyone who's more animated on the air than Terry Gross or Ira Glass. Michael Feldman is shockier than Hugh Hewitt.

But there's a larger point here. Notice the taxonomy the left applies to opinion on the right:

• Rush Limbaugh leads a vast conspiracy (when he's not a big fat idiot, and I'm sure we can look for "Drug Addict" shortly here)
• Hugh Hewitt? Shock jock, with all the baggage that carries (around a place like NPR, anyway).
• Bloggers (below the stature of an Andrew Sullivan, anyway) are drooling knuckle-draggers.
• The vast right-wing audience? Mindless dittoheads. .
• Gun owners? Rednecks who are making up for some sort of sexual problem

Notice that nowhere in there is "fellow citizen" mentioned.

These are all symptoms of the most worrisome development I can think of in American society; to the left (and yeah, to the lunatic fringe on the right) we are no longer a free association of equals working from both sides of a temporal ideological divide to try to build a society that is better than the sum of its parts. We're now the "englightened" and the "unwashed masses". It's a war.

And the first thing you want to do in a war is to dehumanize your opponents.

Because you don't have to feel guilty about horrible things you do to mere drooling knuckle-dragging dittoheads with phallic obsessions.

Fascist - There are few

Fascist - There are few things that infuriate me as much as casual invocation of tokens of the Nazi era - referring to someone as a "Nazi" or a "Fascist" lightly, as political rhetoric. Same for calling something a "Holocaust" that doesn't involve the wholesale industrial murder of an entire race; it's crying wolf. As Hindrocket notes on "Powerline", these terms have become meaningless from casual overuse. You know the suspects; college kids who think they're scoring a rhetorical coup when they call someone who disagrees with them a fascist; a pundit, frustrated with the success and reach of talkradio, calling the hosts and their audience Nazis. It's not the sort of thing that, in a just world, would be invoked cynically or shallowly.

Of course, the Schwarzenegger "Nazi" flap has been exactly thatl. The Democrat strategist who figured it would be a good idea to lightly link the former bodybuilder with Naziism deserves to lose this election, as far as I'm concerned, for that reason alone.

Especially given that the truth appears to be quite the opposite. Powerline has the skinny on this:

When Schwarzenegger was growing up in Austria, "Nazi" wasn't just an epithet. There really were neo-Nazis who took to the streets much as their fathers had done thirty years earlier. Now, several individuals who knew Arnold as a teenager have come to his defense, pointing out that he not only denounced Nazis--easy to do when, as in America, they do not exist--but actually battled them.

Powerline refers to a couple of articles, including this piece in the Guardian. Money quote:

``It's absurd. It's 100 percent wrong that he could have ever liked Hitler,'' Marnul said at his gym, whose walls are plastered with photographs of Schwarzenegger, who began training there at age 15.

Marnul's interview with AP was the second refutation of claims Schwarzenegger had Nazi sympathies.

On Friday, the Austrian magazine NU, which caters to the alpine nation's Jewish community, quoted former politician Alfred Gerstl as describing how Schwarzenegger and some companions once ``hunted down'' neo-Nazis who had gathered outside the office of a teaching institute run by an avowed anti-fascist.

The polls over the weekend showed that the smear doesn't seem to be sticking. That, alone, is proof that world isn't entirely unjust. Whatever Schwarzenegger's qualifications for the job - and I have the same misgivings about not only Schwarzenegger but the "at least he's better than Bustamante" philosophy that many conservatives to - nobody deserves that sort of accusation unjustly.

Especially when the story is being pushed by a biased media and a group of yellow hacks.

Speaking of Leaking - As

Speaking of Leaking - As the Democrats are crying crocodile tears over alleged White House leaks, it's worth rememberingthis item, about someone whose leaks weren't embarassing - they were deadly:

"'Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, inadvertantly disclosed a top secret communications intercept during a [1985] television interview,' reported the San Diego Union-Tribune in a 1987 editorial criticizing Congress' penchant for partisan leaks.

'The intercept, apparently of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's telephone conversations, made possible the capture of the Arab terrorists who had hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered American citizens,' the paper said, adding, 'The reports cost the life of at least one Egyptian operative involved in the operation.'"

The Democrats are hitting their knees every night praying to Gaia that the Plame-Wilson imbroglio turns into something they can use.

It's time for the GOP to start showing the world who it is is that historically fouls up our security; emasculating our foreign intelligence, leaking agents for political gain, and let's not forget letting Bin Laden slip away twice.

When we want these peoples' opinion on the Administration's competence at intelligence, foreign policy and diplomacy, we should grant them the right to have that opinion.

But only after they earn it back.

The Big Plastic Mug is

The Big Plastic Mug is A Third Full - The Cubbies win.

The Twins lose.

And football just trudges on and on to a post-season that is looking inevitably Bears-free.

I See Yellow - Help

I See Yellow - Help me out here. I need to come up with a pithy yet dismissive lede for this piece on today's Maureen Dowd piece. I'm having a hard time deciding - partly because Dowd leaves so many openings, partly because this sort of yellow, hack journalism so infuriates me.

Here are my finalists:

• For a redhead, MoDo can sure do a great Yellow.
• With friends like this, the Democrats hardly need Gray Davis to screw them up
• Let's see what context MoDo has misleadingly altered this time!

MoDo starts:

Well, there goes the Jewish women's vote.

Leave aside the slander later in this piece - I don't suspect that Arnold was expecting the Streisand crowd to turn out for him.

Twin revelations of Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping and goose-stepping are not going to play well with some Californians. The androgynous Gray spent the weekend hissing at Arnold's excess testosterone, as Arnold tried a rope-a-grope strategy.

The governor had to be singing "Danke Schön" over tales of the Austrian's 70's foolery: playing Nazi marching songs; clicking his heels and pretending to be an SS officer; clowning as Hitler with comb as mustache; and praising the dictator's ambition and oratorical skills. A Davis aide slyly wondered if Mel Brooks was Arnold's campaign manager.

Comical, nicht wahr? Dowd makes the rather slanderous jump from "noting Hitler's oratorical skills" to prancing about in SS-wear in one libelous leap.

But why?

I think we get a clue in the next graf:

When I was in California, Democrats said that as soon as Mr. Schwarzenegger went up in the polls, the Davis camp was prepared to blast him on women and "play it out in all its seamy glory," as one well-connected Hollywood Democrat said.

And, given that this Dowd piece plays so incongruously against the reality in the polls - the cynical dirt-mongering seems, if anything, to have helped Arnold, at least among Californians smart enough to use the likes of MoDo and Molly Ivins as bird-cage liner - I think this paragraph is the tip-off.

The "...Davis camp was prepared..." with the gloriously seamy dirt - and five will get you ten part of the preparations involved giving Maureen Dowd advance notice that they needed one of her patented slur-pieces, synchronized to catch the end of the weekend spin cycle before the election; the sort of fact-free "when did you stop beating your wife" distorion-fests that make one thing MoDo is channeling the ghost of Walter Winchell.

And yet it hasn't played that way. This piece reminds me of the infamous "DEWEY WINS" headline of 1948 - Californians, the polls tell us, seem to be failing to fall for the dirt in droves.

Although I don't know if any polls have controlled for Jewish women.

When the star's female accusers were recycled in the L.A. Times, Democratic women's groups — already in full cry against Arnold for being boorish despite his un-Bushian moderate stances on women's issues — howled even louder. They rejected his apology and explanation that he was just being "playful" when he grabbed several left breasts out of left field over the decades.

Even before the latest charges, Hillary Clinton, by phone, and Ann Richards and the lawyer Gloria Allred, in person, joined Governor Davis at a bristly rally in West Hollywood with 200 female activists, including contingents from NOW and Planned Parenthood, chanting about Arnold's sins.

At the Davis rally, Senator Clinton chose not to defend the groper who was not her husband. Ms. Richards chose not to defend the groper who was not a Democrat; in 1998, the former Texas governor shrugged off Mr. Clinton's louche behavior: "If we try to retire every man from office who's done what he did, we wouldn't need affirmative action."

Dowd reports this as if there were any suspense in the fact - that NOW and Planned Parenthood would have reached any other conclusion, that they hadn't planned on some sort of Pro-Davis/Busto, anti-whomever the Republican front runner was, from the moment this recall was certified, harping on whatever agenda point came within a California Dream of violating any of their sacraments.

An alien from another planet reading Dowd might think there was a chance that Senator Clinton would ever attack a misogynist who was "on the side of the angels", or that Ann Richards would restrain herself from one of her faux-folksy outbursts even if she could.

Now Republicans who thundered against Bill — not Arnold, who scorned impeachment as a waste of time and money — argue that peccadilloes are not relevant to governing. And feminists who backed Bill are ushering Arnold gropees up to the Democratic microphones.

Other pundits, and half the blogosphere, have noted the differences that MoDo's attention span and agenda won't allow; perjury to a grand jury, obstruction of justice, anonymous sources of groping versus named sources on rape; to repeat them would be excessive.

And not to repeat them would be to subscribe to the Democrats' facile, five year old spin: "It's all about sex to the Republicans".

Dowd's cultural imperialism takes a turn:

Cheekbones jutting, Maria Shriver played the Tammy Wynette-Hillary role with nerve and verve,...

"While she's a Kennedy - one of us, I'm going to invoke the stereotype of the "red-state" woman that so comforts us: all-enduring, duped, just not like the rest of us!"

Dowd notes that it really is all about her, anyway:

Certainly, the bodybuilder-turned-phenom has had moments of being, to use David Letterman's word, a lunkhead. But I find the selective outrage of feminists just as offensive.

Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, "Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one."

Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator.

But it's not the same thing, and except in the minds of Democrats-at-all-costs, never was. While the zeal of some impeachment advocates may have been excessive, the goal was to punish a criminal, not harass someone's 30-year-old indiscretions.

I asked my friend Leon Wieseltier, who knows a lot about Judaism and politics and women, about Arnold.

"Schwarzenegger is obviously not anti-Semitic or an admirer of genocide," he said. "Hitler does not appear to have been his moral ideal, but his business model. His old fondness for the Führer is just another expression of the animating principle of his life and movies: the worship and steady acquisition of power. Sacramento is simply the biggest Hummer he can buy."

Read that last paragraph again; what does it say except "achievement=naziism"?

Besides, if we ever hear the "Horst Wessel Song" drifting from Governor Schwarzenegger's office in Sacramento, there's always the blitzkrieg option: the recall of the recall.

STereotypes, innuendo, clumsy spin (that I'll bet dimes to dollars was written before the LATimes re- ran with the Four Anonymous Gropees...

Well, you know what they say about cute redheads; what they lack in intellectual talent, they make up for in the sack.

Whoops. Did I just indulge in stereotype and innuendo?

What It's About - No,

What It's About - No, indeed, the California electorate seems to get the big picture. Mark Steyn has a great piece, not only on the state of the recall, but on the absolute, crushing, unbelievable detachment of the media from reality.

On the LATimes' double standard on coverage (anonymous sources of Arnold's groping get front-page treatment, after the paper spiked not only named sources on Clinton's little rape habit, but also syndicated opinion on the subject):

"But the lofty ethics bores of American journalism apparently have no problem with opening up their front page for anonymous one-sided accusations of ancient improper advances. In that case, did I mention the time Gray Davis grabbed me by the crotch and whispered in my ear: 'Have you ever had a man tax you up the wazoo?' Or, if the issue is the violent grabbing of anonymous women, how about this? 'He just went into one of his rants of, `F--- the f---ing f---, f---, f---!' He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, `Good God, Gray! Think what you are doing to me!' And he just could not stop.' That's a former staffer of Davis, as reported by Jill Stewart in New Times LA in 1997.

No, the public gets what the LATimes (and Hesiod) don't:

The story here is that California is in crisis. The electorate understands that; its media don't. It's CNN that, while sniffing that this election is a 'circus', runs tedious featurettes on the pornographers, sitcom actors and other fringe candidates. Meanwhile, the public winnowed the 130 runners down to a quartet almost immediately.

Indeed, the only folks obsessed with joke candidates were the media professionals who took ex-London socialite Arianna Huffington's campaign seriously. In last week's debate, Arianna and Arnold bickered constantly. The pundits assured us Arianna had come out on top. The next poll showed her with 0.4 per cent and she withdrew from the race shortly thereafter. So much for media savvy. The only bottom that's an issue in this election is Gray Davis's, and on Tuesday all it will be feeling is the electorate's boot."

As always with Steyn, worth a read.

What If Bustamante Held a

What If Bustamante Held a Press Conference, and Nobody Came... - Lefty blogger "Hesiod" ponders the deeper meaning of Bustamante's "boycott" of a gubernatorial debate:

"And when I say 'boycott,' I'm not just talking about Cruz Bustamante. He invited ALL of the other 'major' candidates to join him in an unscripted debate...outside of the planned venue. You see...the planned debate they will be avoiding, is the one where the candidates all got the questions in advance. [Thus explaining why Arnold agreed to appear].

The best part is that the other candidates mostly agreed with Bustamante!"

"Hesiod" seems to think this is a smart campaign move for Bustamante, and a problem for Schwarzenegger.

In a normal election, maybe. But this election isn't about any single issue, or even a small group of issues, and especially not about what Cruz Bustamante thinks about them.

For the nearly 2/3 of Californians that plan to vote for the recall, it's about getting rid of Gray Davis, and his administration's detritus (including Bustamante).

They could debate nonstop from now until the election, or hole up in a hotel in Oklahoma for all the good either one will do them. It's about ending the mismanagement, stirring the malaise, throwing the bastards out in the great American tradition.

A former boss of mine would have referred to the debate as "turd-polishing".

Nauseating - Warning. This piece

Nauseating - Warning. This piece (via Instapundit) put me off my brunch.

It's about life in North Korea. Read it if you haven't.

But you've been warned.

Coming Up This Week on

Coming Up This Week on Shot In The Dark - A veritable embarassment of riches:

• What the Rush Limbaugh Vicotin flap may be telling us about the battle between old and new media
• The latest Mike Hatch dustup.
• Maybe, just maybe, my long-delayed screed on inner-city conservatives - and how we can get along with Urban Republicans.

I figure if I commit myself to some serious writing, the job offer is more likely to happen.

Wow - A pretty amazing

Wow - A pretty amazing week, all in all. My second Hughalanche in two weeks (my hit counts were pretty stunning after Hewitt linked to me again, even better than last week's link), plus six or seven new job leads, a halfways decent interview, and a little 40-hour job that will pay my bills through some time in November. And another little spike in donations at my Amazon link (on the right side of the page). Not bad.

Question for Monday - what does the Limbaugh Painkiller brouhaha tell us about the media at large?

I'll be writing about it Monday morning. See you then, bring a friend, and have a great weekend until then.

We'll Know Them When We

We'll Know Them When We See Them - Yesterday on CNN I saw Nancy Pelosi's harsh visage scowling at me through the TV screen like an avenging comparative women's lit professor. Like most of the left, she was trying to make as much mileage out of the Dems' official reading of the Kay Report as possible. Here's her statement, via Sharkblog (who dissects her statement with extreme prejudice):

"As the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I have seen no evidence or intelligence that suggests that Iraq indeed poses an imminent threat to our nation. If the Administration has that information, they have not shared it with the Congress.

"If we invade Iraq, we will show our military power. If we can eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction without invading, we will show our strength."

I'd love to ask a Democrat - any pro-Hussein, pro-dictatorship anti-war Democrat - what they mean by "imminent".

Given that intelligence is so crushingly imprecise (especially against an enemy with a closed society that is actively trying to obfuscate your intelligence efforts), how do you determine "imminence?"

• We didn't know Pearl Harbor was "imminent" until the first bombs fell. Literally - even after a group of Minnesota Navy Reservists on the USS Ward sank a Japanese midget submarine off the mouth of the harbor, and after a radar station detected the incoming raid, no alert was called. We didn't know what was "imminent".
• We didn't know the invasion of South Korea was "imminent" until North Korean tanks and artillery immolated the ROK and American front lines by complete surprise.
• We didn't know the Tet Offensive was "imminent" until bombs started going off around Saigon.
• The Israelis didn't know the Yom Kippur war was "imminent" until Egyptian and Syrian artillery began plowing holes in their positions
• The Japanese didn't know the Om Shinrikyu nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway was "imminent" until people started falling over sick and dead.
• We had no idea that 9/11 was "imminent" until the first 911 calls reported a crash and fire in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

One of the things that drove me from liberalism 20 years ago was the Democrat party's complete frivolity at foreign policy. Even as a committed liberal, I was a student of military history and the history of diplomacy - and even when I fulminated with anti-capitalist rage, I was astounded by the foreign policy and military history ignorance of my fellow liberals. It's only gotten worse.

So, a note to Nancy Pelosi, and anyone who thinks that the Democrats can be trusted with foreign policy - the only way we'll know when a WMD attack is "imminent" is when people start keeling over from sarin exposure, streaming into emergency rooms with Anthrax - or when a radioactive dustcloud from a "dirty bomb" erupts over some American city.

This episode of Day By Day seemed grimly appropriate:

So, Democrat readers (and I know you're out there): what's the difference between Jan, in the strip, and Nancy Pelosi?

The Recall - I don't

The Recall - I don't write a lot about the recall, compared to some bloggers - I'm not from California or anything - but I had to mention this.

Yesterday, Schwarzenegger asked:

"'One wonders what the motivation of all this is, why I'm getting thrown all this stuff three days before' the vote, he said in a pool interview. 'Where have they been the last 20 years, 10 years, five years?'

He also said he would have apologized long ago to women he had groped -- had they said something. 'No one complained to me,' he said. 'When someone comes to me and says how dare you say this, how dare you do this, I can apologize right then and there.'"

Well, there's a simple reason; stealing momentum.

Arnold's had all the momentum in this race since long before he even announced. The Davis/Bustamante/LATimes machine is keenly aware that not only has Bustamante not developed any traction in the polls, but that in fact momentum is going the wrong way. Arnold has set the agenda, the pace and the tone for the whole campaign.

Now, the LATimes (which is acting like a complicit tool of the Davis/Bustamante campaign) has seized the initiative...to a point. The race isn't about lioinizing Schwarzenegger anymore - this must be increasing Arnold's negatives - but I don't see it increasing Bustamante's chances.

If anything, I'd suspect this drives up the "No" vote against recall. Will it be enough to save Davis?

I think Arnold's move yesterday - declaring it the last day he'd respond to womanizing and Nazi-sympathy allegations - was a good one. He needs to get back on message - message that was working in a way star power alone couldn't have, until last week.

There's Hope! - Halle Berry

There's Hope! - Halle Berry is available!

I mean, since Marisa Tomei hasn't returned my calls...

(Via Cheleblog)

Chalabi - Reding covers Ahmed

Chalabi - Reding covers Ahmed Chalabi's speech to the UN, an event that was greeted with deafening silence elsewhere:

"To those who stood with the dictator and who continue to question the intentions of the American and British governments in undertaking this liberation, we invite you to come and visit the mass graves where half a million of our citizens lie, come and visit the dried up marshes, come and visit Halabja where chemicals were dropped on civilians, come and examine the lists of the disappeared whose right to live was taken away from them by Saddam Hussein. And we the Iraqi people will ask you why you chose to remain silent. [emphasis mine]."

It'll be interesting, seeing history's verdict on Chalabi. The mainstream media seems obsessed with painting him as a power-mongering puppet of Halliburton, or a con man using Iraqi's misery to further his own agenda.

I Don't Believe In Karma,

I Don't Believe In Karma, But I Believe What Goes Around Comes Around - Wednesday, I got a call from a local recruiter. A company I interviewed at last May (who thought I was a great personality fit, but I wasn't the most qualified person for the position) has a position open that is right up my alley, and could they submit my resume? Sure, I answered.

Yesterday, company called back and wanted an interview - today.

So, I'm getting ready to head out for an early-afternoon interview.

Prayers, karmic infusions and best wishes gratefully accepted.

Arnold and Hitler - The

Arnold and Hitler - The SanFran Chronicle has the best story I've yet seen on Schwarzenegger's "Hitler" flap.

As the article says, it's a faint trail:

"The allegations that Arnold Schwarzenegger expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler during the filming of 'Pumping Iron' have been circulating since the actor announced his candidacy this summer, but the film's director, quoted by ABC News on Thursday, denied the story last month when contacted by The Chronicle.

ABC News and the New York Times obtained a copy of an unpublished book proposal by the film's producer and director, George Butler, that contained quotes allegedly made by Schwarzenegger in 1975 during an interview while making the movie.

In the book proposal, Schwarzenegger is quoted as saying, according to ABC News, 'I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it.' Then Schwarzenegger supposedly adds, 'like Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium. And have all those people scream at you and just being total agreement whatever you say.'"

Hardly goosestepping, is it?

I saw Arnold on the news this morning. Paraphrasing, he said that he admired Hitler's speaking style and ability as a communicator.

As the son of a speech teacher and a lifelong student of political oratory, I've got news for you; Leave Hitler's message out of the equation for a moment - Arnold was right. Hitler was an amazing, mesmerizing public orator. More tellingly, he was one of the first world leaders to genuinely understand and exploit the poiwer of the electronic media. He was a pioneer at using the media for political ends. If you are in the profession of trying to communicate with people (as Schwarzenegger, an actor and now a politician, certainly is), Hitler was, in terms of style and technique, a seminal figure - which one can say without denying for a moment that he used those talents in the promotion of colossal, corrosive evil.

Does allowing that Hitler was a great speaker and communicator and manipulator of the media imply any admiration for his politics, policies, and historical legacy? Does saying that imply that the speaker sympathizes with Hitler and Naziism?

I can't speak for Schwarzenegger, but speaking for myself - if that's what you believe, tell it to my face. Make sure your medical insurance is paid up first.

This fracas is a sign of how desperate the LA Times is getting to keep their people in office.

P.S. - How much do you want to be some moonbat lefty blog clips out the part where I say "Hitler was a great public speaker" et al, and quotes it to show what a bunch of Nazi sympathizers we conservative bloggers are?

Any bets on that?

Chait's Numbers- As I pointed

Chait's Numbers- As I pointed out in yesterday's post on the subject, a whole crowd of conservative bloggers piled on Jonathan Chait.

And I didn't even count the big guns! Ponnuru at the Corner attacks Chait's math:

"I’ve been debating Jonathan Chait over at The New Republic about whether Bush hatred is justified, or at least rational. Chait had the last word, and I declined to prolong the debate. But I can’t resist making one small point. In the course of our debate we disagreed about whose tax cuts were bigger, the incumbent’s or Ronald Reagan’s. I said Reagan’s were bigger, in support of my point that Bush is not the rampaging right-winger Chait makes him out to be. Chait said that Bill Gale and Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution had established that Bush’s tax cut was larger than Reagan’s as a share of GDP “if you allow for some technical corrections.”

In response, I noted that I doubted I’d agree with this duo’s technical assumptions—I’ve criticized Orszag’s work before. In his final entry to the debate, Chait explained what the “technical corrections” were. There were two. First, Chait and company exclude 45 percent of Reagan’s tax cut from consideration! That’s some technical correction. Reagan’s tax cut indexed tax brackets for inflation. In the 1970s, people were taxed on the basis of inflationary gains in income even though their real income hadn’t risen. For Chait, the 45 percent of the tax cut that was devoted to ending that practice need not be counted as a tax cut because it “merely offset natural revenue growth from inflation.” Second, the cost of Reagan’s 1981 tax cut should, in Chait’s view, be considered only after taking account of the 1982 tax hike that partly undid it."

Read on, of course.

So the question is - and perhaps Hewitt, with his contacts with Peter Beinart, is the one to answer this - will Chait sound off on this one again? Will he continue to rationalize his hatred, or transfer his hate to more plebeian targets?

WMD Watch - I'm not

WMD Watch - I'm not normally one given to heaping rhetorical abuse on my opponents. If you like that sort of thing for its own gleeful sake on a regular basis, you need to read here and here.

That being said, anyone who reads the Kay report on Iraqi WMDs and surmises that "There's No There There" is a deluded fool who either flunked history, or learned it from people with an agenda not far to the right of Saddam's.

Sullivan has several posts on the subject of the Kay report in today's Dish. Scroll down, read 'em all.

Key points? According to Sullivan:

>
• A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

• A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

• Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

• New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
• Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
• A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
• Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
• Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
• Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

Money quote?:

One of the crazy premises of the "Where Are They?" crowd is that we would walk into that huge country and find large piles of Acme bombs with anthrax in them. That's not what a WMD program is about; and never was. Saddam was careful. He had to hide from the U.N. and he had to find ways, over more than a decade, to maintain a WMD program as best he could, ready to reactivate whenever the climate altered in his favor. Everything points to such a strategy and to such weapons being maintained. [emphasis mine - mb]

Anyone (on the left, especially) that thinks Saddam's only worthwhile goal would have been mounds of missiles, bunkers full of bombs, piles of poison gas all stockpiled and ready to go as of March 2003 is myopic and deluded.

Hatch Back In The News

Hatch Back In The News - Mike Hatch? Dishing out patronage?

Well that's what Republicans in the Legislature think:

"It was a staple in small-town newspapers from Stillwater to the South Dakota border last year: a local activist appointed to a task force formed by Attorney General Mike Hatch to study health care or other consumer issues.

In each case, the appointee was a legislative candidate from Hatch's DFL Party.

Republicans were quick to accuse him of using his office for partisan advantage, and they have kept it up long after the task forces faded into history along with the November elections. On Wednesday, state GOP leaders called on Ramsey County prosecutors to investigate whether Hatch illegally destroyed public documents relating to the task forces."

Hatch, long a gadfly to the GOP and the only DFLer among the state's elected Constitutional Officers, has allegedly been playing dirty tricks all year long to try to impugn the Pawlenty Administration; making hay out of budget cuts to the state Gang Strike Force, claiming that the administration favored releaseing sex offenders to the general population and that several administration and state GOP officials' ties to NewTel and NewAccess were shady, and of course the American Bankers brouhaha.

"Developing Hot", as Drudge says.

Sounds About Right - Dave

Sounds About Right - Dave Barry, via Cathy in the Wright:

"Men are like a fine wine. They start out as grapes, and it's up to women to stomp the crap out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with."

HURL - The SCSU Scholars

HURL - The SCSU Scholars continue their embarassing look at the course offerings at St. Cloud State's Human Relations department.

Read it - it'll make you grind your teeth, but do it anyway.

The Times - The LA

The Times - The LA Times, that is. How anyone can look at the example of the Los Angeles Times, and still claim that the mainstream media isn't utterly, completely, committedly liberal, is beyond me.

Medved had an excellent series of points about this today (note to Medved: Start posting the key points from your show on your website. Better yet. start a blog, a la Hewitt. Heck - hire someone to do the blog for you. For a nominal fee, I'm available...); when Juanita Broaderick came out publicly to charge Bill Clinton with...harassment fondling talking about porn movies creating a "hostile work environment" rape, the LA Times spiked the story. More telling still, they even excised mentions of the case from a George Will opinion column! And yet this "story" - these anonymous women telling unsubstantiated (or in some case, long-debunked) stories are not only covered, but get breathless, unquestioning front page treatment!

Speaking of Medved - he had an excellent, moving apologia for Limbaugh's apparent, alleged addiction on his show today. He described the process of the operation - which includes drilling into and attaching equipment to the patient's skull; I wanted to pop a couple of T3s myself by the time he went to break.

More on the Limbaugh flap later today or tomorrow.

The Monkeys carry a useful digest of LA Times-related coverage in the blog world. And while I can scarcely get overly analytical about football even when I'm bored, much less with the Twins in the AL playoffs, the King from SCSU Scholars has a a great perspective.

Had to Happen - Right?

Had to Happen - Right? - The Yanks even the series with a 4-1 win in the Bronx.

Splitting in NYC is all right. Right?

I'm getting that "heart in the throat" feeling I got during both of the ALCS in '87 and '91...

Key Economic Index Creeps Upward

Key Economic Index Creeps Upward - The Berg Consumer Confidence Index (BCCI) took its biggest jump in three months this week, rising from a 9 to a 18 on a scale of 0-100.

The index, which hovered at an alltime low of 1 through much of last winter, rose to a 12 during a brief flurry of job orders when the Iraq war began, settled to a 7 in April, and then hovered around 15 for much of the summer, spiked upward after a two-week deluge of new job requisitions, including seven in the last two days.

Analysts indicate the Index could spike as much as another five points if a short-term contract job is confirmed later this week. That increase would push the BCCI into territory it hasn't seen since the summer of 2002.

"The new numbers reflect not only the huge jump in incoming job leads, but two interviews in the next two days, which could portend a record jump in the BCCI in the next few weeks", says analyst Greta Krupper. "But we'd be wise to refrain from irrational exuberance - lots of companies interview people when they're not even close to ready to hire anyone."

"No way. The economy's been drooling, and the tech sector is dragging its knuckles", says analyst Chonathan Jait.

Mitch Berg could not be reached for comment, as he was trying to find the tie that matches his shirt.

The Chait Goes On -

The Chait Goes On - Quick, where did the following come from:

A recent article of mine in ______ defending Bush hatred seems to have worked like some kind of conservative dog whistle, silently summoning drooling right-wingers out of their lairs to bay at the moon...Wait. Did I just lump David Brooks together with a bunch of incoherent right-wing knuckle-draggers?

Who wrote this piece? Was it:

A) StarRabbit Eikenson-Filck, posting on Indymedia.com?
B) Jonathan Chait, writing for The New Republic?
C) Moonbat lefty blogger Hesiod?
D) An anonymous writer on lefty conspiracy site "Democrats.com"?
E) What's the Difference?

If you answered E, you know where this is going.

---

Wait, I'm being unfair. Let's start at the beginning.

Last week, Jonathan Chait, a "senior" editor at The New Republic, posted an article, "Mad About You: the Case for Bush Hatred".

A chorus of voices rose to attack the article and the sentiments behind it:

• Hugh Hewitt, who featured the article on his nationwide talk show,
• Powerline's Rocket Man, Trunk and Deacon with a total of five articles covering everything from Chait's many factual miscues to the wider implications of the cultural war,
• Michael Novak, who carves up the Chait's whiny approach; "Sensing desperation, Chait's comments about the younger Bush's accent, posture, and mannerisms come down to ethnic prejudice and intellectual bigotry. None of this is remotely rational."
• David Brooks in the NYTimes, who summed up Chait's overall approach "The quintessential new warrior scans the Web for confirmation of the president's villainy. He avoids facts that might complicate his hatred. He doesn't weigh the sins of his friends against the sins of his enemies. But about the president he will believe anything."
• Exultate Justi with a fine counterattack,
• Finally, my own piece

Is Chait right or wrong to hate - not disagree with, not oppose, but hate the President, with all the moral and political ramifications (to say nothing of journalistic ones)? You be the judge.

Was Chait's article a petulant, misguided display that proves the old saw "Hatred is Ignorance?" Was it chock full of inaccuracies, factual errors and personal grudgemongering that reads as if it dates back to high school ("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")? Read the articles above. I link, you decide.

Yesterday, Chait responded.

---

In one of my favorite Saturday Night Live bits ever, Heather Locklear plays a deranged Cable Sales Channel hucksterette.

Locklear did a perfect rendition of a QVC shill, pitching yet another jar of snake oil (or in this case, a Ronco-ish pasta maker, invented by Mike Myers) - with a difference. Amid the patter, completely by surprise, Locklear threw in little bon mots of corrosive racism [I'm paraphrasing here - I can't find a script for the sketch online]:

"...just add your ingredients, and bingo! Instant Pasta! Why, this machine is so easy to use, even a Puerto Rican can figure it out!"

And, as a horrified Myers tried to explain the simple instructions...:

I'm glad this machine is easy to figure out. Because normally when a product says it has easy instructions, I think it's a big fat lie. Like the Holocaust.

What made the sketch so hilarious was that the caustic racism slipped into the most innocuous places, and was all the more notable for the banality of its surroundings.

In yesterday's New Republic piece, Chait does much the same.

He goes to great lengths - in both articles - to prove his bona fides as an open-minded person and legitimate commentator:

I spend far more time reading the conservative media--in addition to National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan's website are all part of my daily fare--than I do reading liberal commentary.

In his first article, he said:

Antipathy to Bush has, for example, led many liberals not only to believe the costs of the Iraq war outweigh the benefits but to refuse to acknowledge any benefits at all, even freeing the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. And it has caused them to look for the presidential nominee who can best stoke their own anger, not the one who can win over a majority of voters--who, they forget, still like Bush.

Reasonable, no?

And yet there are the outbursts - like Locklear's comic surprise trips into bigotry, only serious this time:

A recent article of mine in TNR defending Bush hatred seems to have worked like some kind of conservative dog whistle, silently summoning drooling right-wingers out of their lairs to bay at the moon. Writing in The Weekly Standard, a conservative talk-show host named Hugh Hewitt calls my piece "much-ridiculed," the entirety of his evidence consisting of the fact that a few conservative bloggers dislike it.

Those few bloggers were Powerline, the Monkeys, Exultate Justi and myself.

Drooling, baying dogs? Read the bios of Powerline's Hindrocket, Big Trunk, and Deacon. Compare them with Chait's bio. You be the judge.

And this:

Did I just lump David Brooks together with a bunch of incoherent right-wing knuckle-draggers?

Knuckle-draggers? ("Oh, Jon - I bet you say that to all the conservatives...").

While I get around in four languages, play ten musical instruments and can do everything from the Brandenburg Concertos to Anarchy in the UK from memory, am passionate about classical Russian literature and am raising a writer and an artist, I guess the dragging knuckles would explain all this gravel in my lunch.

While the insults were the low-rent stuff of the college newspapers (that had found their way for whatever reason in a respected national liberal magazine), they were indeed part of the key to Chait's article. Read all the commentary above - the David Brooks piece, Mike Novak's article, the five Powerline posts, Exultate Justi's post and my screed. While each piece was different, and most took slightly different tacks on the story (leaving aside Powerline, whose overlapping expertises allow them to divide and conquer like few blogs this side of the Volokh Clan), in the end all eight made similar points - read for yourself, note the overlap - all say, essentially, that Chait's original article was factually challenged, relied as much on what appeared to be personal, petulant emotional slights stemming from an academically-bred sense of entitlement as on whatever "facts" he presented, evinced no understanding of conservatives or the reasons for Bush's popularity, and was a poorly-written rant that reflected very badly on what has always been considered a respectable magazine.

Despite the similarity in content, tone and style among the eight pieces, though, Chait observes a strict hierarchy:

1. David Brooks, being from the New York Times, gets a collegial nod of respect: "Brooks is intelligent and an excellent writer".
2. The National Review's Michael Novak, on the other hand, is of a lower caste, but at least gets a special dispensation: "Novak's column was a semi-literate rant about me, filled with sweeping invective, bizarre digressions, and, strangely-enough, phrases in bold-face seemingly at random." He's semi-literate - but, along with the likes of "National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan's website", as he puts it, he's at least one of the right semi-literates, the ones that work in the same corner of the industry he does.
3. Trunk, Hindrocket, Deacon, Exultate Justi, Hugh Hewitt and myself, on the other hand working as we do in the nekulturny wild frontier of talk radio and the blogophere? No matter how many ways we fold, spindle and mutilate his article (and let's be honest - we did), we're like the Indian untouchable caste - beneath contempt, much less consideration.

Old-media bigotry in action? The actions of someone who would never try for a gig at the National Review, but just might want a job at the Times one day? Or just the sign of a guy who can't argue the facts?

Hewitt said:

This is a reaction that suggests our collective analysis of Chait's screed scored, I think, and the Powerline gents, Mitch at ShotintheDark and other bloggers who took Chait apart line by line must also be pleased to have been so denounced.

What is curious, however, is why Peter Beinart is allowing a much respected magazine to be hijacked by a feverish writer resorting to the sort of tactics associated with the paranoid of both right and left. A loose cannon like Chait may be a subscription magnet for the MoveOn.org crowd, but hardly representative of the writing style that has marked TNR for its many decades of responsible commentary.

I think Hugh's right - Chait's response is a churlish, defensive jumble.

Caste systems aside, Chait's second piece was no better than the first, of course; fisking it is almost a rote exercise. Chait says:

The irony is that the exertions of the anti Bush-haters lack even an attempt at analytical rigor. Brooks does not even mention, let alone try to refute, my argument.

Buncombe. First, at least three of the eight posts listed above specifically addressed the points in your article, showing them to be groundless, specious, hopeless.

Second: There was little to refute! The article was like a kid's tantrum - impossible to refute, something you'd ignore if you weren't worry about reinforcing the behavior!

Novak and Hewitt's responses are on the level of discourse you'd find at a Howard Dean rally.

And yet, given the intellectual vacuity of the original article, that level of discourse may have been more than Chait deserved - again, read the original, and you can be the judge.

Here's a howler:

The most glaring absence in Brooks's column is the word "impeachment." In exploring the cause of liberal anger, it would seem relevant that Republicans took the highly unusual step of setting a perjury trap and impeaching a popular Democratic president.

Ah. It's the GOP's fault! If only we hadn't held Clinton accountable for his behavior, they'd cut Bush a break!

Chait closes:

The timing of Brooks's plea for civility is a tad suspicious. After Republican culture wars softened up Clinton, and tainted Al Gore, paving the way for Bush's election, suddenly it's time to declare president-hating out of bounds.

No. It's time to move it to the fringe - where it was during the Clinton years, and where it should be today.

Yes, Brooks criticized some of the excesses of Clinton-hatred, but he vigorously supported impeachment.

Right. Rather than succumb to irrational hatred - the thing Chait himself glorified in his first piece, with its endless, niggling references to Bush's accent, his walk, his childhood - Brooks (and many of us) favored settling the argument through a dispassionate, legal procedure. Rather than flailing away in an endless, circular emotional argument pitting poles of fringe partisan hatred against fringe partisan forgiveness.

It's true that some of the Bush-haters go way too far--Michael Moore comes to mind. But if Brooks wants to proscribe all Bush-haters, not just the conspiracy-mongers, then what he seeks isn't a higher level of discourse but raw partisan advantage

For starters - let's remember what this is about; this is Jonathan Chait defending his justification of hatred, an ignorant, uncultured, ugly emotion that masks ignorance, bigotry and most of the ignoble side of the human condition. It's not defensible.

And not to speak for Brooks, but I suspect the real goal is to identify and castigate the lunatic fringe.

Which is what Jonathan Chait is - and where he's dragging The New Republic.

Testing - Oh Blogger, Where

Testing - Oh Blogger, Where Art Thou?

When Blogger Yaks - Blogger

When Blogger Yaks - Blogger seems to have eaten all my larger articles.

Patience. Much more to come.

Chaitred Revisited

According to HughHewitt, Jonathan Chait has referred to the Powerline gents and I as "drooling right wingers," and "incoherent right-wing knuckle draggers."

Hewitt says:

What is curious, however, is why Peter Beinart is allowing a much respected magazine to be hijacked by a feverish writer resorting to the sort of tactics associated with the paranoid of both right and left. A loose cannon like Chait may be a subscription magnet for the MoveOn.org crowd, but hardly representative of the writing style that has marked TNR for its many decades of responsible commentary.

Detailed reply tomorrow.

Until then, here's Chait's original article (pour yourself a drink, it's a long one), here's my response, and here's a post linking to all of Powerline's commentary. You decide who's the drooling knuckledragger - or merely the petulant pseudointellectual who's trying to justify his two-year tantrum.

'Til then, I'sa gonna go git all likkered up, shine me some deer, and club me some wimmins.

Much Ado About Tom

I'm a conservative. No bones about it. In a perfect world, Tom McClintock would be the lone Republican in the California recall race right now. Would he be winning? Ex Post Facto polls taken in the context of an electoral circus aside, we don't know. We do know that the moderate, sometimes ill-informed, socially-relatively-liberal but apparently-solidly-Friedmanesque Schwartzenegger has put "electable", "California Republican" and "Fiscal Responsibility" into the same sentence in time for a meaningful election.

Here's a bit of advice from Minnesota; even assuming McClintock doesn't pull out and hand his voters over to Schwartzenegger, I don't think it'll matter.

Two months before the 2002 Minnesota gubernatorial race, the polls showed a three-way dead heat between DFLer Roger Moe, Independence Party nominee (and Ventura heir-apparent) Tim Penny, and eventual winner Tim Pawlenty (all had numbers in the low thirties, with the difference less than the statistical margin of error), with Green candidate Ken Pentel pulling over 5%.

Between that poll and election day, the numbers shook out to their eventual tally (figures rounded to nearest full percent):

• Pawlenty: 44%
• Moe: 36%
• Penny: 16%
• Pentel: 2%

The lesson? Talk is cheap.

Before the election, it's easy to speak in favor of a quixotic candidate, especially to a stranger on the phone. But it's human nature to want to side with a winner, and I suspect it's American nature to want to make your vote count (unless you're a Green). While McClintock seems to be polling in the 16-18% range these days, I'll bet anyone this: assuming he doesn't pull out (and I bet he will, but work with me here), I doubt McClintock will get 9% in the final election.

I suspect as we get down to the wire, the idealistic conservatives (that phrase alone should give most left-bloggers an aneurism) who are answering "McClintock" in the surveys today will quietly vote for Arnold. They may even deny it later - but the numbers will show it.

Hewitt gives the top five reasons McClintock's fans should change their ways in WorldNetDaily today, including this ultimate one:

"Finally, a vote for Tom is a vote for Terry McAuliffe. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee first promised there would be no big name Democrat running on question 2. Now he's promising that a Democrat will be governor on Oct. 8. McAuliffe is counting on Tom voters to pull this out for the Democrats and, crucially, for his own reputation. Already held in low esteem by most of his party colleagues, if McAuliffe loses California after losing Florida and then New York City, it doesn't take much imagination to see a revolt forcing this Clinton Kool-Aid drinker to step aside."

All true. Read the whole thing.

And see what happens.

There Was Joy In Mudville

There Was Joy In Mudville - Not only did the Twins win...

...but I passed my Level 2 final exam in bagpipes last night.

Only eight more months until I start playing actual pipes.

Assuming I can afford 'em by then.

Who's Smash? - The celebrated

Who's Smash? - The celebrated blogger Lieutenant Smash reveals his true identy.

(Via Instapundit)

Sixty Years Ago This Month

Sixty Years Ago This Month - We're three weeks into the third year of a war that truly has no end in sight.

As bad as that feels in the pit of the gut sometimes, it helps to consider the example of people who fought against vastly worse odds than we face today, also with no end in sight.

I've studied one form of military history or another for decades. My favorite subject, of course, is World War II - and one of the most interesting topics of the war was that of the various resistance movements that sprang up, especially in the intensely pacifistic countries of Scandinavia and the Low Countries. I believe it's no coincidence that some of the most pacifistic countries in Europe (Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway) have some of the largest, best-equipped militaries, relatively speaking; all suffered under Nazi occupation, and all have vowed "never again" to whatever extent.

Especially interesting are the Danes; while their nation has a pacifistic reputation, their troops were among the most respected in Bosnia (because, unlike most UN troops, they had no problems meeting snipers and mortars with machine guns and tanks - they tended to accomplish their mission first, and worry about lace-panty UN buncombe later); their special forces are among NATO's best; they, alone among continental Western European nations, contributed combat forces (a submarine) to the war in Iraq (and I don't believe for a moment that the boat was "gathering intelligence"; Polands GROM naval commando unit has trained extensively with the Danes, and was tasked with taking and holding offshore oil rigs; I'll bet dimes to dollars there's a connection).

So about two weeks ago, I finished reading The Savage Canary, David Lampe's history of the Danish Resistance in World War II. It's a story we all need to remember in these dire times.

Especially this story.

Sixty years ago this month, over the course of about three weeks in October of 1943, the Danish Resistance managed to find and smuggle nearly all of Denmark's Jewish population to Sweden. They started with some terrible handicaps; Denmark's few synogogues had detailed membership records of most native Danish Jews (Danes are a thorough people), while many more Jews were refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe who were working on the farms, and stood out from the general population.

Using a network of churches, unions, resistance fighters and sympathetic Danish citizens, the Danish resistance managed to to spirit over 7,000 of the 8,000 Jews in Denmark into fishing boats and freighters and smuggle them across the narrow straits into Sweden, evading German patrols on land and ships at sea. The story is an inspirational one - and, unfortunately, a unique one.

Of 30,000 Danes that were active in the resistance, 3,000 were killed in action, executed by the Germans, or died in concentration camps. Certainly not the worst odds of the war (Polish resistance troops had about a 1 in 4 chance of surviving), but not good either.

As the world notes the passing of Leni Riefenstahl, who did much to herald the rise of Nazism, I'd like to make sure the world notes a countervailing act of courage and resistance that has passed nearly unnoticed in the United States. It's important to remember - partly to pay homage to the anniversary of one of history's great acts of bravery and compassion, and partly to help us remember that in a world full of terrorists and their enablers, great selfless courage still exists.

UPDATE: A commenter and an emailer both noted that Norway also smuggled out many of its Jews - about 3/4 of them, according to the B'nai B'rith's "Black Book". Very true - and equally heroic. But it was carried out in smaller numbers, over a much longer time, while the bulk of the Danish action took place almost completely within a month - thus, easier to commemorate with a time-linked article.

Ill-Informed

I can make fun of ill-informed people all day long, when the subject is the Second Amendment.

Last April, I stood outside the Minnesota Senate and engaged a member of "Code Pink" - an irritating "Peace" and "Disarmament" group whose gimmick was dressing, er, pink - in a discussion of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, as we waited for the fateful final day of debate.

Her: The law would allow too many crazies to get guns
Me: What crazies? Show me the loophole that'd allow the "crazies" to get a carry permit?
Her: It'd allow all sorts of people to get guns
Me: It has nothing to do with "getting guns", it's about self-defense. You do know the criteria for issuing a permit, dont' you?
Her: Not off hand.
Me: Have you read the bill?
Her: Er, no...
Me: OK, the bill would require the state to issue permits to people who are over 21, have no criminal, mental illness or drug or alcohol record, and who've passed a background test and a training course. Which is more background check and training than the current law requires.
Her: Umph - well...I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Of course, if you're getting your information about the Second Amendment and the Minnesota Personal Protection Act here or here or here, or here or especially here or here, it's a safe bet you'll not only be misninformed, but probably paranoid.

You expect it from people who bring pinkness to a political debate. You'd not expect if from someone labelling himself a Republican.

You'd be wrong.

For someone who earned his fortune waving guns around in movies, Arnold Schwartzenegger is no more literate about gun laws than Wes "You law-abiding people are the problem" Skoglund:

While the federal ban on so-called "assault weapons" is scheduled to sunset in September 2004, the much more severe California prohibition has no sunset date. The federal and the state law are both based on cosmetics — on the idea that a gun is bad if it has a bayonet lug, or other small features that have nothing to do with the gun's firepower.

Schwarznegger also endorsed the Brady Bill — which never affected California gun sales, because the state's gun laws were more restrictive than the requirements of the 1993 Brady Bill.

It gets worse:

Schwarzenegger said that he thinks there should be a law for mandatory gunlocks. Apparently Schwarzenegger has no idea that California enacted such a law several years ago. It was this law which led directly to the death of two children in Merced, California, in August 2000. When an insane killer with a pitchfork attacked their home, their older sister — who was a trained shooter — was unable to protect them because the family guns were locked in a safe.

If during the campaign Schwarzenegger will not bother to learn simple facts about gun law, what is the likelihood that he would pay any more attention after being elected governor?

Don't get me wrong; in a state that is as strangled by the lunatic left as is California, I'm all for incrementalism; I'd rather have the deeply imperfect (from a conservative perspective) Schwartzenegger in office than the politically impeccable McClintock in second place, in the same way that I prefer to have the relatively-moderate Tim Pawlenty in the governor's office than Roger Moe in and Brian Sullivan out and saying "If only..." (and I know some of my longtime readers are solid Sullivan supporters, as was I; I just don't think Sullivan would have won the election; can you imagine Roger Moe in office these last eight months?)

But in a state where the lunatic fringe has driven gun policy that has had a disproportionate impact on the rest of the nation, it's important that Arnold get straightened out somehow.

Perhaps Charleton Heston could come out of retirement. It'd make more sense than the Monkeys' suggestion (although their ideas is flattering, and sounds pretty cool to boot).

Perspective - Den Beste on

Perspective - Den Beste on something a lot of the left misses - Iraqis can't be expected to immediately act like free people, with all the expectations and habits free people have:

"In the Antarctic, penguins nest on land but hunt at sea. There are leopard seals and killer whales who think that penguins are delicious, and who know where the rookeries are located. They hang out in the ocean nearby and wait, looking for a meal. If a group of penguins want to go to sea to hunt, the first few to enter the water take the greatest risk, and no one wants to be the first. So they collect on the edge of the ice, and jostle themselves, and eventually one or two lose their balance and fall in, and then the rest of them dive in after them.

Iraqis are not penguins, obviously, but there's something like that going on. After 25 years where expressing any kind of independence could earn you a horrible death, or earn such a death for everyone you love, it's hard to believe that it's changed. They were told that it was changed, but was it really true? And was it permanent?

There was a natural tendency for most to not take that chance. But a few took small chances, and didn't suffer for it. That encouraged others to try a bit more as time went on.

The first independent newspapers were very tentative. The Americans said they believed in free press, but did they really? And would supporters of Saddam visit the newspapers in the night? It was a risk, and those working on those newspapers were doing things which would have gotten them all killed just two months before.

But they didn't suffer. The Americans left them alone, and they didn't get visited by Baathist death squads. More newspapers appeared and began to be more frank, and Iraq now has the most free press in the Arab world. But that didn't happen overnight"

It's all worth a read.

And remember that the next time some liberal hamster calls Iraq a "quagmire".

Danger! - Laura Bush, in

Danger! - Laura Bush, in Moscow:

"American children, I'm afraid, are addicted to television," she told the first ladies of Russia, Armenia and Bulgaria on Tuesday, citing studies that place average TV consumption in the United States at several hours a day.

She continued:

"When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they're important — that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them," she said.

In that context, she termed TV-watching a big no-no.

"We're always, everyone — librarians, teachers — are trying to inform parents about turning the television off," said Mrs. Bush, a former teacher and librarian herself. "Television watching is very passive and ... reading is much better exercise for the brain."

Note to Mrs. Bush; careful with that kind of talk, or you'll lose the show-biz vote.

In the meantime, I'd like to officially welcome Bulgaria to the First World. Not only are they contributing troops to the liberation of Iraq, but their first lady, Zorka Parvanova (far right, below)...

...is further evidence of something I noticed three years ago; every Bulgarian woman I've ever met has been a heart-rending babe.

Demons and Spawn - Lileks

Demons and Spawn - Lileks related this story the other day in the Bleat:

“Are you sure it’s not a demon?” I asked my wife. She gave me that wifely look. “Because when your kid starts talking about creatures we can’t see, I think we ought to include demons in the mix of possible reasons.”

“I think it’s an imaginary friend,” she said. “Probably not a demon.”

“Sure. Sure. But - do you think they’d be able to tell in Sunday school? Like, if she hissed whenever they brought up Jesus?”

“I’m sure we’d hear about it.”

One late-winter day, during the 1994 Winter Olympics, I went out in the back yard with my daughter, then two years old.

She toddled over to a spot of glare ice by the garage, and as I watched perplexed, began spinning maniacally in tight circles.

"Daddy!", she yelled. "Daddy! Satan!"

Huh?

"Daddy! Satan!" She whirled about in a half a dozen more tight, frenzied circles.

"Satan, Daddy, Satan!"

I expected the green-pea soup vomit...

...when I remembered she'd been watching skating with her mother.

SKAY-ting, not SAY-tan.

Nothing seemed so bad after that.