Shot In The Dark

The Search Goes On -

The Search Goes On - The search goes on for Dru Sjodin, a Pequot Lakes (MN) girl apparently abducted from a parking lot in Grand Forks, ND.

The Grand Forks Herald continues to cover the story:

"Despite rumors flying Wednesday around the investigation about a body being found, they were all false, and nothing was found that has been linked to Sjodin, police said. No suspects have been identified, and no one is in custody, police said.

The 22-year-old UND student from Pequot Lakes, Minn., is thought to have been abducted about 5 p.m. Saturday near or in her car in a parking lot at Columbia Mall in Grand Forks."

It's hard to remember, sometimes, the effect something like this has in small-town America.

And seeing this picture reminds me; damn, it must be cold up there.

Presidential Moment - Bush slips

Presidential Moment - Bush slips the media gauntlet, flies to Iraq to spend Thanksgiving with the troops.

Watch for the Dems to harangue about:

• the cost
• the election-year symbolism
• his outfit :

  
  (remember the flap over him wearing a flight suit when he flew to the Abraham Lincoln?

Call it what you will. It's not just greatp politics. It's great leadership.

Especially when juxtaposed with the Dems' attitudes on the whole thing.

New Years Day, 2003 -

New Years Day, 2003 - I thought about leaving you with the Thanksgiving piece I wrote last year. I was pretty happy with it, and it kind of summed up how I really feel about Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me - the time when I reflect on the past year's agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so - for me anyway - than New Years' Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years - the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in '87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in '88, crazy in love in '89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in '90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in '91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in '92, in a new house in '93...wondering how long my marriage would last in '98, being able to answer the question "not long at all" in '99...

...and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad...well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there's the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I'd better get on with it.

To last year's litany, I should add the throat-clutching insecurity about the economy and my employment which, within a month, became fully justified. If anything, I have more to be thankful about this year: that I got through four months of unemployment and five more of drastic underemployment, in one piece; a new job; opportunities; relative stability.

It's a new year for me, again; as I noted last year, all the big changes in my life seem to hinge on the Thanksgiving season, good or bad. This year seems to be no exception - this year, it seems to be a good thing. So far.

And for that, I'm deeply thankful.

And as I said last year, I'm thankful for all of you. When this blog started, I got 7-8 visitors a day - friends, relatives, "car crash" spectators. The Garrison Keillor flap and the subsequent Instalanches pushed me up to around 200 visitors a day on average. Today, a typical weekday brings 4-500 of you to the site; it's flattering, humbling, challenging, and more fun than I'd ever imagined it being. Thank you all.

Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving! I certainly am.

F-Gate - Last week, the

F-Gate - Last week, the tempest in the blogosphere's teapot was Lileks' dropping of the F-Bomb against Salam Pax.

Spitbull comments - and begs two questions. One regards the Midwestern sensibility about swearing:

"Come to think of it, I believe they teach our kids to use the term 'Uff da!' to express strong emotion at school, but I guess James must have forgotten temporarily. But we'll forgive him. After all, he did apologize so nicely.

The other; has Mr. Bull ever met anyone from Chicago?

Now Dan, it's your turn. Chicago is technically in the Midwest after all. Let's keep the discussion civilized!"

Spit! People from Chicago - certainly every one I've ever known - swear with a brio that'd put a New York cabbie to shame. It's not the utilitarian, surgical cussing of the Minnesota farmer or mechanic - who tend to regard cursing as something akin to nudity or emotional revelation, something you only do when you really need to, and not to be indulged in otherwise.

No, every Chicagoan I've ever met has approached swearing the way a Frenchman regards wine; as something to be enjoyed, lingered over, savored.

When Lileks said "F-bomb You" to Pax, you could hear the North Dakota accent within. Had James been from Chicago, it would have been more like "F--- you, Salam, you F---ing D----ebag J--off!" delivered with the sort of pugnacious grin that you see on little boys who are about to TP a house, each syllable crafted with loving, joyful care; "F-wk Yooo, you DOOO-shbag J-g-off...."

It's one of the things I love about Chicago.

Just don't tell my mom.

Two Out Of Three Idiots

Spoons notes:

"George Blyther and Woodrow Johnson, a 60-year-old retired bureaucrat and and a 70-year-old retired gas-station attendant, respectively, have concluded that John Hinkley is pyschologically fit to be released from the mental hospital where he has been kept since his trial for the attempted assassination of President Reagan. The men come by their particular expertise by virtue of having served on the jury that found Hinkley not guilty by reason of insanity 21 years ago. Blyther, for his part, asserts that the Bush administration's opposition to Hinkley's release is 'purely political' and has 'nothing to do with reality.'

This is in reaction to...

...wait for it...

...wait...

...a Washington Post story.

Complicating matters, the other nine pinheads who acquitted Hinkley (and haven't seen him in two decades) have not yet offered their two cents.

You wondered what they'd all do when they got Mumia Abu-Jamal off the hook...

TV Romance

I've been single - again - for just about four years now. I've gone out with a woman or two - or 68 - in that time. And as a result, I think I know what's wrong with this country.

Romance, TV-style.

The PiPress over the weekend featured an article by Barbara Buchholtz, "Blind to Mr. Right." The scary part is, I think I've gone out with quite a few of the women in the article.

"We're seven attractive, smart, successful women who are used to getting everything we want," she says. Several are also waiting for a thunderbolt to strike. "Everyone says you know it when you meet him. There's magic. With my former husband, there were no bells, but I thought we'd have a nice comfortable life and get along," she says.

"I'll know when I meet him." Sounds reasonable on the surface, doesn't it?

But you have to read it literally: When I meet him. Not on the third date. Not after two hours of conversation over coffee. Within the first minute.

And to get the chance at that first minute, you have to leap some fairly rigorous hurdles these days. Buchholtz starts out:

If the fairy tales were rewritten, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella wouldn't be so quick to head off with their princes once they kissed or found the lost slipper.

They first would pull out a checklist for him — good looks, passion, an impressive job, net worth, nice wardrobe and trendy vacations — to be sure their suitors measured up.

Buchholtz is very close. That's all part of it.

But for all-too-many women (and, I presume, guys, although I haven't dated any of them), once the bona-fides and the income and the wardrobe have been gone over it boils down to one word: Chemistry. In science, Chemistry is a discipline defined by empirical reason. In dating, it's the reading of sheep entrails - no, worse, since entrails entailed some sort of at least nodding acquaintance with empiricism. It's the opposite of reason; the notion that one can be swept away at first sight due to forces beyond anyone's control. It's "that special something" that nobody can define, but everyone knows the results.

A woman I briefly dated (and with whom I felt no "chemistry") called it: "Chemistry is that feeling you have in the back of your head that says 'I know I just met you, but I am attracted enough to want to sleep with you long before I know I should."

In dating today, we see a mixture of old and new values: For centuries, marriage had little to do with romance; they were as much financial transactions as anything, as they are still in much of the world. About a hundred years ago, that started changing in the West, and romance - including the "love at first sight" fairy tale.

Today? It seems only both will do. Perhaps it's because women's roles have changed; not so much their overt roles in work and society, but their unstated roles; the notion that men, or "their" man, is there to protect them and their children from the depredations of the world is a dead issue today. So there's a practical element to courtship - especially among women for whom ensuring and protecting ones' lifestyle has replaced raising and protecting children as their primary motivation - that that was perhaps less important 30 years ago

Despite their good intentions, part of their prolonged hunt may be because they keep seeking some wrong qualities, says editorial stylist and freelance producer Susan Victoria, of Chicago, who is 57 and single. "So many women want a good catch and won't talk to a man unless he makes a certain amount," she says. "What they should be looking for instead is the right emotional connection."

Pamela Garber, a psychotherapist in South Florida, agrees that too many women set as the goal a certain lifestyle rather than intimacy. "A mate simply becomes another part of the package," she says.

The man and, when you get to that point, the baby as well. Children, for a growing number of couples, have become a lifestyle accessory. But that's fodder for another post. Buchholtz continues:

A prime reason for this phenomenon is that we've become a brand-conscious society.

"Our culture bombards us with messages that if we buy a certain product or service, we won't have to settle for someone who's less than the idealized person the media has created as a benchmark, such as a George Clooney type," says Rob Frankel, author of the self-published "Revenge of Brand X" (Frankel & Anderson Inc., $36.95).

Or the message of "Sex in the City" - that if they and their friends analyze their love lives to a fine sheen, Mr. Perfect will make himself apparent.

In the first sixty seconds, mind you.

(Via Dave's Picks)

"Astroturf" - That's the new

"Astroturf" - That's the new buzzword among the blogs on the left.

According to lefty bloggers like Josh "Joshua Micah" Marshall, when a group of average schmuck liberals gets together to agitate for something - even if it's under the aegis of an organization like MoveOn.org (which just got $5 million from George Soros) - it's "Grassroots".

But everyone knows that it's the conservatives that are run by a centralized cabal of big-buck financiers, and we couldn't possibly organize to move mountains at the grass-roots level, right?

Every time I worry about getting enough material, I just read a few of my favorite lefty blogs. It fixes things every time.

The Peril of the Moderate

The Peril of the Moderate Moslem, Part II - Powerline is observing the same thing I am - that as US policy remains stalwart against terror, the terrorists will go for easy targets - the civilians and Moslem moderates who are, in the long run, the greatest threat to them.

Powerline notes, in referring to a conference by Gen. Abizaid, who noted attacks against US forces are down sharply in recent weeks:

To some degree, the Baathists' efforts have been re-directed toward attacks on Iraqi civilians, designed to deter cooperation with the coalition. Bremer says he doubts the attacks will be effective: "If Saddam taught the Iraqis nothing else it was how to endure the depredations of thugs."

In the meantime, Sullivan points to this report in the Guardian, on the mood in Turkey.

A cash register full of money quotes in this piece.

. But once we had left the airport, it was hard to see any sign of a crisis. The streets were clogged with traffic and people shopping for the holiday that begins today. The shores of the Bosphorus were lined with fishermen and a procession of large, slow-moving families enjoying the unusually fine weather. The restaurants and cafes were doing a brisk business, and every few hundred metres there was a florist overflowing on to the pavement to meet the seasonal demand.

In my brother's neighbourhood, which was ankle deep in broken glass a week ago, the glaziers have been working so hard that there is a joke rumour going around that they were the masterminds behind the bomb. Now all but a few of the windows have been replaced, bar the ones on the mosque next door to the synagogue. The buildings across the street have lost their fronts and been condemned. But the lighting store next to them is open for business.

My brother says that the shopkeepers on the street were out with their brooms within minutes of the explosion. It was the residents who got the wounded to hospital. He saw no official presence for two hours.

They are very much in evidence now. Those with homes or businesses in the affected areas must leave their identity cards with the police manning the barricades. Anyone who stops to look at the damage can expect to be filmed by a man who may or may not be an innocent journalist. It is all very subtle, and very calm. The shopkeepers in the fish and flower markets near to where the entrance to the British consulate stood until last Thursday do not want to talk about the bomb any more. They would rather sell me a string of red peppers or talk me into a pair of wonky glasses and a monster mask. Like my friends, they see staying at home behind closed doors as a form of defeat. They are determined to get life back to normal as soon as possible, no matter what.

Needless to say, you need to read the whole thing.

Turkey has had one form of domestic strife or another, frequently between Islamic fundamentalists and the secular authorities, especially the military, since Ataturk established modern Turkey after World War I. The latest phase - tied to the current war on terror inasmuch as it is linked to Wahabbist madrasses that have sprung up throughout the Turkish countryside - promises to be difficult.

How will the Turks react? To some extent, as Sullivan notes, that's up to us.

Open Carry Day in Ohio

Open Carry Day in Ohio - Ohioans have been fighting for a concealed carry reform bill similar to Minnesota's for some time. Their legislative and legal battle has been long and brutal - and, at the moment, the legal opposition comes down to Governor Taft, who is pretty much singlehandedly stalling things.

However, due to a recent court decision, open carry is legal in Ohio. So CCW Reform supporters in Ohio are carrying openly as part of an organized campaign of civil resistance - and may be planning a march on the capitol, according toClayton Cramer:

Ohioans For Concealed Carry has announced that activists from across the state who are interested in protesting Governor Taft’s obstruction of concealed carry reform will "openly carry" their sidearms, beginning in a public park at the corner of Parkview and Commonwealth outside the Governor’s Mansion in Bexley, November 30 at 2:00 p.m.

In the past two months, over one thousand Ohioans have staged 'Defense' Walks around the state, at which they openly carry firearms to protest the failure of their elected officials to keep their promises and enact concealed-carry legislation.

Read both pieces.

Gunned Down, Part II -

Gunned Down, Part II - The Kansas town of Geuda Springs requires all homes to have guns, a la Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia. Geuda Springs has no police force, and passed the ordinance as a means of deterring crime.

Anyone want to guess how hard the WaPo had to look for dissenting opinion? They found a "City Attorney" (in a town without a police force?) and this comment from the county sheriff:

"Geuda Springs has no local police force; the Sumner County Sheriff's department is responsible for policing the area. Sheriff Gerald Gilkey said the ordinance makes him concerned for the safety of his officers.

"This throws up red flags," he said.

From his comments, I take it the Sheriff's department has had lots of problems in Geuda Springs? The only crime records I can find in a quick web search are for Sumner County - but that includes the urban cesspool of Arkansas Springs. Perhaps the Sheriff is either sensationalizing, or being taken out of context?

Let's see how many people - including Sumner County Sheriffs Deputies - get shot in Geuda Springs from now on...

What Kind of Hawk Are

What Kind of Hawk Are You? - One of the more irritating hard-left tropes sine 9/11 has been the notion of the "Chickenhawk". If you've never served in the military, you'd best not urge any policy that involves use of the military, lest you be called a chickenhawk. The term flies thick and fast on the left wing of the blogosphere.

Some on the right have taken umbrage at this. I won't. In fact, this idea should be applied through all public policy discussions!

• If you've never been poor, but you write about what society has to do for the poor? You're a Poorhawk!
• Yapping about education policy, even though you're not a teacher (or, like my own city councilman Jay Benanav, your kid went to private school)? You're a NEAhawk!
• Concerned about policy implications on the elderly, even though you're not 65 yet? Pffft. You're an Aarphawk!

But we need more! Leave comments or send email.

Unless you're some kind of Nofeedbackhawk...

Truer Words - Lileks notes

Truer Words - Lileks notes something I wanted to touch on:

"Please, please, please Corporate America: do not put the Cat in the Hat on any more products. The sight of that thing gives me nightmares. It should not be. If in olden tymes such a beast sauntered into town, the menfolk would pick up shovels and beat it to death. "

They've taken the lanky, Suessified icon of my childhood, and forever made me think "The Cat looks like Fat Bastard."

Gunned Down, Part II

As we reported yesterday, the M-16 rifle may be fighting its final battle.

It's long been regarded as too fragile and jam-prone (as we may have seen during the Jessica Lynch incident, where quite a number of M-16s jammed in action). Now it's too bulky, too:

After nearly 40 years of battlefield service around the globe, the M-16 may be on its way out as the standard Army assault rifle because of flaws highlighted during the invasion and occupation of Iraq (news - web sites).

U.S. officers in Iraq say the M-16A2 — the latest incarnation of the 5.56 mm firearm — is quietly being phased out of front-line service because it has proven too bulky for use inside the Humvees and armored vehicles that have emerged as the principal mode of conducting patrols since the end of major fighting on May 1.

The replacement? A cut-down M-16.

The M-4 is essentially a shortened M-16A2, with a clipped barrel, partially retractable stock and a trigger mechanism modified to fire full-auto instead of three-shots bursts. It was first introduced as a personal defense weapon for clerks, drivers and other non-combat troops.

"Then it was adopted by the Special Forces and Rangers, mainly because of its shorter length," said Col. Kurt Fuller, a battalion commander in Iraq and an authority on firearms.

Fuller said studies showed that most of the combat in Iraq has been in urban environments and that 95 percent of all engagements have occurred at ranges shorter than 100 yards, where the M-4, at just over 30 inches long, works best.

Still, experience has shown the carbines also have deficiencies. The cut-down barrel results in lower bullet velocities, decreasing its range. It also tends to rapidly overheat and the firing system, which works under greater pressures created by the gases of detonating ammunition, puts more stress on moving parts, hurting its reliability.

Consequently, the M-4 is an unlikely candidate for the rearming of the U.S. Army. It is now viewed as an interim solution until the introduction of a more advanced design known as the Objective Individual Combat Weapon, or OICW.

"Great, a new weapon!"

Well, maybe not. Look at this thing. If you've never been a soldier, you might think it looks like something from "Aliens". You wouldn't be far off.

It weighs 68 pounds, loaded for action. That's nearly 10 times the weight of the M-16. This, after the military spent forty years trying to build a rifle lighter and handier than the old M-1/M-14 family of rifles, which were both wondeful rifles (I've shot both) and bulkier than your standard deer rifle.

It's not an idle point. Soldiers will have to lug this thing - and all its ammunition - along with their other gear (food, ammunition for their squad's machine gun, etc) into action - and the more tired they are when they get there, the less likely they are to be able to shoot accurately, no matter what kind of sight you pin on the top.

Or so I'm told. I've never been a soldier.

Kim Du Toit has, and he's the blogosphere's resident firearms maven. His opinions about the OICW start here, and if you were left in any doubt, continue here.

More on this later.

Public Image Limited - What

Public Image Limited - What does Sergeant Mom have in common with British Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell?

For the last week, one thing; a realization that the media's image of the President is wrong.

Campbell, a major figure in the British Liberal Democrats (one of many parties that come in behind Labour and the Tories in the UK), said that while he disagrees deeply with Bush (as is to be expected), that:

“He is personally extremely engaging. He has a well-developed sense of humour, is self-deprecating and when he engages in a discussion with you he is warm and concentrates directly on you.

“He looks you straight in the eye and tells you exactly what he thinks.”

Mr Campbell, stressing that the President was “totally at odds” with his media image, went on: “I was not persuaded by what he said, but I was most certainly surprised at the extent to which the caricature of him was inaccurate.”

Campbell realizes something Sergeant Mom notes in her post on Stryker this morning:

Really, people, I am getting the feeling that you have never paid attention to all those stories and jokes about smart, cosmopolitan types who ventured out into the sticks to patronize the local yokels and wound up loosing their shirts, or their wallets, or at least a couple of illusions regarding making an assumption about a person based on that persons’ dress, accent, and apparent class (or lack thereof) when said yokels out-slicked the city slicker.

This, in fact, ties together quite a number of threads.

The US media and government establishments are completely centered on the coasts, east and west. While solid, convincing arguments can be made that race, class and gender are big divisions in American society, I've sensed for decades that regionalism may be the biggest one of all, in the long run.

The signs are everywhere.

Academygirl (link via SCSU Scholars, who are second to none at covering academia) has this fascinating piece, on how very difficult it is for gifted, poor, rural students to get noticed by "elite" universities.

She tells the story of Daniel Spangenberger, of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, who:

SCORED 1330 on his SAT, well within the range desired by many elite schools, and now that he’s borrowed an SAT prep book, he hopes to break 1400 on his second try. His teachers say he’s smart, motivated and exceptionally mature. He holds two after-school jobs and also finds time to volunteer, setting up a computer cafe at the local Boys & Girls Club. And he drives his mother, who is battling cancer, to her monthly chemo sessions. Only two obstacles stand between Spangenburger and his dream: he comes from a poor family (neither parent went to college) and attends a rural high school. “With the right kind of college education, Daniel could do great things,” says Berkeley Springs High School principal George Ward. “But so many smart rural kids fall through the cracks. Top schools don’t know Daniel exists...Many schools say diversity—racial, economic and geographic—is key to maintaining intellectually vital campuses. But Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation says that even though colleges claim they want poor kids, “they don’t try very hard to find them.” As for rural students like Spangenburger, many colleges don’t try at all. “Unfortunately, we go where we can generate a sizable number of potential applicants,” says Tulane admissions chief Richard Whiteside, who recruits aggressively—and in person—from metropolitan areas. Kids in rural areas get a glossy brochure in the mail.”

Of course, in many of the rural areas of this nation, there's a sort of reverse snobbery, which has served to keep many of the hinterland's best and brightest securely locked in the hinterland for generations. Kids are encouraged to go to the state college and come back home to build the communities, and carry on where Mom or Dad left off. Kathleen Norris spelled out the syndrome - and its results - in her classic Dakota: A Spiritual Geography"; part inferiority complex, part reverse snobbery, part monkish aesceticism...

...and partly what Academygirl and the Scholars note: persistent ignorance about the parts of this nation more than 100 miles from the coasts, which leads to underrepresentation at our "elite" universities, which leads in turn to underrepresentation in this nation's academic, media, upper-level administrative and governing classes.

Which leads to the media's ever-persistent myopia about people who don't...act like them. People like the President.

20 years ago, European leaders recall being amazed at Ronald Reagan's erudition and personability - completely at odds with the image they'd gotten from the US and European presses.

The cycle continues.

(Via the Professor and Rush)

Anger Management - Which of

Anger Management - Which of us has not felt this way?:

"In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made 'road rage' famous, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company between May and July.

Booher threatened to send a 'package full of Anthrax spores' to the company, to 'disable' an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.

He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.

I feel the same way when I get my daily emails from MoveOn.org...

In a telephone interview with Reuters on Friday, Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.

Simple solution: Switch to Mozilla Firebird. In my household, Internet Exploder is treated as a virus.

Powerslam - Powerline assails Tom

Powerslam - Powerline assails Tom Daschle's attack on the RNC's ad campaign.

After running the script, Hindrocket adds:

The Democrats' position is ludicrous on its face: they have blanketed the air waves in primary states for months with ads attacking the President's handling of the war, and now he doesn't get to defend himself? Daschle's willingness to take such a ridiculous position can only be seen as an indication of how badly the Democrats fear the national security issue will play for them next year.

I don't think they know exactly how bad it's going to play for them.

I notice that the blogging left is being very quiet about the whole thing...

Crucial Endorsement - Grave-dancing cartoonist

Crucial Endorsement - Grave-dancing cartoonist Ted Rall has endorsed Howard Dean.

He says this on the "Dean For America" blog:

" Howard Dean has the best chance to beat Bush.

Brilliant, aggressive and moneyed... Dr. Dean has a corner on the single most important issue to Americans: health care.

Huh?

I suppose there is a large class of Americans who can completely ignore what's going on outside our borders - or what went on here, two years ago.

Are they a majority? I doubt it. God help us if they are.

This next bit is hilarious:

But the rubber would really tear up the road at the presidential debates, where Dean's dry, sardonic Long Island wit would devastate the hapless Bush--and charm television viewers.

Astounding, isn't it?

Does "dry, sardonic Long Island wit" play in Peoria? Especially a Peoria that knows that Bush has handled the presidency well, and isn't buying Dean's ostrich-head-in-the-sand rhetoric?

Medved's prediction - that next fall will be a historical landslide - is sounded better and better.

And that's ignoring the effect of the crucial Rall endorsement!

Majer Setback - When Brian

Majer Setback - When Brian Lambert knocks off with his absurd political commentary, he's a very good media columnist.

This week, some almost-inside dirt on the departure of Paul Majers from KARE11. Lambert's account differs from the antiseptic, collegial account given in, say, Minneapolis/Saint Paul magazine.

Flopped in a leather chair in his handsome Lake of the Isles home in Minneapolis, Magers prefers the story of moving on to a new challenge. The shift to Los Angeles, he says, "already has new emotions for me — nervousness, anxiety — all those wonderful things we like coping with on a daily basis. It really has created a whole new set of stimuli."

The secret to Magers' success has been analyzed endlessly, even though the discussions are usually quite brief. He's a natural. The relaxed, quick-witted, self-effacing guy you see on camera is pretty much exactly what you get in person. In private, however, he's confident enough to pepper conversation with a few mild, strategically applied profanities and, well off-record, some vivid, funny dissections of other local personalities.

Magers jokes about shifting from the Twin Cities, where he's easily one of the half-dozen most recognizable and sought-after people in town, to L.A., where local TV news anchors rank somewhere between midlevel sitcom actors and last year's pop divas in terms of heart-fluttering star power...

Magers also makes light of the near-miraculous effect he'll have to have on KCBS. It's been an also-ran in the Los Angeles market for years, and many industry pros are skeptical even Magers can do much to raise it from near oblivion.

"Yeah, this thing could go wrong pretty easily," he cracked during the summer. "By this time next year we could be living in a double-wide on the Salton Sea," he said, referring to the parched, windswept hellhole out in the Mojave.

In a city this size, you don't have to go far to find people with Paul Majers stories. Mine? Well, back in the mid-eighties, I talked with him several times; he was a regular listener to the old Don Vogel show, and he called in to the program line at least once. And when I got whacked at KSTP, I used that "connection" to call him up, cold, to see if there might be a job of some sort out at KARE.

While most anchors - hell, most news directors, producers and cameramen - would have put that call in their mental File 13 without much further thought, Majers invited me out to KARE, had a cup of coffee, and introduced me to their then-News Director - something I can imagine very few anchors anywhere doing for someone they'd "met" only via phone on a talk show. (The News Director, on the other hand, rejected me for a dispatcher job, calling me "overqualified", which, given the reputation of KARE's behind-the-scenes production staff at that time, was kind of a slap...)

Anyway, while I watch very little local news these days, I guess it's significant that I don't think I can even name any other local anchors without thinking about it (and thinking about it only yields me Robyne Robyneson, Jeff Passolt and Amelia Santanielle. That's it).

Now that's marketing.

The Peril to the Moderate

The Peril to the Moderate Moslem - As we said Friday - the most dangerous thing to be when it comes to terrorism is a moderate Moslem.

Matthew Gutman sums it up in the Jerusalem Post:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately released a statement following the second twin bombings in Turkey in the space of a week, that Islamic violence threatens the free world. But Turkey experts quickly warned Thursday that even at a greater risk are states that make up the small bloc of moderate Arab/Islamic states.

"Al Qaida is concentrating more and more on the moderate or pro-Western states it considers heretical," said a senior security source, "like Jordan, Egypt Morocco, and especially Turkey." In a recently broadcast statement that could be called a "State of the Jihad" address, Osama Bin Laden listed attacking moderate Islamic or Arab states third after Jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan, the security source said.

Al Qaida seems intensely focused on states like Turkey because far more than Israel, or "US-Zionist imperialism," as the phrase goes, Islamic fundamentalists are threatened by moderate Islamic and pro-western states, said the security source.

This is a hugely important point - one that most Americans just don't realize. The policy among Moslem radicals, going back to the 1920s, is to kill the moderates first. Then the infidels.

Emmylou - I may share

Emmylou - I may share only one thing with Norm Geras of Normblog; a fascination with Emmylou Harris:

Then on comes Emmylou Harris with the ease and naturalness of a grand old lady of the music, and wearing it without any trace of arrogance or show. She just sings her stuff, both new and old, like it's forever. And that voice, with its distinctive purity; not thin exactly but kind of slender, and coming from somewhere higher up. I don't mean this in a religious sense, not being so inclined. But in a metaphysical sense, maybe. For Emmy stands on stage and she sings at you; it's plain, that's where the voice is coming from. But it sounds like from somewhere higher, as though sliding down from between two very closely aligned forms. Of the Emmylou Harris classics, we heard a marvellous Hickory Wind; and Together Again, and Wheels, and Wayfaring Stranger. And then to finish - in the encore - possibly her two greatest songs: (Townes Van Zandt's) Pancho and Lefty, and Boulder to Birmingham, written by her in memory of Gram Parsons.

Meeting Emmylou was one of the epiphanic moments of my life. And if you don't have a copy of "Roses in the Snow" or "Angel Band" or "Red Dirt Girl", you have only yourself to blame. Run, don't walk.

Closing the Links - Slowly

Closing the Links - Slowly and surely, the links between Bin Laden and Hussein are becoming fleshed out with documentary evidence.

Sharkansky notes that someone needs to tell Molly "Bush is a Poopyhead" Ivins.

Just read it.

Scoop - Lileks refers us

Scoop - Lileks refers us to "Iraq Now", a blog by Jason van Steenwyk, a US Army officer currently in country.

Van Steenwyk touches on a topic that ties him to his anscestors 35 years ago in the jungles of Vietnam; hatred of the M16 rifle:

"Well, the secret's out. After months of combat, after Kosovo, after Bosnia, after Haiti, after Mogadishu, the Associated Press and the Army finally realized what we figured out after about 90 minutes on the ground: the M16 is too beaucoups for vehicle-intensive, urban peacekeeping operations. Story here.

The truth is, we seem to be the only suckers out here trying to fight with them. Most of the Cav guys carry carbines. The special ops guys around here all arm themselves with some variant of a carbine, or machine pistols such as the TEC 9 and HK. Ditto the Brits.

I just talked to a British paratrooper the other day. (See, Josh Marshall--we're not "all alone" as you say!). American troops gripe when their rotation goes beyond 6 months. He just spent five years patrolling the mean streets of Belfast. The British have been there for decades. You'd think they'd have learned a thing or two about urban counterinsurgencies.

We talked to some of his troops about their armaments. All of them carried a variant of the submachine gun design, with folding stocks or no stocks at all.

Even the insurgents are cutting the stocks off their AK-47s! "

No, this doesn't much pertain to politics in Minnesota. It's just fun to scoop Kim Du Toit on a gun-related story for once...

Open Letter to the Television

Open Letter to the Television Industry - If I ask "Who the hell is Paris Hilton, and why should I care about her romantic life or her experience on an Arkansas pig farm?", please understand this subtle point: The question is purely rhetorical.

That is all. Carry on.

Two Lessons - PoliPundit observes

Two Lessons - PoliPundit observes Al Quaeda's operating patterns for the last few years - and gets, I think, half of the lesson:

In the two years since September 11, Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists have struck in the predominantly muslim countries of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, Afghanistan and Indonesia. They've struck targets ranging from Australian tourists in Bali to Arab expatriates in Saudi Arabia.

They've hit the UN, the Red Cross, a Jordanian embassy, a British embassy, a Turkish embassy, synagogues, mosques, restaurants, banks, houses... They've killed women and children, old and young, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.

Poli's conclusion?

There's no pattern to the choice of targets, except an insane desire to lash out at civilization itself. If it wasn't clear to the world already, it should be now: You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.

He gets it - but only halfway.

The attacks in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and Jordan illustrate the real lesson, one that's been around since 1920: The most dangerous thing to be in the Moslem world is a moderate.

The pattern is endless:

• From the Balfour Declaration until the end of World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - a radical cleric who openly admired Hitler - ostracized, terrorized and killed Arabs who openly advocated rapprochement with the Jews.
• Since Israeli independence, and especially since 1967, the pattern has continued. Any Arab - especially Palestinians - who advocate a moderate approach risks (and frequently achieves) death or serious intimidation at the hands of thugs working for the more extreme factions.
• Of course, it's nothing new; it's a terrorist dictum going back to Chairman Mao. The guerrilla needs to swim in a sea of friendly fish - so the first order of business is to make sure all the fish are on board. Even before going after the enemy.

Expect many more attacks against the Turks, Moroccans, Senelalese, Indonesians, Indians.

UPDATE: Oh, wait - it's really three lessons. Or should be, if Howard Dean (or his supporters) are smart enough to absorb them.

To wit: notice where the attacks in and out of Iraq have been focused lately? Moderate Moslems (Turkey), Arabs who are largely moderate and allied with the West (the Saudis), and Arabs that are actively fighting against them (the new Iraqi police force).

Now - remember Howard Dean's bright idea - that we should turn the occupatio of Iraq largely over to...whom?

Moderate Arabs. Because they'll be able to "calm the waters..."

But only in Howard Dean's world. In the real world of moslem terror, it's the moderate Moslems that are the first enemy to be destroyed.

Has Kos Seen This? -

Has Kos Seen This? - The Daily Kos is one of the tonier lefty blogs.

It's known as much for obsessive poll-watching as anything, and is famous for its right-side bar showing every poll in the western world that measures George W. Bush's approval ratings. They are always falling on Kos' page - and yet the numbers never quite seem to drop below the low 50s. How is that?

Anyway, Drudge notes:

If the 2004 Presidential election was held today, registered voters surveyed for TIME/CNN would choose President George W. Bush over any of the declared Democratic candidates.

Let me check...

...Nope. Didn't see that on Kos.

Wonder what could be wrong? Just an oversight, I'm sure.

Ace of Spades - The

Ace of Spades - The GOP is going to start running ads invoking the terror issue as campaign-fodder:

"After months of sustained attacks against President Bush in Democratic primary debates and commercials, the Republican Party is responding this week with its first advertisement of the presidential race, portraying Mr. Bush as fighting terrorism while his potential challengers try to undermine him with their sniping.

The new commercial gives the first hint of the themes Mr. Bush's campaign is likely to press in its early days. It shows Mr. Bush, during the last State of the Union address, warning of continued threats to the nation: 'Our war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power,' he says after the screen flashes the words, 'Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.'

By indirectly invoking the Sept. 11 attacks, the commercial plays to what White House officials have long contended is Mr. Bush's biggest political advantage: his initial handling of the aftermath of the attacks."

It's about time.

Oh, you can watch for the Dems to let slip the dogs of bleat about this: "No fair, exploiting September 11 for political gain."

So - has the Howard Dean campaign exploited terror - or rather, its constituents' views on terror, namely the notion that Bush is the only terrorist - for political gain?

Note to Democrats: if you want to play politics with foreign policy, be ready for it to be played back.

And a note to all you moderate Democrats - and I know you're out there: If you, as a party, didn't think your ultra-left base's stance on this, the most important issue of our time, wasn't going to bite your butts with the general voting public, then what were you thinking?

Paging Jack Tripper - I

Paging Jack Tripper - I went to college in a tiny, struggling little school in the middle of North Dakota. The school was nominally affiliated with the Presbyterian Church - mainly because they wanted roughly $5,000 a year that came from the church's General Assembly. Things were that tight at Jamestown College back then; change from under sofas in dormitory lounges went into the general fund.

The school had a pretty stodgy moral code; getting caught with alcohol on campus was a $50 first offense. And "Prurience", as it was quaintly called in the school handbook, was serious business. People were not supposed to be in the dorm rooms of the opposite gender after 11PM - 1AM on weekends. Granted, the rules were followed only to the extent that it took to maintain appearances; beer flowed like the Volga in the dorms; the walls and ceilings shook all weekend. Rules, schmules.

Jamestown College was, of course, the country cousin of MacAlester College, which is floating a trial balloon for a policy that would allow opposite-gendered students to cohabitate in the dorms.

Responding to a request from students, Macalester College has formed a committee to study a proposal that would allow students of the opposite sex to share a dorm room.

If approved, the proposal for gender-blind housing is an attempt to make transgender students feel more comfortable on campus, officials at the private school in St. Paul said.

I'm not sure what level of "comfort" the transgendered students are looking for - I can't relate to them, beyond the normal bounds of human empathy and compassion.

But if they're not already comfortable at Macalester - a school whose political mien resembles Evergreen State if not Berkeley - I have to wonder where they would feel comfortable.

Among the issues to be addressed is who would be eligible for the housing program — including such details as whether to limit it to those who are transgender or allowing gays and heterosexuals.

Can you imagine if they cut the policy off with transgendered and gay students?

"Yes, Ms. Dean of Students, I'm gay. Yeah - that's the ticket. And I'm thinking I'd be much more, er, comfortable, and feel much more accepted here at Macalester, if you let me share a dorm room with Britney instead of Jared."

The issue has been covered in the student newspaper but it hasn't generated much controversy on campus, said senior Katherine McCarthy, who serves on a student advisory committee for the dean.

"I think it's a good idea,'' she said. "Students who are uncomfortable in same-sex housing should have the right to have housing they are comfortable in.''

Question: has anyone asked the non-transgendered (or non-gay) residents of the dorms how they feel about having dorm-mates of opposite or ambiguous gender among them?

Before the legion of the perpetually indignant bum-rushes my comment section again - I honestly don't know, and would like to.

Somebody's Going To Heck, Part

Somebody's Going To Heck, Part II - In this case, Rambling Rhodes:

Being that it's so close to Thanksgiving, I wince with a small little bit of a sardonic grimace when I read such headlines as "At least 27 killed in Turkey blasts."

I feel strangely dirty just reading it.

Guy After My Own Heart

Guy After My Own Heart - Elder from Fraters describes the kind of trip to London that sounds a lot like the one I took myself...

...although I didn't have a wife with me at the time.

Still:

. My wife has been too busy of late to get involved with the trip planning and so I will dictate our every move in London. Buwah-hah-hah!

Can you say heavy historical emphasis?

"We've spent eight hours at the Imperial War Museum. Can't we go shopping now?"

"Shopping? London's a bad shopping town honey. If we hurry I think we can still make the HMS Belfast..."

Only eight hours at the IWM? Dream on. Eight hours will cover the Belfast, mano.

Bon voyage, anyway.

Walk Like A Mesapotamian -

Walk Like A Mesapotamian - Iraqi blogger the Mesopotamian observes about the pro-dictatorship "anti-war" Anti-Bush protests in London:

"All you peace lovers and humanitarians of trendy London town, spare a thought or two for the coalition soldier out there in the dark and wilderness guarding our hospitals, primary schools and orphanages from the bombers and assassins, and the Iraqi Police reporting everyday for duty under constant danger of death and mutilation with their poor equipment and meager $50 or so a month pay package. They number almost 100 000 by now and if enlistment is really opened up they would quadruple in number immediately. Why do you think they come? Saddamists pay anybody ten thousand dollars per explosion, and they are going around trying to recruit, and this is a fact that all people in Baghdad know. So why do they come, you think? But only those who have eyes can see, and ears can hear. Why do you think the crackle of celebratory gunfire ululated till dawn, on that sultry Baghdad summer night when the death of Uday and Qusay the monster brats of the tyrant was announced? This, the media did not dwell upon, although quite newsworthy and dramatic. That was the real Opinion Poll of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Baghdad. (P.S. I hope the word ululate exists in the English language, it means the sound that our women make in celebrations of marriages or when welcoming heroes and the like, if it doesn’t please add it to your dictionary)"

He seems to have things in perspective:

But enough of this and to cut a long story short. As long as America and her allies choose the side of the oppressed and downtrodden, as long as they remain on the side of the people, they will be invincible. When Might is coupled with Right, then expect great historical transformations.

I once worked with a Ukrainian gentleman. When we got around to talking politics (and with this man, it was unavoidable), we got around to discussing Reagan. My only problem, as far as he was concerned, was that I (I!) didn't admire Ronald Reagan enough! He had been on the east side of the Berlin Wall until it fell, and told me of the regard in which Reagan was held in the former Eastern Bloc - a popularity some say is reflected by that region's support for the liberation of Iraq.

So will Bush be regarded the same way in Iraq - at least, Shi'a Iraq? Well, he's got Mesapotamian sold:

Here below I paste parts of the speech by that Great descendant of the ancient Celt, who everyday grows bigger and bigger in the eyes of this poor Iraqi “Ordinary Man”. Note the parts in bold.

Read the...well, you know the drill.

London, 1984 - Powerline notes

London, 1984 - Powerline notes the difference in protests between the London of the Cold War and today.

Key observation: the protests of 19 years ago were several times bigger that today's - and this before the terms "internet" or "Flash Mob" had ever been uttered.

Biographies - Powerline points us

Biographies - Powerline points us at excellent piece in Human Events Online, "Ten American Biographies Everyone Should Read".

It's a treasure trove of great reading. In particular, I noticed it cites Witness by Whittaker Chambers. It's blurbed as follows:

Chambers details his own career as a Soviet spy, and his involvement in bringing fellow spy Alger Hiss to justice. Chambers repented of his Communism and later became a Christian and patriotic American. A former editor at Time, Chambers portrayed the Cold War as a moral struggle between two irreconcilable world views: an atheistic view, in which man made up his own rules; and a religious view, in which God set rules that man was bound to obey. This construction had great influence on Ronald Reagan, who cited Chambers at length in his famous Evil Empire speech. Chambers also pointed out that Western liberals have basically the same amoral worldview as the Communists. "In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return," wrote Chambers. "I began to break away from communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men."

Read the list - I plan on hitting the library for several of these over the winter, unless one of you beats me to them.

(Via Powerline)

Biteline - Lileks is in

Biteline - Lileks is in rare form today, even for Lileks.

On last night's Nightline, which like much of the media yesterday focused more on The King of the Freak Show Michael Jackson; James got Nightline's email announcement, bomoaning the staff strife that led to the the momentous choice between covering the War and Jacko.

The staff was split. Nightline, supposedly the Thinking Person’s Late Night Show, was split about whether a repudiation of 50 years of foreign policy was slightly more important than the arrest of a washed-up, crotch-grabbing yee-hee! squeaking nutball who was probably the horrid pedophile everyone already thought he was.

The question is whether this reflects the mood of the country, or whether it reflects the mood of our Olympian betters who hand down the news from their lofty aeries. I think it’s the latter. I hope it’s the latter. Of course Jackson is an item of interest, but it’s a below-the-fold story. It’s an artifact of the noisy empty 90s, the Jerry Springer era, the time when the networks sought out the people pasted to their sofas shoveling in Doritos and watching hapless fools throw folding chairs at their ex-lovers. Watching the nets fall over themselves covering Jackson makes you suspect that they yearn for those days, because they are profoundly ambivalent about the conflict in which we are engaged.

They fear Islamic terrorism, but it’s an abstract fear now. Their distaste of Bush is much more tangible and immediate; it’s part of the atmosphere in the newsroom. This is his war, not theirs. If it is a war at all.

Here's my question: What will the first Hollywood movie about the Iraq war be? (Leave aside Saving Private Lynch for a moment). More importantly - will it more closely represent Saving Private Ryan, or will it be more like MASH or Three Kings - a mocking, "counterculture" "satire"?

Any bets on that?

Speaking of Hollywood - Salam Pax seems to have gone it. In a letter to the Guardian, Mr. Pax mocks the President.

James isn't happy:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Well said.

Read the whole...er, wait. You probably already did, right?

Another Tricky Day - This

Another Tricky Day - This is going to be a long one.

Winter's the busy season in the Berg household. Basketball rules most of the week; Monday and Thursday are my son's basketball practice, and my daughter's team meets Wednesday and Friday. Tuesdays are bagpipe practice - my daughter is also there for drums, and I think my son wants to start on the pipes, too (look out, neighbors). There is no slack in the Berg schedule for the next three months.

And it's generally OK - this blog survived same last year - but the first week or two of it is kind of trying.

Hopefully posting more tonight. If I can remember what night it is...

Suspense! - In the comments

Suspense! - In the comments thread to yesterday's posting on Hillary!'s supporters, commenter Rick V got a shout out from Day By Day cartoonist Chris Muir.

Hmmm. Will Rick's remark make it into DBD soon?

Stay tuned...

UPDATE: The plot thickens.

Squishy Money - Glenda Holste

Squishy Money - Glenda Holste starts her latest PiPress editorial with a Ivins-y snark:

"Say what? The Republican National Committee asked Howard Dean to direct organizations dedicated to defeating President Bush to abide by the old soft-money limit of $2,000 a person.

Scared of competition from these new money shops, I suppose.

Really rich folks (like George Soros) apparently aren't supposed to write big checks in presidential politics unless the rich guys donate to the Republican candidate."

Glenda: This differs from what Democrats were braying about back when "Rich" and "Republican" were synonyms precisely how?

No doubt they're worried, of course; as we saw during last year's Senatorial election here in Minnesota, the bulk of the GOP's donors seem to be smaller parties, while the DFL gets its money from bigger donors and institutional groups like the Teachers' Union.

But that's not Holste's main point. It's about the turnout, you see:

Regardless of which Democrat wins the nomination, what lies ahead is probably the greatest turnout election contest in U.S. history, made possible by the greatest money machines ever assembled in American politics. In an electorate composed of about one-third Republicans, one-third Democrats and one-third swing voters, the temptation has been to believe the victory primarily lies with courting those swing voters. But 2000 told us that turnout from party bases — and in which states — could be as important in deciding the 2004 election.

And if you're a Republican, you can only hope she's right. While the GOP base has traditionally outstripped the Dems in terms of turnout per capita, recent polls show that we now outpace the Democrats for the first time in raw numbers.

Holste continues, noting that Minnesota and Wisconsin are now...:

...two states are among 17 that smart money calls "battlegrounds" — for lack of a term that is not bellicose. We can dread what's ahead in the "air war.'' That much money will mean record numbers of TV campaign ads. Negative ads are designed largely to suppress turnout for what used to be called a "worthy opponent."

Says who?

Or, perhaps more accurately, so what? If Candidate A wants to win, she can do it two ways: Get more people to vote for her, or get fewer people to vote for Candidate B. And if B has a personal record that Candidate A believes the voters would find noxious, why not publicize it?

Seriously. Professional sanctimoniacs decry negative advertising, as if politics is supposed to be a a Socratic debate attended by dispassionate solons. It's not. It's the intellectual equivalent of the coups and civil wars that most lesser nations fight to settle who shall lead them; on the battlefield the key issues of liberty or slavery, prosperity or poverty and countless in between are all settled - and in our country, they're settled peacefully, unlike most of the world. But to deny the fractiousness of human relations - and more importantly, to deny that factionsness an outlet through wonky tinkering like Speech Rationing - is to invite its return in more cancerous form.

Ask yourself this: Since campaign finance "reforms" first went into effect, has campaigning gotten more "civil"?

Back to Holste:

But if this presidential contest does end up with focus on turning out the bases, as is an expert specialty of Bush's political direction, Karl Rove, then we who reside in the bull's-eye states are also going to see different appeals. An important part of that difference is coming from the very places that are a bitter cup for the dazzling Republican re-election effort: Rich, seasoned progressives who are developing operations like America Coming Together. This shop (www.americacomingtogether.org), which intends to put $75 million into mobilizing for the Democratic candidate in the 17 key battleground states, is funded and organized by some of the most accomplished people in progressive politics. It is not yet candidate focused, except to challenge Bush's re-election.

Holste acts as if this is going to be a Good Thing for Democrats.

But a year before the election, the Democrats are still not campaigning for anything - just against Bush. It's a truism in politics - one never wins by campaigning against anything - you have to be for something.

And all the money in the world won't be able to overturn the simultaneous realizations that:

1. The Democrats have no message other than "Anyone But Bush"
2. They - or, to be accurate, their dominant left wing (gotcha, Flash) have completely missed the boat on the most important issue of our day - defeating terror, most notably Islamofascist terror (shut up, Montana Freemen).

There are other messagest that matter to Americans, of course. But with the economy improving and the war going well, the Dems are going to have to work hard to find one that helps rather than hinders them.

And all the money in the world can't buttress a bad message. Just ask Michael Huffington.

Another Light Day - Very

Another Light Day - Very busy already. More later today.

Countdown To Hillary - Today's

Countdown To Hillary - Today's Day By Day seems especially dead-on:

It can only get worse. Hillarymania, I mean - Day by Day is just fine...

Scoop? - Jack Shafer wonders

Scoop? - Jack Shafer wonders why the press is ignoring the Weekly Standard's scoop on the links between Bin Laden and Hussein:

"Everybody knows how the press loves to herd itself into a snarling pack to chase the story of the day. But less noticed is the press's propensity to half-close its lids, lick its paws, and contemplate its hairballs when confronted with events or revelations that contradict its prejudices.

The press experienced such a tabby moment this week following the publication of Stephen F. Hayes' cover story in the most recent Weekly Standard about alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The Hayes piece, which went up on the Web Friday, quotes extensively from a classified Oct. 27, 2003, 16-page memo written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee, which is investigating the administration's prewar intelligence claims, asked Feith to annotate his July 10 testimony, and his now-leaked memo indexes in 50 numbered points what the various alphabet intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA) had collected about a Saddam-Osama connection."

As noted in comments yesterday the story is getting some play in the media - but the story hasn't gotten anywhere near the major media.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

(Via Instapundit)

Protest This - The American

Protest This - The American media is covering the protests against the President's visit to the UK.

They seem to be missing this bit here:

"A majority of Labour voters welcome President George Bush's state visit to Britain which starts today, according to November's Guardian/ICM opinion poll.

The survey shows that public opinion in Britain is overwhelmingly pro-American with 62% of voters believing that the US is 'generally speaking a force for good, not evil, in the world'. It explodes the conventional political wisdom at Westminster that Mr Bush's visit will prove damaging to Tony Blair. Only 15% of British voters agree with the idea that America is the 'evil empire' in the world.

Mr Blair insisted last night that he had made the right decision in inviting Mr Bush to Britain as an unprecedented security operation got under way to prepare for his arrival today. More than 14,000 police officers at a cost of £5m will be on duty during the four-day visit, with tens of thousands of anti-war protesters expected to take to the streets.

The ICM poll also uncovers a surge in pro-war sentiment in the past two months as suicide bombers have stepped up their attacks on western targets and troops in Iraq. Opposition to the war has slumped by 12 points since September to only 41% of all voters. At the same time those who believe the war was justified has jumped 9 points to 47% of voters."

You'd never know this from reading the mainstream media!

Insert Miracle Here - There's

Insert Miracle Here - There's a classic New Yorker cartoon showing a genius physicist (we know he's a genius physicist because he's wearing a lab coat and has unruly hair) has completely covered both ends of a chalkboard with a highly complex formula.

In the middle of the board, he's scrawled "Insert Miracle Here".

Another scientists, looking on, notes "I think I've found your problem..."

When it comes to foreign policy, I think I've found Howard Dean's problem. He's inserting a miracle into his formula. Several, really.

On All Things Considered last night, Robert Siegel interviewed the candidate. The transcript's not available (the audio is available on the ATC website).

His main claims re the Iraq war: Get Arab/Moslem troops to take over the occupation, and send the Guard and Reserve troops home ("they don't belong there anyway").

On the second point, one wonders if Dean knows how the US military is structured. After Vietnam, the military vowed that no future war would ever be "Us vs. them" again. The military from the eighties on has been designed so that, beyond the occasional special forces operation like Grenada, it can not carry out any significant operations without using the Guard and Reserve. This is both a cost-saving measure (the military rarely needs very specialized units like Civil Affairs, PsyOps and Water Purification groups - why keep them on the payroll fulltime?) and a political safeguard; when any significant operation requires the calling up of reserves and the Guard, it ensures Main Street will have a stake in the operation.

As to the first: this would play squarely into the hands of the terrorists. Moslem troops - even Moslem troops from nations that aren't intrinsically anti-American, like India, Morocco, Indonesia or the Philippines - would be every bit the target that the Americans currently are for the hard-liners holding out in the Baghdad Triangle. Historically, there is nothing more dangerous in the Middle East than to be a moderate Moslem - they tend to get knocked off before the Jews do. And any attack on troops from moderate Moslem nations would serve to drive a further wedge into the US' relations with these nations, and radicalize their own Moslem populations. Any bets on how long it'd take before someone in the Arab media started calling these troops "mercenaries for the Yankees and Jews?"

Whatever Dean's other attractions - and I'm not a Dean supporter, obviously - his take on Iraq is jaw-droppingly off-base.

Frustration, Automated- I used to

Frustration, Automated- I used to be a technical writer. I left the field for many reasons (although it keeps following me).

Tech writing is a field that engenders intense fussiness; it's detail-oriented in a way that I'm just not. Now, I've been writing in one form or another most of my adult life, and I'm used to having things I write handed back to me for corrections - but never more than when I was a technical writer, when I had managers/editors hand me documents with revisions, which I'd enter - and then get the same document back with a call for things to be re-revised back to the way they were before.

I've maintained a subscription to a tech writing mailing list for years, even though I've left the field. I haven't posted anything to the list in at least five years.

Last night, I posted something.

This morning, an autobot on the mailing list bounced my post back...

...until I corrected something in my post.

Grrr.

Subtext - ScrappleFace has it:A

Subtext - ScrappleFace has it:

A new survey of Britons indicates that a majority believes that U.S. President George Bush is a "stupid evil genius."

"The results indicate that Brits don't think Bush is smart enough to put his right boot on his right foot," said a spokesman for the polling company. "And he's so clever that he tricked the entire U.N. Security Council into thinking Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who sponsored terror. He's a stupid evil genius."

Sort of the way Reagan was a bumbling fool who managed to trick the Soviets out of their system of government...

Abuse - An Iraqi message

Abuse - An Iraqi message to the protesters in Trafalgar Square, via Sullivan.

One of a souk full of money quotes:

"I hated the U.N and the security council and Russia and France and Germany and the arab nations and the islamic conference.
I’ve hated George Gallawy and all those marched in the millionic demonstrations against the war .It is I who was oppressed and I don’t want any one to talk on behalf of me,
I, who was eager to see rockets falling on Saddam’s nest to set me free, and it is I who desired to die gentlemen, because it’s more merciful than humiliation as it puts an end
to my suffer, while humiliation lives with me reminding me every moment that I couldn’t defend myself against those who ill-treated me."

Sullivan says:

And today, these "anti-war" protestors campaign not against Assad or Saddam or bin Laden, but against the man who liberated these beleaguered, terrorized people. The demonstrators sicken, appall and horrify me. Whatever your views on the war, the mass graves surely made frenzied opposition moot. These useful idiots have come undone.

I quote this in part to note that Sullivan has joined me in putting "anti-war" in Ivinsian scare quotes.

Or should that be "scare quotes?"

Anyway, read the whole thing.

Humiliation? - The Independent claims

Humiliation? - The Independent claims the EU is declaring victory, and that the US has agreed to international control of its troops in Iraq:

"The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the 'coming days', Mr Solana told The Independent.

The comments, signalling a major policy shift by the US, precede President George Bush's state visit this week to London, during which he and Tony Blair will discuss an exit strategy for forces in Iraq."

Note the curious wording; "Humiliating" failure injects a level of emotion into the story that would be considered rank spin in the US (for anyone this side of Paul Krugman, anyway) - and even for a British tabloid, it injects a pretty intense voice into the story.

As other bloggers have noted, I have doubts about this story; if true, it'd be a vastly more humiliating turn of events than anything that's happened so far, or shows any rational sign of being possible, in Iraq today.

Developing.

Link-Gate - Last week, we

Link-Gate - Last week, we talked about the Senate Intel Committee memo linking Saddam and Al Quaeda.

Instapundit links to more discussion on the topic.

Sullivan's overview of the media's spin, as well as of the memo itself, is particularly interesting.

Ralled Up - One of

Ralled Up - One of the constants of the conservative blogosphere is that Ted Rall can't catch a break.

And I think it's satisfying, if not fair, to say he doesn't deserve one. But John Scalzi makes a few points on the Rall's behalf:

"I won't argue Ted's points for him, since on Iraq we diverge on a number of issues. I supported the invasion of Iraq and I strongly believe that we need to stay in there for a comprehensive rebuilding as we did in Germany after WWII (during the aftermath of which American troops were attacked by German resistance, so there are not a few parallels between now and then). Likewise I'll not try to argue with those who think Ted is loathsome or evil or unAmerican or simply insane. Ted writes in an intentionally antagonistic style in both his cartoons and columns; he's going to get that from people, and it would be difficult-to-impossible to argue Ted doesn't invite it. He appears to accept that he's not going to be great pals with a lot of people out there. And as I've said before, he's a big boy; he can take care of himself from all comers."

There's more.

Consider it a bag of Cheetos for thought...

The Legion of the Invincibly

The Legion of the Invincibly Sensitive - Joe Soucheray yesterday addressed a topic that's been of chuckling interest on this blog lately - the endless indignance of the terminally-oversensitive.

"The entire episode is an example of what Wordsworth might have meant when he said, 'We murder to dissect.'' The poet was onto something even before the invention of talk radio: the spontaneous combustion of overblown proportion.

Souch's column yesterday addressed the tempest in a teapot that KSTP's ron Rosenbaum invoked a while ago on the subject of retiring St. Paul Police Chief Bill Finney's political ambitions:

On the occasion of the remark, Rosenbaum and the morning show's co-host, Mark O'Connell, were interviewing Mayor Randy Kelly. O'Connell mentioned to Kelly the speculation, then still thick in the air, that Finney might be interested in the mayor's job.

Kelly summoned, out of the blue, a biblical response, saying that 'many are called and few are chosen.''

In the gab business, when the game is always afoot, silence is not necessarily golden. That's why normally civil people who find themselves on cable television news shows end up in shouting matches.

Rosenbaum jumped on Kelly's response and said, "That's another way of saying, 'Get your shine box,' Chief Finney … but thank you.''

The NAACP has, of course, reacted with indignance, in a move that reminds one of the fracas over the outraged response to the word "niggardly" among, presumably, the morally-illiterate.

Soucheray continues:

It is inconceivable that Rosenbaum was waiting to pounce on the police chief with a racially insensitive remark...But there is something else that is inconceivable. It is inconceivable to me that Finney was offended. It is odd happenstance that both Rosenbaum and Finney are big fans of Joe Pesci, who uttered the shine box line in the movie "Goodfellas.'' Not to mention that after 34 years of public service as a cop, Finney has heard much worse.

What a radical notion: common sense. Read Soucheray's entire column for more interesting insights.

Maybe we need a telethon to help treat perpetual indignance. But it'd just make someone angry.

Our Next Scandal - The

Our Next Scandal - The Independent has the dirt on Secretary of State Colin Powell:

"Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, has made an admission reminiscent of Gladstone by revealing that he and his wife Alma help to educate girls in Washington about the virtues of sexual abstinence.

The Victorian-era British prime minister would scour the streets searching for prostitutes to rescue and rehabilitate. Meanwhile, Mr Powellhas described in an interview how he and his wife warn girls about the dangers of Aids. 'Abstinence is a good thing to teach young people before they're ready for the responsibilities of sexual activity,' Mr Powell said. 'Abstinence works. We know it works ... and it is a perfectly sensible strategy to take to young people.'"

Shocking, isn't it?

Among those who view abortion as sacrament, I can understand withering anger at those who, say, oppose abortion on demand. I disagree with them, but I can understand their anger; it's analogous (thematically, if not logically) to my anger at the painful illogic of most gun control advocates.

But against abstinence - a topic that seems to draw scarcely less vitriol on the part of the zealot? That'd be analogous to me derogating people who don't want to own guns. Absurd, no?

Look for it to be used as a campaign issue.

It Stays in Vegas -

It Stays in Vegas - Lileks discovers the great secret of children:

"I don’t need drugs to fly, and I don’t need booze. I just need the thing to get up and get down with a minimum of hokey-pokey. Take off! I struck up a fascinating conversation with the woman in the next seat, who had a child the same age as I did. Turns out she was my wife! Which reminded me: it had been a long time since we had a vacation together since Gnat was born.

When my kids were 18 months and 3 years old, my ex-wife and I took our first trip without kids since we'd been married, four years earlier. As we drove into Minneapolis on our way westward, we promised we wouldn't talk about the kids.

We didn't say a word until we got to Monticello.

Look at the bright side, James; you recognized that woman in the next seat.

Hee Hee - My daughter

Hee Hee - My daughter doesn't know I can hear her singing along...

...to the Franky Perez CD she has apparently pilfed from me.

Singing along with "Cecilia", over and over again. Maybe I'm not such a bad dad, after all!

Anyway - nobody tell her, OK?

"Mitch! Why Is Your Email

"Mitch! Why Is Your Email Address So @#$#@% Hard To Use? - I've had a few emails asking why my email on this page is so cryptic (shotindark - (at) - mitchberg - (dot) - com). "Why don't you just post a link?"

Because spambots these days roam the web looking for valid email addresses (name@domain.com) to use for spam.

When I changed to the mitchberg.com domain, and revamped ALL my email, my spam count dropped to nearly zero. And it stayed there...

...until somebody crossposted my private email to a dozen or so email discussion groups. Some of them are apparently not spambot-proof. My spam count since October 24 has gone from "Roughly Zero" to "Dozens, maybe a hundred a day" on my main email account.

Thanks!

Linked? - Jay Reding points

Linked? - Jay Reding points us to this piece, originating in the Weekly Standard, purporting to show the Hussein/Al-Quaeda link:

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (search) gave terror lord Usama bin Laden's thugs financial and logistical support, offering Al Qaeda (search) money, training and haven for more than a decade, it was reported yesterday.

Their deadly collaboration — which may have included the bombing of the USS Cole (search) and the 9/11 attacks — is revealed in a 16-page memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee (search) that cites reports from a variety of domestic and foreign spy agencies compiled by multiple sources, The Weekly Standard (search) reports.

The memo documents the link:

Two men were involved with the collaboration almost from its start.

Mamdouh Mahmud Salim — who's described as the terror lord's "best friend" — was involved in planning the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Another terrorist, Hassan al-Turabi, was said by an Iraqi defector to be "instrumental" in the relationship.

Iraq "sought Al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided Al Qaeda with training and instructors," a top-level Iraqi defector has told U.S. intelligence.

The bombshell report says bin Laden visited Baghdad in January 1998 and met with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

"The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan," the memo says.

So let's recap - of the four justifications for the liberation of Iraq that the Bush Administration used:

1. Nobody on the left - at least on this side of the lunatic fringe - denies the endless string of resolutions the UN passed against the Hussein regime
2. Many on the left, including that leak in from the lunatic fringe, think that life under Hussein was better than life in Iraq today - but it doesn't come up often in arguments.
3. Weapons of Mass Destruction are still very much an open issue - and the Kay Report showed us just how open the issue is, not that you'd have known from the media reports on the subject.
4. And now, the "there was no link" canard may be on the ropes.

Let's see how this develops, of course.

But by the time of the election, I can see the left having to resort to "Bin Laden's been unaccounted for for 926 days"-sorts of statements, aiming for the demographic that thinks that sort of thing matters and also eats by slurping directly from the plate.

Another Long Day - But

Another Long Day - But the weekend looms.

This week has completely kicked my butt - new gigs will do that, of course. Needless to say, my NaNoWriMo output has gotten shredded, with not a single word of output all week long and a weekend of doing storyboards looming in front of me.

More posting later today, anyway. My NaNo novel might include a bunch of blog postings.

How to put a blog into a prehistoric universe...well, I'll work on that later, too.

Jesse The Portrait - Powerline

Jesse The Portrait - Powerline led us to the Jesse Ventura portrait.

Suggested caption: "Barkley! Get back behind the curtain!"

Is it just me, or does the terrain in the background - presumably Minnesota, with a capitol sitting in the middle of a huge open field - look like it's been laid waste?

Berg's Law In Action -

Berg's Law In Action - Berg's Law - my iron-clad law of liberal opinion about Iraq - is on garish display this week.

The law states:

No liberal commentator is capable of discussing more than one of the justifications for the liberation of Iraq at a time; doing so introduces a context in which their argument can not survive

Brian at Boviosity noticed it in this Sullivan piece yesterday, in re a NYTimes editorial:

"The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq."

Money quote from the editorial:

The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq. Mr. Bush would look breathtakingly cynical if he seemed to be rushing the preparation for real elections with an eye toward improving his own re-election chances.

"When did you stop beating the Iraqi people, Mr. President?

Then, today, Sullivan ran this post, which would seem to expand Berg's Law to coverage of the War on Terror in general - in this case, a spectacularly myopic Michael Kinsley editoral, of which Sullivan notes:

Mike Kinsley pulls off the astonishing feat of trying to tackle how president Bush went from being an anti-nation-building realist to a liberal internationalist in a few years without mentioning a certain incident that occurred, oh, say nine months or so into his presidency. Memo to Mike: some terorists attacked U.S. soil on September 11, 2001. 3,000 people or so were killed. It made a teensy little difference to U.S. foreign policy. Kinsley's gaffe, however, is revealing about certain strands in some liberals' thought these days. For them, 9/11 changed nothing important; it meant relatively little; it was a distraction from more important issues like Enron, as Paul Krugman opined, during the height of the Raines madness. These people don't just have blinders on; they've attached them with super-glue.

Which may actually be a whole new law: "The hard left's entire argument depends on ruthless, relentless control of the context of the argument".

I'm going to have to work on a book. Maybe I'll call it "Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned from Paul Begala".

Light Day, Again - Today's

Light Day, Again - Today's going to be a shredder at work. It's already a shredder at home.

More posting later today/tonight.

Reputation - In 1993, after

Reputation - In 1993, after the "Black Hawk Down" debacle in Mogadishu, the US abandoned its mission in Somalia. That made a big impression on the world's terrorists, especially Osama Bin Laden.

The impression was deepened in incident after incident; the 1993 WTC bombing, the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole...

...and, so the theory goes, he expected no less from his September 11 attacks. If you were a Taliban supporter, it was a big mistake.

The theory continues that Hussein never expected the US to respond to any of his provocations - the 1991 conquest of Kuwait, his WMD programs during the nineties, the run-up to his overthrow.

And yet the fallout from our reputation in the 1990s continues. Most of the current terrorism in Iraq is being carried out against "soft targets" - convoys, NGO headquarters, police stations - targets with minimal risk and maximum exposure to the word media. This piece unwittingly spells it out:

"The Arabic language television station Al-Jazeera said eight Iraqis were also killed. It was the first such attack in this relatively quiet Shiite Muslim city since the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation and appeared aimed at sending a message to international organizations that they are not safe anywhere in Iraq."

Which is the entire message!

There is no military value in a Carabinieri station. A Polish or Ukrainian soldier won't have a huge impact on the actual prosecution of the war.

But if they put a chink in the armor of the Coalition of the Willing - many of whom are only barely willing - then hitting at targets like these will have an impact far out of proportion to even the ghastly cost of yesterday's attack on the Italians.

Nobody said terrorists were stupid.

Going Mobile - Pl@#n L@&^e

Going Mobile - Pl@#n L@&^e has moved her site.

Maybe that's what I need to do to create suspense and boost traffic; disappear, move, and change all references to proper names.

Hmmmm.

Things You Never Hear Mitch

Things You Never Hear Mitch Berg Say -"At one point I paused to consider the paper towel options.. We’re in that difficult time of the year where you want your paper towel to have a seasonal theme, but nothing explicitly Christmas. Turkeys would be nice, but they don’t go that far. "

Oops - I was going

Oops - I was going to say that posting is going to be light today, again...

...but I think I've already blown that.

Now if I could only find time for my NaNoWriMo project...

Captain Hornbuckle - Everyone's linking

Captain Hornbuckle - Everyone's linking to Powerline's piece on Capt. Harry Hornbuckle from yesterday.

And with good reason:

"Reader and Rocket Man colleague John Beukema directs our attention to a page-one story by Jonathan Eig in today's Wall Street Journal, 'Why you've heard of Jessica Lynch, not Zan Hornbukckle.'"

They - and the WSJ - then explain why Capt. Hornbuckle's story matters.

Read 'em both.

Conservatism Kills! - I never

Conservatism Kills! - I never liked Richard Broderick's Green Party candidacy for the Saint Paul School Board, which ended last week when he came in out of the top four in the city School Board elections.

I didn't like his proposals - to turn the school board into a lobbying body for Green political causes, and turn the schools into mechanisms for Green indoctrination. His snide, condescending responses to my questions (on an email discussion group) were another matter - but I'll leave that out of the discussion for a moment.

The fact that he lost - and that relatively conservative DFLer Randy Kelly beat ultraliberal DFLer Jay Benanav in the last mayoral election - isn't just the ebb and flow of politics.

From 1492 until today, the European settlement of the Western Hemisphere has been driven by a cultural dynamic of exploitation and domination.

Whoah! When the hard-left starts with talk of European dominationineeination of the indigineonistic poplulatrices, we know we're onto something really big, right?

We continue:

Though in the United States the overt expression of this dynamic came to an end with the "battle" of Wounded Knee, looking south it is clear that it still plays itself out in its old familiar form in Chiapas, Guatemala, Amazonia, and the Andes...

That Broderick ties Wounded Knee - a massacre in 1890 brought on by poor communication and panic - to Guatemala (a failed leftist insurgency) says more about Broderick than about history.

But simply because in the United States the last Hotchkiss shell in this ongoing struggle flew 113 years ago does not mean that the cultural dynamic that brought us here, to this time and place, simply disappeared along with Native American resistance. On the contrary. It went underground, and continues to haunt the political and class struggles of today.

So the stage is set. Whatever follows is comparable in significance with the massacre of 200 Natives in South Dakota, with the epochal struggles of indigenous peoples to survive (as frequently against the evils of the centralized planning that people like Broderick support as against racism and nationalism). Pretty big stuff, right?

So what is the epochal event that Broderick equates with massacre and epochal social upheaval?

In St. Paul, this cultural dynamic is clearly evident in the policies and administrative style of Mayor Randy Kelly,...

Spit Take

Whaaaa?

Randy Kelly? The moderate, Eastside DFL mayor who comes across as nothing so much as a luke-warmer version of Norm Coleman? Or as Broderick says:

...a politician who won office by only a few hundred votes but has governed as if he'd been granted a mandate from heaven

[Ed. - What? Because he won a narrow victory, he's supposed to cower in fear of his opposition?]

In his push for mixed zoning along the city's dynamic business strips like Grand Avenue and West 7th Street - mixed zoning that would open these thriving small business areas to exploitation and eventual ruin by big box franchises - or for a publicly financed stadium for the Minnesota Twins or his imperious, and possibly illegal, decision to connect Ayd Mill Road to 35-E, Kelly has demonstrated a high-handed manner worthy of a Conquistador.

And the deaths of hundreds of thousands of St. Paulites from smallpox and forced resettlement are truly shameful episodes in Western Civilization.

But in his eagerness to act on behalf of outsiders itching to get their hands on the human and economic resources of St. Paul, he more nearly resembles the stereotypical 19th Century Indian Agent, appointed to lull the natives into submission even as they are robbed blind and the meager rewards they have been promised in return for their cooperation withheld or replaced with shoddy trade goods and tainted meat.

So let's get this straight: Mayor Kelly's initiatives to:

• Bring a Menards to St. Paul
• Keep the Gopher States Ethanol plant on West Seventh open
• Allow national franchises on Grand Avenue
• Connect the Ayd Mill Road with I-35E (note to non-St. Paulites - Ayd Mill Road is a four-lane arterial that was built in the 1960's to - you got it, connect with I-35E!)

...are epochal tales of oppression equivalent, even symbolically, with the Wounded Knee massacre...?

Words fail.

Unfortunately for Kelly, his project received a major setback in the most recent citywide elections. Three of the four City Council candidates endorsed by Kelly - and by his masters at the Saint Paul Area Chamber of Commerce - went down to defeat, and the one candidate who did win, Debbie Montgomery, succeeded on the basis of her own merits as a long-time community figure - and not because of Kelly's support.

The Native American struggle to retain their cultural identity. The Maori battle to regain their cultural self-respect. The fight of the Chiapas peasants against the depredations of a leftist central government. The struggle to keep Chipotle from opening a franchise on Grand Avenue.

Which doesn't fit, here?

I know who not to ask:

Whether this outcome has legs or not, I'm not sure, though I'm inclined to think it portends the outcome of next fall's Presidential election. Kelly, the local Chamber of Commerce's Indian Agent, emerged from this election a de facto lame duck. George Bush, the nationwide Indian Agent of the same exploiting class that backs Kelly, will suffer a similar fate. Why? Because the big difference between middle class Americans and 19th century Plains Indians is that there are a lot more of us and, for the moment at least, we can still vote the bums out of office.

"For the moment at least". So which is it, Mr. Broderick - do we conservatives, especially conservatives aligned with that most vile of evil bodies, the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce, want to massacre our opponents in the fields (with Hotchkiss mountain guns, apparently), or merely revoke everyone's right to vote?

This will play among the ritualistically-guilty in Highland Park, of course - where people are still looking for hanging chads under their fair trade espresso cups.

Final question: Is this an example of the "instinctively Green worldview" that Mr. Broderick proposed using the St. Paul School District's resources to promote among our school children?

Just curious.

Standard Cant - Katherine Kerstin

Standard Cant - Katherine Kerstin had this editorial on the state's proposed, and contentious, new Social Studies standards for school kids, in the Sunday paper.

For those of you not from Minnesota - the question of how Minnesota will assess what its school children have learned has been a long, contentious one, which came glaringly to light five years ago with the adoption of the "Profiles In Learning", a set of standards that were flawed (although not as deeply as the more reactionary of its critics thought) and had the tang of "ideological wonkery" all over them.

Under the Pawlenty administration, there's a new proposal; a list of things (in this case, in Social Studies) that kids are suppose to be able to learn at each grade level.

Predictably, the standards have drawn fire - in this case, from the academic left:

"What would our children's history classrooms look like if the 'U' professors, and like-minded critics, got their way? One thing's sure: Every day, our kids would walk out of class hanging their heads for shame at being Americans. The professors' letter makes clear that they see America -- first and foremost -- as a nation that has oppressed women, enslaved blacks and exploited the poor. They want our children to see it that way, too. That's why their letter is full of recommendations like this: When Minnesota 8- and 9-year-olds study colonial America, they should focus on 'the genocidal impact of European incursions,'the extinction of numerous species and the destruction of whole environments.' When third-graders study the Pledge of Allegiance, they should learn that its author was 'forced by the political climate of Jim Crow and xenophobia' to omit the mention of equality, along with liberty and justice.

The professors reject the new standards' Government and Citizenship benchmarks along with its history benchmarks. They object, for example, to a first-grade standard that encourages 'good citizen traits' like 'honesty, courage, patriotism and individual responsibility.' Why? Portraying such traits as important components of citizenship is tantamount to teaching patriotism as a 'reflex action of blind obedience or conformity.'"

The whole thing is worth a read.

The academic left which controls the agenda for the "educational-industrial complex" seems to regard any and all observances of respect for the Nation (as opposed to Society) as propaganda - and there certainly are precedents for this belief. Education should not become propaganda.

The key phrase in the previous paragraph, of course, is "any and all". Some notion of the nation, at least our nation, America, as something with some admirable traits, is a good thing - as long as our schools can teach enough critical thinking skills to students to discern between information and propaganda.

The problem, of course, is that they don't do that today. Children get plenty of propaganda - "left-wing" cant on social issues, politics, and personality theories - today, all of which goes unanswered. If you've followed this blog for a while, you've heard some of the stories.

How to deal with education? More later.

Zzzzzz - Something about going

Zzzzzz - Something about going back to work in an office always sucks the energy out of me for the first day or so. Posting was light yesterdy, and will be only a little heavier today (although I may actually be awake after 9PM tonight).

Content will be progressively less lame this week. Bear with me.

Now He's Gone And Done

Now He's Gone And Done It - Clayton Cramer carried through on last week's promise, and has started his Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog.

Note to all you CCRN guys and CCW supporters - read it early and often, and support him. I plan on it.

The Celebrity Politician Fad Jumps

The Celebrity Politician Fad Jumps the Shark - Al Franken is pondering running for Senate for the "Wellstone Seat" (as many Dems still call it) in '08:

"'It's a long way away, five years away,' Franken told the Star Tribune Monday night. 'It might be crazy. I might not be the best candidate. Part of this is seeing what happens next year and what direction things are going.'

He has previously dismissed talk of political office, but Newsweek this week first reported the story of his possible bid for the Senate.

Franken, a friend of the late Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone, says he's being encouraged by his friends to run. Driving him as well has been his distaste for the Bush presidency, he said."

There's the usual peek-a-boo involved; one source says he'll run, one says he won't.

Note to Franken: If you want to get anywhere, run against Mark Dayton in the primary.

Imitation of Christ - I

Imitation of Christ - I never liked any of the Matrix movies. They seemed to be soggy with pseudo-Buddhist platitudes, sort of like Jackie Chan with a huge dose of self-righteous wonkery thrown in.

But there's more, says Thomas Hibbs in National Review Online. The movies, he says, capstone a renaissance of Christian imagery in modern pop art.

Money quote:

The recent popularity of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and especially Lord of the Rings tells us much about the appetite of American audiences for grand mythic tales, with myth understood not in its derogatory sense but in the sense deployed by Lewis and Tolkien. The peculiar contribution of The Matrix was to focus on the dilemma of humanity or post-humanity in the age of machine intelligence. It began with a bold and crisp articulation of this dilemma. It could have ended as a powerful and compelling affirmation of the enduring vitality of classic myths. It could have sharpened our sense of the options: a debased, mechanized humanity, void of the aspirations characteristic of what is best and most noble in our traditions vs. a humanity that has recovered a sense of purpose, a sense of the goods for which we ought to be willing to fight and die for.

The Matrix ended no such way, of course. I'm waiting to if, and how, the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy abandons the message, after magnificent resurrection image in The Two Towers. This is Hollywood after all.

And yet if you'd have told me ten years ago, that, by 2002, the best movie of the year would feature a Resurrection scene paralelled on that of Christ's, and that the best album of the year would be solidly themed on faith, strength, hope, self-sacrifice and love, I'd have wondered if we were talking about the same show-biz and entertainment media.

I'm not nearly naive enough to assume that this indicates an interest in the subject of faith on the part of Hollywood (I fully expect the third part of the Rings trilogy to mangle Tolkein's original message beyond recognition - although I'll be as happy to be surprised as I was last year with Two Towers).

But while it doesn't mean Hollywood has discovered faith and socially-unifying myth for its own purposes, it might mean it's figured out the rest of the nation values them, anyway.

Travesty? - A US Army

Travesty? - A US Army colonel got tough with an Iraqi Fedayin prisoner - who gave up the names of a couple of fellow thugs who were about to attack the Colonel's unit.

Guess who got in trouble?

The Yankee Pirate has put up this new site, The case against Lt. Col. Allen B. West, to publicize LTColonel West's case:

"Despite all indications that Col. West's actions (firing his pistol AWAY from the dirtbag and scaring him into giving up two other Saddam Fedayeen thugs), thwarted what had been demostrated in previous enounters as being lethal engagements, the Army has seen fit to offer Col. West a 'broken sword' early out or face a courts martial."

Give it a visit. It's eye-opening.

Veterans Day - Armed Liberal

Veterans Day - Armed Liberal exhumes an old column of is in observance of Veteran's Day. I think It's a good one:

And worried that what I wrote kept coming out sounding either too qualified or would be interpreted as being too nationalistic.

And I realized something about my own thinking, a basic principle I'll set out as a guiding point for the Democrats and the Left in general as they try and figure out the next act in this drama we are in.

First, you have to love America.

I think it’s the best county; I've debated this with commenters before, and I'll point out that while people worldwide tend to vote with their feet, there may be other (economic) attractions that pull them. But there are virtues here which far outweigh any sins. And I'll start with the virtue of hope.

The hope of the immigrants, abandoning their farms and security for a new place here.

The hope of the settlers, walking across Death Valley, burying their dead as they went.

The hope of the ‘folks’ who moved to California after the war.

The hope of the two Latino kids doing their Computer Science homework at Starbucks’.

I love this country, my country, my people. And those who attack her...from guerilla cells, boardrooms, or their comfy chairs in expensive restaurants...better watch out.

I don't get a clear sense that my fellow liberals feel the same way. And if so, why should ‘the folks’ follow them? Why are we worthy of the support of a nation that we don't support?

So let me suggest an axiom for the New Model Democrats:

America is a great goddamn country, and we're both going to defend it from those who attack it and fight to make it better.

And for everyone who is going to comment and remind me that ‘all liberals already do that’…no they don't. Not when the chancellor has to intervene at U.C. Berkeley to get ‘permission’ for American flags to be flown and red-white-and-blue ribbons to be worn. Not when the strongest voices in liberalism give lip service to responding to an attack on our citizens on our soil.

Loving this country isn't the same thing as jingoism; it isn't the same thing as imperialism; it isn't the same thing as blind support of the worst traits of our government or our people.

It starts with recognizing the best traits, and there are a hell of a lot of them.

They were worth defending in my father's time, and they are worth defending today.

So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.

Read the whole piece - and yes, there were parts that I didn't paste in this post!

I Don't Like Mondays... -

I Don't Like Mondays... - ...unless there's money involved.

First day on a new engagement today, and it's going to be an "out of the frying pan..." day. My new client is going to have me in meetings with their customer most of the day - and I'm going to get my company and project "orientation" in the car on the way to the customer's place.

Just the way I like it, actually.

Posting will be fairly light until this evening. And after that? We'll see.

Idea Whose Time Has Come

Idea Whose Time Has Come - Clayton Cramer wants to create a blog just for defensive gun uses.

He apparently has plenty of material:

"I'm going to have to create a separate blog just for civilian defensive gun uses in the press--they are so common!"

Note to Clayton: Put it on. I'll link to it immediately.

Arab Street, Redux - The

Arab Street, Redux - The Telegraph thinks the "Arab Street" might be repelled by the weekend's alleged Al Quaeda bombing in Riyadh:

"Al-Qa'eda appeared yesterday to have unwittingly alienated a vast spectrum of Arab opinion and helped America's war on terrorism by attacking Muslims it considers traitors to the faith, intelligence sources in Riyadh said.

Destroyed buildings at the housing compound in Riyadh after yesterday's explosion

Seventeen people, mostly of Arab descent, including four children, died in the suicide attack against a housing compound in Riyadh on Saturday night. The victims included four Egyptians, four Lebanese, and a Sudanese.

The attack has engendered unprecedented condemnation throughout the Middle East and will have damaged al-Qa'eda's appeal as anti-western and pro-Islamic."

So what does the "Arab Street" really think?

Given that the reactions to the US liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq were so short-lived and relatively mild, it'll bear watching. If the real "Arab Street" begins to shun Al-Quaeda, it might indicate the average Arab has more regard for democracy than many on the left - and among the Islamofascists - credit them for.

On the other hand, Lileks asks :

And it makes me wonder: They stick the shiv in the ribs of their richest and most enthusiastic backers.

What makes them this confident?

Good, sobering questions.

Maybe a twisted, hyper-hyperbolic version of the same thing that makes Howard Dean and John Kerry whiz on the liberation of Iraq - as we call it, "playing to their base?" It's not done for the poor saud in the "arab street", it's done to buff the morale of the people whose morality allows and encourages things like using airliners as cruise missiles.

If the people who provide the bling for Al Quaeda can justify that, what's a bomb in Riyadh?

I could, of course, be comically wrong.

I Feel Robbed - Is

I Feel Robbed - Is it real, or is it Scrappleface?:

"Democrat presidential candidate Howard Dean today blasted President George Bush for fostering an economic recovery that deprives thousands of Americans of their leisure time. The attack comes on the day the Labor Department reported that payrolls grew by 126,000 last month, more than twice the number economists had predicted."

Now that I have some steady trade. I guess that makes me a Dean swing voter...

Somebody's Going To Hell... -

Somebody's Going To Hell... - But this piece may be the most sickly-funny, or funnily-sick, "separated at birth" I've ever read.

Quote Of the Day -

Quote Of the Day - I started writing a piece on John Edwards' appearance on the Russert show (underway as I write this). The original topic, of course, was his triviality on foreign policy - which makes him "about average" among Democratic candidates. I stopped writing when I realized that nobody cares about John Edwards.

But when Russert pointed out that Edwards' campaign has come under criticism for being "a wholly owned subsidiary of the tort bar" - Russert noted that 51% of his contributions have come from law firms and lawyers - Edwards responded:

Remember - nearly half of my contributions come from average, working Americans!

Nearly half!

Oh, the rest of his appearance was a highly-concentrated strain of idiocy. Russert set a beautiful trap, asking how Edwards felt about Howard Dean's support for civil unions for gays (which Edwards is on record against). Edwards responded "I think that's a matter for the states to decide". Russert responded "What if you were the governor of North Carolina?" Edwards responded "I'd oppose it".

Russert then pounced, noting that Edwards felt that gun control and abortion were both federal, not state issues. Edwards phumphered and harrumphed...

...in fact the only thing he didn't do is lose my vote. Granted, he never had it, but it's something.

We're All Neighbors Up There

We're All Neighbors Up There - Bill Tuomala on Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a paeon to heavy metal and the place it has in the hearts of small-town guys like...well, Klosterman, Tuomala and me.

Although for the record there'll never be an eighties metal song as cool as "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Hanoi Rocks.

My theory: Eventually, all cool bloggers will have to prove they spent some time in North Dakota.

I'm dying to hear Sullivan and the Professor explain their way into that one...

YUCCies - Young Urban Conservatives

YUCCies - Young Urban Conservatives - Michael Medved and Lori Sturdevant are, for once, on the same sheet of music.

Medved had some big news last week. Apparently, for the first time in decades, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Republicans is equal to those calling themselves Democrats.

More importantly:

About a third of adults under age 30 now say they're Republicans, up from about a quarter in 1983. Meanwhile the Democrats' share of young adults has gone from about a third 20 years ago to fewer than a quarter today. (Among older adults, four in 10 are Democrats.)

This is huge news. For the first time, Democrats are older than Republicans, and the younger generation is largely - perhaps decisively - Republican.

Polipundit notes that Republicans are garnering a veritable flood of volunteers.

And that national trend has coattails here in St. Paul. The Strib's Lori Sturdevant observed about last week's City Council and School Board elections:

Sociologists say that in countless ways across America in the next decade or so, ambitious baby busters (born between 1965, though some say 1961, and 1976) are going to be bumping into members of the dominating, and often domineering, generation that was born between 1946 and 1964 (or, if you prefer, 1960).

The bumps will come for several reasons. These are people with different values and expectations from life. They often don't understand or like each other very much. Further, there are a lot more boomers than busters, and a lot of boomers have no intention to yield their spot on life's stage to a Gen-X upstart. "They are the first generation in modern times to approach later middle age not expecting to retire," Reinhardt said.

She elucidated: Research shows that people's experiences between the ages of 17 and 24 color their values and attitudes for the rest of their days. America's boomers experienced affluence, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War. The busters knew financial insecurity, family breakup, the end of the Cold War. It's Bob Dylan vs. Kurt Cobain, Ed Sullivan vs. MTV, the Kennedys vs. Ronald Reagan.

The result is a 50-something cohort that tends to be optimistic, communitarian and politically liberal, vs. 30-somethings who are skeptical, individualistic and conservative at the polls, if you can get them there. Think Paul Wellstone vs. Tim Pawlenty.

Leave aside the subtle derogation ("We" got to the polls, Lori, and you've been pissing and moaning about it since last November). She's right. And it's going to have an impact that will have Lori Sturdevant ever more upset as she rolls into her declining years.

I live in the Midway. It's a nice, middle-class neighborhood. It's in Saint Paul, a city whose main business is government. It's also within two miles of five colleges and universities. The neighborhood is home to many of the people who work for government or government education; teachers, bureaucrats, administrators, professors, and quite a few of their students. And they vote DFL; my neighborhood sends Jay Benanav to the City Council, Alice "The Phantom" Hausman to the House, Ellen Anderson (who is as personable and responsive as she is liberal, which really sucks, because I feel bad trying to insult her!) to the state Senate, and is the lynchpin of Betty "White-out on the Monitor" McCollum's support in the Fourth Congressional District.

With some - many - of my neighbors, I feel like I'm in perpetual, first-date, "try not to make them hate me" mode. You can see the looks - on a street dotted (still!) with Wellstone signs, my "Coleman" sign got funny looks (and then got stolen). I see political candidates gingerly flit past my yard, as I wait, watching.

"Really, DFL neighbor - I'm not such a bad guy".

And yet.

Maybe things are changing. Sturdevant's "Wellstone Vs. Pawlenty" simile is excellent, but here in the Midway, it's more like "Hubert Humphrey vs. Pawlenty." The old guard is getting older. They're moving to smaller houses, or to Florida...

...and they're being replaced by younger, "Gen-X" couples with young kids; people like me, I guess. And as a very broad thing, they seem more conservative than the neighbors they replaced. Younger, less-institutional families, drawn by the wonderful housing stock and bargain-basement prices, have been moving in as the older generation moves on.

St. Paul is a strange place; it mixes the Wellstone-y, Kathleen-Soliah-supporting la-la-land DFL of Highland Park with the blue-collar, "pro-life, pro-gun" DFL of Randy Kelly's east side. And looking at the examples of the likes of Brett Shundler in Jersey City, and hopefully Jack Ryan in Chicago, it's an interesting exercise to think...what would it take to put a conservative Republican in office is Saint Paul?

Saint Paul's ethnic minorities have quadrupled their numbers in the past decade. They vote solidly DFL. And when I talk with them, I have to ask; why?

• If you're Latino - hard-working, Catholic, socially-conservative - why do you vote for the part of welfare and abortion?
• If you're an Afro-American who's raising a family - and trying to get a decent education for your kids - why do you vote for the party of our education system's wretched status quo?
• If you're Asian - hard-working, with a legendary (and sometimes stereotypical) focus on education - what is it about the DFL's endless upsucking to the teacher's union that grabs you?
• If you're Somali - why would you vote for a party that essentially coddles dictators like the ones that destroyed your nation?
• If you're a legal immigrant - the kind that built this country - why would you find any traction with a party that promotes illegal immigration, which only devalues your jobs and hurts your status in this country?

Thinking globally: conservatism seems to be winning the war, bit by tiny bit.

Thinking locally: How do we make it happen in Saint Paul?

As Drudge would say - developing.

Paging Howard Dean - Steyn

Paging Howard Dean - Steyn weighs ina great piece on the disconnect between the US and Old Europe.

Money quote:

One of the greatest fictions of the interminable debate on Euro-American differences over Iraq is that it’s an argument about the means, not the end. If only Bush had been a little less Texan, less arrogant, less bullying, if only he’d been less impatient and willing to put in the hours, he could have brought the French and Germans round. After all, everyone agrees Saddam Hussein is a very bad man.

Not the French and Germans. There’s too much evidence suggesting the main reason they were unable to join the Bush side in this war is that they’d already signed on to the other team and they’d decided, in the sort of ghastly vernacular the cretinous Yanks would use, to dance with them what brung you. They’re being admirably consistent about this: at the recent Madrid conference France and Germany both refused to pony up one single euro to Iraqi reconstruction. It was never about the means, only the end.

Lesson: America and ‘Old Europe’ have different objectives in Iraq, and those objectives are incompatible.

You'll have to read - you got it, the whole thing.

In the meantime, David's Medienkritik - the essential German blog - links to this fascinating piece in the Economist.

Snawk - Powerline notes the

Snawk - Powerline notes the Beeb's comments about the Jessica Lynch story.

Here's the amazing part:

Publisher Alfred A Knopf signed a $1m deal for Private Lynch's account of her ordeal, entitled I Am a Soldier, Too, The Jessica Lynch Story.

Praised as a heroine by many, others denounced her rescue as a staged event used by Pentagon officials as a propaganda exercise.

As Powerline notes - reprising something the entire blogosphere brought up last spring - the only "denouncing" was done by the BBC itself - in stories that have been fairly soundly ravaged ever since.

Now, in a story entitled "Jessica Lynch 'raped' in Iraq" - note the scare quote - someone tell me why this next graf is included at all?

Rick Bragg, who wrote the book, is also no stranger to controversy. He recently resigned from the New York Times newspaper after allegations his stories relied too heavily on the work of a freelance journalist.

Counterspin? The Beeb is trying to find a chink in Lynch's story to try to draw attention away from their own malfeasance?

Beyond Parody, Frivolity- Brian at

Beyond Parody, Frivolity- Brian at Boviosity says:

I struggle, when trying to convince people to change their minds, or at least when trying to make my views plain, not to engage in name-calling and hand-waving. I don't always succeed, as anyone who has argued with me will surely attest.

That said, I hope I'm not supposed to take these people seriously:

Blacks say Bush played race card with court pick [...] Prominent blacks charged President Bush deliberately chose a conservative black woman so it would be harder for senators to vote against her

Brian's referring to an article in the Atlanta Journal/Constitution:

Prominent blacks charged President Bush deliberately chose a conservative black woman so it would be harder for senators to vote against her. Her defenders responded that liberal ideology was blinding the African-American leaders.

The 11-member Republican majority on the committee is expected to recommend today that the Senate confirm Brown for the D.C. Circuit. The court hears many appeals concerning federal agencies and regulations, and it often serves as a training ground for Supreme Court justices.

African-Americans from many of the 78 national and California groups opposed to Brown's confirmation gathered in the Capitol on Wednesday to ask senators to kill the nomination, either in the committee or on the Senate floor.

I wonder - how much of the racially-based opposition to Bush happens merely because the opposition feels it's supposed to, no matter what?

Big Morning - Big project

Big Morning - Big project due. Not much posting before noon today.

Wuss

Kim DuToit writes an essay - sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening - on the "Pussification of the American Male".

Money grab:

..."little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of 'good guy vs. bad guy' that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.

Now, men are taught that violence is bad -- that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to 'give him what he wants', instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.

Now, men's fashion includes not a man dressed in a three-piece suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.

Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.

Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.

And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like 'swaggering', 'macho' and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, 'cowboy'. Of course he was bound to get that reaction -- and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.

How did we get to this?"

He explains some of it, hitting some, missing others.

Du Toit has a great piece on the ritual castration of the male in advertising:

Little girl (note, not little boy): Daddy, why do we eat Cheerios?
Dad: Because they contain fiber, and all sorts of stuff that's good for the heart. I eat it now, because of that.
LG: Did you always eat stuff that was bad for your heart, Daddy?
Dad (humorously): I did, until I met your mother.
Mother (not humorously): Daddy did a lot of stupid things before he met your mother...

...What Dad should have replied to Mommy's little dig: Yes, Sally, that's true: I did do a lot of stupid things before I met your mother. I even slept with your Aunt Ruth a few times, before I met your mother.

There's much more.

The Professor notes:

IN RESPONSE to Kim du Toit's essay on manhood, which I linked earlier, I just want to note two things: First, that it's come back to me already via multiply-forwarded email from all sorts of friends and acquaintances who don't seem to realize where it originated, suggesting that it's taking on a life of its own, and second that I actually think the strongest part of his essay was his reflection on how television and advertising reflexively denigrate men -- and especially fathers -- nowadays (sort of the Berenstain Bears syndrome writ large).

Advertising and education are the two greatest forums for this phenomenon.

In advertising, the "Fred Flintstone" archetype has taken complete hold; Fred was impulsive, stupid, lost to his self-centered and wrong-headed desires. Wilma was the inevitable voice of wisdom and reason. It's gotten to the point where kids today accept that as the norm (the fathers on Lizzie McGuire, Boy Meets World, Even Stevens and so many other kids' shows follow that model. It wasn't always that way; compare fathers on TV produced in the fifties and early sixties (Andy Griffith, Robert Young, even Hugh Beaumont - all of whom were on a level field with their TV wives and girlfriends) and TV set in the fifties and early sixties (Tom Bosley's ridiculous father in Happy Days, or the impotently tormented Dan Lauria in Wonder Years). You're talking about two drastically different samples of men. Why is that? I think Kim has it right.

Education is, if anything, worse. TV is a drug you can turn off. But if your son doesn't respond to ostracism and suspension for petty offenses that involve acting like a boy (as has my son, who was suspended for a day recently for bringing, not only a toy gun to school, but a tiny one at that), they start pushing Ritalin. It makes boys act more like girls, which makes the utopian, fabian, feminized educational-industrial complex much more comfortable.

Expect much more on this later today.

Victim Disarmament Update - Citizens

Victim Disarmament Update - Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota is flogging a new, explicitly anti-gun movie, a movie called The American Gun which, tragically (and hypcritically) was James Coburn's final acting role.

CSSM's website is...deluded.

: "As much as we Americans cling to the belief that gun violence is caused by criminals, in fact, most gun death and injury in our country is due to 1) suicide and 2) homicide between people who know each other. AMERICAN GUN illustrates the many aspects of gun violence, portraying the reality that few of us understand.

Including, apparently, CSSM, as we'll see below.

Nearly one third of gun owners in Minnesota keep their firearm for 'protection.' Yet a gun in the home is 22-times more likely to be used against a friend or family member than against an intruder.

Which is, of course, taken from a study that considered all gun owners' acquaintances equally, whether they were friends, abusive ex-spouses, drug dealers or customers (they are, indeed, acquaintances!) or anything else.

James Coburn's character in AMERICAN GUN exemplifies the culture of fear that drives Americans to keep guns, but also the ambivalence we feel about the role of guns in our society.

Hm. Any bets on whether he plays someone with realistic personal views of the world around him?

Any action on that bet?

All guns used in crime start as legal guns.

Right. And everyone who joins the Klan is born a perfect egalitarian.

The gun is not the problem. The owner - whether a clueless, untrained moron who improperly stores his/her weapon, or a criminal, or someone who shoots a rapist in self-defense for that matter - is what makes the difference.

Weapons flow from person to person in an unregulated secondary market through personal sales, street purchases, gun shows and even theft.

Even theft. Heh.

Join CSM for a Sneak Preview of AMERICAN GUN, Tuesday, November 4th.

My only regret? That I missed the preview, and was unable to...:

Join writer/director Alan Jacobs in a sneak preview of his new film, AMERICAN GUN starring James Coburn in his final role. Meet AMERICAN GUN co-star and Minnesota native Alexandra Holden at the reception before the screening.

Oh, that might have been fun.

Wonder if the security guards who would have ushered me out would have been unarmed?

The Ashcroft Libertarians - You

The Ashcroft Libertarians - You know the type.

Before January of 2001, the only civil liberty they really cared about was abortion. The Second Amendment bothered them. They shrugged their shoulders at the Clinton-era erosions of civil liberties, like the property forfeiture laws, which allowed cops unprecedented authority to seize property of anyone accused of drug violations. They though the 1994 Crime Bill was good - for the children, probably.

They thought Libertarians were fevered backwoods yahoos who needed to adjust the tinfoil under their grain-company caps.

But since John Ashcroft became Attorney General, we suddenly have a new generation of Jeffersonians. Suddenly civil liberties are sacrosanct.

Heh - It took me

Heh - It took me a few minutes to realize that this was on the level.

Status Report - NaNo is

Status Report - NaNo is going fairly swimmingly.

And while I have a new contract starting Monday, I also have another meeting today for yet another situation.

Plus another contract to finish up.

Light posting 'til later!

New Media Wins? - Terry

New Media Wins? - Terry Teachout has a great piece on CBS's bailing on their apparent Reagan hack job.

Teachout notes the rather spongy press release CBS used to break the news:

If you were born earlier than this morning, you don’t need me to tell you that CBS decided to pull The Reagans solely and only because of the "controversy." They didn’t give a damn whether it was "balanced." All they cared about was whether enough people would watch the series to make it worth broadcasting—and the firestorm of outrage among conservatives, whom one would assume to make up a large part of the target market for a network miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, left little doubt that such would not be the case.

The difference? It's a new media story:

I’m sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they’ll mostly be right. Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn't know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously—if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

It's all worth a read.

Meanwhile, in further news, the NYTimes is considering changing its policy of letting its columnists handle their own corrections. Michael Cox reports that Maureen Dowd's "Ellipsisgate" fiasco has had its effect on the Gray Lady:

Dowd's May 14 column Dowd used an ellipsis to alter (some would say invert) the meaning of a passage in a Bush speech in Little Rock, AR. At that time, we vowed to continue pressing the issue until a formal correction was made. Dowd's response was to randomly insert the full quote into her May 28 column which many, including the TND, deemed insufficient. While Dowd never issued a formal correction, the TND was able to convince newspapers across the country to issue corrections including two papers that wrote editorials critical of Bush based on Dowd's incorrect version of the elided quotation. For a complete account of this matter, readers can jump over to our archives section. The short version is that a number of papers around the country dropped Dowd's syndicated column including The Mobile Register. Michael Marshall, Editor & Vice President of the Mobile Register, wrote to the New York Times in July to register his concerns with the Dowd column and got two unsatisfactory replies from Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins.

Things now appear to be changing. In the wake of the Jayson Blair fiasco an internal commission at The Times, the Siegel Commission, has recommended a number of changes at the paper including the hiring of an ombudsman to advocate for the readers within the Times newsroom. This new "public editor", Daniel Okrent, will be in place on December 1st but appears ready to shake things up at The Times.

Of course, the fact that a paper needs an "Ombudsman" in the first place is a sign that they have a grossly-flawed system in the first place, but never no mind - the real story here is the fact that the Times is changing anything at all.

And where did the Ellipsisgate story take off? On the libertarian-conservative wing of the blogosphere, and talk radio.

(Via Sullivan)

Reason 1,539 - There are

Reason 1,539 - There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of reasons I won't be voting Democrat in the next election.

This paragraph, from the closing of last night's Democratic Dwarves Candidates' Debate, is merely one:

"QUESTION: You guys seem to get to know each other fairly well. I'd be curious to find out, if you could pick one of your fellow candidates to party with, which you would choose. But keeping in mind, partying isn't just, you know, who do you think can shake their groove thing.

If someone - say, a potential date - uses the word "Party" as a verb, it virtually guarantees there are 300 other reasons we shouldn't go out.

When a political party does it...

Implosion - Jonah Goldberg on

Implosion - Jonah Goldberg on the implosion of liberal policy initiatives:

Rarely has the intellectual rot of liberalism been more evident. Both at home and abroad, the honorable tradition of liberalism — and there is one — has been hollowed out by its own appetite for power and vengeance. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to see how liberalism, at the national level, stands for anything but appetite — undirected, inarticulate, unprincipled, ravenous appetite. Truly it has become Bill Clinton's party.

Consider two stories of demonstrably unequal importance, which nonetheless have fascinated the chattering classes: The $20 billion request for Iraqi reconstruction, and the effort underway to create a successful liberal think tank.

The piece also includes this classic description of Democrat Iraq policy:

Of course, the administration does have a plan. And central to that plan is, well, spending money to rebuild Iraq. The Democrats make it sound like all the U.S. Army is doing in Iraq is having one giant-sized Chinese fire drill every day. One can just imagine John Kerry going to the local garage:

Kerry: I won't pay you to fix my car until you have a plan.
Mechanic: Um, I do have a plan: You pay me. I replace the engine I just took out. Your car works. That's the plan.
Kerry:How can you say you have a plan? Look at the terrible shape my car is in. It's worse than before; there isn't even an engine.
Mechanic: You're an idiot.

Read the whole thing - it's fascinating.

Liberals For Bush? - Last

Liberals For Bush? - Last week, we discussed the notion of Democrats crossing over to vote Bush. Some notable local Democrats reacted with umbrage.

And yet there are signs that many Democrats are crossing over, as noted by Hawken.

While they still support their own parties for whatever reasons, they notice the important thing; that when it comes to foreign policy, and policy against terrorists, the Democrat party - and especially the Nine Dwarves - just aren't serious. Turning the government over to them would be like handing the keys over to a fifteen-year-old.

We've Got Scrappleface... - and

We've Got Scrappleface... - and the other guys have this guy.

Sample? Sure:

"Residents of this conservative Los Angeles suburb, already stunned after a week of devastating forest fires, are now trying to recover from yet another shock - a huge smoke cloud hanging high above the blaze that scorched their homes - an enormous, cylindrical cloud closely matching descriptions of the penis of former president Bill Clinton.

It must be a horrible life, being on the left.

Ignorance On Display - Bumpersticker

Ignorance On Display - Bumpersticker seen today on a car in downtown Minneapolis - inevitably, a beat-up minivan driven by someone who visibly smelled of Patchouli:

Don't Pray In My School,
And I Won't Think In Your Church

Below that:

What Would The
Tooth Fairy Do?

I'm starting to really hope for a landslide victory for Bush in '04 if only to watch the paroxysms of anger that'll overwhelm these people.

Whigged Out - Yesterday, Vodkapundit

Whigged Out - Yesterday, Vodkapundit Stephen Green asked if the Democrats were going to go the way of the Whigs, and obliterate themselves.

Eric Raymond at Armed and Dangerous responds.

The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it's been going on ever since the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s. My first experience of political activism was standing athwart that particular tide of history, yelling "stop!", as a campaign worker for centrist Democrat Scoop Jackson in 1975. I think I already half-understood that he was doomed. What I didn't foresee was the completeness with which the Democrats would abandon their southern and rural wings to become a party run exclusively by Brie-nibbling urban elites. Call it the NPRization of the party.

Recently they've abandoned the private-sector labor unions as well. Just before 2000, a key Democratic strategist noted that party's demographic power base consisted solely of blacks and the public-employee unions. Bill Clinton, charming sociopath and perfect acme of the American political creature that he was, had managed to paper over that problem for a while. But it keeps getting worse. The liberal-Democrat lock on the national media is crumbling under pressure from talk radio, Fox News, and the bloggers. They're losing their ability to control the terms of political debate.

A smorgasbord of food for thought.

Justice? - Linda Tripp won

Justice? - Linda Tripp won her lawsuit against the Pentagon:

"Based on information supplied by Pentagon officials in 1998, The New Yorker reported Tripp did not admit an arrest on her security application for her job at the Defense Department. She had been arrested for grand larceny when she was a teenager. (Related item: Settlement Agreement)

Tripp, whose secret tapes of conversations with Monica Lewinsky helped lead to President Clinton's impeachment trial, sued the Defense Department two years ago, alleging violations of the Privacy Act. She had worked for the department as a public affairs specialist."

This story isn't getting a lot of play in the major American press so far.

Tripp's website has the rest of the story.

Finney - Saint Paul Police

Finney - Saint Paul Police Chief Bill Finney is leaving his job as St. Paul Police Chief:

"Finney will be leaving a department much changed from the force he took over 11 years and three mayors ago.

His tenure has marked a shift from the 'professional,' paramilitary model of policing to a 'community policing' strategy that has attempted to forge closer ties between officers and the neighborhoods where they work."

There are a long list of reasons I prefer Saint Paul to Minneapolis - less expensive, better neighborhood character, better schools, the best urban fire departmentin the US - but the police force is an important one. While there are exceptions (like with any police department), the Saint Paul police are a sharp contrast with the Minneapolis department. Saint Paul has had as successful an implementation of "community policing" as any city in the country, and the comparison of crime rates shows it.

Minneapolis' police department seems to follow the same model that the Los Angeles PD had under Darrell Gates (and still reportedly has) - the too-small force motivated by a strong "us against them" ethic. And while there are many great cops in Minneapolis, the MPD seems to have a different feel about them on the street - tense, edgy, prickly - that you don't generally find with the SPPD. And Bill Finney is largely responsible for that ethic.

Finney had his critics of course:

There have been regular allegations that St. Paul officers have used excessive force, and that the chief has been lenient with friends and family members who allegedly have strayed from the law or department policy.

Most recently, Finney's son, St. Paul Police Sgt. Jon Loretz, has been accused of assaulting patrons at a local bar during a melee on Oct. 19. Loretz denies any wrongdoing, and the case has been turned over to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for investigation to avoid any conflict of interest.

One episode about Finney is, I think, illustrative - and bear with me, my memory of the details may be a tad fuzzy after nine years.

In 1994, two Saint Paul cops and a police dog were murdered by a deranged ex-Marine during a nightmarish day-long manhunt in Saint Paul. After the shooting of the first officer, a citizen fired at the perp as the perp was drawing a bead on a woman that had seen the shooting. The impact of the bullets on the car scared the perp, and probably saved the woman's life, and certainly helped the police, who were quickly told they were looking for a bullet-holed car with two blown-out windows.

The Ramsey County Attorney - Tom Foley, if memory serves - did his best to try to bring charges against the citizen. The police department, reportedly at Finney's direction, refused to cooperate with the prosecution, and eventually decorated the man.

Bill Finney has not been the perfect police chief - but compared to the Olson years in Minneapolis, I think Saint Paulites have every reason to be thankful for the Bill Finney years, and hope we do as well with our next chief of police.

Iraqi Bioweapons - Power Line

Iraqi Bioweapons - Power Line with the latest from Laurie Mylroie.

Mob Liberty! - The Twin

Mob Liberty! - The Twin Cities Women's Press offers a fine perspective on Identity Feminism.

In this month's issue, Susan Raffo writes n article snarkily entitled Arnold offered Californians the American dream: freedom for me [and the faulty capitalization is theirs; the TCWP is edited worse than the average blog].

Let's see how far we get:

The Terminator is now governor of California.

Whoah, that wasn't long.

No, Susan; Arnold Schwartzenegger is now the Governor-Elect. "The Terminator" was a character he played in a movie.

He won this new position with a platform based on movie quips and vague references to freedom, democracy and the sacredness of individual choice.

Remember; this is the Twin Cities Women's Press. I'm actually impressed that "Freedom" wasn't in scare quotes.

In 1991, Arnold Schwarzenegger was taped as saying, “I come from Austria, a socialistic country. There you can hear 18-year-olds talking about their pension. But me, I wanted more. I wanted to be the best. Individualism like that is incompatible with socialism. I felt I had to come to America, where the government wasn’t always breathing down your neck or standing on your shoes.”

Schwarzenegger is only the most recent—and possibly most celluloid—proponent of this idea that freedom is something that can best and maybe only happen when it happens for an individual.

I'm going to try to meet Mz. Raffo halfway here.

Perhaps she means to say "Success is something that can best and maybe only happen...". Because "Freedom" is something that can only happens to an individual; there is no meaningful freedom that attaches to groups that mustn't start with the individual.

If freedom, or "Freedom", were not a matter of the individual, then the freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly would only apply to politicians, the institutional press, established churches and the legislature.

No, Freedom is always individual.

Everything else boils down to a mindless collectivism that forces people to make decisions that are not in their best interest.

Strawman. Or, since this is the Women's Press, "Strawperson".

While conservatism is certainly focused on the dignity as well as liberty of the individual, there is nothing about any flavor of conservatism short of anarcho-libertarianism that doesn't note the need for a society that upholds the things individuals need to protect their freedom - the rule of law, the security of the society's freedoms. Stating the case as an either-or is absurd and meaningless.

WARNING: The standard lefty strawman - the "Rugged Cowboy", is about to be invoked. Normally when a lefty invokes TRC, my internal logic circuits overload and I revert to full O'Rourke snark mode. I'm going to contain myself:

The cult of the American individual, the rugged cowboy on the edge of the great frontier, the come-to-America-and-get-rich dream of doing it alone, making it alone, is the great myth that’s stuck to our national shoes like gum that’s long dried solid.

Even while the cult of those who pooh-pooh individualism suppurates like old chaw on a hot sidewalk, separating into even portions of tobacco juice, saliva and snot.

Oh, wait - I thought I'd wandered into the simile workshop. I'm sorry.

We return to Mz. Raffo, who seems to be confused:

The problem with this U.S. ideal of individual freedom is that it depends on someone being generous towards those who don’t have as much private time or ranch land. An individual is only ever as generous as the mood they’re in. There are a lot of ranchers who would’ve left me on the side of the road with no way home simply because they were tired, they didn’t like my looks or they had too many other things to do.

Get that? Freedom depends on unanswered charity!

No, Mz. Raffo. Freedom depends on the "generosity" that comes from a free association of equals (or people willing to work to become equal) deciding to co-exist in a society they rule together. Not handouts.

Freedom is not analogous to getting to the destination of some vacuous hitchhiking trip; it's the act of being able to decide to take the trip in the first place, and risk the consequences depending on your own motivations and talent.

Mz. Raffo goes on - and this part almost made me spit coffee on my monitor:

The American dream has worked for Arnold. A mostly untalented Austrian with well-worked muscles, iron discipline and focused willpower came to the United States and became a multi-millionaire and international celebrity.

Get that?

He had "iron discipline" and "focused willpower" - which made him one of the most successful people in Hollywood - but he's "mostly untalented!"

I suspect that in Susan Raffo's world, discipline and willpower aren't talents - but mindless adherence to cant (see Martin Sheen) are.

He’s perfected the art of self-marketing, running his gubernatorial campaign like a movie premier and thumbing his nose at politics-as-usual.

(Both of which sound like talent to me!)

Schwarzenegger’s taken the overcrowded California dream of forever sunshine and turned it into a Hollywood snapshot. You work real hard and deserve to kick back in your fence-enclosed backyard sipping a margarita by the pool.

O rin your communal kibbutz, or apartment in Pomona, or artist's loft in Lowertown - whatever you choose to use your talents to work toward. That's part of being free, or "free" if you prefer!

This is the dream that bought Arnold an election.

Receipts, please!

The dream of a world where you can have neighbors who never bother you, unless you want them to. It’s a great dream, I suppose, until you’re the one standing on the side of the road waiting for a rancher to go a hundred miles out of his way, hoping he’s in the mood, and with no other way home.

And Mz. Raffo again mistakes "freedom" - the right to hitchike into the middle of the Montana desert - for "charity" - the rancher's unbidden desire to bail her out of the mess she got herself into.

I cut liberally from the article. You may read the rest at the link above - but you're also free not to.

You Go, Grrrrrrl - A

You Go, Grrrrrrl - A study says Oprah fans are likely to be under mind-numbing stress:

"According to a new study, fans of the 'Oprah Winfrey Show' have higher stress levels than those who are not fans. According to the study, 5 percent of the country's adult population, or 9 million people, said they feel so much stress that they can no longer cope. Half of those said they were fans of the show.

'Either watching 'Oprah' leads to anxiety, or severely stressed Americans are drawn to her show to look for solutions,' said [Hale] Dwoskin [by Hale Dwoskin, author of 'The Sedona Method'] in the release. 'However, the most likely conclusion we can make is that people who seek out Oprah's life-affirming TV are probably just more aware, open and honest with their emotions.'"

I know that both time I watched Oprah, I felt my blood pressure rising, and felt a desire to smash something...

Bad Day - Sullivan on

Bad Day - Sullivan on yesterday, a bad day in Iraq, which he describes as...:

"...enough to make anyone want to leave the place in disgust. But that's the point. Saddam always relied on the Somalia strategy. He believed - and probably still does - that the U.S. does not have the guts to stick this out and wear down the Sunni dead-enders now combined with Islamist terrorists. He planned on this kind of war of attrition from the minute he knew he was militarily finished. That makes our endurance all the more necessary. The slow collapse of American credibility in the 1990s will take time to reverse. And moments like yesterday are classic attempts to test our determination. "

I'm waiting for the first leftblogger to cite yesterday's attacks as a reason to withdraw.

Plausible? - Day By Day

Plausible? - Day By Day notes Terry MacAuliffe's complete impotence as DNC leader:

It's as good as any other theory so far...

Got my K-Tel On

Lileks, on his way to fisking the worst song of all time (Going Up The Country by Canned Heat) in a Bleat last week, gives a link I've been dreaming about for years; K-Tel Records.

Bear in mind, my parents tried. We didn't have Public Radio in Jamestown, North Dakota in those days, so my parents listened to CBW in Winnipeg - a station that, in retrospect, was Thomas Magnum to MPR's dowdy spinster. And my first instrument was the cello. The three local radio stations broadcast, in order of size: Country (KSJB), Beautiful Music (KSJM), and the owner's opinion of the state legislature (KEYJ, the station that eventually hired me in 1979).

But then, one day in 1976, over in Mike Aylmer's basement, on the tiny, 1960's vintage portable record player - K-Tel's Block Buster.

And it was there that I discovered the seductive joys of...well, not really rock and roll. But certainly pop music, circa 1976.

The album included:

• Fly Robin Fly — Silver Convention: "Radish" Widmer - I'm one of about ten people on earth that remembers his real name, Kevin - sang this song incessantly. I think it had its effect.
  
• That’s the Way I Like It — KC and the Sunshine Band: Thai Tran - a Vietnamese kid whose family was miserably stranded in North Dakota after escaping with his family from 'nam and living in a camp in Thailand, and then at an army base in Arkansas, learned English to this song: "Nat da wee, oh hoh oh hoh, Ah wike ee, oh hoh oh hoh...". Last I heard, he was a sociologist of some kind. You do the math.
  
• Why Can’t We Be Friends — War
  
• Pick Up The Pieces — Average White Band
  
• Part Time Love — Gladys Knight and the Pips: The above three songs show what a pathetic state R'nB was in by 1976. People look back on Disco like it was the aberration. Piffle. Disco rescued R'nB from an early demise.
  
• Only Women — Alice Cooper: "I liked I'm Eighteen better"
  
• Please Come To Boston — Dave Loggins: I resolved on hearing this song never, ever to be this sort of sap for a...a...a chick.
  
• Air That I Breathe — Hollies: I remember this song sounding very nice. It hasn't aged well.
  
• Frankenstein — Edgar Winter Groups: This was the song every garage band tried to do, to show that they had the funk. It was North Dakota.
  
• I Want a Do Something Freaky to You — Leon Haywood: "He's talking about sex, isn't he?" "Shut up, my mom'll hear you!"

  Side Two

• Sky High — Jigsaw:
  
• Chevy Van — Sammy Johns: "OK, NOW he's 's talking about sex!" "Er, I dunno". "JEEEEZ, shut up! My mom's upstairs!"
  
• The Last Game of the Season — David Geddes: That's right - THAT David Geddes, of "Run Joey Run" fame. The mid-seventies had a little mini-fad - bathetic Death Pop. "Rocky" by Austin Roberts (young couple falls in love, Girl dies after having baby, Guy sees the mom in little girl), "Billy Don't Be A Hero" by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods (Guy goes off to war, Girl begs him not to be a hero, Guy becomes a dead hero anyway), and Geddes' "Run Joey Run" (Guy meets Girl, knocks Girl up, Girl's father tracks Guy down with a shotgun, Girl dives in front of the buckshot to save Guy), and "Shannon" by Henry Gross (Guy's Sister dies, family collapses - actually the only one of these songs that's aged at all well). People wondered - who will come out with the crucial followup? Geddes "won " with LGOTS (Guy's blind dad sits in the bleachers watching every game of the season - up until the championship game, during which Guy plays the game of his life. But the blind father has died just in time to miss the game!).
  
• Swearin’ To God — Frankie Vali (sic): Frankie Valli is a very misunderstood character. While his castrati wail with the old Four Seasons songs was as irritating a presence as pop music has ever produced, he also sang on some of the best American pop music of the early sixties; the Four Seasons were among the very few artists doing genuine rock and roll in the years between Elvis' induction and the Beatles. Songs like "Big Man In Town" and "Walk Like A Man" were great foreshadows of Springsteen and the Asbury Jukes. But ten years later, time had stripped away the Four Seasons, and airtight two-minute musical parables of the Jersey goombah life, and uniqueness. And all that remained was the wail. And it was sad.
  
• Doctor’s Orders — Carol Douglas
  
• Help Me Rhonda — Johnny Rivers
  
• Caribbean Festival — Kool and Gang
  
• Peace Pipe — B.T. Express - "He's singing about POT, man".
  
• Slippin’ Into Darkness — War
  
• I’m On Fire — 5000 Volts

Question for those of you were born after, say, 1972; are you starting to understand why so many of us looked at Bruce Springsteen and the Sex Pistols as conquering liberators?

Maxi-Flop - CBS's "Reagan" mini-series

Maxi-Flop - CBS's "Reagan" mini-series has some interesting backers:

CBS entertainment chief Les Moonves insists that Democrat diva Barbra Streisand didn't have anything to do with the insulting portrayal of President Reagan and his wife Nancy in his network's upcoming biopic "The Reagans."

But only four months ago the anti-Republican songstress was described in mainstream press reports as "tight" with the Reagan-bashing film's producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron.

And, by all accounts, the series shows it.

George Putnam excoriates CBS's Reagan miniseries.

One of a wallet-ful of money paragraphs:

"Reagan played right guard on his college football team. Next to him at the center position was the only man of color on the team. The night before an important out-of town game, Reagan's team was to be given a steak dinner. As they sat down to eat, the restaurant owner approached the man of color and said, 'You can have your dinner, but you've got to eat it in the kitchen.'

Quietly furious, Reagan asked his fellow teammates to each contribute a few dimes and nickels so they could leave and go elsewhere for dinner ... and then the team walked out en masse, went down the street to a local hamburger joint and that was their dinner. The next day they enjoyed a smashing victory. Just one small incident of many showing where Ronnie Reagan came from."

Many more observations worth reading.

Counterterror - Krauthammer with with

Counterterror - Krauthammer with with historical and demographic perspectives on the guerrilla war in Iraq:

"The Saddam loyalists swim in a small lake. They represent the deeply loathed Baathist regime, with just a small constituency at home -- bolstered by foreign terrorists who may speak for a general kind of Islamism but are no more loved by Iraqis than they were by the Afghans, who despised them.

There is no general uprising among the Iraqi people. On the contrary: 80 percent of the country is either Shiite or Kurd, for almost a century ruled and repressed by the Sunni Arab minority. Which is why most polls show a very substantial majority of Iraqis want the Americans and British to stay and are pleased with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The resistance to the U.S. occupation is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab. But it represents only 15 percent to 20 percent of the Iraqi population. For 30 years, through their own Saddam Hussein, they used their power not just to rule but to rob. They gorged themselves on Iraq's oil wealth. Tikrit was a sleepy town before Saddam rose from it to Stalinist god-king and poured not only privilege, power and protection into Tikrit and onto Tikritis but vast amounts of money as well."

The American left, whose knowledge of history goes back no further than 1968, regards all guerrilla war as unwinnable. Krauthammer notes that it's not true, citing the British war in Malaysia in the '50s (and even Krauthammer swings and misses - the Brits won even more similar wars in Yemen and Oman in the '60s).

You'll want to read this.

(Via Vodkapundit)

NaNo, NaNo - About 3,000

NaNo, NaNo - About 3,000 words over the weekend. Doesn't seem so bad, so far - although I'm sure I'll regret writing that soon.

But it occurs to me that to meet the NaNo goal you need to write about 1,300 words a day. Last September I dumped all my blog writing into a file, and figured I'd been averaging about 670 words a day for a year and a half - and last year most of my posts were short, and I only did a few a day. I'll bet I've averaged way over 800 words a day just on the blog alone for quite some time.

So maybe this NaNo thing isn't such a big deal!

Who Da Cowboy? - David's

Who Da Cowboy? - David's Medienkritik is an essential read for a perspective on the European media.

The Halloween edition led with this image, from the German weekly Zeit (Ironically, German for "Time"):

David responds with this graf...:

Isn't it amazing that this stupid cowboy's economic policy seems to be doing quite well, especially when compared to the not so successful efforts of his smart German counterpart? 7.2 % annual growth in the US compared to zero in Germany - what a difference!

David then follows with a perhaps more appropriate picture...

...but you'll have to read his blog for that.

Take Toys, Leave Sandbox -

Take Toys, Leave Sandbox - The Dems respond to the 7.2% growth numbers...churlishly:

"Democrats yesterday downplayed the strongest quarterly economic growth in 19 years, refusing to give President Bush credit and stressing still-lagging job creation, while Republicans gloated over the news.
'President Bush has compiled the worst economic record since the Great Depression, and it is going to take a lot more than one quarter of growth to clean it up,' said Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in a statement.
'The real measure of a strong economy is when average Americans see real benefits and the people who lost their jobs under President Bush are working again,' he said. "

No word on a Dem response to Friday's BCCI jump...

Where's The Party - So

Where's The Party - So yet again, there's a great party...

...and I was never invited.

Just like high school all over again.

Oh - and Saint?

I was glad to be there, in what may turn out to be the ultimate nexus of blogosphere-related icons in Twin Cities history. That is, until Mitch Berg and the Pioneer Press Weather Blog guy finally get together for that symposium on cumulonimbus clouds they've been threatening.

Again, just like high school.

Novel Idea, Part I -

Novel Idea, Part I - Posting will be light today, and for the next 30 days, as I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month. I may bulk things up with links to other bloggers you should be reading.

I'm writing into the wee hours, trying to finish a novel (50,000 words or so) by November 30. NaNoWriMo measures its accomplishments by counting words - which should tell you how serious an exercise this is. But I've always wanted to write a novel, and doggone it, I'm going to do it.

I'll post my ongoing word count on the top-right corner of the blog.

I'm on my way out for a very busy weekend of housework, shopping, and maybe even a dollop of social life. We shall see.

I got a good start on NaNo last night, and got up early to lay in a supply of posts for next week, so even if NaNo burns me out on writing to the point where I can't stand the thought of sitting at a computer to blog, I'll have something new on here every day.