Shot In The Dark

The Hackey-Sack-Playing Chiba-Monkey Trivia Zombie Awards, 2004 Edition

The Hackey-Sack-Playing Chiba-Monkey Trivia Zombie Awards, 2004 Edition - This year's award goes to...

...the envelope, please...

This year's award goes to Fraters Libertas, for their award post!

We teed off with:

Blogger Whose Mouth Wrote Checks Their Ass Couldn't Cash

RUNNER UP: James Lileks, the Bleat. He gets cut some slack...

WINNER: Mitch Berg, Shot in the Dark. If Mitch did nothing for the next six months but blog he still wouldn't make up for all the promised material that never showed up.

I guess I should be flattered that anyone cares I "promise" things that I can't get around to.

And I DID spend six months doing almost nothing but blogging in 2003. But I'm thinking - besides my piece of "Urban Conservatives" (which still lurks in my "Drafts" on Blogger), what didn't I deliver?

But again, I shoudn't complain - it's the only time I'll ever beat Lileks for an award. As opposed to a game of one on one.

Then, there was:

Blogger Whose Unchecked Navel Gazing Reached Egomaniacal Levels

RUNNER UP: Mitch Berg, Shot in the Dark. For referring to himself in the third person while setting his personal tastes as the standard for cinematic excellence:

it's not easy to take books that Mitch Berg found completely unreadable (I made it through about 20 pages of "Fellowship" before I put it down for good), and turn them into movies that are not only monumental and epic, but genuinely touching on a human as well as philosophical level.

Jeez, fellas, pay attention: Mitch Berg wasn't using his tastes to set the standard for cinematic excellence. He did it to define literary tedium.

However, many of the awards were dead-on:

Worst Color Scheme in a Blog

WINNER: SCSU Scholars. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but that yellow background color looks like the phlegm a malaria victim might cough up.

Hear hear.

King - if you can't get a student to do it for extra credit, gimme a call. You're in the NAOB, and you need to join the big leagues in the design department. Like Fraters, with their current layout, "Tribute to the Italian Flag". Brava!

Finally:

Blogger Who Just Can't Decide To Stick Or Stay Away for Good

RUNNER UP: Sedalina. We love her and all and are very happy she's back, but all this dramatic departure and return stuff is killing us. However, it's not killing us as much as the fact that she's able to get more chicks in six weeks than Saint Paul has gotten in two years.

I'd laugh - but I'm too busy crying.

And then, the winner:

WINNER: Rachel Lucas - whose tortured, self-absorbed deliberations about whether or not to hang up her keyboard got old very fast. And continues to age with each passing week. Verne Gagne didn't quit and come back as many times as Lucas did this year. And he did it with much more dignity.

Careful. You might run afoul of the Knights Who Say Assclown.

Next year, I guarantee...

...er, no. I don't.

Happy New Year!

And may 2004 be much better than 2003 for all of us.

I'd say "It could hardly be worse", but I know better than to tempt fate than that.

Predictions

Predictions - Everyone else is doing it, why not me? Here are my predictions for 2004:

• By this time next year, the link between Al Quaeda and Iraq will be documented.
• Most of the world will doubt that Bin Laden is alive - with evidence pointing toward his death in Tora Bora in December of 2001.
• Since my political predictions are usually the kiss of death for a politician, I predict Dean will beat Bush by 30 electoral votes. Heh heh.
• I will have a date that isn't an exercise in self-abnegation, or worse, black comedy. Maybe two.

I notice I was smart enough not to make any predictions at this time last year...

Link?

Link? - US Troops find Al Quaeda literature in Iraqi arms cache:

"U.S. forces operating in the so-called Sunni Triangle -- the region of Iraq most loyal to captured former dictator Saddam Hussein -- found a significant weapons cache that included al Qaeda literature and videotapes, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
Members of Task Force Ironhorse 2nd Infantry's Arrowhead Brigade discovered the material Monday morning at a site in Samarra, about 65 miles north-northwest of Baghdad. Some of the items were found hidden in a false wall, the military said. "

See my predictions...

Speaking Of Our Tired, Overcommitted Military

Drezner - in for Sullivan - has this piece on the 101st Airborne's evolving mission in Northern Iraq.

It quotes a NYTimes piece that should give the likes of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark pause:

military commanders here expressed frustration that most international aid organizations have not returned in force since the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last summer.

"The N.G.O.'s have been a disappointment," said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Division, speaking of nongovernmental organizations. "Don't get me wrong, the truck bomb at the U.N. headquarters was horrific. But they seemed as if they were very, very quick to bail out of here, compared to the risks they have run in a variety of other missions."

In other words, the organization that Dean and Clark would give rights of "first refusal" over our foreign policy - refuse to run one themselves?

Read both pieces - both are interesting.

The Clinton Military meets the Dean Foreign Policy

Some pundits on the left continue to point at the results in Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the sort of grin you see from toddlers who've just made really good pants, and yell "See! The 'Clinton Military' wasn't so bad after all, was it? Hmmmmmmm?"

Well, yes. It was.

I got another letter from a high school pal of mine, who's flown more fighter planes than I've owned cars in the last fifteen years, writes:

I'm not sure of the exponential increase defense spending has seen under the "Bush Administration" but, this is clearly another case of a biased reporter spinning an article while ignoring the fact that for eight years prior to the "Bush Administration" the military was gutted by an administration whose opinion of those whom chose to serve their country with honor was somewhat akin to the reaction of a high-society debutante faced with something ugly, slimy, and smelly.

Don't even get me started on paradigm shifts and the institutional resistance to change inherent in DOD. Let's just say it is difficult at best to focus some decision-makers upon future threats and the requirements to counter them.

Of course, if you quote me on this I would recommend a GPS jammer from Radio Shack that might give you a false sense of security when the JDAM is inbound!!!

He sends a piece from the NYTimes editorial page, "The Thinning of the Army".

Over a third of the Army's active-duty combat troops are now in Iraq, and by spring the Pentagon plans to let most of them come home for urgently needed rest. Many will have served longer than a normal overseas tour and under extremely harsh conditions. When the 130,000 Americans rotate out for home leave, nearly the same number will rotate in. At that point, should the country need to send additional fighters anywhere else in the world, it will have dangerously few of them to spare.

This is the clearest warning yet that the Bush administration is pushing America's peacetime armed forces toward their limits. Washington will not be able to sustain the mismatch between unrealistic White House ambitions and finite Pentagon means much longer without long-term damage to our military strength.

I'm confused.

Does this mean "The Clinton Military" was only suitable for winning quick, hit and run brushfire wars, and standing guard over quarreling factions in borscht republics?

The left needs to get its story straight.

The only solution is for the Bush administration to return to foreign policy sanity, starting with a more cooperative, less vindictive approach to European allies who could help share America's military burdens.

Let's stop right there.

First - No. It's not the "only solution". There are several others. We could mobilize the nation for war; we could start turning factories over from civilian to military production, call up more reserves, even consider the draft. We could get serious, like we did on the eve of World War II.

Is it advisable? Probably not; it'd gut the economy. Which is why another solution - focus our military on fighting wars rather than the Clinton-era focus on a Peace Corps with guns, and increasing their budget to give it the training and equipment that the Clinton administration scrimped on - is a better idea.

As to our allies "sharing our burdens": this is akin to the Howard Dean claim that we could generate 100,000 "moderate moslem" allies to take over in Iraq, always made without naming a "moderate moslem" country with 100,000 troops to spare. Which allies? What troops? The German military is a shadow of its Cold War self, and except for its elite forces (the HSK special forces and Fallschirmjaeger paratroopers that already served in Afghanistan) serves largely as a post-reunification make-work program, which is logistically, doctrinally, legally and politically incapable of operating outside German borders. The French military, aside from its tiny Marine Corps, Special Forces and Foreign Legion, is worse - an ill-equipped draftee army that has not trained to fight an actual enemy in nearly 20 years.

In fact, what allies do with militaries that are actually capable of doing something useful, and have troops to send? Let's see - the Brits, the Poles with their great military traditions, the South Koreans with their high training and motivation...

...oh, wait - they're already there. Never mind.

Meanwhile, if a sudden crisis were to erupt in North Korea, Afghanistan or elsewhere, the Pentagon might be hard pressed to respond. For a time, it could make do by sending tired troops back into action, mobilizing reserves and borrowing forces from areas that are quiet but still highly volatile. Such expedients have severe long-term costs. The White House must recognize the damage its unilateralism is inflicting on the Army and change course before the damage becomes harder to undo.

That, or spend less money on Medicaid pork-barrel schemes, and start rebuilding a military that can fight a long war.

During the Reagan years, the regular Army had 20 ground divisions, the Marines two more, and the National Guard and reserve added (as I recall) 10. Anticipating the "Peace Dividend", Bush Senior cut the Army to 16 ground divisions (and the Navy and Air Force were cut proportionally). Today the Army has 12 divisions, the Marines one and some change, and the Guard and Reserve contribute proportionally fewer combat units. In war, the math is fairly simple; a division can only fight so long before it needs to rest, refit, absorb new guys to replace the ones that have had too much action. You can't do it on the cheap and politically-expedient - which is what Clinton did - and expect to win a war.

Which is what we're in.

The Shorter Jeff Fecke

The Shorter Jeff Fecke - "Kos has this report that the sky was grey in Iraq today [A report that, often as not, will prove false in coming weeks - Ed.]."

"The Administration would never claim the sky was yellow."

"Noooo. Never happen."

(Buck up, Jeff - imitation is the sincerest form of...er, I guess in this case, retribution :-)

Brain Food

Brain Food - This piece made me spit coffee on my monitor yesterday:

Sales of America's dietary staples--cow spinal fluid and brain tissue--dropped significantly last week after the discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or 'mad cow disease') in Mabton, Washington.

A quick survey of upscale cafes in the Seattle area showed a precipitous decrease in sales of spinal latte, a musky cocktail made from steamed spinal fluids and arabica beans.

Meanwhile, delicatessens throughout the city report declining demand for their formerly-popular brain-based foods.

"I used to love coming here for a cerebellum sandwich and a cSales of America's dietary staples--cow spinal fluid and brain tissue--dropped significantly last week after the discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or 'mad cow disease') in Mabton, Washington.

A quick survey of upscale cafes in the Seattle area showed a precipitous decrease in sales of spinal latte, a musky cocktail made from steamed spinal fluids and arabica beans.

Meanwhile, delicatessens throughout the city report declining demand for their formerly-popular brain-based foods.

"I used to love coming here for a cerebellum sandwich and a cup of spinal soup," said an unnamed deli customer, "But these news reports have got me spooked. I think I'm going to stick with tuna for a while, even though the mercury in tuna seems to make me unusually sensitive to temperature changes."
up of spinal soup," said an unnamed deli customer, "But these news reports have got me spooked. I think I'm going to stick with tuna for a while, even though the mercury in tuna seems to make me unusually sensitive to temperature changes."

Salad for lunch. Definitely.

Puritan Alert

With America's annual anti-alcohol witchhunt only hours away, it's worth visiting the DUI Gulag to poke a few holes in some of MADD's myths that are circulating today.

So Much Material

So little time.

I have an immense backlog of stuff I'm trying to get written, here...

...and no time!

Hopefully tonight. For now it's off to work.

The Fast Lane

Yesterday, Governor Pawlenty unveiled a new plan to create low-density toll lanes on some of the Twin Cities busier commuter routes.

Exactly one femtosecond later, the DFL claimed that the plan would starve children and kill Bambi.

The plan would create toll lanes, which would likely be faster for commuters that want to pay the price. This is a plan that is used in a lot of major metro areas; in Chicago, you can choose between toll and free routes to get between many of the higher-demand areas, with traffic distributed accordingly. In the case of the Pawlenty plan, which would put toll lanes along Interstate 35W (which cuts north/south through the metro via downtown Minneapolis), Interstate 94, Interstate 394 from downtown to the west burbs, a big chunk of the Interstate 494 and 694 ring road, I35E in to St. Paul to the north, and parts of major feeder roads U.S. 10, the dreaded 169 and the always-snagged MN36 to Stillwater.

The staff at the DFL data processing center in downtown Saint Paul fed the punched paper tape into their IBM mainframe with "HIGHWAY" "WAYZATA" "STILLWATER" "TOLL" on it. A few minutes later, the computer spit back:

UNFAIR ADVANTAGE TO WEALTHY
REQUIRES PROMPT SPIN

Which is what they did.

"You're starting to have private enterprise build it and rent it and lease it, where before, it's always been the general public involved in it,'' said Sen. Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, chairman of the Senate Transportation Policy and Budget Division. "I'm not saying it's a bad idea. It's a Band-Aid to what we really need to do — make a long-term financial investment in transportation and transit that many other states have done.''

While Johnson is the most relentlessly tedious speaker in a MN Senate crowded with snoozers, at least he makes the honest point that it is not the only answer - more on this later.

However, you know you're on to something when Alice Hausman - my "representative" from District 66B in the Midway of St. Paul, a woman who normally only appears in public when the teachers union lets her out for exercise periods - holds forth:

"This administration governs by gimmick,'' said Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, who sits on the House transportation committees. She said it is impossible to evaluate the plan without information on the amount of the tolls motorists would pay.

Read: "...before we can see exactly how to demigog this thing".

Hausman highlights the hypocrisy of the DFL on this issue: They attack the suburbs, and the subsidy they receive from the urban areas, endlessly and relentlessly - but when the GOP unveils a plan that would shift that subsidy to the consumers themselves (presumably in their H2 Hummers with country club stickers, in the DFL world...), it's suddenly an entitlement of wealth?

I have favored toll routes - lanes or entire roads - for years. They have the singular advantage of making road taxation voluntary, shifting the subsidy for the roads to the actual consumers. This is both a good thing and makes the DFL very angry.

But I also think we need commuter rail (as opposed to the Ventura Administration's dim-witted light rail line), similar to Chicago's Metra system of trains that run on full-gauge ("heavy") rail lines. They make economic sense, in that they dodge the main cost of rail trainsit (the right of way purchases that made the Ventura Trolley so hideously expensive, and will likely inflate the cost of the Minneapolis/St Paul line to ghastly proportion). The two main lines proposed so far - the North Star line from St. Cloud to Minneapolis, and the Red Rock line from Hastings to the Downtowns would both have serious potential to be self-supporting very quickly, especially if they're equipped with used rolling stock. Both of these ideas not only make good transit sense - they are economically sound (unlike every DFL-supported transit plan, or most of Governor Pawlenty's, for that matter).

Jason Lewis did the metro a great disservice with his one-size-fits-all dismissal of all commuter rail transit in favor of roads - and conversations with local Republicans show that the damage, in terms of common sense, was immense. This is an area where conservatives can beat the stuffing out of the DFL on one of their pet issues, and dramatically improve the quality of life in the metro, and do it while upholding conservative principles of free-market discipline and public frugality.

The Year in Liberal Hate Speech

Jeff Jacoby, on Townhall, continues his annual series on liberal hate speech and the media double standard that coddles it.

Classic quote:

"MSNBC fired right-wing talk host Michael Savage in July, and rightly so, when he told a gay caller to 'get AIDS and die, you pig.' The liberal Nina Totenberg, on the other hand, suffered no ill effects for saying, during the flap over General Jerry Boykin's views of Islam and the war on terrorism, 'I hope he's not long for this world.' When the startled host asked if she were 'putting a hit out on this guy,' Totenberg backtracked and said she only wanted to see him expire 'in his job.'

But this isn't the first time the NPR diva has publicly wished death on a conservative. 'I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind,' she said of Senator Jesse Helms in 1995, 'because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.'"

Read it all, naturally.

Naturally, I need to start doing this sort of thing with Katherine Lanpher, Doug Grow and Brian Lambert.

Foot In Mouth To Knee

I used to joke that in Saint Paul, the DFL could plaster a set of those wind-up chattering teeth with a DFL sticker, and it'd win an election. "It may just be a set of wind-up chattering teeth", would say the Volvo-driving, perpetually indignant Highland Parker or the teeth-gritted West End union snuffy, "but at least it's not Republican!" This explains some of the "representation" Saint Paul gets, locally and nationally - the insufferable Jay Benanav on the City Council, most of the School Board, the inaccessible Alice Hausman in the House, and the empty suit Betty McCollum in the US House.

So when George Will writes about Howard Dean...:

Arthur Goldberg was a fine public servant -- secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, ambassador to the United Nations -- but a dreadful candidate for governor of New York in 1970, when it was said that if he gave one more speech he would lose Canada, too. Howard Dean is becoming Goldbergean.

Regarding foreign policy, Dean recently said not only that America is no safer because Saddam Hussein is captured, but that America is "no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center." Well. He says he supported the war to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, although he thinks it made us no safer. And even though he says the war in Iraq made us no safer, he says he would "not have hesitated" to attack Iraq if the U.N. had given us "permission."

Because Dean's foreign policy pronouncements have been curiouser and curiouser, his recent domestic policy speech did not get the attention it deserved for its assertion that America is boiling with "anger and despair." Republicans are, Dean says, trying to "dismantle" the welfare state -- presumably when they are not enriching Medicare's entitlement menu -- and they aim "to end public education."

...I have to ask will "for whom would this be a problem on Dean's part?"

The swing voter? Among swing voters that pay attention to anything, perhaps.

Among the Democrat base? "Sure, he may be wackier than Ralph Nader on butane - hell, he may make Jim Stockdale look lucid by comparison - but at least he's not Bush Republican.

While Howard Dean is looking more and more like the lunatic fringe, so - I'm sorry to say - is the "base" of the Democrat party. Not the whole base - down, Jeff and Flash - but the part of the base that calls the shots.

The Dean candidacy is nationalizing a phenomenon that swept the Minnesota DFL in the past fifteen years or so; while the party (like all political parties) has always been the province of the activist, the activists have gotten more zealous, more fundamentalist - more polarized. The situation parallels that of 1972 - when the pragmatic, Kennedy/Scoop Jackson wing was crowded out by the dogmatic, statist, far left wing of the party. This year, the pramatic - some might say to the point of cynicism - Clinton/MacAuliffe wing is being pushed, maybe pushed aside, by a similar crowd. Maybe the same crowd - the Volvo-driving fiftysomething was probably driving to McGovern rallies in a VW Microbus back then. In recent years the DFL - invested as it is in a party nominating process that rewards relentless activism at the expense of consensus - has been endorsing candidates farther and farther from the mainstream, to the point where the DFL endorsement has been a kiss of death in many elections (vide Roger Moe and Skip Humphrey).

It's a process that gave us Paul Wellstone, at a time when Minnesota was susceptible to electing people like that. Dean is a symptom of the same dynamic - I wouldn't be surprised if he started tooling about the nation in a little green bus one of these days.

But I doubt Paul Wellstone would get elected in Minnesota today - which probably doesn't bode well for Dean or the Democrats, here or nationwide.

The Harder Hummer

Iraq Now, on the slow, bumpy ride to getting armored Hummers to Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the absence of guidance from echelons above reality, the units here on the ground have resorted to all manner of equally unauthorized Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to protect themselves on the road.
Most of our Hummers have thin canvas doors. “Hang your flak jackets over the windowsills,” the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment told us, helpfully.

Actually, when we got the new Kevlar body armor vests, we took the old Viet Nam era flak jackets, procured for us by the same farsighted geniuses who bought us the A3s, we strapped them like balustrades along the outsides of the truckbeds. You haven’t seen a finer sight since The Grapes of Wrath.

Other units contracted with Iraqi machine shops to make metal doors to replace the canvas doors with which the light infantry units had been so thoughtfully provided. (Did we really think that light infantry would not, sooner or later, get embroiled in a counterinsurgency campaign?).

Pentagon Intertia versus the troops needs in the field - read the whole thing.

My Only Comment...

...on the Vikings is that now we only have to wait two months for pitchers to report for spring training.

Football - at least, if the Bears are out of the running - tends to bore me stiff.

So see you next season, Vikes. When you take the field, I'll do so with the little tang of regret that accompanies the season you announce - "Baseball is winding down yet again".

But the Vikes' annual ignominious exit from the season - especially this year's plummet from grace - means that spring, rebirth, life, baseball are all right around the corner again - and as the days get longer, the reports from the Grapefruit League will start filtering in with the birds, and life will be good, and warm, and free of John F@#$@#g Madden.

Polish Joke

Ralph Peters has this superb piece on Poland's long history of fighting for freedom:

"It's a mistake to over-idealize any nation. But if there's a land of heroes anywhere between the English Channel and the coast of California, it's Poland. Our Polish allies have taken a brave, costly, principled stand for freedom and democracy in Iraq. They desperately want to be seen by Washington as reliable friends in this treacherous world.
The least we could do is to treat them with respect. "

But we don't.

The West's history of shafting the Poles is so long and odious, it's a wonder they are pro-West at all:

• As Peters noted, the Poles' contributions to saving the West from the Turks were immense. Polish cavalry in its day was the most feared instrument of war in Europe - for good reason.
• After the Napoleonic Wars, the rest of Europe gave Poland back to the Russians without a fight.
• After World War 1, Poland emerged as an independent country - but the west (largely the French) made certain it was toothless, ensuring that it had neither defensible borders nor a first-class port (Gdansk was accessible through a long, narrow, indefensible corrodor between Germany and East Prussia - and hence fell instantly when war began).
• In 1939, while the Germany Army ravaged Poland with 100 divisions, precisely 12 German divisions faced the Poles' putative Allies, the French and British, who between them had over 100 ground divisions, as well as more and better tanks than the Germans had. They did nothing, allowing the Germans and Russians to swallow the country up.
• In 1944, the Armija Krajowa - the underground Home Army - revolted against the Germans in Warsaw. The Russians halted their advance until the Germans mopped it up after weeks of brutal urban warfare - they figured the Germans would save them the trouble of sending the guerrillas to Siberia themselves, as most were democrats and monarchists.
• During and after the war, the US and UK, in the interest of political expedience, ignored evidence of the Russian slaughter of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn Wood and elsewhere.
• At the end of the day, we gave Poland up to the Soviets at Yalta. This agreement was no less than a rape of Polish society, which had suffered so grievously under centuries of Russian rule.

Read the rest of Peters' article. Get outraged. Write your congressperson - as I'm doing today. The way we're treating the Poles is a crime.

Again.

UPDATE: The Professor linked to this wonderful Friedman editorial on the same subject. Money graf:

After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: people here actually tell you they like America — without whispering. What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven't they gotten the word from Berlin and Paris? No, they haven't. In fact, Poland is the antidote to European anti-Americanism. Poland is to France what Advil is to a pain in the neck. Or as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs specialist, remarked after visiting Poland: "Poland is the most pro-American country in the world — including the United States."

So call your legislator again!

Dean-Hatred?

Jonathon Chait returns.

A while ago, we met Chait when he was extolling the virtues of hating President Bush in the New Republic.

He's turned his apparently boundless supply of ire on Howard Dean now.

And it's pretty darn good.

In this piece, he assails the cloistered cluelessness exhibited by so many Dean supporters, including many pro-Dean bloggers:

One of the most disturbing things about Dean and his hard-core supporters is that they give the impression that they know nothing at all of why President Bush is successful, and therefore what it takes to beat him. Read the pro-Dean blogs, and the you come away with the view that Bush is strong because he's ruthless and has lots of money, and therefore if the Democrats are also ruthless and raise lots of money, they can beat him. This ignorance is compounded by the fact that many Deanies seem to exist in a isolated cultural milieu in which everybody is secular, socially liberal, and antiwar. They can't fathom why those things might hurt Dean in a general election because they don't ever talk to or read anybody who thinks differently. Dean's Internet networking--which has had lots of positive effects on American politics--has probably intensified this cloistering, by creating intellectual ghettos on the web where true believers can interact, undisturbed by those who don't share their faith.

A perfect example of this phenomenon comes from the liberal blogger Atrios, who attempts to rebut Frank Foer's blockbuster TNR cover story on why Dean's secularism would doom him in a general election. His own predisposition on this topic can be seen in his profession that he was embarrassed when Democrats gathered on the Capitol steps to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (I'm not saying this disqualifies him, only that it's a distinctly minority view.) Atrios's prescription on this is that, since "there's literally nothing [Democrats] can do overcome that image" of being secular, "Stop playing defense on these issues, and stop letting the other side write the script."

Atrios, of course, assumes that the majority of Americans will be interested in a "script" that is Aggressively Secular - that is, one that actively divorces faith not only from public life, but from all discourse related to it, one that cloisters not only the faithful but faith itself into a convenient hour block on Sunday morning that is conveniently isolate from the rest of life.

I'd like to see the Dems try that - it's accelerate the McGovernization of the party.

(Via Sully )

Just...So...Wrong

Took the "Which Leader Are You?" test.

I got:

I may never live this down.

I was so shooting for Reagan...

"Fair Trial"

Powerline discusses the ins and outs of giving "fair" trials to dictators.

They don't have a great precedent:

After World War II, Churchill opposed the idea of trying the Nazi leaders who were still alive, arguing that they should simply be shot. Trying a deposed tyrant to "prove" what is already known, with far more certainty than can ever be achieved in a courtroom, is likely to achieve little other than giving the tyrant a platform from which to proclaim his "innocence" and to confuse the historical record. A year or two ago, the Trunk and I wrote an article for the local bar journal about the cross-examination of Hermann Goering by the chief Nuremberg prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson; see the link on the left side of the page. Goering's cross-examination did not go well, to put it mildly.

The key issue, it seems to me, is that giving a deposed tyrant the equivalent of a criminal trial assumes that it is somehow necessary to prove that a dictator is responsible for the crimes committed by his regime. It also assumes that an Anglo-American type trial is the best (if not the only) means of establishing the "real" truth. I would reject both of those assumptions, and, if dissuaded from shooting Saddam when his usefulness as an information source has ended, I would impanel a tribunal to take testimony from Iraqi citizens for the purpose of preserving a record of Saddam's crimes, with no participation by representatives of Saddam or the Baathist regime. Following which, Saddam would be executed.

This is something that's going to put our cultural divide into very stark relief, with opinion ranging from Powerline on the one hand, to the idiotic editorials that wondered if Hussein's "arrest" was legit because there was no warrant.

Hindrocket's idea sounds better and better, the more I think about it.

Christmas Music

Warrior Monk over at Spitbull turns in a fairly capable list of Christmas classics for the holidayed-out.

Not a bad list...

...except that any such list that doesn't include "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues is invalid from the word go.

That is all.

Kicked

Powerline "notes that the DNC's "blog" Kicking Ass is back on the air after a brief outage.

They noted correctly that it's not a blog at all - it's a message board. And they close by noting:

Kicking Ass provides a useful window into the soul of today's Democratic Party. And the astonishing thing is, it isn't just a bunch of loonies like IndyMedia; it's sponsored by the Democratic National Committee.

Very true.

Many leftblogs have a curious practice of posting "Open Threads" (like this example from the Daily Kos, who, if memory serves, has a hand in "Kicking Ass", which is essentially nothing but "Open Threads").

Why?

I don't recall ever seeing this practice on any conservative blog. Which, I think, highlights a key difference between conservative and liberal grassroots communication; liberals seem to need to carry out their conversations within some sort of hierarchy, with some higher authority vetting and authenticating it. The trend, online, started with the myriad email discussion groups, like the once-great, now-nearly-worthless Minnesota Politics mailing list, and seems to continue with the likes of Kicking Ass, Democratic Underground, Indymedia, Kos and the many other sites that ape the practice. It'd be inflammatory to call it "hive mentality", but I can't think of a better word...

Return Of The Poseur

Brian at Boviosity tackles Roger Ebert's review of Return of the King.

Ebert had this to say about the movie:

That it falls a little shy of greatness is perhaps inevitable. The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece. It is a melancholy fact that while the visionaries of a generation ago, like Coppola with "Apocalypse Now," tried frankly to make films of great consequence, an equally ambitious director like Peter Jackson is aiming more for popular success. The epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns, and audiences are much more interested in Middle Earth than in the world they inhabit.

Fantasy?

The story is about good versus evil - something that faces everyone, in some way or another, every day, whether it's in parking in a handicapped zone or cheating on ones' spouse or in fighting international terror. It's about faith and redemption and belief in a Messiah and the higher, transcendental ideals for which the messiah stands, and for which we live and fight in our bigger or smaller ways, and sometimes choose to live or die for.

Fantasy?

Oh, wait - he's not done:

Still, Jackson's achievement cannot be denied. "Return of the King" is such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films. Yes, they will be adrift during the early passages of the film's 200 minutes, but to be adrift occasionally during this nine-hour saga comes with the territory; Tolkien's story is so sweeping and Jackson includes so much of it that only devoted students of the Ring can be sure they understand every character, relationship and plot point.

So - the story is "silly", but the special effects sure are cool!

What to say? Well, Brian says it best:

I suppose when a movie doesn't support your particular worldview, it must be airily dismissed as "archetypes" lacking in "psychological depth." You keep saying that movies aren't about what they're about, they're about how they're about what they're about. I've always admired that stance and I guess it's true, unless they're about the reality of Good and Evil and the need for Good to sacrifice some of its easy complacency when Evil is determined to kill it. Then they just need to be dismissed as "for adolescents (of all ages)."

Even adolescents know a shite-spewing poser when they see one, Rog, and I'm looking at one right now. If you'd had the ring, you'd still be using it to sneak through Bill Clinton's secret service coterie and give him big sweaty bear hugs...right up until you got run through with a rusty Nazgul sword, of course.

Read the whole thing.

Gays In Minnesota

The latest Minnesota Poll shows that a majority of Minnesotans reject gay clergy and consider homosexuality a sin.

This was interesting, following as it did last week's Time/CBS poll that showed similar results nationwide.

Says the Strib:

"Most Minnesotans believe it is wrong to ordain sexually active gays and lesbians to the clergy, most object to giving same-sex couples the same legal rights as married people and most say homosexuality is a sin.
Those results are from a Minnesota Poll of the state's religious beliefs and practices, taken of 1,049 people Dec. 2-8.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents oppose ordaining gays and lesbians. Fifty-three percent said homosexuality is sinful, and 51 percent oppose granting homosexual couples the same legal rights as married people.
The numbers sear through the consciousness of Christian churches, particularly mainline Protestant denominations grappling with how to minister to gays and lesbians and whether to allow them into the ministry."

I keep going back and forth on this issue.

As I said in the piece earlier in the week, I think the gay movement - like the feminists and Afro-Americans before them - have done a great job of alienating those that should support them - indeed, want to support them in many cases. Despite some peoples' best efforts to convince people otherwise, I'm perhaps one of the most pro-gay-rights conservative Christians you'll ever meet. I think there is a legitimate case to be made for gay civil unions. I have trouble with the notion of gay marriage - in spite of Andrew Sullivan's very logical case for the subject, I'm neither convinced nor convincingly opposed.

Pieces like this - by the Strib, which would have to be considered pro-gay-marriage - might tend to push me back to the "anti" camp. As they do with so many of their polls, they try to equate correlation with causation:

Consistently, through all three poll questions, a profile of those who oppose and support gay rights emerges among Minnesotans.

• Younger, more educated, politically liberal and religiously inactive Minnesotans are more likely to favor legal rights for couples, are less likely to believe that homosexuality is a sin and would allow ordination.
• Those on the other side are older, less educated, politically conservative and more religiously active.

Catch that? "If you oppose gay marriage, it's because you're an old, stupid, fundie dittohead".

It'll be interesting to see how these polls are spun in the next few weeks.

The Common Food

Twin Cities' sports-radio station KFAN is doing a firat - opening the nation's first radio-station-branded restraurant.:

"'A lot of people,' says Mick Anselmo, regional vice president for Clear Channel Inc., 'aren't willing to stick their head up out the hole and take a risk. You know that. You see it all the time. They play it cautious. But that's not us.' Anselmo, boss of all things Clear Channel in the Twin Cities, was working the crowd last week at a preview of KFAN the Restaurant.

The sprawling, high-tech, 24,000-square-foot eatery, formerly Lido's Italian Market Café & Bar, opens its doors at 4 p.m. today.

If successful, it could be a model for other Clear Channel operations around the country.

In keeping with KFAN's market niche - loud opinions expressed with extreme, almost comic-book vehemence, about sports - the restaurant will feature dozens of big-screen TVs, and a two-hour daily radio show broadcast live from the restaurant. I can feel the headache already.

Which begs the question; what sort of restaurant would the Cities' other radio stations sponsor? Hmmmm:

• KQRS - The waitresses are cute, but they tell long, dull stories that have no punchlines. The waiters interrupt your order with "Mitchie, Mitchie, Mitchie - you're just keepin' da brotha down". And the food is sometimes good, but the kitchen staffs only serve unnaturally large chicken breast sandwiches.
• KSTP - Their lunch rush is huge. But if you come in for dinner, they'll give you a baloney sandwich, and tell you you'd damn well better be glad about it, like they were back in the old days.
• KDWB - Special of the day: Monday through Sunday, Cheeseburger Happy Meal. Also the only menu item. Although it's listed two dozen times in different typefaces and fonts.
• KNOW - Soffritto of Tomatoes and Fresh Herbs with Penne, served by a kitchen staff of two dozen cooks, six dozen assistant cooks, four supervising cooks, a vastly overpaid chef, and 200 waitstaff that bug you for a really large tip five or six times during your meal.

Speaking of KFAN - I can never listen to the station for more than a few minutes; the hosts make everything sound like a pro wrestling cablecast. "The Roseville Raptors T-Ball Team is laying the smack down, boyee!" Puh leez. Listen, morons; it's sports. It's oversized adolescents charging around a field or a court while people pay for the right to watch them. That is all. Which is fine - I love going to a baseball game or two every year. But while listening to talent-free pinheads yap about...er, professional sports is bad enough, when the likes of Chad Hartman start swerving into world events, it's just too much.

Signs that someone needs some perspective:

"The city (of Roseville) wants to do something for a grand opening," Herstine [Mike, the joint's General Manager] said. "We're the biggest thing in town. So they're excited. The other day, one of them was calling us the Taj Mahal. "

Reason #45 not to live in Roseville.

Christmas Remembered

Lileks notes one of the more liberating observations you can make about Christmas:

All Christmases refer back to the Christmases of your early childhood. That’s your baseline, your definition. Mine were warm and happy, which is a blessing and a curse – you love the season, but now you have an unreasonable standard. Everything falls short. It takes a long time to unlearn Christmas and reassemble it for your own – although having kids of your own accelerates the process, makes it easier. Forget your own unrealistic half-remembered expectations; let’s implant the same in the next crop! And when your toddler hugs your leg and says Oh Daddee it’s the best Christmas EVER you know you’re back in the groove.

This ties back to what I wrote yesterday; there's no reason for this to be a depressing season, as long as it's yours, and in the here and now. Christmas when I was a kid was the same thing - nearly perfect. And when I stop trying to make Christmas "nearly perfect", then that's exactly what it becomes.

Ramone Street

New York names a cross-street after Joey Ramone.

It's a few weeks old, sure. But still pretty cool.

Gabba gabba hey, indeed.

The World is Shocked

Jesse Ventura's Americatanks after two months.:

"After a two-month run, former Gov. Jesse Ventura's cable show is off the air and there are no immediate plans for MSNBC to bring it back.

The news channel's president, Erik Sorenson, sent a memo Tuesday to staff announcing he was extending a previously announced holiday break for the show."

And I never managed to see it...

T'is the Season

Lileks has a compact, pictorial holiday bleat..

He noted the changing holiday scene:

At the Mall on Tuesday it was almost the Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name; there were references to the season, and things festive. "

Maybe it's just a sign of our over-inclusive, PC times, but I was shocked - shocked, I tell you - to see explicit references, not only to the Christmas holiday (omitting the now-obligatory references to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa), but to the actual story of the Navitity on...

..."The Wiggles", an Australian kids' show that makes "Barney" look like "24", and is usually not much less PC than "Captain Planet".

And yet there it was, plain as a Sunday School lesson - the whole Christmas story, complete with Mary, the star, three wise men, baby Jesus...I sat and listened, amazed I was actually hearing this on the "Disney" network. The "Wiggles" are Australian; maybe the same un-PC-ness that gives Australian English 35 words for "drunken vomiting" allows them to speak of a key tenet of their nation's major faith.

Anyway.

I had a wonderful Christmas, thanks for asking; had my mom and her husband and my little brother over for dinner today. First time I've ever done Xmas dinner solo - nobody's come down with Salmonella yet.

Knock wood.

I should take this time to point out that I love Christmas. Easter is more important spiritually, and Thanksgiving is a big personal day for me, but Christmas is still the big kahuna. I guess it has a lot to do with having kids. For them, it is the most wonderful time of the year. In trying to keep it that way, maybe it rubs off on me. I don't know. But I may be the only adult I know that actually looks forward to the season.

I know why so many people find the season depressing; they are exactly the reasons I refuse to feel either depressed, or the "pressure" that seems to bring it on for most people.

And I'm looking forward to next year already!

Anyway - I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday, and thanks for brightening my 2003 by stopping by!

Dean Update

From Curious Furious:

"Update on the Howard Dean Slaughtered By a Landslide Meter: Last month it was Godzilla v. a Giant Jelly Donut - Dean of course being the donut - with the capture of Saddam it has been upgraded to: Joan Rivers v. Mike Tyson on a 4 day meth binge ... Dean representing the one with the bad plastic surgery ..."

Stay tuned for further updates.

Yes, Virginia

ScrappleFace has a holiday classic.

Yes, Virginia, there is a United States of America. It exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no United States! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.

There's more - and while I bet you know how it reads, you still need to read it.

I may well link it every Christmas, at this rate.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! - More later today or tonight - but until then, do me a huge favor; drive carefully and have a great holiday.

Who Caught Hussein?

Josh Marshall tackles the rumor that Hussein was captured by the Kurds. We discussed this last week.

Marshall says:

"There've been other rumors flying around -- like this one from Debkafile. But Debkafile is about as reliable as raw intelligence and should be treated with the same skepticism. Actually, it's not just that it should be treated like raw intelligence, it ... well, that's for another day.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying there's nothing to this. I haven't had time to make any calls. Anything could be true. And it's entirely possible that there are dimensions to the intel leading to Saddam's capture, which haven't yet been revealed. But none of the publish accounts I've seen strike me as credible or even close to substantiated. So until I see more I assume there's nothing to it."

Marshall's right, at least in terms of the mechanics of assigning credibility to a story.

But In the end, even if true, the proper response to the story is "So What?" If the promise of the reward money got a member of Hussein's handlers to hand the boss over to the Kurds (which seems possible, given the extent to which Hussein's security apparatus seems to have penetrated the Kurdish opposition during the regime), then it was money well spent. We didn't have to fight a climactic battle for him, or track him to the Sudan and grab him in a messy black-bag job.

One suspects the likes of...well, Kos moreso than Marshall - will try to make hay over the notion that "Bush's" military didn't make the collar - that we had to rely on "unsavory" Iraqis do "Do the work for us".

Such "logic" is too depressing to bother refuting.

Russia to Forgive Iraqi Debt

Wasn't this the sort of thing that the "no contracts to countries that didn't support the war" flap of two weeks ago was supposed to have blown to smithereens?

The stuff that had the likes of Josh Marshall calling the Administration "amateurish" at foreign policy?

Remember?

The Return Of The Market

Daily Kos noted a few weeks ago that the "Terror Market" - the Pentagon's idea for a futures market for predicting terrorist attacks - may re-open in March, proving (if true) that you can't keep a good idea down.

Kos' reaction is predictable:

The idea is still grotesque, and the site would still allow terrorists to make money off their own attacks. Bet on an attack, conduct the attack, cash the check. Beyond ridiculous.

So many possible reactions to such a short paragraph.

"Grotesque" - what, the reaction is aesthetic?

Kos seems to share the liberal conceit that "disagreement with me equals stupidity in you." The scenario would probably be more like "bet on an attack, conduct the attack, cash the "check" (Kos seems to think the market would be some sort of online slot machine), have an FBI SWAT team meeting you at the ATM before you deposit the check.

The idea - as we discussed last summer - is sound, has history backing it, and is potentially very useful.

Bush Up

Bush Up - The Minnesota Poll - as liberal an artifact as exists in Minnesota - shows President Bush's job approval at 56 percent in the state.

The Strib ran some positive comments...

"He stands up for what he thinks is right and won't back down to anybody," said poll respondent Dorla Tellerhuis, an auto parts warehouse worker who lives outside of Scandia. "And he's standing up to those people who want to destroy our country."

...and some negative ones...

Virgil Gunter, a retired paper company worker from Grand Rapids, said he believes Bush "is not the man for the job ... He hasn't solved our terrorism - remember how he was going to get that Osama guy? The war's costing a lot, and we have bread lines over here."

Mr. Gunter may unwittingly display the current idea that the young have become more conservative than the old.

Let's see how the Strib analyzes this:

Since September, when the war in Iraq and the economy appeared to be sputtering,

Whoah!

The war in Iraq never "appeared to be sputtering" to anyone with the remotest literacy in the subject - which excludes the Strib and anyone who relies on it for information on the subject, of course.

...the number of Minnesotans who say the nation is headed in the right direction has jumped from 36 percent to 55 percent. They're even more rosy about life in their home state, with 58 percent saying things in Minnesota are headed in the right direction.

Approval for Bush's stewardship of the war, at 58 percent, is higher than his overall job rating. But Minnesotans remain sharply divided on how well he has handled the nation's economy.

It's better than it was in September, when 37 percent approved of Bush's economic performance. But while 47 percent now approve, 45 percent give him a thumbs-down. That puts him where he stood in August 2002.

Jacobs [Larry Jacobs, political science prof at the University of Minnesota] said he believed the economy "remains something the White House must be a little worried about ... Big economic numbers are up, but on everyday pocketbook issues, voters are still a bit sour."

Mr. Jacobs should know that "pocketbook indicators" are trailing issues in any recovery. And while they may be trailing a bit further with this recovery (the recession has technically been over for nearly a year), that will be good news for Bush in Minnesota, barring any further calamities.

I'm dying to see how the DFL spins this news. The DFL (motto - "We loved Howard Dean the first time we saw him - when he was called Paul Wellstone!") seems to be off in its own little world lately.

Of which more next week.

Orange Christmas

Orange Christmas - I was going to write about it, but Lileks already did.

So Which Is It?

On the one hand, Andrew Sullivan is citing this American Family Institute poll.

In the meantime, the Times/CBS poll tells a different story:

Attitudes on the subject seemed to be linked to how people view marriage itself. A majority of respondents, 53 percent, said marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people opposed gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of respondents said marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people, 55 percent, said they support gay marriage.

The most positive feelings toward gay people were registered among respondents younger 30, and among those who knew gay people.

The nationwide poll said that 55 percent of respondents favored an amendment to the constitution that would allow marriage only between a man and a woman, while 40 percent opposed the idea.

Medved, citing the same poll on his show yesterday, noted that opposition to homosexuality itself seems to be on the rise.

Why is this? At a time when social attitudes about so many things - sex, sexual orientation, gender roles, race relations, religion and many other traditional breaking points in American life - are liberalizing or libertinizing, why are attitudes toward homosexual marriage, reform of obsolescent sodomy laws and other key "gay" issues taking hits?

I'm no expert, but I'd suspect it's for a lot of the same reasons that feminism has taken such a whack in the last decade.

"Identity feminism" - the victim-mongering, hyper-academic, bitter cousin of the "equity feminism" that drove the grandmothers of so many current feminists - has alienated a big swathe of society over the last few decades, including many of the younger women that have been opting for a more nuanced, equity-based feminism in place of the vitriolic man-hatred of their bitter aunts. Why? Because "identity feminism" went beyond challenging an unjust status-quo - something most Americans eventually will get behind - and sought to become a power, in and of itself.

I think the gay movement has made, I think, many of the same mistakes that the Identity Feminists and the likes of Jesse Jackson did - going beyond the initial focus on ending inequity and bigotry (which are thoroughly admirable), and moving on to trying to re-mold society at large in an image they found acceptable (which is not).

And just as the feminists alienated many would-be supporters by trying to re-mold institutions like marriage and life itself to fit their agenda (and, in the case of public education, succeeding!), gays have gone beyond the fight against bigotry to attack institutions to which most of society is positively attaced - the Boy Scouts, and the traditional religious notion of marriage.

Huge mistake. While there is a thin film of people who will hate gays no matter what they do, the attack on the religious conception of marriage has alienated an awful lot of people who are, in many ways, very sympathetic to the gay movement's other agendas.

As a result, we have the surreal dichotomy; homosexuals and homosexuality are becoming more accepted (can you imaging "Queer Eye" or 30 years ago? Or the current state, where gay tastes serve as the social barometer of hipness?), while the reconstructionist agenda of the gay movement, if this Times/CBS polls is accurate, is seeing its support erode. It's the same dichotomy that the feminists and Afro-Americans have seen - women and african-americans are more equal than ever before, while Germaine Greer and Jesse Jackson's fortunes are at a bit of a nadir.

We're Very Different People -

It's become an trite observation; "these people just don't see things the way we do". When I hear people say - or read people blog - things like "capturing Hussein doesn't make us safer", I am at a loss for a response.

Hewitt, fortunately, is not:

Hours after the Homeland Security alert level was raised on Sunday, a poster at the blog Dean for America made this comment which is representative of opinion among the Dean Dongs: "Dean's remarks about national security and the Saddam capture not making the US any safer has [sic] been validated by today's Orange Alert."

There's no arguing with such reasoning, even by pointing out that although banks continued to be robbed after Dillinger was killed, banks were indisputably safer than when he was alive and among the robbers. The left does not want to understand the war on terror because to understand it is to leave the left and join the center-right on issues of deterrence and preemption, and especially in the center-right's suspicion of the impotence of international organizations on matters of national security.

And this is what I'm finding - some of my responsible Democrat friends, the ones with enough background in history to qualify as "acceptably literate", are starting to have doubts about their party and its front-runner.

If Lieberman or Gephardt don't get the nod - and they won't - they're seriously wondering if they can vote for their party.

Good.

The Process Disease

I'm a software designer. I design User Interfaces to make them easier and more intuitive to use - so that users can not only accomplish things with software, but be comfortable with the knowledge that they're accomplishing something.

The job involves being very "goal oriented"; figuring out a vision of what your user is supposed to be trying to accomplish, and then delivering it. If you don't know where you're going, you'll not only never know when you get there - you'll never know how to get there, either.

The bane of my existence are the people in the organization who call themselves "process police". In the "process-oriented" world they inhabit, it doesn't really matter where you're going - as long as your path there is documentable, traceable and orderly. I'm exaggerating, naturally - some process people have a keen sense of what needs to be done, and they accomplish it - otherwise, no software would ever get done. At its worst, though, eternal focus on "process" is a means of systematically providing oneself plausible deniability for accomplishing nothing. Mocking "Process people" has made Scott Adams a rich man.

So look at the world today; the world of crisis diplomacy, like the world of software development, is full of processes that are creaking to bloody, horrific halts, because people, events, reality aren't cooperating.

The contrast in desired, stated (and in the case of this past year, real-life) approaches to terror and Saddam Hussein's outlawry throw this contrast into stark relief. What did Bush do? He went forth and vanquished the enemy.

For what do his opponents endlessly pine? A "process" - without filling in details (fair enough if you don't know them) or filling agenda-based details (the UN? Oh, whatever) or failing to fill in a goal (stupid). (No, I mean that . Stupid).

Democrat foreign policy, and its focus on "process" without "goal" (Dead and imprisoned terrorists, objectively safer USA) is, like introducing "process" to a dysfunctional company, a clinical-sounding way to camouflage inability to make a decision - or at least to make the tough politially-dicey decisions.

Bush focused on the goal - elimination of terrorism and its sponsoring countries - immediately. He followed up on that focus with action - action that's been exceptionally successful.

That kind of thing, successful or not, drives "Process" people (or, as Al Gore refers to them, "Protheth people") crazy.

Things I Wish I'd Said - Dating Edition

I've been single for four years now. I figure that I've been on at least one date with a total of 72 different women in that time. With some I had second or third dates, a few I dated for a few months, and a couple I went out with for 6-9 months before something or another went wrong. I'm a 41 year old guy who...well, looks 41. I never made the List of Conservative Blog Studs, so I guess life is pretty much over.

Still, I genuinely enjoy meeting women, but while I firmly believe think it's possible that I might meet that special someone someday, it goes without saying that I haven't yet [1]. So I date.

And date.

And date.

And over the course of four years of expensive, soul-destroying masochism meeting all those interesting women, I've encountered, as they say, "all types".

So I present for your morbid enjoyment, "Things I Wished I'd Said to Some Dates Of Mine", 2003 edition.

Woman #1: 36, recently divorced after a two-year separation. Let's call her "Ann". Two young children. Perhaps the most devastatingly attractive woman that I've ever had in my car - long auburn hair, near-supermodel bod in a cocktail dress that left nothing to the imagination. After a date, she sent me an email saying "You're a nice guy, but I just don't feel any chemistry, so I'd rather not see you again". We spoke again at a happenstance meeting, a year later.

MITCH: So, how are you doing, Ann?

ANN: Oh, I've gone out with a few guys. Went out with a couple of them, for a few months. It's been frustrating - I feel the chemistry when we meet, but after a few months, it feels like something's missing.

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID: Let me get this straight - you meet guys, and you only go out with the ones with which you feel "chemistry" immediately? And then you wonder why it fizzles after a few months? You married young, right?

ANN: Yeah, I was 19.

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID THEN: Lemme guess, that was all about "Chemistry,", too, right?

ANN: Well, until the kids came along, sure...

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID: Riiiight. "Chemistry", at least on the first date or three, is nothing but a feeling in the back of your head that says "I know I don't know you very well, but I think I want to sleep with you way before I should". I mean - you expected precisely what from these "Chemistry"-based "relationships?

I'll let you think about the question for a while, sure. Have another "Sex On The Beach"...

Woman #2 - 37 years old, never married, one young child. We'll call her "Leela". We met for drinks, after a week or two of casual phone conversations that seemed vaguely interesting. She used to be a hottie - but years of office life and fast food are catching up with her - every part of her below the neckline is deserting its post under gravity attack. Still, you can see the face of a woman that used to turn heads in bars. Not the Saint Paul Grill, mind you, I'm talking bars like "T-Birds".

LEELA: (Looking disinterested in Mitch, after about two minutes of strained conversation) Yeah, I pretty much go with initial reaction. I figure, if the Chemistry's not there, there's really nothing to keep me interested. Back when I was single before I had my daughter, I met some of the coolest guys when I was out bar-hopping. I just don't feel that on dates anymore, and it bugs me.

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID (on figuring that she was saying she had no interest in him): So you're 37, and you have kid to take care of, and you make all sorts of noises about wanting to find the "right guy", but at every first date, you're sizing the guys up against the bar-hopping "bad boys" you still seem to miss so much? Does anything strike you as...

...oh, never mind.

Woman #3 - 35 year old communications professional, one kid. Let's call her "Lori". Devastatingly attractive at 35 in a way that will look flinty and frumpy in 15 years. Conversation takes place at the end of a first, blind date.

LORI: Well, I gotta be honest. You're not exactly what I look for in the looks department. (Smiles) Hey, I warned you - sometimes people say I'm too honest for my own good!

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE SAID: That's OK. You're not exactly what I look for in the brains department. (Smiles) But hey, I'm too honest for myown good, too.

(The person in the above example may occasionally read this space. Hey, sorry - sometimes I really am too honest for my own good! Although where I come from, it's more often called "Rude, unempathetic and solipsistic.")

Woman #4: Drop-dead gorgeous single mother of two. Let's call her "Julia". We'd had a wonderful first date three weeks earlier. We'd had a couple of phone conversations since then - pleasant, seemingly interested in a second date, but non-committal for various reasons, some of them plausible, others trailing off into space. Then, I got an email:

JULIA (Via email): Hey, Mitch - it was nice meeting you. However, there's someone else I'm going to be dating. So please don't call again. However, your blog is pretty cool - mind if I read it? :-)

WHAT MITCH SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN BACK: Tell it to the Amazon Link in the right margin.

The next date from hell I go on, I swear, I'll do it.

Don't tempt me. I mean it.

[1] OK - Date #71 has serious potential. Although I may have just jinxed it...

Absence of Knowledge

Iraq Now attacks the media's literacy about military matters.

Nothing new in the concept - the media is famously ill-informed about anything to do with the military.

But this is new:

Whether we ought to use a smart bomb to attack a high-value target in a residential area is absolutely a valid ‘just war’ question.

Personally, I suppose you could justify it if the strike has a reasonable chance of killing or incapacitating the target, and if the killing or disappearance of that target individual has a reasonable chance of saving lives by hastening the collapse of military resistance, or disrupting the command and control of major enemy units so severely that they become paralyzed by indecision, or poor decision, become unable to react to the Protean nature of the mechanized battlefield, and so become simply irrelevant to the battle.

Unfortunately, this side of the equation seems wholly absent from Human Rights Watch’s analysis. Nor has it appeared in any of several articles I’ve read covering their report. Only Kaplan—a veteran national security affairs writer and a damned good one—even touches on the issue. And that is only indirectly, when he glances against the concept of proportionality from the Just Warfare tradition.

If military reporters were up on their beat, though, they would be familiar with the principles of maneuver warfare, which provide a good deal of theoretical basis for the strike. In part, these principles are as follows:

1. It is better to win by outmaneuvering an enemy and placing him in a hopeless position than it is to outshoot him. Or as Sun Tzu wrote: "To win without fighting is the acme of skill."

2. Firepower should be focused not just on enemy weaknesses, but critical vulnerabilities.

3. The armies of totalitarian regimes, and those with weak or nonexistent NCO corps, are especially reliant upon centralized command and control.

4. Put enough pressure on the command and control nodes, and their decisions will become unsound. They will be reacting to false information, or information which is hours old. If it takes your division 24 hours to conceive, plan, and execute an operation, and it takes him 36 hours, then his decisions will become increasingly removed from the reality on the ground. The errors will compound geometrically, and you will appear on his flanks or rear (or overrun the Baghdad Airport) before his command and control procedures can grasp the fact that you’re within miles of his critical point. This is called “getting inside his decision cycle.”

If the reporters and editors assigned to the military were really up on their beats, they would have boned up on the basic theoretical underpinnings of U.S. military doctrine. B.H. Liddell-Hart’s “Strategy,” “Warfighting,” an excellent Marine Corps manual on the theory of maneuver warfare for the unit level leader (which the Army should immediately adopt and distribute, by the way), and The Art of Maneuver

Unfortunately, in most cases, they have not done their homework. A few of them have a passing familiarity with concepts like jus in bello and jus ad bellum, but no one I’ve seen has yet grasped the indirect battlefield effects of violently attacking nodes of command. Nodes like Saddam, Qusay, and Uday themselves. No reporter I’ve seen writing on the HRW report has yet demonstrated an understanding that it is better to cripple an enemy’s command and control and then bypass his irrelevant army than it is to allow things to devolve into a head-to-head mutual slaughter. No reporter I’ve seen writing on the HRW report has yet seemed to grasp that one of the best ways to do that is to hit the boss so hard and so often that he becomes terrified of using his cell phone.

As a result, the public is ill informed.

Before the war, the military put "embedded" reporters through a brief training session, to acquaint them with basic military procedures designed to keep them alive when the units with which they were embedded started taking fire.

It seems they might need to put their editors through a course, teaching them something about not only long term military history (about which editors are illiterate enough) but the recent evolutions in the way war is fought.

You Mean, 10,000 Hack Pundits and Moron Comics Can Be Wrong?

The Admnistration's "Drugs Support Terrorism" public service spots last year drew a lot of flak from the righteously indignant.

"Why, that's just paraoid!", they bellowed from columns and blogs and guest chairs throughout the land. Understandable - if drugs were linked to Al Quaeda and other terrorists, that'd mean that all of show-biz, the NFL and NBA, and every high school in America would be in the Al Quada camp.

Guess what?

The United States Navy seized two tons of hashish and detained three men it said had ties to Al Qaeda when it halted and boarded a boat in the Persian Gulf on Monday, military officials announced Friday.

"An initial investigation uncovered clear ties between the smuggling operation and Al Qaeda," the Navy said in a statement.

Pentagon and military officials declined to give any details of the information that linked the shipment or the three men to Al Qaeda, but they said they had evidence that the cache of drugs aboard the 40-foot boat was intended to raise funds for terrorist activities.

How 'bout that?

Suppose we'll see 10,000 hack pundits and moron comics taking it all back?

(Via Jay Reding - to whom this blog sends good luck out to Orange country...)

Not Ready For Prime Time

Powerline was absolutely on fire yesterday.

First - a fascinating series of links about General Clark, explaining why he's just not a viable alternative, even for those looking for a less-fevered alternative to Dean.

Money bit:

Clark now blames the non-capture of Karadzic on the fact that he had to cooperate with the French. But this dodge undercuts Clark's insistence on multilaterlism when it comes to Iraq. And, speaking of Iraq, Jacoby points out that "before he became a presidential candidate, Clark strongly supported the Iraq war resolution; since entering the race, he has tied himself into knots insisting that he actually opposed it. Before becoming a candidate, he described Saddam as a menace requiring urgent action -- 'the clock is ticking,' he said last year. Now Clark labors to explain why Saddam wasn't a burning issue --'there was no ticking clock,' he said last week."

It seems to me that Clark is even less ready for prime-time than Dean.

Read the whole thing - there are some essential links.

Before that - comparing the rantings of Al-Jazeera and those of Madeline Albrecht

Return of the Trilogy

Saw Return of the King last night.

I may need to see it again.

I have been awash in admiration for Peter Jackson ever since the first movie of the trilogy; it's not easy to take books that Mitch Berg found completely unreadable (I made it through about 20 pages of "Fellowship" before I put it down for good), and turn them into movies that are not only monumental and epic, but genuinely touching on a human as well as philosophical level.

And Return of the King is touching, in a way that amazed me, even as I sat and watched it

Oh, there are flaws; there is so much material to jam in there that some things seem jagged (what happened to Saruman? How did Eomir kill the "unkillable" Nasgul? How does that Elf ship sail with no crew?), and some character denouements get very short shrift. I'm told the extended version, which will probably clock at a butt-numbing 4.5 hours, will fix some of that.

Still, it's a wonderful movie - for different reasons than "Two Towers". The second movie was an epic adaptation of Christ's story to a situation parallelling the world in the middle of the 20th century; redemption and salvation beyond death.

"ROTK", despite having bigger and more cataclysmic battles than Helm's Deep, has a smaller focus - on Sam, who started the series almost as comic relief, and ends as the focal point of the story. And it's wonderful.

Because after two films that focused on the larger than life - the arthurian Aragorn, the etherial Elves, the Christlike Gandolf - the "Return of the King" is about the return, not so much of Aragorn to the throne, but of the real king of this story, the little guy - literally, the hobbit, Sam - from his immersion in war between good and evil, back to the precious mundanity he spent so long trying to protect from unspeakable evil.

And this is the beauty of the story - in the end, like so much of the greatest Western art, it's the little guy that overturns the immense evil. It's the peasants lining up behind the priest at Tolstoy's Borodino, in War and Peace (as good a parallel to the battle of Helms Deep as exists in Western Literature), or Private Ryan, or Stanislaus Schmajzner in Escape from Sobibor (a true story and not really literature, but the story's elements play like literature, if you've never read the book), or Gary Cooper in High Noon - it's the little figures that are the most interesting story, and the most important ones.

I'm starting to read Garth's Tolkein and the Great War - and it's interesting seeing the parallels between Tolkein's experiences in the war and incidents in the movie (which I assume are the tip of the iceberg compared to the books) - the doomed charge on Os Giliath (sp?), with it's references to the New Model Army in the Somme, was revelatory.

ROTK is sad and intense in a way that the other two weren't. It's more personal.

And in the end, I think it's the movie of the three that I'll like the most. It certainly has the lessons our society needs.

Person Of The Year

Time has released their person of the year for 2003.

But according to Tim Blair, we weren't supposed to know it yet...

Time magazine is obsessively secretive over its annual Person of the Year selection. This year’s choice is due to be announced in the US on Monday...

US troops are the People of 2003 -- and someone in Time’s online imaging department will be looking for a new job in 2004.

Well, it's still up as of 8:20 Central time...

And David's Medienkritik sends its contgrats from Germany.

If It Walks Like A Turkey

The left is still cleaning up the sticky mess they left after the "Plastic Turkey" story broke after Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad for Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately for the Bush-bashing journos involved, they were had. Tim Blair has the hilarious body count.

Let's Do A Poll

Over the weekend, I'm going to check out the usual leftyblog suspects.

The goal? See how many of them try to disavow the link between the invasion of Iraq and Libya's disavowal of WMDs.

My prediction? "All but two or three".

We shall see.

Things I Love About Doing This Blog

Things I Love About - Last summer, I righted a colossal wrong, and published a website memorializing the Iron City Houserockers - the greatest band you never heard of, a hard-edged band from the early eighties from Pittsburgh that combined punk ferocity with heartland-rock aesthetics that made John Mellencamp sound like Culture Club.

And, since nobody west of Chicago had ever heard of them, they were my little secret.

Last weekend, I got an email from, of all people, the Houserockers' drummer, Ned Rankin.

The good news? He liked the site.

The buzzkill? His son has a CD out now.

Rule of the Universe #25 - you know you're in trouble when your teenage heroes' children are putting out records. Although if you listen to the clips, it's not half bad...

Just Keep Repeating... - ...after

Just Keep Repeating... - ...after Howard Dean: "The pre-emptive invasion of Iraq didn't make us safer. Our aggressive response against the Taliban made things less, not more, safe. We're losing the war on terror due to the policies of the Bush Administration"

You know who you are.

Ten Lessons

A high school pal of mine who's current an Air Force fighter pilot sends this piece from talk show host Dennis Prager, with the ten lessons to be learned from the capture of Hussein. It originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and is generally available online only by subscription, although it's ironically available here.

Ten Lessons
By Dennis Prager
Ten lessons from Saddam Hussein's capture:

1. . America is the greatest force for good on the planet. America, with the support of Britain and some other countries, and against the rest of "world opinion," liberated Iraq from evil. If it were up to the U.N. or the EU, or the editorial boards of most major American newspapers, Saddam would still be happily making palaces for himself and torture dungeons for his people.
   
2. . The positive effect on humanity of good vanquishing evil cannot be overstated. When evil people get away with what they have done, it has a dispiriting effect. Even those of us who believe that a just God dispenses justice after this life ache to see justice done here and now. In this regard, it is not only good that Saddam was captured; it is good that he lived in holes, and aware that his sadistic sons had been killed. It is nice to know that he has been suffering.
   
3. . No Muslim or Arab country lifted a finger to help the Iraqi people. This is because the Muslim and Arab worlds do not divide the world between good and evil, but between Muslim and non-Muslim and Arab and non-Arab. Since Saddam was a fellow Muslim and Arab, the fact that he tortured and murdered so many was as irrelevant to the Muslim and Arab worlds as the Islamic egime's genocide in Sudan and the subjugation of women in Taliban Afghanistan.
   
4. . Not everyone is happy about Saddam's capture. Palestinians, for example, are weeping. Saddam was their hero. Iraqis were forced to march with his posters, but Palestinians did so voluntarily. Many on the Left are also not particularly happy. Saddam's capture is a victory for American force and for George W. Bush, and the Left hates both more than it hates Saddam.
   
5. . The Left seeks power, but is incapable of leading because leadership and wanting to be loved are mutually exclusive. Leftists, including liberal politicians, want to be loved and want America to be loved. That was President Clinton's great desire, and that is why, with all his abundant talents, he could never lead. Much of the Left's criticism of Mr. Bush revolves around this issue: "Look at how popular we were right after 9/11 and how unpopular we are now."
   6. Most of the Left does not hate evil; hatred of evil is primarily found on the Right. With exceptions such as Tony Blair and Joseph Lieberman, virtually the entire Left finds evil far less disturbing than global warming, smoking, economic inequality, and drug prices. And with the exceptions of "paleoconservatives" such as Pat Buchanan, most of the Right regards the use of American power to vanquish evil as the greatest good the U.S. can engage in.
   
6. . In the Arab world, power is venerated. For years leading up to 9/11, slamists were respected for their increasing power and America was losing respect as it suffered blows at the hands of Islamic terror. Now America is seen as the powerful one, and is earning the respect once accorded Saddam and Osama. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
   
7. . There are many who respect goodness above all else. But humanity as a whole has far more respect for power, and takes powerful societies more seriously than good ones. That is why China is respected despite its being a dictatorship and its brutal crushing of Tibet. China is powerful. The stronger America is, the more people will take it and its values seriously. As an unprecedented combination of power and goodness, America could reshape the world.
   
8. . The Marxist belief that forces, not individuals, shape history is wrong. George W. Bush is living proof.
   
9. . The reason the president is shaping history is that he has as strong a set of beliefs -- in America's moral mission and in Judeo-Christian religious values -- as those he is fighting. Those who hold bad beliefs can only be defeated by those have equally strong good beliefs.

It's A Reflex

Other people have commented on the Padilla case in greater depth than I can manage. I'm not going to say I completely disagree with the ruling - which says that US civilians arrested on US soil are subject to constitutional protections - but then, I'm no lawyer.

The only thing I have to add is that the Pioneer Press' first edition headline for this story is "Courts Hand Bush Setback in War On Terror".

Maybe it was a first-edition bobble - the online headine is "Bush handed setbacks in 2 terror rulings" - but it shows how ingrained the left's point of view is at the major newspapers. It wasn't a setback in the "War on Terror", merely a legal ruling that forced a case against an alleged traitor into a civilian, rather than military, legal system.

Not a defeat.

Blah - Feeling not at

Blah - Feeling not at all well today, and the posting will show it.

More later.

Hopefully.

No Joke

The Fraters - the Northern Alliance's unofficial ambassadors of dissipation - have a project that we should all get behind - an orphanage in Chihuahua.

Hit the PayPal link and drop 'em a few bucks. If you live in this country, you've been blessed far beyond what you (or I) can imagine - let's share a bit of it with those that need it.

Poor and Standards

I've been meaning to write about the endless, recursive debate about Social Studies standards - itself a byproduct of the late, great, eternal debate over the Profiles in Learning.

I haven't yet. Too much going on. It's a shame, because if there's anything that schools should do and try to do well, it's social studies. They tend not to - and the debate over the standards is potentially vital.

Fortunately, the SCSU Scholars are providing team coverage. Give them a read - and follow the story.

I'll be commenting in the future, but just from the perspective of a parent who is becoming more and more furious at the inadequacy and political motivation of social studies education in our schools.

Of Dwarves And Men

Fascinating interview with John Rhys-Davies - "Gimli" the Dwarf in the Lord Of the Rings trilogy.

Never thought I'd say this about an actor -but this interview has some fascinating insights:

I grew up in colonial Africa. And I remember in 1955, it would have to be somewhere between July the 25th when the school holiday started and September the 18th when the holidays ended. My father took me down to the quayside in Dar-Es-Salaam harbor. And he pointed out a dhow in the harbor and he said, “You see that dhow there? Twice a year it comes down from Aden. It stops here and goes down [South]. On the way down it's got boxes of machinery and goods. On the way back up it’s got two or three little black boys on it. Now, those boys are slaves. And the United Nations will not let me do anything about it.”

The conversation went on. “Look, boy. There is not going to be a World War between Russia and the United. The next World War will be between Islam and the West.”

This is 1955! I said to him, “Dad, you’re nuts! The Crusades have been over for hundreds of years!”

And he said, “Well, I know, but militant Islam is on the rise again. And you will see it in your lifetime.”

He’s been dead some years now. But there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and think, “God, I wish you were here, just so I could tell you that you were right.”

What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a jewel it is.

And much more.

Worth a read.

Deaniacs?

What to call Dean supporters?

Hewitt says

: "I have been using the term Dean Dongs to refer to Dr. Dean supporters."

Not bad...

...but whenever I see two or more of them in the same place, I refer to them as "Dean and Deaner".

This Is War. This Is Your Brain On War

Derrick Z. Jackson is a columnist for the Boston Globe. I've only read a few of his columns; he strikes me as the Syl Jones of Boston, but I could be wrong.

He sounds the usual bleat of the left - the headline ("Still no mass weapons, no ties to 9/11, no truth") truly sums up most of the column, conveniently releasing you from reading most of it (Thanks, Globe editors! - Ed.).

So had Hewitt not drawn my attention to this graf last night, I might have completely missed it:

With no weapons, no ties, and no truth, the capture of Saddam was merely the most massive and irresponsible police raid in modern times. We broke in without a search warrant.

Quick, Derrick Z. Jackson - tell John McCain he has a wrongful imprisonment suit against the North Vietnamese!

We had no warrants for Herman Göring, Albert Speer, Von Ribbentrop or any of the other Nazis, either. It was, and is, war! You don't need a warrant to capture the enemy!

Civilian deaths constituted justifiable homicide. America was again above the law.

No. We were, and are, the law - as we have been in nearly every case where the UN needed actual international "law" enforced.

We have taught the next generation that many wrongs equal a right.

No. We taught them that sometimes war is the lesser of many evils.

In arrogance, we boasted, "We got him!" The shame is that we feel none for how we got him. The capture of this dictator, driven by the poison of lies, turned America itself into a dictator.

When conservatives attack the patriotism of liberals, I think this sort of column is exhibit A.

Meet the New Nick. Same as the Old Nick

As the billboards remind us, Nick Coleman has made the jump back to the Strib, the latest in a herd of reporters and columnists so big it may have been used as a justification for the Minneapolis-St. Paul light rail line.

I'd tackle it - but the Saint from Fraters already did.

Precious memory:

I’m afraid he’ll write something as embarrassingly melodramatic and exploitative as this on my behalf:

One regular was a wounded Vietnam War veteran named Robin, an alcoholic who camped in the brush and woods around the edge of downtown St. Paul.

Last spring, police found Robin near the Cathedral of St. Paul, on the steps that overlook a panorama of downtown, dead from an apparent stroke. It would've been a perfect spot from which to see an ice castle.

Do you think Coleman’s new editors at the Star Tribune still wince when they read his stuff, or has their tolerance already ramped up?

Read it.

The Fraters have been getting so much exposure on Hewitt.com lately (a link on Hewitt gets you almost as much traffic as an Instalanche these days), maybe they can buy the first round next time...

Blah

Overslept, and have early conference at my son's school.

More to follow later.

Prisoner of Wha? - One

Prisoner of Wha? - One of the left's latest bleats - that Hussein is a POW, and that we had no business videotaping his head-lice exam according to the Geneva Convention.

Piffle. He's not a POW. He's a leader - and a horrific one at that.

The Geneva Convention was designed to prevent the horrors inflicted on prisoners of war before the twentieth century. The lot of the POW before the Convention was bad; the British slaughtered all non-ransomable French POWs at Agincourt rather than feed them; the British cooped American rebel prisoners in damp, rotting, vermin and disease-infested hulks of decommissioned navy ships, from which few emerged alive; other examples abound.

The Geneva Convention is not, as some liberals seem to think, a series of legalistic technicalities. It's a humanitarian agreement, designed to protect the soldiers and officers that fight wars between signatories from the humiliation, starvation, brutality and slaughter that were the POW's lot in earlier generations.

That Hussein is alive at all now is testament to the US adherence to the spirit as well as the letter of the convention. Beyond that? It's all legalistic claptrap.

Has Anyone Told Kos?

Has Anyone Told Kos? - Powerline discusses the latest poll results:

It's not a shock, obviously, but the latest New York Times/CBS poll shows President Bush with a 58% approval vs. 33% disapproval rating. This is up from 52% approval just a week before Saddam's capture.

They go on to note that Bush's numbers on the economy are teetering on the brink of 50% approval.

One of the bigger liberal blogs is The Daily Kos. Kos made a bit of a splash by displaying, day by day, the evolving picture in the polls - as long as they showed George Bush dropping. All the blogs that aped Kos hung on these polls, posting rafts of "Bush's Popularity Drops" articles with every twitch from "superhuman" down to merely "better than most first-term president at this point in his term".

So after reading Powerline, I went to read Kos' digest of polls, and...

...what the...?

He hasn't updated them since early November! Which is...

...about the time the slide stopped?

I'm sure there's an innocent explanation, but I'd really like to hear what it is. Kos supporters?

As Jeff Fecke would say: "Huh".

Open Letter to Dean Supporters

I've said it before - Howard Dean is not a serious candidate when it comes to foreign policy.

But to be honest, I've never really read much about Dean straight from the horse's mouth. So this morning, I went to "Dean For America".

Astounding.

On Iraq:

We remain the sole superpower in the world. As Madeleine Albright once put it, we are the "indispensable power" for addressing so many of the challenges around the world. But we cannot lead the world by force, and we cannot go it alone. We must lead toward clearly articulated and shared goals and with the cooperation and respect of friends and allies.

With sixty allies in Iraq - including virtually every nation that has a credible military, besides France, Germany and Russia, I think we can say it's official; "International Cooperation" is a Democrat euphemism for the UN. I'm convinced that the President could have every nation in the world on board, including our enemies - but if the UN Security Council weren't on board, the Democrats would call the President a unilateralist cowboy.

I seek to restore the best traditions of American leadership. Leadership in which our power is multiplied by the appeal of democratic ideals and by the knowledge that our country is a force for law around the world, not a law unto itself.

Right. Because we're mainly regarded as a rogue state today, right?

In fact, I can see why Dean is squirming on this one: Bush has overthrown the Truman doctrine of supporting all anti-Communist governments, no matter how unsavory or horrific their leadership. We are doing the right thing - which kicks the legs out from under a traditional liberal stance, one of the few admirable ones they've taken in the last 35 years.

That has to hurt.

I will not divide the world into us versus them. Rather, I will rally the world around fundamental principles of decency, responsibility, freedom, and mutual respect. Our foreign and military policy must be about the notion of America leading the world, not America against the world.

Which is nice, but a big part of the world regards the situation as "them versus us". Radical Islam - nicknamed "Islamofascism" for good reason - is entrenched in a "them versus us" view that is a key tenet of (their perversion of) their faith.

I've yet to see how Howard Dean plans to change their minds, beyond vague blandishments about being decent and responsible.

On North Korea:

A nuclear North Korea is unacceptable. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration's mishandling of this crisis has made this outcome more, not less, likely. Contrary to this Administration's view, engagement is not appeasement, and it is time for a coherent approach that will effectively deal with this crisis:

Negotiate a resolution of this issue with North Korea—but do so from strength. We are the strongest nation in the world; North Korea is one of the most backward and isolated.

Articulate a redline, making clear that the US—and it allies especially Japan and South Korea—will not tolerate NK's production of nuclear weapons.

We've had redlines. The DPRK crossed them. Under Clinton, they crossed quite a number of them.

So, Dr. Dean - when (not if) Kim crosses your "redline", what will you do?

Yeah, yeah, I know - negotiate from strength. So what if the DPRK pulls out and goes their own way, as they've done repeatedly?

Well?

Offer a declaration of peaceful intentions and economic exchanges—supported by our allies especially South Korea and Japan—in exchange for verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons.

Which we've tried.

Utilize a program of intrusive inspections to generate verifiability of any agreement.

And when - not if - Kim repudiates the inspections (as he did during the Clinton administration - then what?

Kim Jong-Il eats naive-on-foreign-policy Democrat presidents for breakfast.

Develop an economic program with South Korea, Japan, and China that will generate change in the North Korean society

Dr. Dean - that's fine. Except for the little matter of one Kim Jong-Il, whose entire existence is based on the retardation of change. Secret police. World's largest per-capita military. Stalinist apparatus of oppression. Concentration camps. You advocate what sort of change - putting up a TGI Fridays in Pyongyang?

I could read more - go into his domestic "agenda" - but who cares?

Foreign Policy and the War on Terrorism is the only issue for me this election. And Howard Dean is not a serious candidate.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

A high school classmate of mine, who is a career fighter pilot, sends me this story, saying:

It appears to support your
"Moon Bat" labeling of certain individuals. I have some stronger feelings
but...given my current occupation will reserve them until I retire!

It's Rep. Jim "Baghdad Jim" McDermott, who along with David Bonior made the infamous trip to Baghdad immediately before the war, and claimed that Hussein was more trustworthy than President Bush.

The article begins:

The Washington congressman who criticized President Bush while visiting Baghdad last year has questioned the timing of the capture of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., told a Seattle radio station Monday the U.S. military could have found Saddam "a long time ago if they wanted." Asked if he thought the weekend capture was timed to help Bush, McDermott chuckled and said: "Yeah. Oh, yeah."

The Democratic congressman went on to say, "There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing."

Right, Rep. McDermott. Because war, especially the actions of your enemies, is something you usually plan to a finely-honed "T".

When interviewer Dave Ross asked again if he meant to imply the Bush administration timed the capture for political reasons, McDermott said: "I don't know that it was definitely planned on this weekend, but I know they've been in contact with people all along who knew basically where he was. It was just a matter of time till they'd find him.

It's just a matter of time until everyone dies, too. That doesn't mean many of us know when or where.

I digress:

"It's funny," McDermott added, "when they're having all this trouble, suddenly they have to roll out something."

I looked in Google to see if Rep. Baghdad Jim McDermott had anything to say about Al Gore's last minute rolling out of George Bush's drunk driving conviction during the 2000 election.

Nope. Not a thing.

Of course, not everyone in Washington is a moonbat:

State Republicans immediately condemned McDermott's remarks, saying the Seattle Democrat again was engaging in "crazy talk" about the Iraq war.

"Once again McDermott has embarrassed this state with his irresponsible ranting," GOP state Chairman Chris Vance said in a news release. "Calling on him to apologize is useless, but I call on other Democrats to let the public know if they agree with McDermott -- and Howard Dean, who recently said he thought it was possible that President Bush had advance knowledge about 9/11. The voters deserve to know if the entire Democratic Party believes in these sorts of bitter, paranoid conspiracy theories."

Of course, not all of them do.

On Monday, Democrats joined the criticism of McDermott.

"With all due respect to my colleague, that is a fantasy," Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said of McDermott's comments. "That just is not right. ... It's one thing to criticize this administration for having done this war. I mean, that's a fair question. But to criticize them on the capture of Saddam, when it's such a big thing to our troops, is just ridiculous."

McDermott spins:

McDermott, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, called the timing of Saddam's capture suspicious but said he was not alleging it had been intentionally delayed.

"Everything was going wrong, and they got a real Christmas gift, if you will, in that the troops did a magnificent job and found" Saddam, he said.

"Everything was going wrong".

The war - defined as "taking Iraq, and destroying all organized resistance" - was a raving success. The guerrilla war is brutal and difficult - and inevitable - but the shifting patterns of attack indicate it's going the right way. The economy is improving at a nice, if unpredictable, And the Democrats seem bent on nominating a nutbar loose cannon.

Er, yeah. Things are going awful for Bush.

Again - McDermott and his supporters are invited to pony up the evidence.

Someone commented in one of my threads yesterday - moonbats are such easy targets. Oh, believe me, I know - the City Pages and the usual array of lefty blogs provide enough material for a blog on their own.

But some weeks, moonbats are like potato chips; you can't stop with just one...

Dead Pool - The Commisioner

Dead Pool - The Commisioner has charged Fraters Libertas with setting up the first dead pool on the Hussein execution date.

Hewitt correctly points out that it took 17 months to execute 10 Nuremburg defendants. But that was in an era where the French and Russians had an interest in justice, and the Germans had no say. Things are more complicated today.

I say January, 2007. If at all.

My Palm Pilot... - ...has

My Palm Pilot... - ...has a list of about 20 topics that I'm just dying to blog about: The death of the Album, observations on my first airplane flight in four years, what's the deal with women today...

...but I'm so swamped with non-blog life, it's near impossible to get to it all!

Maybe I'll have to revisit my "no weekend blogging" policy...

...oh, wait. I don't have one.

Damn.

The Glass Is Half Full.

The Glass Is Half Full. Of Koolaid.- Left-wing hate site Democrats.com ups the ante for conspiracy theories:

According to DEBKAfile analysts, these seven anomalies point to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner.

After his last audiotaped message was delivered and aired over al Arabiya TV on Sunday November 16, on the occasion of Ramadan, Saddam was seized, possibly with the connivance of his own men, and held in that hole in Adwar for three weeks or more, which would have accounted for his appearance and condition. Meanwhile, his captors bargained for the $25 m prize the Americans promised for information leading to his capture alive or dead. The negotiations were mediated by Jalal Talabani’s Kurdish PUK militia."

They quote this DEBKA piece. Note that DEBKA - the "Matt Drudge of the Middle East" - proves the Infinite Number of Monkeys" theory - if you toss out enough theories, one of them must be right. Sorry to say, I've quoted them a few times myself:

"A number of questions are raised by the incredibly bedraggled, tired and crushed condition of this once savage, dapper and pampered ruler who was discovered in a hole in the ground on Saturday, December 13:

1. The length and state of his hair indicated he had not seen a barber or even had a shampoo for several weeks.

2. The wild state of his beard indicated he had not shaved for the same period

That's right. Being on the run, he could have at least gotten to Great Clips, right?

3. The hole dug in the floor of a cellar in a farm compound near Tikrit was primitive indeed – 6ft across and 8ft across with minimal sanitary arrangements - a far cry from his opulent palaces.

Yep. And Anne Frank's cramped, miserable Annex was proof that the Nazis had caught her two years before her "capture", too...

4. Saddam looked beaten and hungry.

So did I - and it only took ten years of marriage to do it. But I digress...

5. Detained trying to escape were two unidentified men. Left with him were two AK-47 assault guns and a pistol, none of which were used.

You've been sleeping in a hole in the ground. You've been moving four times a day for the past eight months. You're hungry, exhausted, 66 years old, and under mind-numbing stress. So you're supposed to make the "rational" decision at that point to open fire on an overwhelming number of American troops?

Alternate explanation: Hussein would seem to have an immense capacity for delusion (vide Gulf War I). Perhaps he really did think he could negotiate. I'd imagine it wouldn't have been the first time.

6. The hole had only one opening. It was not only camouflaged with mud and bricks – it was blocked. He could not have climbed out without someone on the outside removing the covering.

It was blocked with styrofoam and carpet. Even Howard Dean's reasoning could have pushed it open, if reports are correct.

7. And most important, $750,000 in 100-dollar notes were found with him (a pittance for his captors who expected a $25m reward)– but no communications equipment of any kind, whether cell phone or even a carrier pigeon for contacting the outside world.

Hussein may have been delusional, but he wasn't apparently as stupid as the author, or as Democrats.com; Hussein knows (and learned the hard way, twice) that the US can trace electronic communications better than anyone in the world. Couriers - trusted ones, at that - would have been the only reliable means of communicating - not that one would expect Democrats.com to know, or care if it did.

But let's take DEBKA's point - the one Democrats.com jumped on like a starving Schnauzer on a hot dog - that Hussein was captured by his own people, and "sold" to the US for the reward money.

So what?

That would be what the $25 million reward program was for! We didn't care who dropped the dime on Hussein - be it a rustic and hearty Iraqi peasant, or a dirtbag Fedayeen with visions of walking down Fifth Avenue with Heidi Klum on his arm; so what? It's a fair cop, and money well spent!

Sez Democrats.com:

Interesting theory. Also noteworthy is the fact Saddam's capture followed right on the heels of James Baker's appointment for Iraq "debt restructuring," when Bush badly needs the support of Europe. Plus that annoying Halliburton scandal...

In the Democrat.com world - like that of many Democrat bloggers - the data always fit the conclusion.

Merry Christmas, Dean is Over

Merry Christmas, Dean is Over - The Strib Editorial Board comments about the capture of Hussein.

Not like there's anything new here.

"• In Iraq, as President Bush said in his Sunday address, the people now know that Saddam will never return to power. The Iraqis now can invest themselves fully in working for a post-Saddam Iraq.

But what form will that investment take? All Americans can hope it knocks the wind from the sails of the insurgents who have been killing American troops. But will it? Opinions differ widely on that, and a car bombing Sunday night near the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad did not augur well.

"Did not augur well."

Leave aside the obvious question - "Why? Does a bomb - or a dozen, or a hundred car bombs spell defeat? What do you expect the insurgents to do? Quit being absurd, will you?"

Let me ask this: When have the Strib Editoral Board's "Auguries" been correct? They were wrong about the conduct of the war, wrong about its likely outcome...

Stick with reporting, Strib. Your auguring skills need work.

• Saddam's capture also creates a smaller version of the vacuum that developed after the fall of Baghdad to coalition forces. How will Iraqis respond? By pulling together for a united, democratic Iraq? Or will the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds see this as their best opportunity to stake claims to power, possibly igniting a civil war?

Or, maybe, a little bit of both. We don't know.

But we do know one thing; everything that is a positive development for the Administration will be downplayed or ignored in the Strib (like last week's anti-terror demonstrations in Iraq), unless, like the capture of Hussein it is too big to ignore; such things will be spun (ipse this editorial). Anything that doesn't "fit the plan" will be portrayed as a grave question of Bush's judgment.

Saddam's capture also has the potential to remake the Iraq equation internationally -- provided Bush wants it remade. By virtue of the capture, the United States enjoys renewed clout in the region and in national capitals globally -- including Paris, Berlin and Moscow.

Bzzzzt. We enjoy all the clout we need in the region; we have the power, the planes, the bombs, and the country!

A battle royal has been going on within the administration, however, between the old-line Republican establishment and the neocon coterie gathered around Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The old liners want to internationalize the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. The neocons want no part of that, and have actively tried to sabotage such efforts.

Old-liner James H. Baker's mission thus takes center stage. He departs today on a mission that originally was designed to win concessions from Russia, France and other nations on forgiving debt owed them by Iraq. It was reported Sunday from Washington that Baker's portfolio had been broadened.

Does that mean Bush has grasped the significance of the opportunity Saddam's capture presents? Has he given Baker broad authority to seek an internationalization of Iraq's reconstruction in all respects, including totally open bidding on contracts for U.S.-financed construction work in Iraq? If so, that would be progress of great importance.:

Alternate question: Does the Strib understand that they're essentially asking for "internationalization" for its own sake - it will play no useful role in the redevelopment of the country, and may well be harmful? Remember - the people we are keeping out (nearly the only people we're keeping out!) are the ones that propped Hussein up for decades in the first place!

There have always been two separable questions about Iraq: Should the United States have invaded and will the United States be successful in launching a peaceful, democratic new Iraq? Saddam's capture gives hope for a positive answer to the second question, but it alone says nothing about the first.

Two possible responses:

1. Further proof, were any needed, of Berg's Law: "No liberal is capable of simultaneously addressing more than one of the four justifications for the liberation of Iraq; to do so would render his/her case untenable".
2. Perhaps the Strib should be excluded from the reconstruction...

If you'd like coherent commentary about Iraq, check out Kaus.

I'm No Lawyer, But... -

I'm No Lawyer, But... - Jason at Iraq Now asks whether Iraq has any moral duty to repay its debt to the likes of France, Germany and Russia:

"The question before the world here is this: Does a nation’s obligation to repay an international debt attach to a people, a land, or a government?

Put another way—when a brutal and oppressive dictatorship such as Saddam’s has incurred mountains of debt, with no democratic participation in fiscal policy whatsoever, and the proceeds from the loans are spent irresponsibly, or even used against his own subjects, then very serious questions can be raised about the obligation of the people of Iraq to pay back the loan. The debt may be considered “odious� to the Iraqi people, and while they may take a purely pragmatic decision to honor those debts in order to secure cash flow and financing from other sources, they are not under any moral obligation—and perhaps under no legal obligation to do so."

He then goes on to at least partially answer the question.

Among many of the answers:

I’m (ahem) borrowing this term from the financial world. Essentially, the doctrine of moral hazard means that the lender must accept responsibility for the credit risk of the borrower. If the lender feels that he can rely on government or the courts, or any other third party to bail him out of a loan gone bad, then he will have no incentive to perform normal due diligence on the credit-worthiness of the borrower. Rather, when you remove risk from the lender’s equation, he has a perverse incentive to lend his capital to the riskiest debtors he can find, since those loans pay the highest yields.

And much more.

This begs many questions, foremost of which: Is the US signing up to be a bill collector for lenders in three nations that were stupid enough to lend money to a corrupt dictator? If so - why? We didn't do it.

And all you Dean supporters - see all that the "international community" did to keep him in power? Does that even bother you?

Anyone?

Curb Your Disappointment, Part II

Curb Your Disappointment, Part II - Read Sullivan's digest of crestfallen left-wingers.

Curb Your Disappointment - General

Curb Your Disappointment - General Sanchez ended his interview with Katie Couric on Today this morning: "...thanks, Katie, for all your support".

Couric did a very subtle double-take. I have to think Sanchez had a good laugh off-camera.

Fog Of War - A

Fog Of War - A new army, raised to fight against troops loyal to a bloody dictator, faced its first test against the fanatical, battle-hardened troops loyal to their enemy.

And they dissolved and ran away, almost without a fight. They just didn't have what it took to face their opponent, who fought with methods they'd never been trained to deal with.

Who are we talking about?

The US Army, in the Battle of Kasserine Pass, in North Africa in 1942.

The left has been grinning like a toddler who just made a big pants over this story - in which 300 members of the new Iraqi Army's first operational combat battalion quit, citing low pay.

Juan Cole - a lefty blogger I've never encountered before, and after this taste of his work will certainly never seek out again - says:

. But surely a further motive is their increasing suspicion that the same guerrillas who have wounded 10,000 US troops and killed hundreds will put them through the meat grinder as soon as they are deployed.

"Surely" it is? Hm. Cites, please?

According to NPR, the money (which is about 1/5 of what it takes to support a family in Iraq today) is the main problem, along with the inevitable problems of making troops who are used to operating under a Soviet-style system operate under the Western system of operations, are the problem.

Cole is also disingenuous in citing "10,000 wounded"; that count includes ALL injuries suffered in the war so far, and is 20 times the number of coalition fatalities; through the entire 20th century, military dead tended to outnumber the wounded by more like 5-1. This is a major victory in its own right - not that I'd expect the typical leftyblogger to have the faintest idea...

UPDATE: Cole is worse than that, according to Sullivan:

"My wife, Shahin Cole, suggested to me an ironic possibility with regard to the Shiites. She said that many Shiites in East Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere may have been timid about opposing the US presence, because they feared the return of Saddam. Saddam was in their nightmares, and the reprisals of the Fedayee Saddam are still a factor in Iraqi politics. Now that it is perfectly clear that he is finished, she suggested, the Shiites may be emboldened. Those who dislike US policies or who are opposed to the idea of occupation no longer need be apprehensive that the US will suddenly leave and allow Saddam to come back to power. They may therefore now gradually throw off their political timidity, and come out more forcefully into the streets when they disagree with the US. As with many of her insights, this one seems to me likely correct."

Of course, in Cole's world, the only way that "emboldenment" can take place will be through violent resistance to the US.

The Only Good Christian Music

The Only Good Christian Music - When I was in college, I was involved in an endless argument with a guy who lived down the hall from me.

I, of course, had been playing in rock and roll bands since I was a kid. Neighbor - let's call him "Chad" for simplicity's sake - was in a "Christian Rock Band", which was distinguished from all of the bands I'd been in in three ways:

• Being a Christian group, they only played at churches and for college and high school church groups
• Their bills were paid by our college, to help it keep its' nominally Christian label
• They didn't rock. Not at all.

The argument usually started with Chad - a clean-cut son of a couple of southwest North Dakota preachers who, unlike most Preachers Kids I knew at the time, neither binge-drank nor shot heroin nor slept with an endless series of college and high school girls - asking "so if you're a Christian, why don't you play in a Christian band?"

"Because 'Christian Rock' bores me stiff, and it preaches entirely to the choir. The best "Christian" music - in fact, if you really take Christ's admonition seriously, the only real Christian music - is real rock and roll, not labeled "Christian", but written and recorded and performed by people who are Christians. People like U2, Simple Minds, the Alarm..."

The Infinite Monkeys address the issue:

"Speaking of bad Christian music, the other day I was at the gym and Clay Aiken's (from American Idol) 'Invisible' comes on. I scream 'God, this is like bad Christian music!' My workout partner laughed and said, 'Isn't all Christian music bad?'

It's a crying shame. There's good Christian-- it's called Gospel. The Authentic Gospel. Not the 'we're gonna R&B-hip-hop it up Gospel'-- just the plain Gospel music y'know. Now that is good Christian music. This whole thing to make Christian music contemporary-- bah humbug. I say let the fat ladies with soul make a joyful noise unto the Lord. That's my opinion."

Close, but no cigar.

There are three kinds that work:

• Bach, Mozart, and the other baroque and pre-classical composers, whose output was done to the glory of God, and showed it. This was music done with the same attention to detail that the theologians of the day brought to their studies. Only more fun to contemplate, 300 odd years later.
• The "Authentic Gospel" the Monkeys discuss: Mahalia Jackson, Rev. James Cleveland, the whole crowd up though the young Aretha Franklin. Stunning stuff.
• Yep, those same rock and rollers that I was yakking about 20 years ago - U2, the Alarm, T-Bone Burnett, and quite a few more. At their best, they were very good indeed.

Specifically excluded? Just about anything you buy at a "Christian Music" store.

The Lunatic Fringe Sounds Off

The Lunatic Fringe Sounds Off - Left-wing hate site Democrats.com leads with this piece.

Note that they change their front page (sort of) daily. Being weasels, they don't archive any of their front pages. So for posterity's sake, I'm going to recreate their front page here:

All Hail Caesar! He Lied About Iraqi WMDs, Turned a $5 Trillion Surplus into a $5 Trillion Deficit, Lost 3 Million Jobs, Poisoned the Air, Heated the Planet, and Daydreamed Through 9-11. But Heck, He Got Saddam - the Man Who Had NOTHING To Do With 9-11!

You can bet that if when the Hussein/Al Quaeda connection, and the full story about WMDs, finally is told, these bilious, hate-drenched cowards will wiggle away from their statements faster than you can say "Yummy Yellowcakes".

So remember - you may not have seen it here first, but you'll be able to see it here when its creators will be wishing you couldn't...

Anticipation - David's Medienkritik ably

Anticipation - David's Medienkritik ably covers the German media.

His list of predictions on how the German media will react to the news of Hussein's capture happens to coincide with my predictions of US media and left-wing reaction.

1. For some (or: many) Iraqis the capture is a disappointment - they want to see their beloved "President" back in office.
2. Pictures of Iraqis who took to the street and fired rifles into the air where staged. They were paid for by the CIA.

3. Saddam cannot expect a fair trial - just a "tribunal", that's contradicting human rights. It would make sense to shift Saddam's trial to Den Haag and let the UN take over the responsibility.

4. Did Saddam see his lawyer already?

5. No capital punishment for Saddam! Capital punishment would be a disgrace to us.

6. Saddam will prove in his trial how he tried to save peace. Bush and the necons were determined to go to war.

7. Non of the current problems in Iraq are solved by Saddam's capture: the quagmire continues and will become worse, because Saddam was one of the last bastions of stability.
(a)

8. Resistance against the "american occupation" will grow. Saddam's followers will take revenge.

9. It is disgusting seeing Saddam showcased to the world's media. Admitted, he wasn't a saint, but he has human rights, too. The guy could even comb his hair before being filmed.

10. OK - they got him. But what about the WMD? THEY ARE STILL NOT FOUND!!

OR BIN LADEN! WHAT ABOUT BIN LADEN? If we don't catch him, the terrorists have won!

Useful... - I took a

Useful... - I took a surf through the left branch of the Blogosphere to get an idea how the left is taking the bad news of Hussein's capture.

The Daily Kos - the wonkiest site on the net - is phuffing and phumphering:

Capturing Saddam is good news (although not as exciting or important as would be news of capturing the guy Bob Graham called "Osama Bin Forgotten"). But capturing him alive might not have been the best news for the Bush administration. There are many questions to be answered over the next hours, days and months, and it's not clear that anyone has the answers.

Look for Bin Laden's health to suddenly become Cause #1 among the Dems.

Kos kontinues:

And what about the continued attacks on American troops? It's hard to imagine Saddam was exerting much operational leadership over the attackers from inside a "spider hole" in which he barely had room to move around. The people attacking coalition troops don't appear to need Saddam around to tell them what to do, and their actions don't appear to be necessarily directed at restoring Baathist control over Iraq as much as evicting the occupying forces from their country.

Note to Mr. Kos; read some history, especially that of Josip Broz Tito or General Giap. Get back to us when you have some historical perspective.

"Atrios Eschaton" (again, what is it with the foofy, pretentious names for leftyblogs?) says:

But, it really doesn't change much. Capturing Saddam isn't going to end the resistance to the US occupation in Iraq. It may improve things slightly, or it could even make it worse, but the net effect will probably be negligible.

Mr. Eschaton: I'm going to bookmark your remarks. We're going to review it in Christmas of 2004 - very, very publicly.

Saddam was a bad guy, but it isn't clear he's any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our "Coalition of the Willing," so this pretense of moral clarity, etc... is ridiculous.

Mr. Eschaton - or may I call you "Atrios"? - name one country in the Coalition (no scare quotes needed, silly man) where mass graves are being dug up daily.

Any time now.

Saddam wasn't a threat to us.

If the Atta link pans out - and it may - then you'll be right, if only in the sense that a threat that has already been carried out is called "History of Terrorism". Since your site (and your movement) is all about technicalities these days...

He closes:

And, cynical me just has to ask - who's the enemy now? The base needs one.

Cynical? I'd hold out for ignorant and moronic. (All you friends of Atrios can quote me on that).

Ollie Willis - who is frequently less an idiot than many leftbloggers:

MORE: Fox News, of course, is working themselves into a lather. I just want to say - man, Bill Clinton's army ain't too shabby, eh?

The remains of Ronald Reagan's Military are doing just fine, despite Bill Clinton's best efforts.

"Hesiod" - a leftblogger that I've called "Moonbat" before, and no doubt will again - was the first left-blogger I'v seen actually try to explain why Hussein's capture might be a Bad Thing for the US (although many have said it would be):

But...now that the object of their fears has been neutralized, if the insurgents continue on their same path (and conditions in Iraq do not radically improve), they may begin to develop an aura of legitimacy among many Iraqis.

They will not be perecived as fighting to return Saddam, but to attain Iraqi independence.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how this could be a major problem for us.

Fair enough.

But it does take one to figure out how the non-Sunni 80% of the Iraqi people - the ones that have largely not been shooting at us or the allis - would figure any benefit from another round of Sunni/Tikriti-led "Independence".

He continues:

Obviously, we all hope and pray that this breaks the back of the resistance.

But, it may well be that it does the opposite. And building up the hopes and expectations of the Iraqi people...only to create bitter dissapointment if things do not start going much more smoothly...is a recipe for disaster.

Here'd be some recipes for disaster:

• Follow the current Democrat mantra, and turn the admnistration over to the UN. Let them suck up to the former Ba'athists enough to scare the bejeebers out of the rest of the nation. Foment a civil war.
• Follow Howard Dean's chimeric and idiotic notion of bringing in hundreds of thousands of Moslem troops, complete with all the inter-sect rivalries endemic among people of that faith; it'd be like sending an army of Southern Baptists and Mormons to Northern Ireland.

More as coverage warrants.

Actually - no. No more. I can't stand it any more. Most of these people are digging so hard to try to spin this as no big deal, it's nauseating.

The "Other" News - Iraq

The "Other" News - Iraq and Mohammad Atta possibly linked.

(Via Instapundit)

Merry Christmas, Nightmare Is Over

Merry Christmas, Nightmare Is Over - US Troops bag Hussein - alive.

My first thought - "Thank you, God".

My second thought - "In your face, Howard Dean".

My third thought - "What will the Democrat conspiracy machine make of this?

My my count, 11 of the 55 members of the "Deck of Cards" remain at large, alive and unaccounted for.

UPDATE: Is it just my connection, or is the news making the Internet much slower than normal?

With More Reporters Like This...

With More Reporters Like This... - A Time Magazine correspondent was wounded in Baghdad, in an attack on his Humvee while on patrol with the First Armored Division.

According to an NPR report, someone tossed a hand grenade into a Humvee holding Michael Weisskopf and his photographer, James Nachtwey, as well as two soldiers.

There, it gets interesting:

...a memo sent to Weisskopf's former colleagues at The Washington Post said he picked up the grenade and tossed it out of the Humvee. It exploded, blowing off his hand and wounding him in the chest and arms. The memo said Nachtwey received shrapnel wounds that were not as serious.

'According to people he works with at Time, he picked up the grenade and tossed it out, losing his right hand in the process while saving four lives,' the memo said."

Perhaps soon a Newsweek guy will grab the .50 caliber machine gun and return fire...

Something about March 11 -

Something about March 11 - Among the many kind comments added to yesterday's note about my birthday were two from people who also had birthdays yesterday (and Happy Birthday a day late to both of you!). Among all of the random set of readers who came to this site yesterday (and there were nearly 450, not counting me), to have three people with the same birthday is kind of odd.

Which got me to thinking.

I went to a tiny little college - a total of 500 students at the time (over 1,000 now). You'd think that among 500 people, a standard random distribution of birthdays would put one, or maybe two, on the same day.

There were four December 11 birthdays among the 500 of us.

So I think we can safely assume that March 11 has the worst weather of any day of the year.

Demogogma - Matt Entenza (DFL

Demogogma - Matt Entenza (DFL - St. Paul via Neptune) says GOP areas are getting lower property tax increases than DFL areas:

"A recent analysis of property-tax changes across the state shows an average statewide increase of 7.6 percent for homeowners, but House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, DFL-St. Paul, said the more telling information lies in the pattern of tax increases -- and decreases -- across Minnesota.

Displaying mockups of two actual property tax notices, Entenza noted at a news conference Thursday that the statement for a Woodbury homeowner showed a property-tax increase of 2.4 percent, while one for a Roseville homeowner registered at 15.4 percent.

Note to Rep. Entenza: displaying a mockup of a property tax notice is incredibly misleading. It doesn't show the baseline from which the taxes were calculated.

Property taxes in Woodbury and Edina are already quite a bit higher than in Roseville, on average (and notice that the article doesn't mention whether Entenza discussed the actual valuation of the houses, or their current tax burden).

I'm not sure, but I'll bet that the Roseville home's overall taxes as a percentage of value (or, for that matter, income) are still equal to or lower than the ones in Woodbury.

And then we get to this little bon mot:

The data were compiled by the nonpartisan House research staffers.

What's with this "nonpartisan research staff" canard that the Strib pulls out whenever DFL legislators pull flattering numbers out of their assets - numbers that, inevitably, are delivered (or, to be fair, reported) without supporting figures, methodologies or details?

It was the "non-partisan Senate research staff" that generated Wes "Lying Sack of Filth" Skoglund's (DFL-Asylum) "...there will be 90,000 guns on the street" canard during the Concealed Carry debate.

Two questions about our legislative "research staffs":

1. Non-partisan research staffs? Either they're civil service or govenrment employees - and we know where their union falls, politically - or they're appointees, which does not imply "non-partisanship".
2. When will the press - or the public - start either demanding better from the legislative research staffs, or at least telling the whole story about them?

. Entenza wailed:

'When people find out that they're paying double-digit increases while their neighbor a few miles down the road is maybe getting a cut, they will be angry, and they have a right to be upset about that,' he said.

And if the absolute tax burdens shifted in the same way as the increases to the point of making the absolute tax burdens higher for lower-valued homes, then they'd have a point.

But I don't see any reference to absolute numbers in this story. And that, I suspect, means that Rep. Entenza (D - Demigoguery) presented any such thing.

The Strib snuck this in:

Although Entenza attempted to make the case that Republicans had 'rewarded their friends and punished their enemies,' that pattern does not fit completely. Many outstate Republican districts -- and even some fast-growing GOP suburbs -- fared poorly under last year's budget.

Austin, a city represented by first-term Republican Rep. Jeff Anderson, is at the top of the list, with an average residential property-tax increase of 43 percent. That includes proposed levy increases for school districts, the city and the county, Entenza said. Anderson could not be reached for comment on Thursday."

So could someone ask Entenza about property taxes on the Iron Range, which continue to hover below overall state rates?

Oh, wait - that's DFL turf...

"You've Heard of 'Simply Red'?

"You've Heard of 'Simply Red'? Meet 'Hopelessly White'" - So a couple of weeks ago, Rolling Stone came out with their periodic vanity exercise, their Top 500 Albums of All Time.

Whenever you do a Top (pick a number) album list, you're filtering things through your own preconceptions and experiences. My list does no different (we'll get to that later). When you are an editor at Rolling Stone, you're filtering it through your background as an upper-middle-class, Ivy-League ex-hippie who still smells the gunpowder from Kent State.

I was going to let the poll - like most everything else from the increasingly-irrelevant Rolling Stone - pass without comment. The only list that rtruly matters is my own - or, for your purposes, yours.

But Plain Sedalina unloaded on the poll:

I scan this list and think, "Omigod those people at Rolling Stone are fossils!" This isn't the 500 greatest albums, it's a hagiography of Sixties cultural icons.

(Note to Sedalina: Ipse Rolling Stone)

Where's all the electronica and hip hop? (Or for that matter, more country?)

There's an even more important question here. Let's see if you find it before we get to it.

Let's start the list:

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys

3. Revolver, The Beatles

4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan

5. Rubber Soul, The Beatles

Right off the bat - three out of the Top Five are Beatles? Sure, they were a great band, but this is a little myopic...

But no, that's not the big problem. Keep looking.

6. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye

7. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

8. London Calling, The Clash

9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan

All great albums, to be sure. But...

...well, keep looking.

10. The Beatles ("The White Album"), The Beatles

This is the - no, the most overrated album of all time.

But still not the problem.

11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley

12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis

Remember this...

13. Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground

14. Abbey Road, The Beatles

15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience

So at 12 we have a jasz artist whom the sixties generation blessed with hip-itude, and a deconstructor of the blues and guitar revolutionary.

But...

...well, we're getting warm.

16. Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan

17. Nevermind, Nirvana

18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

Should have been #2 or #3. And Darkness On The Edge of Town doesn't turn up at all. Bastiches.

But that's not the problem. Keep looking...

19. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison

20. Thriller, Michael Jackson

21. The Great Twenty-Eight, Chuck Berry

KAPOW!

So it took us 21 places to get to any of the black artists that actually created pop music as we know it!

Sure, they toss off the obligatory bluesmen like Robert Johnson (27) or Muddy Waters (38), and the always-fashionable R'nB guys like James Brown (24) - but where's Bo Diddley (he turns up at #214)? Little Richard (50)? Where are any of the doo-wop groups that also put early rock and roll in front of the mainstream audience?

However, at least Berry beat out:

22. Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon

...which, unaccountably, beat out:

23. Innervisions, Stevie Wonder

24. Live at the Apollo (1963), James Brown

And while we're on the subject:

13. Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground

42. The Doors, The Doors

43. The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd

58. Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

Four of the most overrated albums ever made - and the single worst band (The Doors) ever to become a mass cult.

Hm. I might have to work on one of these, just to show Rolling Stone who's boss...

(Post title via J.D. Considine)

HBTM - At least I'll

HBTM - At least I'll never have to tell anyone I'm 40 again...

Graylist - Correspondent PJZ writes:I

Graylist - Correspondent PJZ writes:

I see that you have not yet blogged on the supposed "black listing" for Iraqi reconstruction contracts by Paul Wolfowitz. In case you do, I thought you might want a copy of the actual document in question rather than relying on the media reports. Pay close attention to points 4-6.

DETERMINATION AND FINDINGS RE: U.S.-FUNDED REDEVELOPMENT CONTRACTS IN IRAQ (December 5, 2003)

Deputy U.S. Secretary Of Defense Paul Wolfowitz Issues A 'Determination And Finding' That Bids On Redevelopment Contracts In Iraq Will Be Limited Only To "Companies From The United States, Iraq, Coalition Partners, And Force Contributing Nations," With A List Of Countries Eligible For Bidding On U.S.-Funded Contracts

Most of the news stories I've seen have made it appear as if the United States has a de facto black list of nations who did not support or opposed the Iraqi mission and we are specifically excluding some nations.

Read the findings, indeed. It does explain things, vastly better than the media is doing.

Prime contractors on jobs paid for by American taxpayers have to be from coalition-member nations. Subcontractors can be from anywhere. Prime contractors on jobs paid for by anyone but the American taxpayers can be French, or German, or North Korean for all anyone would seem to care.

Of course, some people read this, from the Times...:

President Bush found himself in the awkward position on Wednesday of calling the leaders of France, Germany and Russia to ask them to forgive Iraq's debts, just a day after the Pentagon excluded those countries and others from $18 billion in American-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects.

White House officials were fuming about the timing and the tone of the Pentagon's directive, even while conceding that they had approved the Pentagon policy of limiting contracts to 63 countries that have given the United States political or military aid in Iraq

...and conclude:

I mean, it defies ridicule (what will I do?). The tone? How were they supposed to sugar-coat it?

Clearly, we need to come up with a new executive branch foreign policy appointee, someone whose job it would be to coordinate all this stuff, who could make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing, someone who could ride herd over interagency disputes.

(Dr Evil on) Riiiiiight. (Dr. Evil off).

You can count on this: If a prime contract had gone to a French company, the likes of Josh Marshall would be crying "See! Inconsistency! Why are they only "American First" until the money starts to flow?"

If I were the President (or Donald Rumsfeld or Condi Rice), this would be my response:

OK, pundits. If you insist on tying these two things together, do it this way - because this is the way that actually makes sense:

Yes, we're limiting prime contracts paid for by the American taxpayer to countries that are part of our coalition. Damn right we are. We liberated Iraq with a vision; to create a democracy in the Middle East. Why should we trust this objective to nations that have contributed nothing to sharing that vision?

And yes, we are asking non-coalition members to forgive debts. The debts were for loans that allowed the Hussein regime to consolidate its power, making it that much bloodier and longer-lived than it would have been otherwise. They were, in essence, complicity in mass-murder. So even if a nation doesn't feel it can participate in the Coalition, it would still be a fine piece of moral expiation to forgive these loans...

...or at least send your bill collectors after Hussein, the guy who really owes the money.

And that, my French, German and Russian friends, would solve both problems for you, now, wouldn't it?"

Probably a good thing I'm not in politics.

The Endorsement - Gore made

The Endorsement - Gore made it official yesterday, endorsing Doctor Dean:

"Enveloped by a new aura of establishment credibility, Howard Dean on Tuesday accepted the endorsement of former Vice President Al Gore, who urged his Democratic rivals for the White House to shift their focus to the campaign against President Bush.

Gore, who stunned Dean's opponents with his early endorsement, said he was swayed by the vigorous grass-roots support for the former Vermont governor, as well as Dean's staunch opposition to the war in Iraq."

Many, many people have already commented at great depth about the significance of this endorsement; how it's:

• a slap at the Clinton/MacAuliffe machine
• probably Gore's first move in the '08 campaign
• possibly a sign that the Dem establishment isn't that confident in Dean's chances of winning next year; why would Gore tie himself to a winner that could lock him out of the White House for eight more years? (Because Dean would give him the DNC - Ed.).

Here's my question: Is it really good news for Dean?

Think about it: Who really cares about Algore anymore? The people who chant that the President was "selected, not elected?", and believe that Gore is the real president now? People who pine for the Clinton years? How many of that crowd weren't going to vote for the Democrat nominee (whomever it is!) anyway?

Think about this: In an economic boom year (albeit a false and waning one, but we didn't know that in 2000), while campaigning as a sitting incumbent of a popular administration, Algore only got 50 percent and some tiny change of the vote, in an election that by all rights he should have won!

That means somewhere along the line in 2000, Algore lost the scads of swing voters that, under those conditions, should have put him over the top.

So - Dean's being endorsed by the guy who blew a 14 point lead in the fourth quarter.

He's happy about this?

Well, I suppose it means he's locked up the "Josh Bartlett is my president" crowd...

Death Penalty News - Ann

Death Penalty News - Ann Coulter is right about so many things. She's a firebrand, to be sure, a shoot from the hip kinda pundit, and that's what I like about her. And much of the abuse she takes from the liberal press stems from her accuracy, not inaccuracy.

But if there's one thing Ann Coulter says that drives me nuts, it's her constant poo-poohing of the one, conclusive reason to oppose the death penalty; it is prescribed in error way too often. And in my opinion, once is too many.

Here's another case, from the Strib:

"Charges were dropped Tuesday against a man who spent 20 years on Pennsylvania's death row for a murder that DNA evidence says he did not commit.

The decision makes Nicholas Yarris the first Pennsylvania death row inmate cleared by DNA evidence, but he will remain jailed pending appeals on crimes he committed after escaping from sheriff's deputies 15 years ago.

Prosecutor Sheldon Kovach filed the motion Tuesday to drop the rape and murder charges in the 1981 death of a woman in the Philadelphia area. 'The commonwealth would not have sufficient evidence at this point to proceed,' he said."

Now, here's the rub: the likes of Coulter will respond "See? the DNA got him off death row!".

True - two decades later. Here's the rub - according to Yarris' supporters, the prosecution spent the better part of this past decade doing its best to prevent the DNA from the case from getting a proper analysis.

Coulter's a lawyer - and I'd suspect she'd never give the notion of prosecutorial malfeasance any credit. In this case, it'd seem to have happened.

And to me, it's not worth the risk. Life without parole is a better, cheaper - and safer - option.

The only capital punishment I support is the kind delievered by an armed citizen, in justifiable self-defense.

Grrrr - Blogger was yakking

Grrrr - Blogger was yakking this morning. I finally got the chance to repost everything.

I really need to get Moveable Type going...

Religion and Prosperity - Here's

Religion and Prosperity - Here's the argument I have with my few atheist, agnostic and non-Judeo-Christian friends. It starts out like this: "Name a non-Judeo-Christian society that has ever been a net gain for the peasant on the street, during their lifetimes."

The argument quickly devolves into a digression on geography, natural resources and will to power - which inevitably dodges the point. "Leave aside the fact," I answer, "that China and India and pre-Columbian Mexico and even Mesopotamia were hardly bereft of resources, historically - it's a matter of fact that in each of those societies, and every other similar example, the resources went exclusively - not "in an unbalanced way", but "without exception" - to the ruling class. It's only been through the rise of Judeo-Christian philosophy that the lot of the peasant has ever improved".

"Yes", the response goes, "but that's only because the West had the Industrial revolution".

But how could the Industrial Revolution - or, for that matter, the Renaissance or the Information Age for that matter - have occurred in, say, a Moslem or Buddhist or Taoist society? The fundamental driving forces of those societies, with the possible exception of Islam - are inimical to the formation of governments that respect the rule of law and have fundamentally liberal values. Christianity does - and many of Western society's great advances have happened, if not in the name of Christianity, at least in societies broadly formed according along the lines of Judeo-Christian philosophy.

I say possibly Islam - there is argument there. Drezner has an interesting debate going on over the economic future of Islam.

Tyler Volokh Cowen is, if not bearish, at least not convinced that Islam is a direct cause of a poor economy - it's merely hard to disentangle it from the lousy governments that strangle people and economies:

These correlations miss the point. To the extent that Islam has negative effects, it operates through indirect mechanisms. Islamic countries have a difficult time establishing democracy and rule of law and good economic policy. True, if you include enough proxy variables in the regression -- such as good policy -- the influence of Islam will wash out. Islam is an indirect cause of some problems, not the direct cause, and the direct causes may well have more statistical significance. But the point remains that Islam can influence the variables that matter.

The study uses intra-national comparisons as well. Muslims in the United States have done quite well. Muslims in India and Ghana are not poorer that non-Muslims in those countries, adjusting for the relevant variables (Malaysia of course is an exception, I might add that in the case of India Hinduism might be bad for growth too, not to mention the animism that is common in Ghana, so this is a comparative result against some not so impressive contenders.) But again this is missing the point. The fact that Islamic individuals can do well, when embedded in some other economic and legal order, does not mean that Islamic countries can sustain such institutions. In fact I think that Islamic philosophy and theology make it harder to have a liberal legal order.

Kieran Kealy disagrees - sort of.

The whole thing is worth a read...

Midnight Confessions - I'm a

Midnight Confessions - I'm a fairly normal guy. I work a job, raise a couple of kids - in short, nothing unusual.

But I harbor a shameful secret - one so deep and dark and awful, I am loathe to broach the subject in polite company.

And it would stay that way - secret, unbroached - had I not found support out there in the blogosphere. There is one other person with the guts to shine a light on this...thing , to get it out of its dark, shameful corner.

Atomizer, from Fraters Libertas, says it:

Since the Elder has brought up the subject of John Lennon songs that are painful to listen to, let me add the utterly atrocious "Happy Christmas (War is Over)" to the list.

Thank you, Atom.

But in all honesty, I have to say it goes further for me. I can not think of anything John Lennon ever did after the Beatles that I would ever voluntarily listen to twice.

Oh, put it back in the scabbards, all you Lennon zealots out there. He and McCartney did a lot of great stuff with the Fab Four. And while I'm not the world's biggest Beatles' fan (I prefer the Who and the Kinks among Brit Invasion bands), they were a great band - and I like a lot of, say, George Harrison's post-Beatles work.

But Lennon? His whole solo oeuvre sums up like this: A bunch of session guys standing around playing drowsy, self-indulgent, depressing music that sounds like it's being done after too much NyQuil.

And as far as Lennon himself - Ray Davies made bitter, cynical alienation fun. Lennon made it tortuous.

Imagine? Vision of a Sartreian hell. Merry Christmas, War Is Over? "White Christmas" for the "Paxil as lifestyle accesory" set. Double Fantasy - as in, every single song on both disks? Call it Double Miasma, and I might buy it on grounds of pure honesty alone.

I'm with Atomizer - it's Christmas; you can play your Bach, your Irving Berlin, or your Joey Ramone for all I care; any of them can suggest some shred of what this holiday is about.

Save Lennon for the classic rock rotation - the one I never tune in, if you please.

Gore Endorses Dean - Who

Gore Endorses Dean - Who to link to about this story:

Hewitt? Sullivan? Reding?

All of them and more, of course. But in the end, Scott Ott probably covers the story as well as anyone.

I did like Sullivan's quote:

if Dean goes down in flames (which must surely be the likeliest eventuality), Gore has allied himself with the energized, leftist Democratic base, and could position himself in 2008 as the real soul of the party - unlike that centrist opportunist, Senator Clinton. In fact, the minute after a Bush re-election, the Gore-Clinton struggle for control of the party begins again in earnest. To my mind, this is somewhat delusional of Gore. No sane political party would ever give him another chance at the presidency, after he threw it away with such spectacular incompetence in 2000. But all politicians have to be a little delusional; and Gore is nothing but a politician.

And this:

And it also marks the first time that a major establishment figure has essentially blessed the new forces of web-based anti-war upper-middle-class activism that has propelled his candidacy. Gore, of course, helps with blacks, for good measure, a group now indispensable to any chance the Dems have next year. So there you have it: the left-wing take-over of the Democrats continues apace. And only the Clintons can stop it.

How much of a blessing is it for Dean? How many of that 50.01% that voted for Gore in '00 would do it again?

Especially now that he's finally (irrevocably) thrown his lot in with the hard left in the party?

Jonah Goldberg notes, regarding Gore's backstabbing of Joe Lieberman:

Indeed, Gore could have picked Dean in 2000 to be his runningmate -- the man was no less qualified then than he is now. The only thing that has changed is that Gore has moved even further to the angry left and Dean is in a position to reward Gore (and Gore may be counting on the even angrier Dean voters in 2008, after Bush finishees his second term). And, oh yeah, we are in a long, dangerous bloody struggle with an enemy dedicated to destroying us. And, we are in the midst of one of the most ambitious and generous foreign policy efforts in American history (recall that Al Gore was a passionate defender of nation-building). But all that seems to be beside the point.

In other words, Al Gore not only thinks Howard Dean is more qualified to be president of the United States than Joe Lieberman was or is, he thinks that is especially the case now after 9/11. If you really let that sink in for a second, you can see what an amazingly mercenary and damn close to dishonorable position that is. Moreover, it shows how a vast swath of the Democratic Party really, fundamentally, doesn't care that there's a war on -- except, that is, to the extent it wants to bug out from it.

So, all of my moderate Democrat friends; who's your guy? Lieberman, the only candidate with a responsible position on terrorism? Or are you going to sit tight and hope for Hillary to throw her hat and her newfound hawkishness into the ring?

AWOL - November and December

AWOL - November and December have been crazy months for me - and the blog has showed it.

Not that I really felt I could maintain my manic output of last spring, at the depths of my un/underemployment, when I wrote just to keep doing something between the job calls that, at the time, never came.

But oy, vey, this last month has really gut-shot my output; not merely in terms of quantity, but in the mental energy I have to put into it. I think it's getting better, but we'll see.

First, I need to fix my coffee maker...

Evolution - Under George Bush,

Evolution - Under George Bush, the Republican Party is changing.

Conservatives don't like it, of course. You don't have to look at too many hard-right blogs to see the type of anti-Bush rhetoric that'd make the Democratic Underground blanche.

Liberals don't like it either, of course; Bush is triangulating them out of their turf.

Both sides are right - and wrong. Sullivan pegged it yesterday:

Put together Niall Ferguson's typically brilliant op-ed in the NYT yesterday with Tom Friedman's open mind toward Bush's new Wilsonianism and I think you see one interesting interpretation of the sheer radicalism of this administration. By committing the U.S. simultaneously to a bigger welfare state (now coopted by the G.O.P.) and a policy of aggressive democratization abroad, president Bush is re-casting Cold War liberalism for the next century and calling it Republicanism.

So Bush could be the New Kennedy...

We have no idea at his point in history how this will or will not work out. I'm less sanguine than Ferguson about America's long-term, fiscal health.

...or the new LBJ. Time will tell, and of course you know what I'm hoping for and betting on.

Sullivan continues:

But the deepest insight of Niall's piece is the thought that circumstances in part forced Bush's hand. After the bursting of the Rubin Bubble, and worldwide deflation, a tougher fiscal stance might have led to a catastrophic global depression. And after 9/11, a passive approach to Islamist terrorism might well have sent a signal that we were a soft target and emboldened the new fascists even more. And continuing the failed policies of the past in the Middle East would have meant another, worse 9/11 sooner rather than later. But even if you see the Bush Project as driven primarily by events, that doesn't make it any the less impressive. The sheer scale of the undertaking is undeniable.

This begs a question.

We know how liberals (as opposed to Democrats, many of whom fall back on their Truman/Kennedy roots, and are quite sensible on foreign policy) would have reacted to 9/11 - by launching feel-good initiatives at the UN that would have Clintonized the event, casting it as a national tragedy, a law enforcement incident, a point for endless international negotiation.

How about the hard right? Where would the Buchananites have taken this (are there still Buchananites out there), with both terror and the economy?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

In my opinion, there are a slew of ways the GOP has needed to change. We'll get to that tomorrow.

Come On Baby Light My

Come On Baby Light My Cake - Sioux the Librarian, a correspondent on an email list I frequent, notes that yesterday would have been Jim Morrison's 60th birthday.

Let me just take this opportunity to say this: it's a sign of profound hope that the current generation of teenagers does not seem to have had one of the bouts of Morrison-worship that have plagued pop-music every decade or so since Morrison's fire got lit for the final time 32 years ago. The eighties, of course, were clogged with Doors references, from the sublime (John Densmore's self-deprecating appearance on "Square Pegs", Michael Hutchence) to the ridiculous (the "He's Hot, He's Sexy, He's Dead" issue of Rolling Stone, Run Westy Run). The nineties? Two words for you - Pearl Jam.

So far, no signs of any recrudescence of the Doors Cult in this decade.

Maybe the terrorists are losing...

Move Back! - Along with

Move Back! - Along with most of the conservative blogosphere, I've been hammering on MoveOn.org for years now. MoveOn - famously characterized by pundits from the Fraters all the way down to that Coulter chick as a group founded on the principle of making it safe to be a middle-aged white lothario - has busied itself with becoming a clearinghouse for anti-Bush claims. Not exactly conspiracy theories; it's more like "Question: How do you know MoveOn is claiming Bush lied about something? Answer: Their fingers are moving over their keyboards".

Spinsanity - not a conservative site, mind you - notes this, writing about "The Daily Misleader", which is MoveOn's blog:

with The Daily Mislead, MoveOn has become the leader of a new school of liberal criticism that seeks to brand every policy disagreement with President Bush as a broken promise or lie. These loose accusations trivialize charges of dishonesty, reducing them to little more than another partisan spin tactic.

Vague promises, partisan interpretations

The most frequent way in which The Daily Mislead unfairly accuses the Bush administration of dishonesty is to present evidence of a vague promise made by the president and attack him for betraying this promise by not supporting some favored liberal policy.

For instance, on November 20, the Mislead made this accusation: "President Bush unveiled his energy plan in May 2001, vowing to 'make this country the world's leader in energy efficiency and conservation in the 21st century.' But the energy bill under final consideration by the Senate and supported by the President devotes less than ten percent of the $25.7 billion in tax breaks to energy efficiency."

But why is ten percent not enough? How much would be enough? MoveOn never says, because it's too busy engaging in partisan attacks posing as objective analysis of dishonesty.

The article goes on to note, correctly, that this sort of thing isn't doing the alternative left media any good in the long run.

Definitely worth a read.

In Other MoveOn News - I subscribe to the MoveOn.org mailing list. It's usually a repetitive daily call to action against the President's latest outrage against democracy, like the Medicare spending bill that out-Democratted the Democrats.

But I got this one yesterday:

The House is scheduled to vote on this bill today, Monday December 8th.
The Senate may follow suit soon afterward -- unless we help stop them.

Please call your Representative and Senators now, at:

Representative Betty McCollum
DC Phone: 202-225-6631

Senator Mark Dayton
DC Phone: 202-224-3244
Local Phone: 612-727-5220

Senator Dean Barkley
DC Phone: 202-224-9430
Local Phone: N/A

Urge them to reject Bush's Omnibus* spending bill.

Move On, indeed.

They sent a correction later in the day.

First You Talk Everyone Into

First You Talk Everyone Into Loving Each Other - Atomizer, from the Fraters, finds the perfect comparison with the Dean campaign's view of foreign policy:

"Howard Dean has revived the old Steve Martin comedy bit of the late seventies entitled 'You Can Be A Millionaire and Never Pay Taxes'. For those of you who don't remember, Martin's foolproof plan to foil the IRS began with:

'First...get a million dollars.'

Dean's modern day equivalent reads (from his own website):

I (have) laid out four goals for American leadership in the world:
First, defeat the threat posed by terrorists, tyrants, and technologies of mass destruction.

Despite the fact that Dr. Dean has opposed everything President Bush has done in the past three years to do just that while offering no alternative solution, I think he is on the right track. All we have to do is simply claim a desire to defeat the enemy and things will work themselves out."

I'm convinced Dean has to know that he's talking garbage - but that his advisors know that the Dean base is completely illiterate about foreign policy.

Or blinded by ideology or anti-Bush hatred to know better.

Same thing, really.

They Begin At Calais -

They Begin At Calais - The Administration plans to commence a War Crimes Tribunal, run by Iraqis.

Predictably, it's running into static from France the international community.

Iraq Now - written by a soldier in Iraq - responds:

"Ok, I don't get it. On one hand, these groups are saying the U.S. is too involved. On the other hand, they claim that the little dark swarthy savages - you know, the ones who invented the rule of law in the first place--aren’t competent to try the cases. So if the Iraqis can't do it themselves, and we can't help them, then the only option left is to forget about the tribunal at all.

And an interesting elaboration on politics in Iraq:

Here's what they don't get: If you look at a map of Iraq, superficially looks like one political entity. Ok, we know it really isn't. Almost everyone by now has figured out that it's really three: the minority Sunni muslims, and the Shias and ethnic Kurds who were so savagely oppressed by Saddam and a few of his favored Sunni clans.

So most informed people can draw two rough lines on the map and divide the populated areas of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, stick a Sunni, Shia, or Kurd label on the map as appropriate, and think that passes for a sophisticated understanding of the situation on the ground.

Wrong.

The reality is that there is no bright line along which the ethnic groups can be separated. Further, Sunni areas are further subdivided into tribes, clans, and sheikdoms—some of which—particularly the al-Tikriti tribe, had closer ties to Saddam than others. Other tribes, even in the Sunni areas, were marginalized and brutalized by Saddam themselves and are aching for payback.

Most people simply do not grasp how deep the interclan rivalries and jealousies are, even among Sunni tribes. Saddam the strong man kept a lid on things in the same way Tito kept a lid on ancient grudges between Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians in the Balkans."

There's more.

Do Citizens for a Supine

Do Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota Know About This? - Good Samaritans in Redwood Falls get shot at:

Authorities in western Minnesota looked Sunday for a 16-year-old boy who allegedly opened fire on two people who thought he was having car trouble and stopped to help.

The Renville County Sheriff's Department said that as the man and woman stopped on a gravel road along the Minnesota River near Morton around 10:20 a.m., the youth in the car pointed a rifle at them.

He reportedly fired several shots at the car, and at the woman as she fled. Nobody was hit, but the woman was struck with what was believed to be the butt of a gun, authorities said. She was treated and released.

Obviously, we need a five-day waiting period on Samaritan activities.

The War on the Allies

The War on the Allies - Lately, allied battle deaths in Iraq seem to far outnumber US casualties.

If we had an especially knowledgeable media, this would be bad news for Howard Dean.

Lately, troops from our foreign allies - Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish - have been getting killed, in greater absolute numbers and still-greater proportion, than US troops.

This is no accident. Hussein's sympathizers must realize by now that we're not the same US that ran from Somalia under the cover of the UN. But they also have to know that many of our allies are not especially steady on the war. Somalia-like casualties - and the Italians and Spanish just suffered them - might cause them to waver, at great political cost to the President.

The question; does Howard Dean know this? Or is he merely hoping his voters don't?

UPDATE: There's some wavering going on.

Saturn Wavers - Saturns are

Saturn Wavers - Saturns are one of those things that people either love or hate. The people who hate them tend to be status-crazed yuppies (or yuppies in training) who consider their cars integral parts of their identity, and need something flashier to buff up either withered self-esteem. (That should generate hate mail like the "Violent Lesbians" thread never dreamed of).

I've had one for two years, and I love it. But GM seems to be dead-set on scuppering the marque.

From Chele.

Curiouser - Fraters has a

Curiouser - Fraters has a poll.

I haven't read it yet. We can check it out together.

(click grind read read read read)

Hey! They're feuding with Hewitt again! What the...?

Off For Now - I'll

Off For Now - I'll very likely be "off the air" for the next day or two. Posting will be light to nonexistant until Sunday, most likely.

We'll be making up for lost time then, of course!

Have a great weekend.

What Kind of Complex? -

What Kind of Complex? - People talk about "Minnesota Nice" - the sort of strained civility, descended from Scandinavian roots, that characterizes social interaction in the Upper Midwest.

To that classic term, I need to add "Minnesota Smug"; the belief that somehow the "Minnesota Nice" are, for some reason, better than the rest of their neighbors. It usually implies supporting the DFL, of course.

To define "Minnesota Smug", you merely need to read Doug Grow in the Strib. Read his archives - but also read yesterday's unctuous exercise in MinSmug; he was writing about Governor Pawlenty's move to reinstate the death penalty in Minnesota:

This must be how lynch mobs worked. A strong leader, reacting to anger, would work up the crowd, then, en masse, there would be a rush to the nearest tree.

No, Doug; the governor has called for an orderly, legal process to enact a change in law. He has not called for a mob to string up Alfonso Rodrigues.

I know that's a subtle point.

On Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, reacting to anger from a case that hasn't come close to being resolved, was calling for the rope. He said he would push for Minnesota to become a capital punishment state.

"As a Minnesotan, as a governor, as a dad of two young daughters, I'm fed up with these stories where we have children abducted, women abducted, with a not very good system for resolving the issue," Pawlenty said.

Now, I'm deeply ambivalent about capital punishment. I favor it for every reason but one; the possibility of executing the wrong person. Everything about the death penalty makes sense except that - but the possibility of kiling the innocent is enough to prompt me to reject it. And it's in emotional cases like this one that the death penalty is most likely to be imposed in error.

But it's not the poor sex offender that Grow is worried about. No. It's those dang Republicans and their supporters:

Even though Minnesota is far different from the progressive place we used to know, this was chilling.

What isn't clear is whether Pawlenty is being a manipulative pol, playing on the emotions of state residents, or whether his belief in capital punishment comes from his heart. Either way, he was trying to create public policy with a jerk of the knee.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to to the Constitution, the New Deal, and the Gun Control Act of 1968 were all "knee jerk reactions that played on the emotions of the voter during or after traumatic events. Three of the five were good things, one was probably ineffective, and the other was just plain wrong; I suspect Doug Grow wouldn't have written a snarky column about any of those "knee jerks."

Grow continues:

Who isn't angry when tragedy happens? (It should be noted that there are tragedies daily in Minnesota, though most get far less political or media attention than the apparent kidnapping of University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin.) Who doesn't feel empathy?

But this would seem to be the time for a leader to attempt to comfort the family, support law enforcement and to say to the rest of us, "Take a deep breath."

Grow needs to take a deep breath.

Capital punishment is not about comforting the family or supporting law enforcement, or even dealing with "the rest of us".

It's about killing a depraved person who has destroyed a life, and the lives of everyone they knew.

It's about revenge.

And "minnesota nice" and "minnesota smug" both tell us that revenge isn't something "nice" people think about. And like Concealed Carry reform earlier this year (which brough Minnesota Smug out like flies to dookie), they tell us that it's a form of moral defect to protect yourself from those who'd destroy you or your family!

The sonorous examples of the sainted, forgiving exceptions to the rule are trotted out:

Don Streufert understands a father's anger. His daughter, Carin Streufert, was 18 when she was kidnapped, raped and murdered 12 years ago in northern Minnesota by two men, who are now serving long prison terms.

"I'm in the governor's corner when he calls for more safety for our daughters," said Streufert from his home in Duluth. "It's appropriate to be angry. . . . But I don't see anything positive that would come from capital punishment."

Streufert and his wife, Mary, had been scheduled to speak against capital punishment at an Amnesty International event next Wednesday in Duluth. Now, after the governor's stunning announcement, there will be more urgency in their words.

Christ tells us to forgive. The Streuferts seem to have done this. For their purposes, that's fine.

The Streuferts understand they're unusual. They've gone so far as to meet their daughter's killers. And they understand that families of victims all find different ways to try to cope with horror.

But they believe society must act on a different standard from individuals.

"The terror people feel will not be answered with capital punishment," Streufert said.

I can accept that (remember - I oppose capital punishment). But it's not about answering terror.

It's about removing a predator, rapist and murderer from society.

For different reasons, many others were saying the same thing.

John Bessler, a Minneapolis attorney who has written three books on capital punishment including, "History of the Death Penalty in Minnesota," said there's no evidence that the death penalty makes a state safer.

See my previous paragraph.

Grow ushers Minnesota Smug back into the conversation:

Should Minnesota become even more like Texas than it already has in the past few years by becoming a death penalty state? Texas is the nation's runaway execution leader. It has one of the highest murder rates in the country. Minnesota has one of the lowest.

When Doug Grow invokes Texas, you know that he has no interest in the issue at hand. Capital Punishment is just the rhetorical taxi that takes him to the address he really wants; his hatred of the unwashed hoi polloi that have so soundly rejected the utopia he and his fellow travellers thought was so within reach.

Of course, as Doug Grow is a mouthpiece for the DFL, there has to be the obligatory campaign plug:

Sen. Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis, was disgusted by the governor's words. Ranum, chairwoman of the Senate public safety committee, supports tough prison sentences but is a foe of capital punishment.

But what caused her to bristle was Pawlenty, standing before Minnesota as a champion of public safety. Ranum said Pawlenty's budget slashed all sorts of programs that dealt directly with public safety.

"Don't just listen to what he says," Ranum said. "Watch what he does."

Indeed.

He's "Cut programs". What programs? We don't know - but "Jane Ranum says...", and that's enough for Doug Grow.

This must be the rub for the likes of Grow and Ranum; Pawlenty has cut programs - but actually done things to make the life of the criminal more dangerous. Concealed Carry reform will reduce crime by making violent criminals just a little bit more afraid to ply their trades. Capital Punishment will make some criminals more afraid, to be sure - the convicted and condemned ones.

If you think it sounds like I've been slowly talking myself into supporting capital punishment over the course of this article - you may be right.

Sullivan on Stamps - Sullivan

Sullivan on Stamps - Sullivan comments on Paul Robeson's inclusion on a postage stamp.

He exhumes a laudatory eulogy Robeson wrote about Joseph Stalin (read it) and asks:

Would anyone who had written such things about Hitler in 1945 now be celebrated on a postage stamp?

Of course not. But Stalin is...well, different, dammit!

Yo To Arms - City

Yo To Arms - City Pages interviews Twin Cities sci-fi writer and longtime concealed carry activist Joel Rosenberg, one of CCRN's more interesting members.

One of many money quotes:

"'My take is that the predictions of 90,000 gun permits issued over the next year are wildly low,' Rosenberg says. 'One of the things that all the demagoguery on the anti-gun side has done is generated a lot of interest among folks who weren't interested before.' The interest is such, in fact, that since the passage of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, widely known as the conceal and carry law, Rosenberg has temporarily put his fantasy writing aside to pursue a lucrative sideline training prospective handgun carriers. 'I'm doing three and four classes a week, and I could easily be teaching every day. Right now I'm trying to cut down to full time.'"

Read the whole thing, of course.

The Return of Liberal Talk

The Return of Liberal Talk Radio - I have seen the future of liberal talk radio. And its name is Al Franken Colleen Cruse.

Kruse - longtime local comedian best known for endlessly recycling her life as a single welfare mom in the nineties, and apparently a onetime contender to be on Friends - hosts a new show on WMNN Radio, an AM (1330) station that started life as MPR's all-news outlet, that heretofore has been the Twin Cities' 24-hour news station. Kruse's show is the station's first foray into talk radio. I heard it around 2PM yesterday.

Kruse calls the show, with typical liberal modesty, "Higher Ground". The station's drops between breaks constantly intone "lean left, lean right, or stay in the middle...", but you know exactly where Kruse fits in. Her leadoff guests yesterday: City Pages editor Steve Perry, talking about "the so-called recovery", as Kruse termed it.

Kruse sounds like someone who's used to an audience, trying to get used to working without one; she stammers, she giggles in places where it makes no sense, she has no sense of rhythm in an interview. Her co-host (whose name eludes me; WMNN's website has no mention of the program), apparently someone with small-time radio background, adds little; while he sounds better on the air than Cruse, his input is completely uninteresting.

There are comparisons with Katherine Lanpher; neither of them really belongs in radio, both of their shows slant hard to the left and neither will admit it.

The best comparison I can think of:

• Colleen Kruse - Katherine Lanpher on laughing gas
• Katherine Lanpher - Colleen Kruse on sedatives, only still not as funny during the rare joke that connects

Hope that helps.

Out Of Control, Still -

Out Of Control, Still - One of the left's most inviolate shibboleths is that countries like Australia, Britain and Canada - which have strict gun control - are safer places than the US.

For years, hints have been leaking out that it's just not so. British Home Secretary Jack Straw famously addressed the issue two years ago, in a speech that was alarmed about the booming crime rate in the UK.

Folsom James points us to a study by the Fraser Institute that tends to confirim this.

From the press release:

Disarming the public has not reduced criminal violence in any country examined in this study. In all these cases, disarming the public has been ineffective, expensive, and often counter productive. In all cases, the effort meant setting up expensive bureaucracies that produce no noticeable improvement to public safety or have made the situation worse. Mauser points to these trends in the countries he examined:

And from the study:

Restrictive firearm legislation has failed to reduce violent crime in Australia, Canada, or Great Britain. The policy of confiscating guns has been an expensive failure. Criminal violence has not decreased. Instead, it continues to increase. Unfortunately, policy dictates that the current directions will continue and, more importantly, it will not be examined critically.

Only the United States has witnessed such a dramatic drop in criminal violence over the past decade. Perhaps it is time politicians in the Commonwealth reviewed their traditional antipathy to lawfully owned firearms. It is an illusion that gun bans protect the public. No law, no matter how restrictive, can protect us from people who decide to commit violent crimes. Maybe we should crack down on criminals rather than hunters and target shooters?

Both pieces are worth a read.

One Line On Kerry -

One Line On Kerry - Sullivan has the best one:

"Kerry is emerging as the worst of all the viable Democratic candidates. He has the backbone of Clinton and the charm of Gore"

I can see the Kerry career ending in about a year. If not sooner.

The Peril of the Moderate

The Peril of the Moderate Moslem - Part IV - Excellent article in the Globalist by Tulin Daloglu on the Israelization of Turkey .

One of a bunch of Dinar quotes:

Although Turkey did not support the war in Iraq, it agreed later on to send its troops. But no troops were deployed in the end — because the Iraqis preferred it that way.

Yet, Washington and Ankara did not become allies yesterday. Rather, they have been strategic partners for decades and staunch allies in NATO. There is also Turkey's ever-closer cooperation with Israel.

Read it all, of course.

Arrest - An arrest in

Arrest - An arrest in the Sjodin case:

A convicted sex criminal was arrested Monday night at his Crookston home and charged with kidnapping Dru Sjodin, who remains missing.

Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., 50, was arrested at 7:20 p.m. Monday on a warrant from the Grand Forks County State's Attorney's office and signed in Grand Forks District Court, according to Grand Forks Police.

He is, of course, innocent until proven guilty.

I'm trying not to get a sinking feeling about this. But with statements like these:

"Out of respect for the Sjodin family and in the interest of the integrity of the investigation, no further information will be released at this time," police said in a news release Monday evening.

Allan Sjodin, Dru's father, said late Monday after news of the arrest, that "we are going to reserve comment until tomorrow morning. We want to assess the situation and set up for tomorrow. We are going to go about searching again tomorrow morning. That is the only comment I can give."

...it's just not easy.

By the way - Rodriguez would not seem to be an example of Minnesota "Catch and Release" correction:

Rodriguez grew up in Crookston and first was convicted of attempted aggravated rape and aggravated rape in 1974 in Crookston and sent to prison. During a furlough from prison in 1979, he attacked another woman, attempting to abduct her from a city sidewalk in Crookston. He was convicted of attempted kidnapping and aggravated assault in 1980.

He remained in prison from 1980 until May 1 of this year.

State officials say Rodriguez previously was known to one victim and attacked two other women who did not know him, according to state correctional officials.

This is the part that I'm making sure my kids know all about - especially in light of the other, less-publicized case in Fertile, MN:

Wayne Swanson, who prosecuted Rodriguez in 1980 and served as Polk County attorney from 1979 to 2002, recalled the case Monday night.

"He attempted to abduct a woman off the street," Swanson said. "She fought him. He stabbed her. She did get away from him. She was not about to go with him. She was a pretty gutsy lady."

The case in Fertile is less well-known because the girl fought back, and got away. That seems to be the case with many such crimes; if you fight back against aggravated assault, kidnapping, attempted rape, robbery or other violent crimes, you are 1/4 as likely to end up dead than if you don't fight back. (If you use lethal force, of course, the odds are 1/7 - but don't tell the good folks at Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota). Anyway - the lesson for the kids today - always fight back. Never get in the car while you have the strength to keep yourself out. Scream and holler, and if the perp pulls a gun or a knife, run for it - your chances are much better than if you get in the car.

If Sjodin turns up dead - and I'm praying for a miracle here - look for a renewed call for the death penalty - in Minnesota.

Ignorant Americans - I minored

Ignorant Americans - I minored in German in college, and spent some time overseas. I've never been overly burdened by the old European (and elitist American) trope that "Americans are ill-informed/provincial/ignorant about anything that happens outside the US."

Of course we are.

Humans - most people - have a saturation point for information. That point is different in every single person; it's the difference between people who ask you what state North Dakota is in, and people who have never lost a Trivial Pursuit game in all of history (pats self on back).

If you travel in Europe, you learn - it's a small place. The countries there are the size of states in the US; Minnesota is the size of the old West Germany; add in Wisconsin, and you have the reunified Germany. On our northwest border, of course, North Dakota is nearly triple the size of Belgium and the Netherlands. South Dakota is at least as large as France. It's a fair bet that the average Minnesotan knows a fair bit about the culture of Wisconsin, or the Dakotas.

In fact, while Europeans are proud of the fact that many of them are bilingual, think about it; if the Dakotas spoke three different languages, and Iowa yet another, and all those folks in Illinois and Ontario two more, and Minnesotans needed to know these languages for their economic survival, I think it's a fair bet you'd see a lot of multilingual Minnesotans.

I bring this up because of an email I got from David, at Davids Medienkritik. Trans-national ignorance is hardly a one-way street:

" 'Still observers point to the fact that a short visit in Iraq will not change everything with one blow. The American troops in Iraq have to reckon with continued resistance and the expected rise in popularity for Bush could also be over very quickly. They point to former US President Lyndon B. Johnson who visited the troops on a spectacular trip to Vietnam but then clearly lost the 1968 election to his opponent Richard Nixon.'

David notes

A mistake of this magnitude might lead some to reach the conclusion that most of the 'America experts' in the German media were too busy throwing rocks at police and getting high back in 1968 to pay close attention to the US Presidential election.

Just to clear things up a bit, Lyndon B. Johnson didn't even run for the Presidency in 1968 after announcing he would not seek re-election at the beginning of the year. Not only that, but the 1968 election between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey turned out to be a hotly contended race which Nixon won by the thinnest of margins and was by no means 'clearly lost' by the Democrats.

German journalists frequently and gleefully report on the 'ignorance' of the average American, always with a hint of condescending superiority of course. It seems, though, that they aren't quite the brilliant know-it-alls they fancy themselves to be either..."

Many of us have known this since Adenauer won the World Cup in 1980.

Jackson Shunned, Media Stunned -

Jackson Shunned, Media Stunned - Didn't see much coverage of this - protesters turning on Jesse Jackson at a rally.

Interesting quote:

"'We are tired of coming here to voice our opinion when we got African-American people sitting at the table and saying they represent our interests and playing this puppet game,' said one protester.

More interesting response:

Afterwards ABC7's Rob Johnson asked Reverend Jackson why he felt like so much verbal venom was aimed in his direction.

'They lashed out at Dr. King, they lashed out at Nelson Mandela, they lashed out at Jesus, so all of those who fight for change become the object of frustration,' said Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rainbow-Push Coalition"

Christ, Mandela...Jackson; Martyrs.

The man may have finally lost it.

Out Of Control - The

Out Of Control - The Gun Control movement has had a rough couple of years - even before 9/11, their fortunes were waning. Gun control laws were relaxing nationwide, the concealed carry movement was burgeoning even before the attacks (there were eight "shall issue" states in 1983 - we're around 35 today). Municipal lawsuits against gun manufacturers, including Jay Benanav's here in St. Paul, were falling by the wayside by the score.

The Professor, writing on the Fox website, discusses the effect 9/11 had on the gun control movement:

"Properly understood, the gun control movement has always rested on certain essentially religious notions (indeed, though it is little publicized, much of the gun-control movement’s financial and institutional support comes from non-evangelical Protestant denominations). These notions are that violence – even against a criminal – is always bad, that ordinary people are not to be trusted, and that it is best to let the authorities look out for you.

In addition, the movement has always contained a rather strong undercurrent of hostility toward traditional American standards of masculinity, of which it sees the gun as a symbol.

It is here that things seem to have changed the most. Americans have learned that being harmless does not guarantee that they will not be harmed: in fact, it seems that terrorists (like ordinary criminals) actually prefer victims who cannot strike back.

The heroism of ordinary people in the aftermath of the attacks has also undercut the gun control movement’s elitist notions that ordinary Americans are dangerous, violent rubes who must be kept under control. (The absurdity of the chattering classes, with their exaggerated panic over anthrax mail and the ridiculous posturing of some peace advocates, has also served to give elitism a bad name). "

Read it all, natch.

Oy - Immensely busy weekend.

Oy - Immensely busy weekend.

Today looks to be busier still.

Bear with me...