Shot In The Dark

All About Oscar

All About Oscar - The Oscars are going on (not that I'm watching or anything), and according to Yahoo News, the producers are "worried" about activist stars hijacking the ceremony for a political stump.

Soooo worried:

The Academy Awards (news - web sites), attended by all of Hollywood's good and great and watched by up to one billion television viewers across the globe, presents a tempting soap-box for politically active stars who win awards.

"Hollywood egos cannot resist telling us what they think about what's happening," said awards expert Tom O'Neil.

Last year, liberal US documentary maker Michael Moore scandalised Hollywood and America when he lauched a vitriolic attack on US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) for waging war in Iraq (news - web sites) during his acceptance speech for his best documentary Oscar for his anti-gun film "Bowling for Columbine."

With free-speaking left-wing actors Tim Robbins and Alec Baldwin sure to take the stage this year as presenters if not as best supporting actor winners, and with equally combatant Sean Penn also nominated, organisers are bracing for possible fireworks as conservative Bush seeks re-election.

Robbins, a Green Party activist, fiercely opposed Bush over the war in Iraq along with his Oscar-winning partner and fellow 2004 Oscar presenter Susan Sarandon,

"Who knows what people are going to say," O'Neil said.

Hopefully, lots.

I say let 'em speak. Don't even shoo them off the stage after their 45 seconds (or whatever) is done. Let 'em talk til 4AM.

Because I think the traditional tirades from our out-of-touch, hothouse-bred, relentlessly-elitist "Hollywood Elite" are pure PR gold for conservatives; listening to the prate and gabble of these hamsters makes liberalism look just plain stupid.

If I were Terry MacAuliffe, I'd hire a team of saboteurs to shut down the network feeds from the show. Every minute the likes of Michael Moore and Tim Robbins are allowed to yammer causes a thousand votes to switch from "D" (or "G") to "R".

Not To Be Trusted

Not To Be Trusted - I'm listening to the Democrat candidates talking with Dan Rather right now.

They're talking about Haiti.

John Kerry: "Our president, as usual, waited too long to act". Hm. And then when he acts, you'll be there to heckle the decision in the Senate.

John Edwards: "We have to put a political process in place." Reporter: But Aristide is a terrible president! Edwards: "We need to put a process in place!". Reporter: But he was put in place by Clinton! Why aren't you criticizing him? Edwards: "But the President did what he always does - ignored it! The president talks about a doctrine of pre-emption. How about a doctrine of prevention?" Right. Like Democrats were so famous for doing in the 1990's.

Kucinich: "I'd create a department of peace".

I can' watch this anymore. Further proof - if any were needed - that none of these hamsters can be trusted with foreign policy.

UPDATE:

Edwards: "Do you think this country will be changed from Washington, DC?"

Kerry: "I believe we need a president with the experience to fight the tough fights".

Like you haven't with a single tough fight in your entire post-Navy career?

UPDATE 2:

Edwards is tearing into Kerry's inconsistencies. Just hammering him. He's using today's WaPo refutation of Kerry's alleged deficit reduction plan.

Kerry's responses sound patronizing, arrogant, and - added bonus - don't actually respond to any of the issues.

I hope the GOP strategists are watching this.

UPDATE 3:

Sharpton is really, really pissed. "If you want a two-way discussion, just say so!" He feels he's getting short shrift on the time, and he's right - but he's stopping just short of playing the race card.

Of course, when he starts to speak, he makes no sense.

The real question is, why is he (or Dennis Kucinich) here at all.

A Request

A Request - If you catch me taking blogging as seriously as these people, please send help.

The story? A bunch of liberal blogs got together to skew some elections.

Elections for what? A blogosphere popularity contest, essentially. Some of these guys put an awful lot of effort into driving up their hit counts; it's as if the characters in "Best In Show" were transplanted into a movie about bloggers.

Funny part is, the "scandal" centers around an old friend of the Northern Alliance.

It's a small world. Wear deodorant.

Simple Way To Filter Your Argument

Simple Way To Filter Your Argument - Brian at Boviosity directs us to this Tim Blair bon mot:

Lately, I’ve taken to employing the Patrick Cook gambit:
He merely asks: "Do you believe we are at war?" An affirmative answer indicates that conversation may proceed at an adult level. A negative reply requires Cook to excise large words, and to explain any difficult concepts using puppetry and mime.

You know ... it actually works. Try it.

Take Brian's poll, while you're at it.

Radio Daze

Radio Daze - One week until the Northern Alliance Radio Network debuts on AM1280 the Patriot.

The show website should be online next week.

This is going to be an interesting week.

Screed Alert

Screed Alert - I have an inordinately large screed about education in the hopper. I'm trying to figure out whether to put it out next week in 2-4 parts, or just dump the whole thing on the blog this weekend and see if Steven DenBeste tells me to quit horning in on his megaposting turf.

Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back

I spent a good chunk of the day in downtown Saint Paul the other day.

Yaaagh. See what happens when I don't come downtown for a couple of years? Everything goes straight to hell.

Now, Saint Paul has always - and by "always", I mean "since the forties" - been a city where downtown was just another neighborhood, rather than the center of the city. Saint Paul has been called "Fifteen small towns with one mayor", and it sorta works. Each neighborhood has more than just a look, feel and identity - and a history, and at the moment, some sort of outlook.

Some of them are always carved in stone. Highland is prim, proper, the home of DFLers who have liberalism the way some people have halitosis. The East Side is like an assembly line; immigrants and the dirt-poor come in at the bottom, in Swede Hollow and the ramshackle old railroad tenements on and below Dayton's Bluff, and as their prosperity and language skills evolve, they move up Payne Avenue, becoming blue-collar, working class Americans about the time they get north of Maryland, before sending their kids off to the U and moving to Battle Creek or Maplewood. The Midway echoes from the footsteps of generations of little kids, raised by sensible, frugal parents looking for good houses at bargain prices. Como has the same sedate gentility it had a hundred years ago.

But downtown?

I love downtown Saint Paul's quirky charms; little shops tucked into odd corners, the feeling that little or nothing had changed since the Depression when you walked into the Endicott or Pioneer or Hamm buildings. I always preferred the look and feel of downtown Saint Paul - at least the old downtown Saint Paul, with its limestone and pre-depression landmarks and shards of art-deco - to Minneapolis. Downtown Minneapolis is a too-blond, perfectly-primped, cold, distant, thirty-something marketing exec from Edina who drives a Lexus and knows all the waiters at Chino; Saint Paul is an Irish-Italian redhead from the East Side who takes the bus to her gig at the courthouse and can (and after three drinks, will) sing "It's Raining Men" at karaoke night without looking at the monitor.

But downtown hasn't fared well lately - and by "lately", I mean "for the last couple decades". A lot of the decay predated me by several decades; architectural history buffs tell me that once, before Urban Renewal, Cedar Street was a bustling, thriving avenue with lots of storefronts, the kind of thing that makes wandering around downtown a pleasure. Today, of course, it's a cold, windswept series of backsides of buildings, and downright unpleasant.

Even during the time I've been here - 18 years and change - the changes have been marked, and mostly depressing. Galtier Plaza - born and reborn and reborn again since it first opened right about the time I came to the Twin Cities - used to be the center of a thriving little destination; you could take the kids, grab a bite, go to the Farmers Market, see a movie, check out Mears Park, and on and on. The area had stores, bars, viable businesses...

...and today, all that's missing seems to be the tumbleweeds. The streets feel desiccated, drab, lonely.

Except for a few little slivers around the X, the Ordway and City Hall/Lawson, most of downtown reminds me of downtown Fargo in the seventies; in transition, but into what, we don't yet know.

The place is a monument to the folly of too much government intervention, of course; during the seventies and eighties, the St. Paul Port Authority built huge office buildings like the World Trade Center, just in time to serve a market that was vanishing. They built or financed or promoted a couple of "Festival Malls" - Galtier and Carriage Hill - that did about as well as any other festival mall (remember Riverplace, Saint Anthony Main, the Conservatory...). During the Latimer and Scheibel years, the Port Authority rang up immense debts and ran through development plans faster than Kos runs through polls. The Norm Coleman years were focused on big developments, like the Xcel, Rivecenter, the Science Museum and Lawson Commons, which did wonders for the little knot running from West Seventh up to about the Hamm Building - and not much more. The fundamental problems - that icky, cold, Stalinistic corridor on Cedar Street, the huge, uninviting, empty shell of the WTC, the misbegotten, unfriendly Town Square - still remain.

This last three months, I've been working in downtown Minneaopolis; despite the cold, artificial frenetics of the place, it's got throb and hustle and bustle to it that I love - and after ten years of working in the 'burbs, needed.

I wandered around downtown for a few hours, looking for any of the old landmarks, the ones that used to be part of my personal geography. When I first moved to the Cities, there were places to go: Shannon Kelly's for a good beer and some fun company; the Oz for sleaze; the Park Tavern for a classy night out. Now, after dark, there's nothing going on east of Saint Peter.

Later - when my son was three and my daughter was almost five, and my then-wife went back to work, I used to stay home with them in the morning (my work schedule was that flexible, for a long time). We had a season ticket at the children's museum; the ritual was to get down to the Childrens' Museum, play for an hour or two, walk through the skyway to St. Paul Center for lunch as we watched the super-cool fountain in the three-story atrium, then meander through Daytons or wander about Mears Park on the way to their daycare, by their mom's office.

Most of it's gone; the Children's Museum is there, but the food court, the dazzling fountain and the daycare are long vanished, replaced by empty offices. Town Square is a shell of its old self. There used to be signs of commerce, of a private sector...of life down there.

I had a bagel at Brueggers and watched who went by; a couple of vagrants, a few knots of government workers (you can usually tell them from private sector workers; the tight, strained gait, the institutional casual dress, the discomfort around the rabble), a bunch of people waiting on connecting buses. Not the signs of a place that's thriving. A few blocks away from Rivercenter, the place reminded me of sitting on the wrong side of the tracks in a South Dakota tourist town, during the offseason; too much depends on the tourists who come for the Reptile Garden Wild games for things to really feel secure.

There's going to be a revival in downtown Saint Paul, someday. There's too much great, quirky, retro, solid, lovely real estate to not attract some activity, someday. Someday, when the last cool, funky, prewar building in Northeast Minneapolis is converted to a Panera and the rents finally zoom out of reach, perhaps it'll be the new, New Uptown. Maybe it'll be the cheap incubator space for the next technological boom to come from the Twin Cities, whatever it is.

For now, it's just sad.

Death Cult

Death Cult - While part of Hollywood (presumably the part that's not busy counting receipts) is busy yammering about the "gore" in the Passion of Christ, another part of Hollywood seems to be quite blind to bloodshed.

"Monster", starring Charlize Theron as the title character, female serial killer Aileen Wuornos, is technically an excellent movie. Theron is a wonderful actress, the last woman on earth I'd ever have expected to say that about.

But, as Michelle Malkin notes, the movies has a subtext. The movie is, and traffics in, a rather abusive set of fictions, treating Wuornos as a victim both of her targets and of the system. The movie portrays many of her victims as johns, but...:

As her biographer Sue Russell noted recently, Wuornos ruthlessly gunned down complete strangers, some in the back as they tried to escape. "I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again," Wuornos coldly bragged. She fantasized about a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style life of crime, cunningly covered her tracks, and nonchalantly made off with her victims' belongings to bring home to her lesbian lover. The entertainment media routinely lump Wuornos' victims together as her "johns." But Russell concluded that "it's just as likely that some were simply good Samaritans lending a helping hand, since Aileen's modus operandi was to hitch rides, claiming her car had broken down. These men have been demonized in a way in which we would rarely demonize female homicide victims. And that has brought incalculable pain to some of their families."

But focusing on the devastation that Wuornos caused to her victims' wives and children wouldn't play well in Berlin or Berkeley. Championing the crime victims instead of the criminal wouldn't have allowed a starlet such as Theron to bask in the spotlight and further the leftist agenda.

That is why Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for "Dead Man Walking," but Charles Bronson never got a nod for "Death Wish."

And why a grotesque musical drama on the life of serial killer Andrew Cunanan is in the works, but not on the life of his most prominent victim, fashion designer Gianni Versace.

The death penalty is at a bit of a low ebb in the US right now, and I'm not entirely broken up about it. I don't especially support the death penalty - partly on religious grounds, partly because people are inherently corrupt and stupid, and juries and prosecutors are no exception to that rule.

But when I see who is on my side, and why, I tread very lightly on the issue.

Suicide - The left has

Suicide - The left has been gravely intoning the number of suicides among US troops stationed in Iraq. This German report is the latest. The suicide rate among GIs in Iraq is around 13.5 per 100,000 troops - higher than the 10.5/100,000 rate among stateside troops.

Tragic? Absolutely.

But to put it in perspective, David's Medienkritik notes that not only is the suicide in the peacetime German Army higher (at 17/100,000) than the US military's rate in theatre, but the suicide rates throughout society are vastly higher per capita in Germany (14/100,000), France (19/100,000) and Belgium (21/100,000) among many others.

Fast Eddie

Fast Eddie - When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, just getting started in the radio business, a new sportscaster came to Fargo's Channel 4, to backstop the legendary Jim Adelson. He was "Fast" Eddie Schultz, former college tackling dummy quarterback (if memory serves) for Moorhead State.

Jeez, he was awful. He couldn't pronounce the alphabet, and his sportscasts were like parodies of Chris Berman done by "English as a Second Language" students. But he had something going for him; he married Maureen Zimmerman, Channel 4's hot-shot anchor and the most beautiful woman ever to come from Jamestown, ND (and that includes Peggy Lee at her peak), became "Sports Director" at Channel 6, and spent many years as a chronic joke in the local media.

The joke? He could guess which side was left with only three tries.

It seems it's true with his political talk hosting career, as Schultz, a former Limbaugh knockoff, is garnering headlines as a turncoat liberal host:

Schultz, 49, a former college quarterback and sports broadcaster, likes to be known as a fighter. He once bolted out of the broadcast booth while doing play-by-play for a college football game to chase down a fan who threw a whiskey bottle at him. He once threatened to "bop" a "bozo" who was harassing him during a broadcast of a college hockey game. [Which would have at least gotten him out of the booth long enough for viewers to enjoy the game without his inane prattle - Ed.]

Some listeners have accused him of opportunism, saying he made the right-to-left switch for the chance to make more money.

"You can't believe anything Schultz says because you don't know what his core beliefs are," said Larry Astrup of Fargo, a former listener who describes himself as "so conservative I'm mad at Bush."

Simple - finding a schtick that sets him apart from the rest of the market!

Oh, he has another explanation, of course:

said his transformation from Republican to Democrat was genuine, and started when his wife-to-be, Wendy, asked him to meet her for lunch at a Salvation Army cafeteria - an experience that made him feel guilty about poking fun at homeless people.

So he was a compassionless moron. It spans all politics. Duly noted.

Notify the media.

Of course, one thing rings true about Schultz' conversion; the paranoia. Always, the paranoia:

Schultz said many conservative talk show hosts have "this big political engine" buying advertising to get them onto stations, making it difficult for him to break into bigger markets.

"I know I'm climbing a pretty tall mountain," he said. "I also know the conservative hard-right attack is coming. I know they're going to go after me any way they possibly can. My feet are on the ground. I'm ready for it."

On the plus side - he makes Sean Hannity look nuanced.

FMA, Part III

FMA, Part III - Jay Reding commented on my post from yesterday

In 2000, 2 million evangelicals stayed home on Election Day. That margin would have been enough for Bush to have easily captured the popular vote and would have cemented his lead in key states. With 20% of the electorate self-described evangelicals, this is a key voting bloc.

If Bush captures a majority of the evangelical vote, he will be reelected. The social conservative base of the GOP may be waning in direct influence and may be far more moderate now than in the past, but they still count for a lot.

Y'see, while I'm personally ambivalent about the FMA, this is what I'm wondering about; is this gambit more sly politics than plan for policy?

I like that idea better.

Bush's biggest achievement during the 2000 primary season was the neutralizaation of Pat Buchanan and his ultra-conservative wing of the party; when Buchanan left and took his (few) followers with him (briefly), he took the backbone of the hard-right with him. It was a safe bet; losing them wasn't like losing voters in the middle who would have voted for Gore - can you imagine a Buchanan supporter (at least, an informed one) switching to the Dems in 2000?

As Jay noted - many of them sat the election out. If Bush can get them to the polls, it's good news for him.

I suspect the FMA will serve its purpose...:

• Get out the evangelicals
• Mobilize the part of the base concerned more with judicial hyperactivity than with either evangelism or gay rights
• Force Kerry and/or Edwards to pick a position - one that neither (especially Kerry) can afford to take...

...and then go away once the election is over.

I don't think it's merely as cynical as "just good politics" - but it is good politics, all the same.

In the comments section of yesterday's post, Jeff Fecke noted that polls show support of the FMA to be lagging behind opposition. Let's leave aside questions of polling methodology and context for a moment (which I'm loathe to do - I do this sort of thing for a living); I seriously doubt the issue will be about the FMA by the time it actually gets to the people, especially the people the Administration is aiming for with this proposal. It'll be about curbing the runaway bench and defining what marriage is - as far as Joe NASCARDad is concerned, anyway.

And that's the part that really matters.

Obsessive Compulsion

Obsessive Compulsion - I really must learn to resist internet lists like this - in this case, from the unknown blogger Mary at Fresh Bed Goodness.

But until I do:

1.Name as it appears on your birth certificate: Mitchell Paul

2. Nicknames: Mitch, Greb, and (at one company) "The Highlander", because I've been around forever and you can't kill me unless you cut my head off, as well as my penchant for bagpipe music.

3. Birth Parent's names? Bruce and Jan

4. Number of candles that appeared on your last birthday cake? I can't remember the last time I actually had a birthday cake. I think I actually had a Lemon Supreme Pie from Baker's Square. It was yummy. I think it had one candle.

5. Favorite animal: (Tie) Madeline and Nosemarie, the family cats.

6. Tattoo? Almost got an anchor on my forearm when I was in Seattle back in college - but nope. Never will, either.

7. How much do you love your job or jobs? My day job, designing software? I love it - and I would even if I hadn't been on the beach most of last year.

8. Birthplace? Rugby, ND

9. Favorite vacation spot you have been to? NYC.

10. Ever been to Africa? No.

11. Stolen any traffic signs? I have never stolen a thing in my life.

12. Ever been in a car accident? Ooof. Yeah. Two that came to me, and one that was my fault (and fortunately, caused the other person about $10 worth of damage, while totalling my car...)

13. Croutons or Bacon bits? Croutons, especially if they're garlic-y.

14. 2-door or 4-door car? 4-door, sensible car.

15. Coffee? One a day. But it's from Dunn Bros.

16. Salad Dressing? Italian.

17. Favorite dessert? Lemon Pie.

18. Favorite Number? 8. It's so...even.

19. Favorite movie? Casablanca. I've seen it 34 times.

20. Favorite color? Green.

21. Favorite Holiday? Depends. For me? Thanksgiving. For the family? Christmas. For everyone? Easter.

22. Favorite Foods? The Iskender Kebab at the Black Sea Turkish restaurant.

23. Favorite day of the week? Saturday.

24. Favorite TV Show(s)? Most Extreme Elimination Challenge!

25. Favorite Toothpaste? Colgate Jack Daniels.

26. Most recently read book/magazine? Ghost Soldiers/Maxim (blush)

27. Perfume/Cologne? Lime Speed Stick.

28. Favorite scent? Walking downwind from Kincaids.

29. Favorite Fast Food place? Chipotle.

30. When was your last hospital stay? I had a smashed finger operated on on December 31, 1989.

31. How many times did you fail your driver's test? Never.

32. Where do you see yourself in 10 Years? Telling "Kos" to supersize my order.

33. What do you do when you are bored? Pick up an instrument and play. Usually guitar, although lately bagpipes are fun.

34. Last Vacation? Chicago last April.

35. Next Vacation? Park Rapids this June

36. Last concert? Heh. Springsteen, September of '02.

37. First thing you would buy with a million dollars? Pay off my mortgage. Then guy a Gibson Les Paul.

FMA, Part II; the Rope-a-Dope

FMA, Part II; the Rope-a-Dope Continues - Just One Minute thinks the whole FMA fracas is a disposable part of the Bush rope-a-dope.

So, Bush is half right idea on process - we want to keep this away from the courts - but wrong to support an amendment, and wrong to think that today's opposition to gay marriage will stand the test of time.

What he should have done is say that he opposes gay marriage, is willing to support (or at least, will not oppose) civil unions, and thinks this issue highlights the importance of electing a President who will appoint responsible Federal judges.

Based on the reaction of Tom DeLay, my guess is that we are seeing a bit of a Texas Two-Step here - having enunciated his principles, Bush will retreat, Congress will not act, and the FMA will take its place alongside the Flag Burning Amendment in the conservative retirement home.

Let's remember that Rudy Giuliani will be a prominent speaker at the Republican convention in New York City. It's hard to imagine that a gay-bashing convention is what Bush and Rove are looking for, and Bush did conclude his statement with a call for "kindness and goodwill and decency".

Can't say as I disagree.

(Via The Professor)

Big Day

Big Day - Yesterday was a huge day for the president.

Leaving aside the moral rights and wrongs of the issue, I think the Marriage Amendment is a can't-lose for the President. Most Americans across the political spectrum oppose gay marriage - even California rejected it at refererendum by nearly 2-1. Even the front-running Democrat candidates, Kerry and Edwards, are at least silent on it - as Medved put it yesterday, Kerry will court the votes of gay marriage supporters, while winking and nodding and not being especially broken up if the issue goes nowhere. So in solidifying his base, I doubt Bush has lost the vote of a single person that would have voted for him.

For conservatives, the last few months have felt like sitting in a trench, sweating out an enemy artillery barrage, wondering where the hell the morons in Artillery are. Yesterday's speech to the Republican Governors answered that. Damn, it felt good to have the campaign finally begin.

I plan on asking Rocket Man from Powerline - do the events of the last few days affect his pessimism about Bush's chances at all?

The Right Thing?

The Right Thing? - Gay Marriage is one of those things, like abortion; I have an opinion about it, but the issue intersects with my day-to-day life so rarely that it seems to be of only academic interest.

But of course, like abortion, the key issue isn't so much about whether gay people marry or get health benefits; it's about reining in the power of the Imperial Court.

The Times goes over the part that's, on the face of it, most controversial:

"The amendment should fully protect marriage, while leaving the state legislatures free to make their own choices in defining legal arrangements other than marriage," Mr. Bush said.

Determining whether the text of the proposed amendment would accomplish that, however, can require a close reading, to say the least. The amendment reads: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups...

..."Constitutions are interpreted over time," said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group opposed to the amendment. "You don't write a gamble like that into the Constitution."

Robert H. Bork, the conservative former judge and former Supreme Court nominee and a leading drafter of the amendment, called that argument "preposterous." He said that the text clearly restricted only courts, not legislatures. What is more, Mr. Bork said, the public debate over the amendment would determine how any court interpreted it. If voters approving the amendment believed it meant one thing, courts would be hard pressed to say it meant another.

Matt Daniels, a lawyer who founded the Alliance for Marriage and who is another drafter of the amendment, said the semantic debate was beside the point. "We, the group that drafted the text and introduced it into the House and Senate," Mr. Daniels said, "are fully open to minor changes to the wording to make it clear, explicit and unambiguous." "

This seems to be the major sticking point - some of my liberal friends believe (erroneously, I think, but I'm no lawyer) that this proposal would prevent civil unions; while the social conservative in me would applaud, the libertarian would not.

And I think the only case for gay marriage (as opposed to civil union) is purely libertarian. I've gone back and forth on this issue over the past two years, and while the likes of Andrew Sullivan make a few good arguments (not even the Catholic Church seriously treats marriage as procreative; most churches recognize divorce, which Christ condemned, dang the luck), nobody has yet attacked the idea, as old as civilization, that marriage is between a man and a woman and nothing else.

And as good as the arguments frequently are, they all seem to be filigrees around that one key, seemingly-immutable idea.

Make no mistake; I consider marriage a religious event. Civil "Marriage" is to me purely a contract - I object philosophically to the idea of a "marriage license", and think government should limit itself to enforcing contracts. I doubt I'd ever marry in a church that recognized the idea of gay marriage (on the off chance that I ever got married again anyway).

I also dislike the idea of noodling with the Constitution over trivial matters - but given the rampant, near-tyrranical activism of the courts, I can see the rationale for this amendment.

Politically? Well, that's fodder for a whole different post.

Uncommon Pusillanimity

Uncommon Pusillanimity - We all remember the POW/MIA movement, back in the eighties and early nineties.

"Never forget", they exhorted us.

The evidence seemed, at the very least, interesting:

What was the body of evidence that prisoners were held back? A short list would include more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam, all labeled inconclusive by the Pentagon; multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence agencies, all ignored or declared unreliable; persistent complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials (some of them made publicly) that live-prisoner evidence was being suppressed; and clear proof that the Pentagon and other keepers of the "secret" destroyed a variety of files over the years to keep the P.O.W./M.I.A. families and the public from finding out and possibly setting off a major public outcry.

And then - nothing.

Why?

Sydney "Killing Fields" Schanberg ties the disappearance of the issue to Kerry. Long money quote:

In the committee's early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

• He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo?from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst?reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

  Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies?but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

• Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."

• A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."

• The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W. developments. It was a huge issue at that time.

• Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their way home."

If true - and we'll see, although Schanberg's record of presenting stories that seem to horrible to be true is a good one - then this is a record of perfidy that the American people need to know about.

It needs to be followed up.

(Via Powerline)

Open Letter to the DNC

Open Letter to the DNC - Please, please keep putting Terry MacAuliffe on talk shows against Ed Gillespie.

I'm watching Today right now, and Gillespie is making MacAuliffe look like the lying, sniveling little thug he is.

Good tactic. Keep it up.

Heroism and Leadership

Heroism and Leadership - John Kerry and his supporters repeatedly insist that his stature as a Silver Star-winning war hero are positive proof that he's qualified to manage this nation's national security.

Let's leave everything aside for a moment - and by "everything" I mean the whole list, as Hugh recited it yesterday:

Kerry was wrong about the Viet Cong.

Kerry was wrong about the North Vietnamese.

Kerry was wrong about the Cubans in Grenada.

Kerry was wrong about the Sandanistas in Nicaragua.

Kerry was wrong about the Soviets and their reaction to Reagan's defense build-up.

Kerry was wrong about Saddam in 1991.

Kerry was wrong about Saddam in 2003.

Disregard it all, and ask yourself one simple question - is heroism itself a qualification for office, much less an assurance of competence at leadership?

About 15 years ago, I edited a draft manuscript of a WWII memoir by a local man who'd been an infantry platoon leader. He fought in the Hürtgen Forest - of six officers and 160 men in his company of 83rd Infantry Division that walked into the forest, he was one of two officers and 30-odd men that walked out. He was severely wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.

In the closing stages of the Hürtgen battle, the remains of his company was ordered to run across a couple hundred yards of open ground, under German fire, to seize a key objective. The author had dysentery - "Montezuma's Revenge" - so bad, and felt so sick, that he couldn't run. He walked across the open field, German fire snapping around him, too sick to really care if he got hit or not.

The colonel in command of the 330th Infantry Regiment saw this display from a nearby hill, and assumed that the author was exercising the most amazing coolness under fire and combat leadership he'd ever seen. The colonel wrote the author up for the Distinguished Service Cross, which came through channels as a Silver Star.

Because of a case of diarrhea.

If you're John Kerry, you'll call what I just said "an attack on veterans". Far from it. Heroism is, in many cases, a simple matter of guys plodding along and doing the right thing under unspeakable conditions, whether it's holding off an attack by oneself with a machine gun (like Audie Murphy), or walking into a blazing skyscraper, or cleaning out a Viet Cong position singlehanded (like Kerry) diving on a grenade to save the rest of one's squad, or walking forward under fire when your insides are turning to goo. Heroism is average people doing the unimaginable.

Does heroism itself make someone a leader?

Acts of heroism frequently involve people stepping far outside their own limitations to do things under the pressure of incredible, defining moments. It frequently involves the instant, irrevocable suspension of judgement to do things that no rational person would do, if rationality were called for.

Leadership requires qualities that may intersect with those of the hero on occasion - but are not the same thing. It requires both the ability to make tough, rational choices, and the ability to communicate those choices to people - even the choices that are counterintuitive. The great leaders are the ones that can convince the people to do the hard things; Churchill leading Britons to stand alone against a Germany that sought an armistice; Reagan leading the nation simultaneously from the disabling grind of stagflation and the lulling lie of detente; George HW Bush leading half a million men from dozens of non-involved nations to fight for a tiny principality halfway around the world; and his son, leading Western Civilization in a struggle that a good chunk of our own people stopped recognizing once the rubble was cleared from the Ground Zeros.

We need heros. Thank God for them.

A leader is a different thing altogether.

Kerry's heroism thirty-odd years ago didn't make him a leader. Far from it - he's the quintessential follower.

Bush may have never charged into enemy fire, silenced it, and lived to tell about it. But for three years he's stepped above and beyond himself and made the tough choices, and led this nation in a way that few people could - and convinced most of the people, rightly, that it is the right thing to do.

Or so we'll find out in about eight months...

The New Era

The New Era - In the mid-eighties, historian Edwin Luttwak - one of the world's foremost military historians - published "The Pentagon and the Art of War", a sweeping critique of the Pentagon of the era. Published in the wake of military failures in Vietnam, the Mayaguez incident), the Desert One fiasco in Iran and Lebanon, and the costly, clumsy success of the Grenada invasion, Luttwak's book questioned the structure and goals of the US military, up to and emphasizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The US military, from the JCS on down, had one overriding strategery; to preserve and protect the US military. The symptoms were everywhere, and they were awful, to the student of military history. Every military operation of any size was preceded by a protracted set of negotiations to ensure that all four services got their piece of the action; officers need combat time to ensure promotions, and officers of each service wanted their piece of the action, even when it was clearly inappropriate for their service to be involved.

As a result, operations like Grenada, Desert One and the Mayaguez incident became huge, bloated, combined-services operations, lumping units that had never trained together into task forces that were ill-suited to the mission; for example, there was no reason the Grenada mission needed the 82nd Airborne Division or the USAF; it was a mission tailor-made for the Marines.

This obsessive niggling over turf became a substitute for having a coherent national strategy; it became institutionalized in the form of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a group whose primary mission was more to negotiate the boundaries where military turf would be shared than to actually develop a coherent strategy.

Powerline points to an excerpt from Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Rumsfeld's War", and perhaps the best piece of evidence that that has changed under the Bush Administration:

Rumsfeld's instant declaration of war, previously unreported, took America from the Clinton administration's view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration's view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed.
This would be a global war, Rumsfeld said, and he planned to give Special Operations forces — Delta Force, SEALs and Green Berets — unprecedented powers to kill terrorists.

On July 22, [Rumsfeld] initialed a highly classified directive to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The Rumsfeld directive is just one page, but its impact was historic: The defense secretary changed the nature of Special Operations forces — and the Pentagon — by giving commanders the authority to plan and execute missions on their own with a minimum of bureaucratic interference.

And with that, 56 years of bureacracy-centered direction was officially declared dead (if not actually buried in terms of day-to-day operation).

Powerline and others have talked at length about Bush's doctrine serving as a national Grand Strategy. This snapshot illustrates it.

Read it all, of course.

Let Slip the Posts of School

Let Slip the Posts of School - Yesterday's post about David Rubenstein's op-ed in the Strib spawned a huuuuuge, somewhat dyspeptic piece on the reasons public education these days leaves me so - words fail me - depressed lately.

How huuuge? Since I'm not Steve Den Beste, I'm going to probably have to break it up over a few days.

The piece - or series, I haven't decided yet - will start tomorrow, if I can just make it sounds LITTLE less dyspeptic.

Which Begs The Question - If you make something less dyspeptic, are you merely making it more peptic?

Profiles in Illegitimacy

Profiles in Illegitimacy - Palestinians are demonstrating over the fence:

"Palestinians have challenged the legality of Israel's West Bank barrier before the World Court, telling the opening session that the vast network of walls and fences would deny them a viable independent state.

Israel stayed away from the U.N. forum's landmark foray into its conflict with the Palestinians, disputing the right of the court in The Hague to rule on the case.

Both Israelis and Palestinians tried to score propaganda points, staging demonstrations outside the court.

Israel says the barrier is just for security and cites a suicide bombing that killed eight people aboard a Jerusalem bus on Sunday as proof it needs it to keep out militants.

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip held protests in a 'Day of Rage' against what they call Israel's
Berlin Wall, separating many of them from their fields, schools and medical services."

Its the wall, of course - not the endless procession of suicide bombers.

From The Fringe

From The Fringe - The left-wing media is fond of one particular stereotype - the right-wing "Freeper" conspiracy theorist, tirelessly cranking out feverish theories about the liberal plots - conspiracies, dammit! - that make the world such an awful place.

I'd suspect they're fairly proud that they don't get much of a voice in their paper.

They'd be wrong - about everything but the politics, that is.

You'd think the Strib, equipped with the likes of Doug Grow, Nick Coleman, Lori Sturdevant and Syl Jones, wouldn't need to go outside the shop to hunt for paranoid, blinkered, insular opinions.

And yet, yesterday they did, with this op-ed by David Rubenstein, described as "a Minneapolis writer" whose article "is adapted from remarks he made at a public meeting on school closures last week", which begs the question, "if he's such a writer, why didn't they just make him write the thing, but I digress.

His perspective is not that of a parent:

I don't have a kid in the Minneapolis public schools,

...but merely that of the perpetual indignant

...but I don't like what's happening to them.

I'm angry at the district, too. But I do know that if school officials weren't talking about closing these schools, it would be other schools, or programs.

The reason is political. One political party now dominates, in this state and nationally. And that party basically wants to destroy the public schools. And in Minnesota it is succeeding. Closures speed the exodus and vice versa.

Now, we've been through this. Minneapolis is shrinking, and its school enrollment is shrinking even faster.

But to Mr. Rubenstein, it's not a matter of demographics. It's a conspiracy:

I can't say exactly why they want to do it. I believe it has to do with their idea of a free market, and their hatred of unions. But I do know how they are doing it.

They are destroying the schools by adding to their responsibilities but not likewise adding to their money.

It's about here you realize you're not dealing with a rational person.

Conservatives - the type even I lampoon - are all about taking away from the schools' responsibilities; if you listen to some of the duller specimens on "Garage Logic", the ideal is "Readin', Writin' and 'Rithmetic", a no-frills school just like the one room schoolhouses of the 1800s; no art, music or languages (although sports seem to get a pass with most of them).

It's the other side - the utopian, social activist left that took over the education academy in the past 40-odd years - that's added the extra mandates; sex ed, endless focus on diversity and multiculturalism, endless and unfunded mandates driven more by social agenda than by any educational goal.

To the conspiracy theorist, the most infuriating thing is that the truth is out there, and yet nobody will believe him!

I'm angry because the district is not saying it: Republicans are starving the school system. And leaving it up to the district to parcel out what's left and take the heat.

Why isn't the district saying it? Sometimes I think the district is like an abused woman who thinks that if she talks about what's happening, it will just make things worse. Maybe it's time to start talking.

So get this; the Minnesota Educational-Industrial Complex, after three decades of absolute free rein, and after decades of booming spending, finally had to go on a fiscal diet - not cuts, mind you, but smaller increases than they wanted - and they're crying "abuse?"

The Minneapolis Schools aren't an abused woman. They're a spoiled child, used to stomping its feet and getting its way.

Which might explain why drivel like this op-ed is being published.

Rubenstein hits on all the usual boogeymen:

If there are public school teachers who are not voting or are voting Republican, they should open their eyes and turn off their TVs and their AM radios. If there are parents who are not voting, it's time to start. And start talking about it. The Republicans are trying to destroy the public schools.

Mr. Rubenstein, unplug your MPR and throw away your Utne Reader. If you had any kids in school, you might realize that the system is doing a fine job of killing itself. This deathwish is both bigger than the Minneapolis public school system, and an integral part of the way the MPS runs itself.

More on this in a later post.

There are lots of these "overtaxed" rich people in Minnesota, and now they run it. And they are going to keep on running it unless everybody else gets real interested in politics.

More interested in politics than the Democratic Party or the Green Party are themselves. You have to wonder why they aren't outside these hearings signing people up.

Embarassment?

My message to the school system is: Maybe it is time to quit being shy when it comes to talking about what is going on. No more statements about "necessary cutbacks" without pointing out why they are necessary.

Right. Because if we really knew why the cutbacks were necessary - shrinking enrollment combined with - and in some ways, driven by - complete systemic failure, more people would recognize your post for what it is; a spittle-flecked rant with no bearing on reality.

I'll join Mr. Rubenstein in this sentiment, though. The public school are failing; that's pretty much the conservative cant. And no amount of money can save them, nor for that matter can endless DFL administrations or crazed focus on the Three Rs and reinstitution of corporal punishment, for that matter.

The public school system - and for that matter, most of the private school system - are failing because the very model they use for teaching is flawed from its very core, and is designed - whether intentionally or not - to leave the majority of kids out. It's failing because it not only ignores a number of key facts about human learning - it institutionalizes that ignorance, and even give people PhDs in the advanced practice of that ignorance. And - perhaps I'm being optimistic in a back-handed way - it's failing because its founding model is completely inimical to democracy. And when a system is that desperately flawed, you can no more "reform" it that you can polish a turd to a fine mirror sheen.

But that's not only a post for later this week - it's a digression.

As far as Mr. Rubenstein's op-ed is concerned - how many good, well-thought-out, well-written op-eds from the right were squeezed out to make way for the semi-literate, poorly-written (speech doesn't make good writing) rant of someone who's using the issue purely for political partisanship?

Rhetorical question, of course.

It's Got A Beat

It's Got A Beat - There was a time when music radio didn't bore me stiff.

That time passed long, long ago.

But just about the time I was ready to turn off all non-talk radio in town (and most of the talk shows are pretty awful these days, too), KQRS finally puts on something worth listening to.

"Little Steven's Underground Garage" - hosted by longtime E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt - is the most fun I've had listening to radio since KQWB in Fargo used to mix the Replacements and Judas Priest with gleeful abandon.

About time.

Nader

Nader - Lots of Democrats are upset about Nader's entrance into the race.

Not all conservatives are happy either.

My biggest worry - in this election, Nader will serve the same role that Pat Buchanan did in 2000, once he left the GOP; he'll provide a safety valve for the Democrats. Without the resources of the mass of birkenstock-clad True Believers of the Green Party backing him, his candidacy will be merely a place for the left to store its lunatic fringe.

And, as Joe at the Outpost noted, he could make Kerry seem positively centrist right at the time when the departure of Dean would otherwise remove Kerry's cover on the left (and Clark's exit opened up room for "slimy and inconsistent" charges). Nader serves as such a perfect lightning rod for "excessive leftism" criticism, it's almost tempting to believe Kerry's supporters are behind Nader's entry.

The Jobless Recovery - Now,

The Jobless Recovery - Now, as far as I'm concerned, the moment I got a long-term contract, the recovery was a jobful one.

Of course, I'm not the entire measure of the economy...

...well, actually, as far as life in the Berg household goes, yes, I am. The Clinton recession ended in November of '03. But for the rest of the households in this country, the mileage may vary. And the conventional wisdom is that this recovery is "jobless".

Fortunately, the Economist has the latest

...“offshoring” is certainly having an effect on some white-collar jobs that have hitherto been safe from foreign competition. But how big is it, really? The best-known report, by Forrester Research, a consultancy, guesses that 3.3m American service-industry jobs will have gone overseas by 2015—barely noticeable when you think about the 7m-8m lost every quarter through job-churning. And the bulk of these exports will not be the high-flying jobs of IT consultants, but the mind-numbing functions of code-writing.

Meanwhile, there is another side to the ledger. Instead of focusing on jobs lost to the globalisation of information technology, Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics in Washington looks at globalisation's power to reduce prices and so help spread new technology, new practices and job-creating investment through the economy.

She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production—all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance—was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.

Worth a read.

(Via Instapundit)

Overly Broad Brush

Overly Broad Brush - Longtime "Shot" correspondent Dexter Van Zile writes about my post on Christopher Lydon, who may be hosting a political blog show at MPR:

The man did some tremendous shows at WBUR. One of his shows on classical music was absolutely brilliant. I can’t remember the name of the guest, but I was listening to it in my car and as the commentator was describing a passage of music, I was stunned by the exposition. I am not kidding. I pulled over and listened to the damn radio.

If he ends up at MPR, it will be a good thing.

I've heard Lydon - he is actually fairly good. Much better than Lanpher ever was.

But I think you could put Sean Hannity into MPR, and the show he did would come out warped to the left.

Safer, Part II

Safer, Part II - Longtime "Shot in the Dark" corresondent Fingers - a fighter pilot - observed this about yesterday's posting on whether we're safer with Iraq free and Hussein in the bag.

Have you done anything on "where would you rather fight the WAR on terrorism, overseas in their battlespace or wait and fight it here in our battlespace?" Let's see, things blow up, bullets that don't hit what they're aimed at don't just evaporate (though you wouldn't be able to explain that to the Detroit residents who like to fire their weapons into the air on 'Devil's Night' (okay so I can't remember the name of 'the night' so pick me apart!).) so.....let me think.... we were able to stop the truck bomber from blowing up the White House ...except...he took out half a city block when we stopped him/her short of the intended target. -or- Several GIs were wounded today when they..... Oh, sorry, someone will now tell me that if we just stay home in the good old US of A that the terrorists will do the same and the threat will vanish!

And there's the big dichotomy on the "war on terror" between the Republicans and Democrats.

It's been said many, many times that the great difference between the parties re the War on Terror is that the GOP regards it as a military issue, while the Dems see it as mainly a law-enforcement and diplomatic issue.

Law enforcement, though, is inherently reactive. You'are always reacting to the enemy. You're always on the defensive - and that means the enemy always chooses when and where the battle will be. The enemy, whoever they are has the initiative. With most criminals, that doesn't mean much; crime is always with us, and even criminals have constitutional rights. But that means the battlefield will be here.

If your military is competent, you don't give the enemy that luxury. You seize the initiative. You hold the battle where and when it's inconvenient for the enemy.

Does Kos Know This?

The most important poll yet. All emphasis mine:

Here's a breakdown of the results:
-- 48% said, "I usually vote before work, and it's too late for that now."
-- 32% said, "I have not yet devoted enough study time to the issues and candidates."
-- 15% said, "I'm on the national Do-Not-Call registry, get lost."

The other five percent were equally divided between George W. Bush and "that Democrat named John."

The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus nine months.

Of course, if Kos (and his many sycophants imitators) treated polls appropriately, he's have no material...

Poison Harpoon

Poison Harpoon - Brainstorming points out this superb response by a retired Navy commander to Robert Byrd's specious criticism of the President's visit to the USS Lincoln.

The whole thing is great, and you need to read it all. I won't paste the whole thing...

...just this bit, which is a wondrous masterpiece:

"If you had spent some time in the service, instead of the Klan, you might understand the significance of that moment to all the men and women aboard the Lincoln, and indeed to all the men and women in the service who shared that moment vicariously. But you chose the bedsheet instead of the uniform, and so you don't.
I am half-tempted to move to West Virginia just so I could vote against you in your next election."

RTWT, natch.

Do What You Need To

The unnamed blogger from Fresh Bed Goodness plans to be the Northern Alliance Radio Network's first fan:

"Some of the boys in the Northern Alliance are getting their own show on the Patriot (1280). They'll have the 12-3 slot on Saturdays. Unfortunately, I'm more than 7 miles from Eagan and in the Mississippi River valley, so the Patriot doesn't come in for crap at our house. There's a Culver's in Eagan, I could stake out their parking lot for while, eat some custard, listen to the radio...mmmm, sounds tastes like a plan.

I think I know where to do our first remote...

(Via the Captain)

Can Minnesota Be Far Behind?

Can Minnesota Be Far Behind? - The New Mexico house just passed a law requiring a breathalizer interlock on car ignitions.

It would require the devices on new vehicles by 2008 and on used vehicles offered for sale by 2009.

Ignition interlocks prevent vehicles from being started when the driver is drunk.

The measure’s sponsor, Grants Democrat [what else?] Ken Martinez, says it would save lives.

He says putting ignition interlocks on every car, truck and commercial vehicle would shift the focus from punishment to prevention.

New Mexico already requires ignition interlocks for some convicted drunken drivers.

Opponents complain that requiring them on every vehicle would be costly to businesses and to the vast majority of citizens, who obey the law.

The bill now goes to the Senate.

Where, hopefully, it will die and disappear without a trace.

The Volokhs, however, do a fascinating comparison that shows the hypocrisy of those who favor such laws and trigger-lock guards on handguns in the home.

The O'Hair Paradox

The O'Hair Paradox - Reason's Tim Cavanaugh tells us why Christians need to be thankful for the legacy of Madeline Murray O'Hair.

One of many money quotes:

She chased religion into the private sector, and there it flourishes, through homeschooling, through church-sponsored schools serving every creed, in overtly religious programming on network TV, in countless "spiritual" bestsellers. Most or all of these would have been anathema in the era of big-tent Cold War liberalism; in an age where the individual’s duty to the state is no longer so clear, we live with them comfortably. Lately even some atheists have gotten into the act, demanding to be called "brights" and respected for their deeply held beliefs. Such a wild ending could only have been cooked up by a master storyteller, but God, as we know from His published works, has little appreciation for irony.

Was religion an overfed, smug, complacent institution before O'Hair? I wasn't there, but it'd be another of those post-WWII institutions that I'd love to try to study.

At any rate - read it all. It's worth it.

Who's The Villain Here? -

It was interesting to read the story yesterday of the LA teen who solved his own kidnapping by Googling his name for a class project.

His mother took him 14 years ago, as in many such cases, because the unthinkable happened: her ex-husband got custody:

"They were taking her child away, and she did what she had to do," said Goudreault's sister-in-law, Melissa Goudreault of Alberta, where the boy was living when he was snatched.

No, ma'am - she broke the law and deprived the child of his relationship with his father - a relationship that the courts in Canada, must have valued to an almost supernatural extent; fathers win custody in Canadian courts every bit as rarely as they do in the US.

Police said the boy's father in Red Deer, Alberta, had been granted sole custody of his son. But on a court-ordered weekend visit in 1989, Goudreault fled with the little boy, cops said.

Goudreault took the child on the lam to Mexico before settling in the Los Angeles area in 1995, police said.

Now, here's the part that frosts me; I just saw the piece on this story on the Today show.

The piece mentioned the basic facts - the Googling, the kidnapping itself. It then spent a long time going over what a wonderful person the neighbors thought she was, the two jobs she supposedly worked to get by, yadda yadda...

Unmentioned: She had illegally kidnapped her son, and deprived the boy of any chance of growing up with a father, to say nothing of the fact that his father had custody.

Police said the teen was upset his mother had been jailed. His grandmother said he may not want to return to Canada to be reunited with his father.

Fourteen years of brainwashing'll do that.

The father, Rodney Steinmann, 43, said he'd love to see his son. "I just think about him," Steinmann told the Edmonton Sun. "A conversation with him is a long time overdue. It would be a relief to ask him if he's okay."

Watch for the media - some parts of it - to portray this woman as some sort of folk hero, to manipulate peoples' sympathies. Watch for feminists to dredge up stories of abuse (conveniently without evidence). As the mother goes through what'll be a long, drawn-out extradition hearing, watch who's put on trial in the media.

I'm so mad could scream right now.

Firstest With The Mostest -

MPR - Johnny-come-latelies that they are - are horning in on the Northern Alliance's act, looking at Chris Lydon do do a national show about political blogs, according to the Boston Glob:

"It's just possible that Chris Lydon's current gig as a fill-in host on Minnesota Public Radio's 'Midmorning' show could lead to bigger things. According to spokeswoman Suzanne Perry, MPR -- which produces such significant national programming as 'A Prairie Home Companion' and 'Marketplace' -- is starting to think about developing a national show about politics and blogging that would be hosted by Lydon, the former host of WBUR-FM's 'The Connection.'

Filling Kacklin' Katherine Lanpher's shoes is one thing.

But the piece doesn't mention Lydon's feelings about going up against the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

'We're always exploring new national programs,' Perry said. Reached yesterday in Minnesota, Lydon said, 'First, it's not that cold. Second, there are real radio professionals [here].

Yup. We'uns all clean up reeeal good.

Third, they're wildly interested, as I am, in the Internet extensions of media.' "

Read: "It'll be like "This American Life", with Josh "ua Micah" Marshall replacing Sarah Vowell.

More as details warrant.

(Via Spitbull and Fraters)

Proving Negatives - We have

We have a number of officers who do recall seeing George Bush on duty in Alabama thirty years ago.

So watch for the moonbat left to start trotting out an endless stream of people who don't remember him - as in this piece in the "Memphis Flyer", that city's equivalent of the "City Pages":

"Two members of the Air National Guard unit that President George W. Bush allegedly served with as a young Guard flyer in 1972 had been told to expect him and were on the lookout for him. He never showed, however; of that both Bob Mintz and Paul Bishop are certain."

And they are certain of this because...?:

Recalls Memphian Mintz, now 62: ?I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with.? But, says Mintz, that ?somebody? -- better known to the world now as the president of the United States -- never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember.

Hm. I never met Bill Clinton, either - must mean he was never president.

So to the moonbat left, the word of someone who couldn't connect with someone who was on base once a month trumps the words of those who saw Bush on duty.

Next month - Atrios finds an Alzheimers patient who is certain George Bush doesn't even exist!

John Kerry

John Kerry - Have Your People Call My People - I love great oratory - so even if you leave out his chameleonlike, pusillanimous record of defense and foreign policy and his worse-than-Kennedy domestic record and consider the record on oratorical skill alone, he's the last person I'd vote for for President. Kerry is stultifyingly bad orator. George Bush - himself far from Reaganesque - makes him look Demosthenean.

So it's in the interest of cooperation that I offer this advice to the Kerry Kampaign; if you're going to try to turn the President's actions into cleveroid plays on words, you're going to need to do a lot better.

For example, you started with:

Instead of saying "start your engines", he should be starting the engine of the economy!

Left over from your prep school student body president compaign, no?

We can do better. To wit:

Instead of landing on an aircraft carrier, he should be landing on single-payer health care!

Instead of liberating Iraq, he should be liberating people from prescription drug payments!

Instead of watching stock cars, he should be regulating the stock exchange!

Instead of worrying about nukes in Iran, he be giving rebukes to Enron! [that's got kinda a Sharpton-y tang to it - Ed.]

Audience? The Senator needs your help, too. I know you won't disappoint.

Safer

Safer - One of the left's most pernicious slanders these days is that we're no safer now that Hussein is gone.

How do they want to explain this?:

Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts.

The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded dramatic evidence of China's long-suspected role in transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s, they said. The Chinese designs were later resold to Libya by a Pakistani-led trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, added the officials and experts, who are based in the United States and Europe.

The packet of documents, some of which included text in Chinese, contained detailed, step-by-step instructions for assembling an implosion-type nuclear bomb that could fit atop a large ballistic missile. They also included technical instructions for manufacturing components for the device, the officials and experts said.

This is important exactly why?

The package of documents was turned over to U.S. officials in November following Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction and open his country's weapons laboratories to international inspection. The blueprints, which were flown to Washington last month, have been analyzed by experts from the United States, Britain and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

So why do you suppose that happened?

If you answered "Because the UN negotiated for it", you're mistaken. They've been on the scene forever. Nothing happened until we deposed Hussein.

Suddenly, all sorts of dominos started falling into place. Had we never invaded Iraq, Libya would still be taunting the UN, and the Khan network would remain undetected.

How bad would that be?

the blueprints would have been far more valuable to the other known customers of Khan's network.

"This design would be highly useful to countries such as Iran and North Korea," said Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security has studied the nonconventional weapons programs of both states. The design "appears deliverable by North Korea's Nodong missile, Iran's Shahab-3 missile and ballistic missiles Iraq was pursuing just prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War," he said.

Such a relatively simple design also might be coveted by terrorist groups who seek nuclear weapons but lack the technical sophistication or infrastructure to build a modern weapon, said one Europe-based weapons expert familiar with the blueprints. While such a bomb would be difficult to deliver by air, "you could drive it away in a pickup truck," the expert said.

But other than that, are we safer?

If it puts a further hole in the notion that the UN is a competent regulator of such things? Yes. Honesty helps.

(Via Instapundit.com )

Better Living Through Steel -

Better Living Through Steel - Sometimes, I think I could dive into the study of American culture from 1945 to 1955 with a Lileks-like devotion. It's a period that fascinates me; for all everone talks about the way the world is changing today, there is really no period in our history that compares with the post-war period for pure social upheaval. Before WWII, maybe a quarter of Americans graduated from high school, and a tiny minority went to college; a huge percentage of American still lived in rural areas; there was no "youth culture". The computer, the TV, the suburb, the mushroom cloud, and that most unfortunate artifact abused today by inferior irononicist cartoonists, the Modern Guy.

This screed was brought on by finding this website, a page on Lustron Homes - a post-war line of prefab houses made of porcelain-clad steel that were billed as completely maintenance-free (and, according to their owners, still are).

So amazing - and so forgotten.

Hm. Another project in the "someday when I have time' hopper.

End Of The Beginning -

End Of The Beginning - Power Line notes the silver lining in a bad month for the President:

"The latest poll data, collected as always by the invaluable Real Clear Politics, show President Bush to be battered, but still hanging on after a dismal month. Polls conducted between Feb. 9 and Feb. 15 show, on the average, 50% approval and 45% disapproval.
It's time to start the campaign."

Definitely.

I think his NASCAR appearance was a good start. As long as perceptions of Bush are filtered through the media - as this past month, when the agenda was driven by their Kerry-driven exhumation of the National Guard story - he will fare badly. Now, though, he's moving around the media, and finally starting to go directly to the people, especially the masses in the Red states, and the more responsible, less-trivial Blue-staters for whom the War is an the issue.

Earlier this week, some of the left-bloggers were taking a long hit off the Kos bong, looking at a few polls and starting to measure the White House doors to see if they can fit Kerry's coiff through without damage.

Not so fast, folks. This thing hasn't even begun.

National Service

National Service - Hugh Hewitt performed this nation a great service last night by playing the tape of John Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Driving home, I was dumbfounded - I'm sure my jaw was hanging slack below my mouth as the Lowry Tunnel gave me a moments' reprieve. The lies. The cynicism - soldiers (and sailors) just don't do that while their "comrades" are still in harms way, or in POW camps. It has consequences, as Hewitt noted:

Paul Galanti learned of Kerry's [1971] speech while held captive inside North Vietnam's infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' prison. The Navy pilot had been shot down in June 1966 and spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war."

"During torture sessions, he said, his captors cited the antiwar speeches as 'an example of why we should cross over to [their] side.'"

"'The Viet Cong didn't think they had to win the war on the battlefield,' Galanti said, 'because thanks to these protesters they were going to win it on the streets of San Francisco and Washington.'"

"He says Kerry broke a covenant among servicemen never to make public criticisms that might jeopardize those still in battle or in the hands of the enemy."

"Because he did, Galanti said, 'John Kerry was a traitor to the men he served with.'"

"Now retired and living in Richmond, Va., Galanti, 64, refuses to cool his ire toward Kerry."

"'I don't plan to set it aside. I don't know anyone who does,' He said. 'The Vietnam memorial has thousands of additional names due to John Kerry and others like him.'"

Elder from the Fraters says it best:

Hearing Kerry's testimony has also gotten my political blood boiling. This SOB should must be beaten (and beaten badly) in November. You want to fire up your conservative base Mr. President? Air this testimony from now till the election.

Absolutely. This stuff is chilling.

And what's more chilling is that there is no evidence that Kerry's changed in any substantive way. Hewitt notes:

I am more concerned about his judgment today than his judgment of 33 years ago. Kerry made his statement at the age of 27, after a first run for Congress, and his career since has been an unbroken campaign to neuter the American military though he would deny this from dawn till dark. He does not understand that America has real enemies today that won't play by his rules any more than he understood communism in 1971. He just doesn't get it. Period. His honorable service and his heroism in no way covers the terrible judgment he has displayed since he returned from the battlefield.

Hugh, it's worse than that.

Nobody can quibble with heroism - and thank God for our nation's heroes, people who will fly halfway around the world to topple a tyrant, or charge into a blazing skyscraper, or attack a houseful of Viet Cong, as Kerry did. But heroism and day by day rational, reasoned thought are two different things (although they can overlap), and in Kerry's case the two diverge drastically. We conservative pundits owe it to this nation to make sure everyone knows how drastically they diverge.

Jared from Exultate Justi cites a Krauthammer piece that explains it well:

The Democrats want to make the issue one of biography. It is, after all, no contest. Kerry has his Vietnam medals; Bush can barely produce his National Guard pay stubs.

...The Democrats simply did not understand that. They lost big. In 2002, past heroism was not enough. In 2004, it might just be. Why? Because Sept. 11 is fading.

The memory is still present enough in the national consciousness that the country demands someone minimally serious about national security. Dean collapsed because when people took a close look at him, he failed the midnight, red-phone, finger-on-the-button test. But the memory of Sept. 11 is now distant enough that, unlike in 2002, biography alone might be enough to meet the "seriousness" test.

Lucky for the Democrats. It is hard to see what Kerry has to offer beyond biography. The issue of our time is the war on terrorism. Bush's strategy throws out the old playbook on terrorism — the cops-and-robbers, law-and-order strategy of arrest and trial followed by complacency — and takes the war to the enemy. Kerry says terrorism is "primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement operation" — precisely the misconception that had us waking up on Sept. 12 realizing that while the enemy was preparing for war, we were preparing legal briefs for grand juries.

In terms of moral courage - sticking by his having convictions, Kerry makes Bill Clinton seem, in retrospect, like Winston Churchill.

I was going to work against Kerry no matter what. But I'm going to put that much more into it now. It's not political any more. Putting this hamster in office would be the greatest disaster for this nation since Jimmy Carter and the Iranian Hostages.

Empty Suit

Hewitt also linked a wonderful piece from USA Today, by Judy Keen, that did something no Democrat seems to want done; analyze John Kerry's voting record:

Kerry and his advisors express confidence," writes Balz, "that his background as a decorated combat veteran in Vietnam and a voting record that occasionally deviated from liberal positions shield him from such ideological pigeonholing." Hard to hide 6,000+ votes over 19 years in the U.S. Senate, especially when the total of those votes,as scored by the Americans for Democratic Action, put Kerry to the left of Teddy Kennedy.

Keen's piece picks up on a Howard Dean point about John Kerry: He has done nothing but talk on Capitol Hill: "Dean's campaign did the research and e-mailed the results to reporters: Kerry has sponsored 371 bills. Nine became law and six of those were more ceremonial, such as renaming a federal building, than substantive. The other two bills related to marine research and one providing grants to women who own small businesses."

Kerry may look like a senator, but he hasn't acted like one.

Remember when the Dems were running the frivolous Mark Dayton against Rod Grams in 1990? The Dems claimed that Grams, a former TV anchor-turned-Republican politician, was an empty suit (a hilarious claim coming from the vacuous Dayton). But it looks as if Rod Grams, in one term in Washington, sponsored more, and more important, legislation than John "Gravitas" Kerry has in his entire interminable career.

Did I Jump Or Was I Pushed

Was it the ad featuring the grotesquely-misshapen rodent heads [it's a 1 meg Flash6 download] singing the gratingly-out-of-tune jingle?

Or was it Fraters Libertas' team coverage of the story that did it?

I don't know. But I did have a Quizno's sub last week. And all I can say is this:

Those ads would be a lot more effective if they weren't plugging a product that tastes like grilled styrofoam basted in expired library paste and ketchup.

That is all.

Billions of Years of Evolution...

(which I firmly believe to be not in any way discongruous with the story of Creation, but that's a separate post)...

...tens of thousands of years of human development...

...hundreds of years of focus on the advancement of human technology...

...fifty years of staggering progress in data processing...

...a generation of quantum leaps in the democratization of the access to that technology...

...allows me to sit with my laptop at the Rock Bottom enjoying a lunchtime root beer as I blog.

Just think; had Algore won the 2000 election, I'd probably be walking behind a mule pushing an iron plow right now.

OK. Too silly. Back to work.

Blast From The Past -

From today's bleat:

You want to know why we invaded Iraq in 2003? Go back and read the papers in 1992. And you’ll find this quote:

“’If they’re such whizzes at foreign policy, why is Saddam Hussein thumbing his nose at the rest of the world?’”

Albert. Gore. Junior.

'nuff said.

Measure Of A Blog

Measure Of A Blog - I really enjoy doing this blog.

Now, for most of the last few months, I've been measuring a "good day's work" on this blog by one metric; does my day's output get to the hit counter (the little blue number way down in the right margin of this site, currently hovering in the 60,000s).

Reading over the last few months, I realized - that's a lot of stuff. Given that I have some new projects coming online, and work and family aren't getting less demanding, and that reaching that hit counter is (until today, the hit counter was below the list of archive links, which is getting longer every week), I've decided to take action.

So - I'll still write down to the hit counter every day. But I moved the archives down below the counter.

Sure, it's cheating. I'm drunk with power.

Blogless and Desperate! - What

Blogless and Desperate! - What do you get when you combine two hot trends?

In the case of blogs (hot trend!) and urban singles (hot trend!), you get dateblogs (Not a trend).

Both of the Twin Cities' major dailies are running dateblogs - blogs hosted by people who are dating. And, might I add, dating, dating and dating.

The Pioneer Press' "Ruby" was in the business first - her "Single In The City" "dating weblog", which reads more like an advice column, has been around about nine months - and since she's a PiPress staffer, she's the better writer of the two. She actually offers the occasional insight, to the extent that any twentysomething has anything useful to say about dating.

She is also waaay too obsessed with clothes; you could make a fun drinking game called "Ruby's Clothing References" ("Every hip clothing reference, take a hit and pass the tall slammer around. If she refers to turtlenecks, whoever holding the slammer has to chug it!"). She is also, unfortunately, a bit of a bigot - as seen in this coment about a fling with a coast guardsman:

Unfortunately, it was doomed from the start – he doesn’t live in the Twin Cities and had no plans to move. The radical Republican slant made me kinda seasick, too.

...or in this response to reader email:

Relationships aren’t for everyone, and that’s OK, but if I wanted to live with that much unfounded fear, I’d vote for Bush .

And if your potential date wanted to be around someone who brings so much bitterness and political anger to the table, Ruby, he'd get jiggy with Rachel Corrie. Except she's dead. But I digress.

The Strib, on the other hand, was good enough to hire a regular guy - or so he seems, from his writing style.

But the anonymous blogger from "Wrecked in the Cities" (I'll kiss the editor of the first newspaper dateblog that doesn't use a play on "Sex in the City" for its title. Figuratively, i mean) could stand to relax a bit:

My date blog is starting to feel like a political campaign. While I am waiting for the results to come in from one speed-dating event, I am off meeting people at another.

Speed-dating is creeping into my dreams. Last night, I dreamt that I met enough people to place third in the Minnesota Caucus. According to the Zogby results, I would have placed second if I had done better among the NASCAR demographic.

That'll teach me to doze off to CNN. Still, it's becoming apparent to me that I need a break from speed dating. And fast. Before this blog gets weirder

Don't worry, buddy - your blog's not wierd. It reads like the diary of every guy who goes back into dating after a long time out of the racket; it reeks of desperation at every turn. "Am I ever going to find someone who really loves me, ever again? Or am I just another desperate, dateless, lonely loser?" Then denial ends, and you realize "Yes, I am". Then you relax, start enjoying yourself, and become someone that a woman who's not every bit as much a desperate nutjob as you are (if only temporarily so, for both of you) might like to be around.

I'm still in stage two, myself. Hang in there, buddy. And watch out for that Ruby chick. She's got all sortsa baggage, and oy, does she gossip.

Core Incompetency

In this space, I frequently advise liberals "never, ever try to write about defense, or anything military in nature. Your ignorance doesn't just harm your credibility; it makes you look like a laughingstock".

We need to add "Disaster preparedness" to the list.

Doug Grow writes about the Hennepin County Sheriff's department's "Homeland Security Unit". Grow snarks:

Hmmmm. The sheriff of Hennepin County with his own Homeland Security Unit. Is this necessary?

By way of proof, Grow cites Henco commissioner Mike Opat, (D - North Minneapolis)

Commissioner Mike Opat was the Hennepin County Board chairman in December and opposed McGowan's request. Opat, who has been replaced by Randy Johnson as board chairman, said he was surprised when he learned of the county's new role in the war on terror.

"I don't know the details of what he has in mind, but we have the FBI, the Secret Service, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the National Guard already," Opat said. "I have to wonder where's the value added."

Now, Grow would seem to answer the question himself earlier in the piece, with the example of a similar unit in Ramsey County:

People in Ramsey County already are sleeping better because Sheriff Bob Fletcher has established a Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit. (Seriously, that's what it's called.) Among other things, Fletcher's 10-member unit kept an eye on the Ice Palace leading up to the recent NHL All-Star Game. (Really. This is true. Members of the unit were stationed in an undisclosed building near the Ice Palace.)

Grow notes:

He says his unit will be trained in dealing with nuclear, biological, chemical and explosive weapons. He also said his unit will play a key role in training and coordinating efforts with other law enforcement agencies in the county and state.

Note Grow's snide postironic snarking. Yeah, Doug, I guess I do feel a bit better knowing that if someone finds a dirty bomb in Saint Paul, my sheriff will be on the scene going all Buford Pusser on the perps, while across the river Mike Opat is still waiting for the FBI, the Secret Service and the National Guard to return his phone calls.

Grow notes:

Yes, all of this sounds like what the FBI's Terrorism Task Force already is supposed to do.

Classic Grow; ensure you're dependent on the highest possible level of government.

Note to Doug Grow; What should the people of Hennepin County do while waiting for the FBI to show up in the event of a problem? Wrap themselves in back issues of the Strib?

What If They Had A Strike, And Nobody Came?

Metro area bus drivers are getting ready to strike:

"Metro Transit workers overwhelmingly rejected a final contract offer on Monday from the Metropolitan Council and gave union leaders the authority to call a bus strike to strengthen their bargaining position.
Before drivers could idle buses, the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005 would have to file an intent to strike notice with the Bureau of Mediation and the Metropolitan Council.

If memory serves - didn't they strike about ten years ago?

Wasn't it a disaster?

Just checking.

Suffering Fools

Ordinarily, I ignore Counterspin, a blog by an anonyblogger named "Hesiod". His stuff has all the spittle-flecked consiracy-mongering cachet that you'd expect to find on Democrats.com, but none of the writing talent [file under damnation by faint praise - Ed.]

But I've seen a few otherwise decent people cite this piece of bilge attempting to respond to last weeks' WashTimes op-ed supporting the President's record in the Air National Guard.

He starts bad:

Ed. How ****ing stupid does this guy think we are? RICHARD NIXON was President in 1970-1971. Not Johnson].

This involves a bit if something called "History", "Hesiod". I'll write slowly.

President Johnson made a decision not to call up the Guard to serve in Vietnam. The Guard is very closely tied to mainstreet USA. He didn't want that - as someone else pointed out, when a Guard unit suffers a casualty, a whole town feels the pain; when a draftee gets hit, one family suffers. Politically, it was an easier decision for him. It turned out to be disastrous for the military - which is why after Vietnam the military adtopted the "total force" concept, meaning that to deploy oversease the military had to have Guard and Reserve units involved. That way, the political leadership would have to make sure they really thought a war was politically worth it before they went into action.

As Nixon's goal was to leave Vietnam, there was no reason to call up the Guard en masse while Bush served.

Now - some air guardsmen were called up individually to go to Vietnam, and I believe a few units flying aircraft useful in Vietnam (attack planes, transports, etc) may have been mobilized. Other pilots volunteered to go - and according to Campenni, Bush volunteered for the program to send ANG pilots to Vietnam, but he and his unit flew a plane that was not suited for use in Vietnam (neither an attack plane like the F-100 and F-105, nor a capable dogfighter like the F4). As it would have taken a year to re-train him in a new plane, one not supported by the unit to which he was assigned, and the Guard wasn't accepting less-experienced pilots like Bush at that point (the war was winding down), there was no purpose in him going.

Reading the rest of "Hesiod"'s rant is an exercise in self-control. For example, on Col. Campenni's remarks about the liberal strawman about Bush not passing a drug test, he says:

[Ed. Another bald-faced lie].

Hm. A thoughtful retort, that. But Hesiod unaccountably fails to tell us why this is a "bald-faced lie". It's the word of an Air Force colonel against that of a spittle-flecked rantblogger.

"Hesiod" also cites another rantblogger who claims Bush wasn't a good pilot. Whether it's true or not (and I doubt it - the Air Guard could afford to be selective at that time, with the Air Force being downsized and lots of Regular pilots looking for part-time flying billets), I have to ask - so what? How far do we move the goalposts, here? As each layer of the smear is debunked, the moonbats try to piece together another, with the full connivance of the media. What's next? He served, he wasn't AWOL, he was in Alabama, all credible and documentary evidence says he was a decent pilot... At this rate, by October the moonbats will be attacking him for having shot down no Russian nuclear bombers?

It's not that Mr. "Hesiod" totally abjures the concept of "evidence", of course. He prints an email from a World War II veteran who, while not addressing any of the points in either Lt. Bush or Lt. Kerry's military records, does manage to make himself sound a mentally incontinent Democrat zealot. Proof enough for "Hesiod" and those who consider him anything other than a tinfoil-hatted crackpot? Perhaps. Not for the rest of us.

This par for the course for Mr. "Hesiod", of course - as we saw in this piece last fall, where we were told Algore would have been a better president because he's a clairvoyant superhero.

I got this link from Flash at Centrisity. I like to pass on bits of wisdom to newer bloggers; pick your sources carefully. "Hesiod" is to credibility as McDonald's is to food.

Watch the Spin

The media will spin the news of the terrorist attacks in Fallujah as a defeat. So will every half-witted leftyblog.

And the story sounds gnarly, indeed - many Iraqi police killed, some prisoners released in a classical commando raid:

It was unclear how many attackers there were. But [Iraqi police commander] Hammad and other Iraqi police and military officials said the attacks all began about 8:15 a.m. with a cascade of rocket propelled grenade and machine gun fire at the five different locations. Fighting continued for nearly an hour.

Pretty scary stuff, that.

It's about here that the less informed leftybloggers will start crying "quagmire".

Not so fast, though:

No American troops were involved in the fighting. Officers from the 82nd Airborne Division stationed a 10-minute drive away could hear the battle clearly. They offered help but the Hammad said it wasn't needed. The Americans did provide additional ammunition and weapons, including light machine guns.

After the battle, soldiers at the civil defense base proudly displayed a light machine gun and a pair of rocket propelled grenade launchers they had captured from the attackers. Thursday, insurgents fired a pair of rocket propelled grenades at this same base while Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, was staging an inspection. Abizaid was unhurt.

The Iraqi police got beaten up. And then they hit back.

They took worse than they gave, but - and this is the important part - they didn't buckle and run. They told the 82nd Airborne to hold off. And they did the job themselves.

And that is a key step toward victory; when the US can leave Sunni towns like Fallujah behind, and the locals will fight the Islamofascist scum as hard as we do.

It's not a victory; you can't win too many victories when your ratio of losses is 5-1 against.

But as the Iraqi cops win a few more, and learn how guerrillas are fought - and remember, only the enemy's first team does these sorts of raids - the body counts will straighten out. And so will the situation.

Belmont Club put it well;

That when dying and bleeding, beset by the flower of terrorism, with pistol to set against automatic rifle and grenade, the Iraqi police did not ask for help from 82nd Airborne. They asked for ammunition.

If John Kerry were president, these men would be human meat in the Hussein sausage machine.

Dadublogger

Dadublogger - Last week, in a note about my piece on Nick Coleman's column about school closings, King from the SCSU Scholars quipped "I'm not going to be the only edublogger in the NA for much longer, at the rate Mitch is going. ".

Thanks, King! But my only qualification as an edu-blogger is having two kids in school...

...or so I thought, until I read this piece in SCSUScholars, which brought back memories of the one semester I taught, as a community faculty member, at a MNSCU university.

One of my more interesting experiences was my exposure to the InterFaculty Organization (IFO), which is the MNSCU teachers union. When I signed on to teach, I was given the option; join the IFO as a full voting member for $112, or join as a "fair share" member for $100. I figured it was worth being a full member, if only because forevermore I could tell my DFL friends while debating "are you actually a union member? No? Well, i am, you scab!"

Now, I'm not clueless about the life of the teacher and the college professor. My dad has taught at high schools and colleges for the last 40-odd years, some of my best friends are professors, and I know it's not all easy. That being said, I doubt anyone's confused it with a sweatshop.

It was at faculty orientation that I learned different. The school's IFO steward - a skinny English prof who looked a bit like Don Knotts via James Taylor - visibly seethed with anger when he talked about the recent negotiations, teeth at one point gritted when he described the Regents' negotiations, as if he were Cesar Chavez addresing a band of Mexican farm laborers rather than a group of well-padded, ultra-educated Midwesterners. I looked around - the faculty were nodding along, although to be fair I don't know if they were nodding with him or nodding at him. I fully expected him to lead us in a Wobbly Woody Guthrie song before he left the podium.

All by way of saying, the IFO is not without its agenda, and those agendas fit comfortably with all our other teachers unions.

King from the Scholars reprints Scholar Dave's letter to the IFO regarding their current letter writing campaign:

I share with you my dismay at the stance taken by (and even the existence of) MnSCU. Since its inception I have noted:

• a serious "dumbing down" of academic standards toward mediocrity at what used to be our flagship state university here in St. Cloud,
• a growing siphoning of taxpayers' dollars away from our students to fund a largely redundant and ever burgeoning administrative bureaucracy in St. Paul,
• evidence of finger-pointing between the Chancellor's office and SCSU's Administration with respect to accountability for the settlement of lawsuits,
• a failure to establish quantitative goals against which progress can be assessed,
• an alarming and growing collectivist bias toward micro-managing our local affairs (down even to the level of seeking to design our university's transcripts),
• an apparent lack of respect for the unique talents and efforts that university professors bring to our profession, and
• an apparent unwillingness to bargain in good faith.

Over the past two weeks I have expressed these feelings in two separate e-mails that I sent to the IFO (action@ifo.org). My hope was that they would be added to you website's list of comments ...

My first question, Mr. Brown, is why have my comments not yet been posted?

Read the whole thing - and, in fact, if you're concerned with education at all levels, you owe it to yourself to read the Scholars daily.

Lard From The Front

Right after 9/11, my pal Mark the Graphics Guy and I were walking around Richfield discussing responses to the government's call for "unconventional responses to terror". My idea; a "sprinkler system" on airliners and other public transit that could, in an emergency, spray high-pressure, liquified pig fat over everyone on board the plane. Pigs are, of course, trayf in Islam; a good, pious Moslem is supposed to go to an Imam if they come in contact with pork or pig byproducts, and get purified; if they die before this is done, they end up in Hell.

Like most of my "comic" ideas, I find I can't make it up fast enough, as we see in this piece Mark sent me:

A prominent Israeli rabbi has proposed hanging bags of pig fat in buses to deter Muslim suicide bombers who may want to avoid contact with an "unclean" animal, an Israeli official said on Thursday.

The idea -- suggested by Rabbi Eliezer Fisher, a rabbinical judge, in a letter to police -- signaled the extremes to which some Israelis may be willing to go to stop Palestinian bombers who have killed hundreds of Israelis in recent years.

Judaism, like Islam, considers pigs unclean. But the ultra-Orthodox rabbi has ruled that special dispensation can be given for placing bags of lard in buses and public places in an effort to prevent attacks.

Of course, suicide is also strictly forbidden in Islam, as is the wanton killing of innocents. These strictures never affected the intifada or the 9/11 hijackers, either.

But it's always nice to be two years ahead of the curve...

Trying To Spin Defeat

A number of leftbloggers, overwhelmed by this week's avalanche of documentary evidence of Bush's service in the Air Guard, have resorted to punting to a screed by Calpundit that, supposedly, picks holes in the White House's doc dump.

I was going to fisk Calpundit within an inch of his life - and I still may, if time permits - but Baldilocks, a USAF Reservist herself, does it better.

Money quote, including a pull from Calpundit's Kevin Drum:

…..the mainstream media needs to at least understand what evidence is currently available and what its possible interpretations are.” [Bold mine]

Why am I not surprised to find out that the “mainstream media” cannot manage to dig up one of their number who is/was a Guardsman/Reservist? (I can help them: FoxNews reporter Greg Kelly is a Marine Reservist. Wonder if he’s been asked about this matter? Heh.)

Interpretation? What is there to interpret? The document shown isn’t some obscure scroll written in a long dead language, found during an archeological dig at the foot of the Himilayas. It’s an objective document showing the amount of attendance points that President Bush earned during the last part of his ANG stint--the part that a certain segment of the population just can’t get out of their minds.

Read it all, natch.

Gack -

Gack - Slept through alarm.

Blah.

More later.

A Guy Thing...

I have a son. He, along with my daughter, is the center of my life.

How much the center are they? Well, y'know how Lileks goes on and on about Gnat? Well, picture that, only for a total of 22 kid-years (32 if you count the stepson).

That's a lot of centering, no?

I'm not so worried about my daughter. She's 12, and she takes after me, especially in terms of the stubbornness of rthe Scando-Scottish heritage we visibly and temperamentally share. She's like a little pit-bull. She'll do fine in this world - especially because, while the world is a tough place for a girl, I doubt there's ever been a better time to be a woman on this planet in terms of things that really matter, things like liberty and economic options and being able to follow one's dream (shut up about partial-birth abortion, already).

It's my son I worry about the most. He turned 11 last week. Soon comes the hormonal jungle of the teenage years. I've been through them before - I have a stepson from my ex-wife's first marriage (Note to Montel Williams' producers: I should be available for a day around mid-month). And it's lousy time to be a boy.

This is not a whine. Yeah, it's a wierd time to be a male of any age, but if you basically agree that all of humankind is created equal, then there's really not much about women's equality that fazes you. I've worked for female bosses as well as male - and both genders have equal claim on boundless idiocy and stupendous genius.

But it's different for boys these days. It's kind of scary. It should scare all of us.

A while ago - sometime after I got out of high school, and before I started raising kids in 1990 - the educational-industrial complex decided that "boyish" behavior was a bad thing. You've heard the horror stories; huge portions of what used to be called "normal boyhood behavior" has been declared politically incorrect by a feminized Educational-Industrial Complex.

Christina Hoff Summers first gave voice to the backlash, with her classic "The War Against Boys", a book you need to find and read and act on, if you value the sanity of your male children.

In a Boston Glob editorial, Ms. Hoff Summers summed up the way the world is turning:

The young boys are casualties of a movement that scapegoats men and boys and seeks to protect women and girls from what Gloria Steinem calls the ``jockocracy.'' Such feminists as Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem believe that ours is a sexist society that wages an ``undeclared war against women'' (Susan Faludi's subtitle to ``Backlash''). Such feminists think most adult males are incorrigibly sexist and that boys must be retrained - the earlier the better.

Nan Stein, a director at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, refers to boys who chase girls in the playground and flip their skirts as ``perpetrators'' and ``gender terrorists.'' Sue Satell, a sex equity expert in Minnesota, justifies strong harassment policies for children as young as 5 because ``serial killers tell interviewers they started sexually harassing at age 10 and got away with it.''

While the boys need reeducation, the girls need all the help they can get to survive in the ``patriarchy.'' Consider the girls-only holiday ``Take Our Daughters to Work Day,'' an annual event organized and run by the Ms. Foundation.

Reacting to growing protests over the boys' exclusion, the Ms. people decided to initiate ``Son's Day,'' an annual holiday for boys. Among the suggested activities for ``Son's Day'' are:

Take your son to an event that focuses on ... ending men's violence against women. Call the Family Violence Prevention fund at 800 END-ABUSE for information.

Make sure your son is involved in preparing the family for the work and school week ahead. This means: helping lay out clothes for siblings [and] making lunches ...''

In short, this punitive little holiday was contrived by women who are convinced that what our male children need most is indoctrination.

And assuming a boy survives this treatment after seeing his natural internal tendencies - competition, contact, rough play - are being nearly criminalized (from his four-foot-tall perspective), what does he have to look forward to?

A society where men are neutered and infantilized, where fatherhood is denigrated, where the value of everything he is programmed to be is rejected by the people who, after his parents, he spends the most time with - his teachers, his school system, and the media from which he probably gets his impressions of the world outside his family.

Marshall Poe sums it up:

From kindergarten on, the education system rewards self-control, obedience, and concentration?qualities that, any teacher can tell you, are much more common among girls than boys, particularly at young ages. Boys fidget, fool around, fight, and worse. Thirty years ago teachers may have accommodated and managed this behavior, in part by devoting more attention to boys than to girls. But as girls have come to attract equal attention, as an inability to sit still has been medicalized, and as the options for curbing student misbehavior have been ever more curtailed, boys may have suffered. Boys make up three quarters of all children categorized as learning disabled today, and they are put in special education at a much higher rate (special education is often misused as a place to stick "problem kids," and children seldom switch from there to the college track). Shorter recess times, less physical education, and more time spent on rote learning (in order to meet testing standards) may have exacerbated the problems that boys tend to experience in the classroom. It is no wonder, then, that many boys disengage academically. Boys are also subject to a range of extrinsic factors that hinder their academic performance and pull them out of school at greater rates than girls. First among these is the labor market. Young men, with or without high school diplomas, earn more than young women, so they are more likely to see work as an alternative to school. Employment gives many men immediate monetary gratification along with relief from the drudgery of the classroom.

And it works in a vicious cycle; as boys make up a smaller and smaller percentage of college students, they'll become a smaller percentage of teachers (among other things) and the professors that create them. The school system will become more and more feminized, and boys will become more and more marginalized.

The result? Kim DuToit thinks American society is getting wussified. Terrence Moore of the Claremont Institute thinks it's because men don't act like guys in 1930's movies.

Me? I think it's insane that our society that knows - knows - that it's wrong to make a gay kid suppress his or her true personality, does exactly that for half of the population.

They Eat Their Own

Did a Democrat feed Kerrygate to Drudge?

The idea passes the smell test, says Limbaugh:

"The Drudge item on Kerry intern issue is something Chris Lehane (Clark press secy) has shopped around for a long time - it was one reason the Gore vetters in 2000 shied away from Kerry as a running mate choice - their conclusion that it wasn't bad enough to disqualify him, except for the fact that they couldn't risk it as they were trying so hard to distance themselves from Clinton's personal failings (note: Lehane worked for Gore at the time - and briefly advised Kerry during this campaign). The Kerry camp has long expected to deal with this, and have assured party leaders they can handle it...'

On the other hand, tompaine.com wonders:

friend who used to work in Democratic politics e-mailed me that "this has Chris Lehane's fingerprints all over it," referring to the Democratic hatchet man who worked for Kerry, then Wes Clark. Since Clark just ended his campaign, I'm not so sure. I wonder if the White House didn't just change the subject.

Old Baggage

Hugh Hewitt asked the Northern Alliance to comment on whether we think John Kerry's 30 year old actions and statements are relevant fodder for this presidential election.

As a matter of logic, and with full knowledge about how humans develop? Not really, no. I used to be a flaming liberal - the party platform I wrote for 1980 North Dakota Boys State was downright Trotskiite. Does that color my beliefs today? Hell no - I may be the most conservative member of the Northern Alliance.

The question is, has he developed at all from his nadir in the early seventies? Let's compare it with a piece of his likely rival's past.

The President, in his twenties and thirties, was by many accounts a drunken lout who could fit shopping bags full of coke up his nose. Does it make him a bad president? No, because he changed and became a better person.

Has John Kerry changed and become better than he was 30 years ago? How you answer that says a lot about how you see this election, I think.

Now - as a matter of political football, of course it matters. It matters exactly as much as the Democrats want to make George Bush's National Guard record.

Which, this week, seems to be "lots".

A Penny Saved, A Spin Earned

So let's talk about the school closings in Minneapolis.

Enrollment is dropping in Minneapolis - dropping drastically. The
Pioneer Press notes that:

"Saying that another round of budget reductions this spring simply wouldn't get to the core of the district's problems, Interim Superintendent David Jennings released the plan that aims to respond to a steep enrollment decline and financial pressures. The district is currently set up to handle 50,000 students, Jennings said. But with a projected 3,000-student drop next year, the district will be down to 38,000 students in the fall."

The PiPress story also notes that:

mark the largest set of school closings in Minneapolis since the early 1980s — when the district shuttered 18 schools at once as baby boomers left the system. This time, the district is seeing more Minneapolis families choose to enroll their children outside the district or send them to charter schools.

Of course, if the baby boomers were leaving the system 20 years ago, it makes sense that their children would be beginning to leave now, right?

But that would be a lost opportunity for spin. More on that in a bit.

Check out the list of schools to be closed or merged. Notice the number of schools whose leases are up, and the number of small schools being merged into other schools.

Also notice the number of closing or merged schools in areas where real estate values are booming - downtown, around Northeast, along the Hiawatha Corridor, in the gentrifying parts of the North Side. This is prime real estate that's earning the city, and the school district, nothing right now.

So here's what you have:

1. Minneapolis has 12,000 seats more than it needs. It has to consolidate.
2. All of that prime underutilized real estate is a potential cash cow for the district.
3. Perhaps most importantly, publicising the pain of the school closings as a response to state budget cuts is a great way for the DFL-controlled Minneapolis school board to shift the blame to the Republican-dominated legislature (with the full connivance of professional guilt-mongers like Nick Coleman),even as the closings perfectly fit their need to consolidate.
4. It's a political attack on both the charter school systems - which are becoming vastly more popular as the MPS's academic record atrophies - and "white flight". Don't underestimate the connection the DFL will make using these two issues during the upcoming legislative session.

As Drudge says, "developing".

Problem Student, Part II -

Problem Student, Part II - An emailer - who will remain anonymous - wrote to comment about my piece on Nick Coleman's column about the Minneapolis Schools plan to shutter ten of their schools.

In Coleman's original piece, he lamented that the closing of Holland Elementary will force students to "transfer to Putnam School. Many will have to take buses for the first time. Most kids just walked to Holland, but Putnam is a mile to the east." My correspondent notes that Coleman:

...writes in his piece that some of the kids from Holland school will have to ride the bus a mile to Putnam, the implication being that this is somehow disruptive to the community. This struck me as odd because busing kids and disrupting neighborhoods has been a Minneapolis tradition for years...[when the correspondent had school-age kids] it came as quite a surprise to learn that our son wouldn't be able to attend the school half a block away. Under the plan at the time, he would have had to been bused to North Star Elementary in North Minneapolis in order to help the people at the lightbulb factory achieve racial balance district wide.

Yeah, I wonder if Nick's ever commented on that? Anyone with access to Lexis/Nexus out there? Or perhaps Nick Coleman himself could respond; he's been known to read this blog. Mr. Coleman; if you have a response to that question, I'll post it here in its full unedited glory. Please write.

Of course, Coleman would not be happy with the writer - he's part of the "white flight":

after living in the same neighborhood of Minneapolis for [many] years, I moved out...and never regretted it for a minute. We're in [a suburban] school district now. It's not perfect but it's small and small-towny we're able to keep involved with our kids' education much easier than if we were still in the Minneapolis morass.

That's a word that keeps popping up about the Minneapolis schools.

I guess the writer is just another talk-radio moron bent on destroying the school system. Right, Nick Coleman?

The Big Refute

A squadron-mate of the former Lieutenant Bush, now a retired Colonel in the Air Guard, should by all right have finally disposed of the worst of the "Bush was a Deserter/AWOL/Draft-Dodger tropes with this WashTimes editorial.

It addresses every single element of the Great Deserter Myth:

• Bush Used Guard "Service" to Avoid Vietnam - "The mission of the 147th Fighter Group and its subordinate 111th FIS, Texas ANG, and the airplane it possessed, the F-102, was air defense. It was focused on defending the continental United States from Soviet nuclear bombers. The F-102 could not drop bombs and would have been useless in Vietnam. A pilot program using ANG volunteer pilots in F-102s (called Palace Alert) was scrapped quickly after the airplane proved to be unsuitable to the war effort. Ironically, Lt. Bush did inquire about this program but was advised by an ANG supervisor (Maj. Maurice Udell, retired) that he did not have the desired experience (500 hours) at the time and that the program was winding down and not accepting more volunteers. " [Note to Fingers - I was wrong!]

  
  

• The Guard was the same a dodging the draft - "The image of a reservist at that time is of one who joined, went off for six months' basic training, then came back and drilled weekly or monthly at home, with two weeks of "summer camp." With the knowledge that Mr. Johnson and Mr. McNamara were not going to call out the Reserves, it did become a place of refuge for many wanting to avoid Vietnam.
  There was one big exception to this abusive use of the Guard to avoid the draft, and that was for those who wanted to fly, as pilots or crew members. Because of the training required, signing up for this duty meant up to 2½ years of active duty for training alone, plus a high probability of mobilization. A fighter-pilot candidate selected by the Guard (such as Lt. Bush and me) would be spending the next two years on active duty going through basic training (six weeks), flight training (one year), survival training (two weeks) and combat crew training for his aircraft (six to nine months), followed by local checkout (up to three more months) before he was even deemed combat-ready. Because the draft was just two years, you sure weren't getting out of duty being an Air Guard pilot. "

• Bush was AWOL in Alabama - "Excusals for employment were common then and are now in the Air Guard, as pilots frequently are in career transitions, and most commanders (as I later was) are flexible in letting their charges take care of career affairs until they return or transfer to another unit near their new employment. Sometimes they will transfer temporarily to another unit to keep them on the active list until they can return home. The receiving unit often has little use for a transitory member, especially in a high-skills category like a pilot, because those slots usually are filled and, if not filled, would require extensive conversion training of up to six months, an unlikely option for a temporary hire. "

And so on. The whole letter is a must-read.

I got this, of course, from Power Line, who declare "Case Closed". In a rational world, that'd be true.

But we've never been dealing with the rational on this issue - we're dealing with Terry MacAuliffe and the moonbat left. Truth may not be a defense as far as the media is concerned.

Case in point; John Roberts, in the press converence on Tuesday when the records were released. I caught the audio on the Laura Ingraham show; it was almost like an SNL bit. He was extemporizing, trying to find SOME angle to spin the story against Bush.

Still, erasing the doubts among those for whom the actual truth matters is important. So here's hoping.

Fair Game

John Kerry's remarks from 30 years ago are baaaack.

“I’m an internationalist,” Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”

Kerry said he wanted “to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care.”

Yet another flipflop, the Crimson notes:

As a candidate for president, Kerry has said he supports the autonomy of the U.S. military and has never called for a scale-back of CIA operations.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich defended Kerry’s 1970 statements as appropriate for their time.

“In the context of the Vietnam War, those comments are completely understandable,” said Reich, who has endorsed Kerry.

Er, possibly.

But in the "context" of one who would be leader of the free world, it's a very dangrous piece of background - especially given Kerry's obvious willingness to flipflop in what ever direction opportunity pushes him.

Good News?

Sullivan has this on the Edwards campaign:

In both primaries yesterday, Kerry won close to a half of the votes and Edwards won around a quarter. But more interestingly, as Will Saletan points out in a must-read, Edwards beat Kerry on the question of the issues and among those in the more moderate wing of the party, i.e. those who were less angry with Bush and more in the "satisfied but not enthusiastic" camp. Edwards wins more pro-war voters as well. I infer that most Dem voters so far have been conned into voting for the idea of Kerry, not the reality. And the idea is that he is more electable. And that has become almost self-fulfilling. Edwards is therefore absolutely right to stay in. More Democrats like his views than like Kerry's (whatever they are as of 1.25 am today), and more middle-of-the-roaders support him.

We on the right have been worried that conservative disaffection with Bush was going to cause enough conservatives to stay at home to hurt Bush this fall. It could happen - stay tuned for more.

But I wonder if we might not see the same on the left - a lot of moderate Dems will be as much or more disgusted with the party nominating Kerry to cause them to sit '04 out?

Because there's a lot more to disgust a moderate about Kerry than there is to tick off a conservative about Bush.

Discuss!

Problem Student

Nick Coleman knows what we need to do for public education; keep all existing, failing schools open, no matter what!

I'm going to start with a bit at the end of today's column:

Many thousands of children -- including three of mine -- have been served well by the Minneapolis public schools.

Every morning in the Southwest, shamans of the Zuni tribe rise before the sun, and begin to pray. The Zuni believe that if they don't pray for the sun to rise in the morning, it won't. Since the sun rises in the morning, the prayers obviously work.

Correlation isn't necessarily causation.

Three of Coleman's children may have gone to Minneapolis schools, and turned out OK. Well, all right! A combination of good teachers and constant parental involvement (especially by hectoring, intrusive a**hole fathers, like Nick and, incidentially, me) got some results out of the system. Good. That fact - or the fact that any students learn anything at all - doesn't mean the system works in Minneapolis, or anywhere, any more than the Zuni prayers truly bring forth the sun.

But let's not get all bogged down in petty matters like reality. The public school system - the public school system! - in Minneapolis is crumbling!

And he knows who is really to blame:

It is a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding in a district beset by ongoing budget cuts, falling enrollment and constant attacks by wolves masquerading as legislators, not to mention ideologues, talk-show morons and think-tank geniuses.

He got one of them right. Enrollments are falling. We're entering a demographic dip now - there are just fewer kids out there. Fewer kids mean we need fewer schools.

The rest? Coleman's stock in trade - facile name-calling. It's how he seems to react to all difference of opinion - as I discovered in a charming if semi-literate email from him last year, responding to a post where I complimented him, but not properly. I may have to post that soon...

But I digress.

I wish the folks who would like to eradicate public schools would visit Holland Elementary, eight blocks from the old light-bulb factory, and see if they still feel like howling in delight.

Let's stop right there.

"Howling in delight?" "Eradicate public schools?"

It's not about stretching a "Thin" budget, or even about trying to a resuscitate a school district that has, to all intents and purposes, failed. No.

It's all about fun! "We" are doing this because "we" enjoy it!

Not, of course, because two generations of ultra-left administration and theory have left the district pathetically unable to function.

Not, of course, because a big part of the enrollment drop comes from parents voting with their feet, and with their dollars, taking their kids to suburban schools under the open-enrollment laws, or voting with their hard-earned dollars nd sending them to private, parochial, charter and alternative schools.

For almost 120 years, Holland School (the current building opened in 1969) has taken immigrant kids and made them into Americans.

And for the past twenty years, Holland, like the rest of the Minneapolis Schools, has been teaching them to be nonviolent, multicultural and, when time permits, students.

Ninety-three percent of the 250 kids (kindergarten through 5th grade) come from families who live below the poverty line. Forty-one percent speak Spanish at home. Many are special-education kids with cognitive developmental problems. And over a year's time, almost a quarter of the kids move into or out of the school, making it almost impossible to teach them much, especially if their English is not up to speed.

Despite the obstacles, the school has done OK, winning awards for how well it has overcome the handicaps thrown at it by a society where the middle class is disappearing, the rich are bailing out and the poor are left to fend for themselves.

And why is that, Nick Coleman?

The middle class isn't disappearing - it's moving to Roseville and Lakeville and New Prague. Why?

If you're Nick Coleman, it's because the middle class is a bunch of racists, talk radio morons and ideologues.

If you've ever lived in Minneapolis - and I have - it's because the DFL (and Green!) bloc that runs the city has given up on trying to make the city a better place for everyone to live, and has turned to concentrating on making dysfunction appear to be the standard. Poverty is virtuous, and we must subsidize it! Non-achievement is the norm - let's penalize and demonize those who achieve! Criminals are normal (and a DFL constituency!) - we must make life safer for them by getting them out of jail sooner, hiring a string of ineffective, ass-covering east-coast political hacks to run the police department, and disarming their victim pool! Our schools don't educate - let's make inadequate, agenda-riven education the inviolate norm; heck, let's make it a virtue!

Coleman illustrates part of the problem next:

"We can't select our students," says Principal Gertrude Flowers Barwick. "We have to take anyone who comes in that door. These are not the children who go to charter schools. But our country was founded on public education. We shouldn't do anything to erode that."

Ms. Flowers - and by extension, Nick Coleman - are apparently getting very desperate.

This nation was not founded on public education. Public education as we know it today didn't come about until the late 1800s. Before that, communities and groups of people - churches, towns, neighborhoods - built schools and hired teachers.

It was nothing like the unionized, dogmatic, sclerotic system we have today. Charter schools are an attempt to return to that model - communities and small groups using their resources (a small fraction of the resources they'd spend in a public school) to do the job right.

This, of course, is intolerable to Nick Coleman. We must all fail - together!

What is happening is worse than erosion. It is a mudslide.

Public schools are under unceasing attack, tax money is being channeled to competing schools --some of which operate with laughably little oversight -- and the best and the brightest are abandoning ship.

Note the odd juxtaposition of ideas: Charter schools (and their tax money!) have "laughably little oversight" - and yet our best and brightest (and their tax money!) are joining them!

Nick! Maybe the "oversight" is the problem!

Acting Superintendent David Jennings -- the former Republican speaker of the House who doesn't buy into conservative dogma that would run schools like businesses -- is boldly slashing spending to try to give the district some breathing room and some time to turn around. But in the meantime, he knows that foes of public education are closing in.

"The public, by and large, supports public education, but a number of the policymakers do not," he says. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've never been to Roswell, New Mexico [where those aliens crash-landed, in UFO mythology]. But the politicians who are beating up on us say we're failing. And, by their actions, they can set the system up to fail. Some of their decisions have done just that. That's what they have in mind."

So - it's not the system that's failing. It's the opposition's fault. The emperor is naked because we said he was.

Hm.

But until defenders of public education start fighting back, the lights will continue to go out, one by one.

If Nick is talking about protecting the institution of public education for its own sake? Sure.

If he's talking about the ability to actually teach children? I'd say the "defenders" are the problem, not the solution.

More on education later this week.

Note to Dems - Drop It

The Dems asked for personnel records.

They got them.. Think it'll shut 'em up?:

"Lt. Col. Scott Gorske, a 23-year Guardsman with experience in personnel issues, said there is no requirement for National Guard members to drill every month. They are required to train a certain amount of time each year. It appears Bush met that requirement, said Gorske, who reviewed the documents.
A memo written by retired Lt. Col. Albert Lloyd Jr. at the request of the White House said a review of Bush's records showed that he had 'satisfactory years' for the period of 1972-73 and 1973-74 'which proves that he completed his military obligation in a satisfactory manner.' "

Suppose the Dems will drop it?

When I was on Hewitt's show today, I posited my theory - and I think I'll stand by it. The Dems are banking that there are enough people out there that don't listen to talk radio, watch C-SPAN or read blogs to leave a rich vein of potential, ignorant voters susceptible to believing...

...well, almost anything.

My prediction; Dems will spread the word that Bush voted against the 1964 Voting Rights Act.

Kast Not Your Pearls Before Swyne

Fraters' JB Doubtless asks:

"When did the Grammys turn into the Teen Choice Awards? "

Shortly after they became the "sleazy industry insider awards".

Hipsters like the Strib's John Remenschneider have to know that Outkast is a joke, but I doubt he will make much of a stink out of their win.

One might as well make a stink out of the Mafia playing dirty, or Daunte Culpepper blowing the big play. There's as much point to it.

Mark Your Calendars

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air Saturday, March 6, on AM1280 The Patriot, here in the Twin Cities.

The show will feature the members of the Northern Alliance of Blogs, and talk about politics, martinis, music, movies, TV, weekends...pretty much everything our blogs cover. Only on the radio.

Stay tuned for more info, coming soon to the various Northern Alliance weblogs.

Seek Help

Listening to Hewitt replaying the Gore speech yesterday, I desperately wanted to call in to observe - with no offense intended to those who suffer brain injury, or their loved ones - that Algore sounds like he's had a stroke.

Listen to the audio (if you can find it): extended periods where he sounds like he's nearly somnolent, followed by - there's no other word for it - bellowing. Yelling, too hamfisted to be theatrical, worlds away from oratorical.

I'm sure Algore is well and healthy, and God willing he'll stay that way. Hewitt's probably right - it's probably the lack of staff; Gore has always been a wretched orator, and I'm sure his speechwriting talents were both minimal and on full display during his speech.

But oy - this man could have been President?

Pawlenty in Iraq

Channel 11 is reporting that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is going to Iraq to visit Minnesota troops.

Nothing on Google News yet.

UPDATE: Again from Channel 11 - the Governor is apparently in Iraq, having left in secret with five other governors on Sunday.

Kerry On

John Kerry leads the president in some polls. It's troubling, but not entirely unexpected; Kerry's had the advantage of having Howard Dean to serve as his lightning rod, making Kerry look both responsible and moderate. His media coverage has been fawning and adoring. Of course he's racking up the numbers.

This week has seen the conservtive blogosphere respond with an avalanche of facts about Kerry - especially Northern Alliance brethren Captain Ed and the Commish. Someone needs to get all this information together.

Hmm. I'm going to work on this.

The Sounds of Heads Bashing Against Walls

As the session starts, the biggest non-story of the year - the attempt to repeal the Minnesota Personal Protection Act - is getting underway.

Note to opponents - lotsa luck. Notes from the PiPress story:

It's been nine months and more than 15,000 permits have been issued since the new law passed, and opponents can't point to widespread trouble because of it. Nor can supporters say that public safety has improved markedly.

This is an absurd paragraph; the improvements that Concealed Carry reform brings occur over time. It's hard to identify crimes that didn't happen...

...unless, of course, they are entirely conspicuous by their absence. Like, for exaple, illegal shootings by permit holders.

Of course, for the opposition, it's never been about empirical evidence, as noted by this statement (emphasis is mine):

Nevertheless, several lawmakers are introducing legislation to reverse the law, and activists like Kate Havelin, with the Twin Cities Million Mom March, hopes that her message now will echo into the future.

"We think that having more guns on our streets, at our places of worship, at the mall, will not be made safer with people with handguns. It's a way to put all of us at greater risk," Havelin said.

"We think".

Maybe this is a sign of improvement; at least the opponents are prefacing their statements with that telling "We Think". For those of you who've been under a rock for the past twenty years, "thought" is all it is. There are now 36 states that have some sort of "shall-issue" or another. None have ever reported problems, most have eventually reported some benefits, and none has made a serious move to repeal. That includes states that are just as blinkeredly liberal as Minnesota - Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.

The "repeal" "movement" - bolstered by their friends in the media - are making a lot more noise than their actual importance warrants, by the way. Our old friends at the "RepealConceal" website, after a year of maintaining the fiction of being an independent, grass roots group, have given up the ghost and rolled over to being a mirror for Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota (hat tip to Joel Rosenberg, whose excellent blog shows where the bodies are figuratively buried among Minnesota's repeal "movement"). And the "Southwest Minnesota Peacemakers" site - perhaps the most insipid of all - seems not to have been updated in nearly a year, and continues to quote the loathsome Nazi sympathizer Boake Carter on its main page.

I'll follow the story. Or, should I say, "story".

Misplaced Priorities

Misplaced Priorities - When the President is offering amnesty and the benefits of near-citizenship to illegal aliens to sneak across our undefended border with our "friend" Mexico, and yet our Coast Guard is still intercepting Cubans who risk death, sharks, and a Cuban jail to cross to Florida and sending them back to Castro's worker's paradise, something's wrong.

Especially when they're this brave, ingenius and persistent.

Three Cuban families' hopes of puttering to South Florida in a green, 1959 propeller-powered Buick were dashed Wednesday when the tail-finned, floating car was sunk, just like their first ingeniously engineered amphibious vessel, a 1951 Chevy truck rigged to a pontoon of 55-gallon drums, an exile source said.

Our administration has done a stupendous job at calling a spade a spade and unravelling the Carter/Bush I/Clinton-era mania for referring to terrorists and thugs as "heads of state" and "participants in the world community". One hopes he'll do the same for Castro someday.

(Tip to Evangelical Outpost)

About Time

About Time - Twin Cities writer and activist Joel Rosenberg finally took the plunge and has a blog. Actually, it looks like it's been around for a while, but I'm finally aware of it.

Like much of Rosenberg's writing, it's a wealth of information about concealed carry, the Second Amendment, the absurdity of the "logic" and turpidity of so many reform opponents.

My favorite passage in his recent, deliciously sardonic post about an idiotic letter to the PiPress:

Anybody who followed the passage of the MCPPA with any attention at all knows that it wasn't the NRA or some sort of amorphous "gun lobby" that brought us this; it was a grass-roots effort, spearheaded in the legislature by Lynda Boudreau and Pat Pariseau, and in the public debate by a bunch of folks with not much in common but a desire to repeal Minnesota's antiquated, bureaucrats-know-best carry law: GOCRA/CCRN. It was people like Joe, Tim, David, Alfred, Lonn, John, Marilyn and hundreds of others -- even, to a much lesser extent, me -- writing letters, making phone calls, showing up to testify at hearings, and so forth. It's not a well-financed lobbying campaign like "Citzens for a Safer Minnesota"; the money that funded CCRN's mailings was contributed in ones and fives and tens by people stopping by at Alfred's table at, literally, hundreds of gun shows.

It was as classic a grass-roots organizing effort as ever there was. "Gun lobby," pfui. She might as well blame it on the boogeyman.

It's on my blogroll. If you care about the endless fight over victim disarmament, it should be on your frequent read list.

Report On the Media

Ranting Profs present an email from an Army officer : in charge of his unit's media relations. It explains a lot about the vaccuum of news about the reconstruction:

"The Fox News crew laid out what qualified as 'newsworthy: -- Women taking
an active leadership role in the new government, detainee/prisoner abuse
cases, any WMD news, and individual soldier contributions (such as one soldier
who bought school supplies and teddy bears for Iraqis out of his own pocket.)
These were the stories deemed airable and they wouldn't respond to anything
outside of that. The news crew wasn't bashful about its agenda and they made
it clear that they weren't going to respond to anything outside of those story
lines unless it was something really spectacular.
Fox stood out most as a network that knew what it was going to put out
before it even shot the footage. Other news organizations were more subtle
about what they wanted to cover but pretty much everyone had their stories
written before they showed up. To Al-Jazeera especially, the video footage was
merely a formality."

And that was Fox, the "conservative, pro-war" network!

Read it all - and remember it when you watch and read media coverage on Iraq today.

He Could Have Run the Budget

He Could Have Run the Budget - Where did all the money go?

Howard Dean's use of internet fundraising got a lot of attention last year. This year, it's another story:

As Howard Dean's presidential campaign tore through the millions it raised last year, nearly a quarter of it went to the company owned in part by his former campaign manager.
The campaign paid $7.2 million to Trippi, McMahon and Squier, the Virginia-based consulting and media firm - 23 percent of the $31 million it spent through Dec. 31, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks political spending.

Joe Trippi, one of the company's partners, was Dean's campaign manager for a year - until he was ousted last month and replaced by Roy Neel as chief executive. Dean asked Trippi to stay with the campaign as an adviser, but Trippi quit.

Instead of a salary, Trippi's company had been paid a commission of the campaign's television advertising buys - a percentage he and his company's partners said he never knew.

Remember his title - campaign manager?

Of course, given the results he got from the money, there are a lot of quesions about that title...

"I didn't want to know. I didn't do this for the money," Trippi said. "I was interested in beating [President] Bush. I was interested in building a campaign that could get Howard Dean in position. I'm proud of what I did. Anyone who knows me knows my personal money was never, ever on my mind, and it was nothing that motivated me."

That begs a couple of questions:

1. Does he think the American people are that stupid? If so, what does that say about the Dean campaign as a whole?
2. If "beating President Bush" was more important than keeping track of their contributors' money and making sure it was going where it was supposed to be going, what would that say about a Dean presidency?

Not that it's an issue anymore, of course.

BRIGHT IDEA: Maybe we should do a staging of "The Rainmaker", only change the title character's name to "Howard."

Just a thought...

Thoughts on Listening to What My Daughter is Listening To

Thoughts on Listening to What My Daughter is Listening To - Speaking as someone who has had to get along in a foreign language, I have to admire Avril Lavigne, the Canadian pop-punk teen idol.

In the hands of a native english speaker, her lyrics and delivery might be considered comically stilted.

But as a young francophone singing in a new language, I think she delivers lines like:

He was a punk, she did ballet, what more can I say?

with the sort of goofy aplomb that made ABBA famous - her French patterns of pronunciation making for a lot of good-natured unintended comedy.

While it may not be my cup of musical tea, I have to tip my hat to a young foreigner who can sing even while wrestling so publicly with English, a very difficult language. Congrats, Avil Lavigne!

UPDATE: I'm informed that Ms. Lavigne is actually a native speaker of English.

The Manchurian Moonbat

The Manchurian Moonbat - For the benefit of those who thought the President did badly in his interview, Sullivan quotes the ever-less-lucid Wesley Clark, who admits Hussein was a "bad guy", but that we just don't invade nations because their leaders are "bad guys":

There simply aren't many national leaders who are also mass murderers who have used chemical weapons to commit genocide, who have invaded two countries, broken the conditions of a truce with the United States, violated any number of U.N. resolutions and tried to assassinate the president of the United States. Maybe Clark could tell me who else is in that category. No one claimed that Saddam was an "imminent threat" for the umpteenth time. And, most glaring of all, the United States did not "make" Saddam a villain, no more than the U.S. "made" Milosevic a villain. That kind of crap belongs at an ANSWER rally, not in a presidential candidate. Thank God he's losing this race badly.

No kidding.

The left thinks it has something on the President with this "misguided invasion" trope. For that trope to work, they must assume the majority of the nation is...well, as deluded as Wesley Clark (and John Kerry, for that matter).

Are they? 49% voted for Algore, which is troubling.

More tomorrow.

Boots Still On The Ground

I heard a rerun yesterday of Dennis Prager's interview with Karl Zinsmeister, author of Boots On The Ground, the story of the 82nd Airborne Division during the liberation of Iraq.

The good news? He's at work on a book about the aftermath.

Neither audio nor transcripts seem to be available for the interview, but it had some fascinating insights. Zinnmeister noted that in the Shi'ite south of Iraq, things seem to be going exceptionally well. The Kurdish north, he says, is doing even better - "the only part of Iraq I'd actually call downright attractive" is a pretty close quote.

Most impressively, says Zinsmeister, the Iraqi city councils are not only taking over the day to day operation of the cities from Baghdad to the provinces.

There's bad news: Fallujah, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, is still dangerous, thanks to the fedayeen.

There's worse news: Many of your fellow citizens have proven Goebbels' maxim; the big lie has apparently been repeated enough for it to have taken hold.

Zinsmeister notes in an article in the Christian Science Monitor a comment by Iowa's ultraliberal senator Tom Harkin:

'This may not be Vietnam, but boy, it sure smells like it," said Sen. Tom Harkin recently. The Iowa Democrat is but one of a host of critics in Washington politics and the media who claim that US troops and administrators are "bogged down" in Iraq.

This is accepted as fact throughou the left-wing blogosphere (never with actual evidence presented, of course), and yesterday on E-Democracy's Saint Paul discussion list, a commentator referred to Iraq and Afghanistan as "fiascoes". The commentator was one (of the few) that would not ordinarily be considered a mindless moonbat.

The good news again: I doubt that anyone that believes this bilge would have voted for Bush this fall anyway.

Kosgasm -

Look for the Daily Kos and sites that accept his word as gospel to get in a lather over this story:

President George W. Bush's approval rating has slipped to 48 percent, the lowest level since February 2001, according to the Newsweek poll. Fifty percent of registered voters say they would not like to see Bush re-elected to a second term (45% say they would). And if the election were held today, Democratic frontrunner Sen. John Kerry would win over Bush by 50 percent to 45 percent among registered voters.

Note to all of you; it's a post convention high. They showed Walter Mondale beating Reagan at this point of the '84 campaign, too.

The story also notes:

However Bush would have clear wins over Democratic contenders Sen. John
Edwards (49% to 44%), former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (50% to 44%) and retired
General Wesley Clark (51% to 43%).

I'm sure Bush would beat up on Paul Tsongas, too.

Here's the part of the story I find intrigueing:

When deciding which presidential candidate to support, 67 percent say it
is either very important (25%) or somewhat important (42%) for them to learn about the candidate's spouse. Seventy-two percent say the relationship between a candidate and his spouse tells voters either a lot (40%) or something (32%) about how good a president he would be; 13 percent say it tells you not much and 12 percent say it tells you nothing.

By all accounts I've heard:

• The President has a solid, functional, great relationship with Laura, whom he credits for helping him straighten up after his rounds of addiction.
• On the other hand, John Kerry is Teresa Heinz' lapdog.

Not that it would change my vote at all...

Snark Not

Last week, Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost noted the Pepsi Superbowl ad that highlighted a group of kids that the RIAA had prosecuted for downloading music.

Since the ethics of music downloading have always perplexed me, perhaps someone can explain it to me. If a teen steals music from a music store it’s considered shoplifting and can lead to a misdemeanor prosecution. Yet if a teen steals music via the Internet it “invigorates the democracy” and can land you a commercial during one of the most watched television events of the year. Am I the only one that is disturbed by this moral double standard?

Perhaps the RIAA should also produce a commercial. They could round up a group of teens who “fought the law” by stealing cases of Pepsi or Gatorade. No doubt Pepsico would find such a groundbreaking commercial invigorating.

Fair enough, so far. As someone who used to work as a musician, I agree.

But then he steers into the weeds:

(Link via: Mitch from Shot in the Dark, who disturbingly, doesn't seem to have a problem with online piracy. Shame on you, Mitch.)

Then you don't read my blog very much, Joe, do you?

Pirating is wrong, and it's stealing. Absolutely. No argument.

The RIAA are thieves, too - legal thieves, as it happens, a front for organizations that have been systematically cheating musicians for decades:

In January, the week before Peggy Lee died, she finally won a class- action suit against her former label. Lee and several hundred other artists and their heirs were awarded $4.75 million in unpaid royalties, miscalculated royalties and unauthorized deductions from royalties. Current acts, including Courtney Love and the Dixie Chicks, have lawsuits pending over accounting practices.

"It's bizarre in this day and age when you audit a record label, in 99.99 percent of the audits, the labels are found to have underpaid the artist," said Simon Renshaw, who manages the Dixie Chicks. "I asked an auditor who's been involved in 9,000 cases how many revealed an overpayment by the labels to the artist: the answer was one. Take that to a statistician." (Spokesmen for the major labels said they did not comment on their financial or contractual relationships with artists.)

So yeah, piracy is illegal. And the kids in the ad had gotten theirs, and then some, for it; they'd been hauled into court. Accountable enough?

In the meantime, though:

• The Pepsi ad was advertising a legal service
• If that legal service hastens the demise of the RIAA, and the day when artists can control their own business online, it's good for everyone - especially people who like music of whatever type.

...so I'm a bit inclined toward forgiveness.

Common?

I've heard this sort of thing from other Deaniacs lately - this one being "Bohemian Mama":

"Even worse than losing progressive voters and activists like myself, what about all the conservatives and republicans that Dean brought into the fold. Folks like my dad: a veteran who sees the hollow aspect of Kerry's claims regarding being a vet in that besides fighting in a war 20 years ago, what has he done in his entire political career to lead the way in helping veterans? What has he proposed in terms of concise policy for veterans and service members?"

And that's just talking about money! Let's not for get to mention the issue that's peeling a lot of responsible Democrats away from the likes of Kerry - protecting the country that the veterans protected in the first place!

By the way, in looking at Yahoo's list of Political Blogs (via Powerline), I have to wonder - how on earth to blogs like this get on the list, and Shot in the Dark doesn't? I get more visitors in a typical month than Bohemian Mama has gotten in the past year, and I'll bet dimes to dollars she gets a bigger spike out of this post than anything else she's done lately. For that matter, Fraters gets more visits in a typical week than this woman has gotten in the last ten months.

Where is the justice?

Yes, I'm snarking. Blah.

Got the Bug

Long time Shot in the Dark commenter (and neighborhood kegerator owner) Anoka Flash has a blog going again. He joins Jeff Fecke's ever-more-misnamed "Blog Of the Moderate Left" as the entire lineup of lefty blogs on my blogroll.

For a Democrat, Flash ain't so bad. I mean, I wouldn't let him babysit my kids...oh, wait - I do. Never mind.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Flash! A 21 bagpipe salute awaits!

Open Letter to the Anoka

Open Letter to the Anoka Flash - What was the variety of beer in that Rock Bottom Growler you were kind enough to give me the other night?

Because I just had two glasses of it, and i think i just fiured ou wher Osama Bin Laden is hiding,a nd I'm going to go gt him now.

Happy Reaganmas!

We're on our way out to celebrate the family's annual Reaganmas holiday.

So may the spirit of the holiday prompt you to win one for the Gipper!

Change Of Heart

I've had a couple of them, as regards capital punishment.

When I was a liberal, of course, I opposed it. When I became a conservative, I inherited a bit of support for the death penalty.

Then, for years, I was opposed, based on only one thing; the likelihood of a mistake. I thought - and still think - that it's better to spring everyone from death row than to execute the wrong person, although life without parole was probably a more reasonable compromise.

Today, I think I'm coming around:

The body of an 11-year-old girl whose abduction was captured by a surveillance camera has been found and a mechanic has been charged with her murder, officials said today.

Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill refused to say where Carlie Brucia was found, saying it is an active crime scene.

He said Joseph P. Smith, 37, has been charged with her murder. He is believed to be the tattooed man in a mechanic's shirt who was seen in a car wash surveillance video leading Carlie away by the arm Sunday evening, authorities said.

I have a hunch Governor Pawlenty's death penalty proposal is headed for an initiative and referendum. So - if you are a pervert who likes to kill young girls, you might want to tell all your friends to cheese it until after the election. I have a hunch I'm not the only usually-anti-death-penalty voter who's getting a taste for the blood of vermin.

You can call it society's revenge if you'd like. I think I could stand behind that.

Zzzzz

Too tired to blog. Must. Find. Coffee.

More later.

Note to CINOs

I just found this quote, from Lord Acton:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own".

Think of the real victories for conservatism - large and small - in the past few years; Concealed Carry Reform involved a small group of activists winning over the legislator, by selling the issue in terms that made sense to the opponent-turned-supporter. Moving Pawlenty to the right - including his "No New Taxes" pledge, which is the most important part of his administration so far - was something the minority that supported Brian Sullivan achieved.

The way to win - to impart some conservative ideals on society - is not staying home from the election is a petulant, self-righteous snit. It's getting the idea across - through the back door, if the front door is locked.

Salvation

My son, Sam, newly 11 years old, is still the world's pickiest eater.

Buffalo wings, hot dogs and pizza are about the only acceptable foods - and then only if the wings are ultra-hot and the pizza is pepperoni.

I have to say that it's been an interesting window into my son's personality; I will not make multiple meals for dinner, and he will not make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich - the offered alternative to whatever I'm cooking. So when he says he'll go without, he will truly go without. He's a determined little cuss.

Ordering pizza is trying; pepperoni is intolerable to me (why not eat sprinkle blood on pure salt and cut out the middleman?) and essential to him.

So I'm indebted (horror of horrors) to the Fraters' JB Doubtless for drawing my attention to the obvious solution - Pizza Hut's new "Pizza Via Socialist Realism".

Upside: I get my Veggie Lovers, Sam gets his farging Pepperoni.

Downside 1: It looks like something from the Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Downside 2: Square Pizza. Am I the only one for whom this is a complete disconnect?

CINO

I"m going to pick a fight. A big one.

No, not against Democrats. Against Republicans.

I got up this morning intending to do a comprehensive fisking of Josh Marshall's latest, blunderiffic screed about the President, with an aim toward convincing those who can be convinced that the man is not a competent writer on defense and foreign policy matters.

But I can't. Not enough time. It may happen this weekend - but then, there are other plans afoot there, too.

Lileks had the line that really matters:

I’m waiting for an ad that simply puts the matter plainly: who do you think Al Qaeda wants to win the election? Who do you think will make Syria relax? Who do you think Hezbollah worries about more? Who would Iran want to deal with when it comes to its nuclear program – Cowboy Bush or “Send in the bribed French inspectors” Kerry? Which candidate would our enemies prefer?

O the shrieking that would result should such an ad run. You can’t even ask those questions, even though they’re the most relevant questions of the election.

We'd better ask them.

Here's my question; given what we know about Kerry - what he says about his own free-spending Massachusetts liberal legacy, his cozying up to the North Vietnamese as they were cramming their people into reeducation camps and boats, his two-faced views on the war (opposed to the '91 war, in favor of the current one - but only on terms under which it could not succeed), would you conservatives vote for him?

No. Of course not.

Over the last few weeks, some commentators have noticed the elephant in the living room; Bush isn't a fiscal conservative. Some of us knew that all along; some figured (rightly) he was more fiscally-conservative than McCain, some equate social with fiscal conservatism, some are Buchanan Republicans who went along to get along in 2000. And they're not happy.

Nor should they be.

But I've heard too many people calling in to talk shows saying "I'm a Republican, and I'm staying home this election. I'm disgusted by the budget". I've had too many comments like this in my blog, reporting on the feeling of too many "conservatives":

Unofficial poll at my regular morning
coffee spot: 5 out of 6 conservatives would find it easy to stay in bed on
election day. One vote for W's opponent - " a true big spender, not
a hypocrite"

Scary.

If you are a conservative, you owe it to your philosophy and your country to tell people this:

Overly-centrist Republicans can be dragged to the right. John Kerry can't be.

Budgets and deficits can be fixed. The Americans who will die at the hands of terrorists, if John Kerry's irredeemably stupid philosophy for fighting the war on terror (as a criminal enterprise!) takes control can not be.

If you think John Kerry will spend a dime less than Bush, then you should probably vote Democrat - you're just about deluded enough.

If you stay home on election day - or vote for some moonbat "Constitution Party" drone - out of a sense of injured misplaced conservative purity, and risk putting John Kerry in office, then you risk a lot more than four more years of massive spending, military decay, and out-of-control political correctness. You risk this nation's future, its civil liberties (imagine how a closet authoritarian like Kerry will react to a major terrorist attack).

And if you're willing to risk that because Bush isn't conservative enough, then it's you who are a CINO - a Conservative In Name Only.

Reap The Whirlwind

Hewitt was in rare form last night, hammering Terry MacAuliffe's idiotic statements and John Kerry's record.

He tears apart Josh "Joshua Micah" Marshall, whose vapidity on defense and foreign policy matters should be obvious to anyone who ever pulled an "R" in the voting booth. Hewitt says:

To every question on this issue, Republicans ought to respond: President Bush was honorably discharged. Did the question of honorable military service ever cause you pause when you were supporting Bill Clinton? And do you agree with John Kerry that the men who fought in Vietnam routinely committed war crimes?

And my favorite, from his WorldNet article on Tuesday:

McAuliffe's decision to deny that service in the national guard is service in the military – even as thousands of national guard have served in Iraq – is a blunder larger than any of his others, and trafficking in discredited urban myths gives you a glimpse of McAuliffe's desperation to turn the conversation to anything except Kerry's way-left voting record, or his role in the Dean meltdown, or the failure of Wes Clark to capture any significant support outside the loon caucus.

Kerry tells the Republican world "Bring It On". Does he have any idea what he's getting himself into?

More over the weekend.

Happy Anniversary To Me -

It took me a couple of glances at the calendar, but today, February 5, is this blog's second birthday.

Reading Michelle at A Small Victory and her essay about her blog's third anniversary prompted me to remember the date.

As fast as time seems to fly these days, this past two years has been enough of a whirlwind to actually feel like...well, two years. It's seen three girlfriends come and go, three jobs (one of them's stayed so far), innumerable crises with the kids, four months of unemployment, five more of drastic underemployment...

...ugh. I'm tired thinking about it.

But I get exhilarated again thinking about what this blog has meant for me. During the most miserable days at my most miserable dotcom, it was an outlet to feel like I wasn't completely irrelevant - back when I was getting eight hits a day, it meant the world to me. During the '02 elections, when my hit counts jumped from 20 a day into the hundreds courtesy of a couple of fortuitous Instalanches and a really fun Fraterlanche, , it was as big an adrenaline rush as I'd had since my talk radio days. And during the endless, arid, throat in mouth months of unemployment, it was a reason to keep my mind together after the kids left the house in the morning.

Anyway - today, we're averaging around 500 hits a day, and the oocasional Instalance and Hughricane will push it into the thousands, and while that makes me still pretty minor-league, it's still fun.

So thanks. And I'll hope to see you here next year.

Bring some friends!

I See How This Works

The cover photo in Tuesday's morning Strib showed a half-dozen or so representatives from A Million Pink Moms for Supine "Safer" Citizen Codes, protesting at the opening of the legislative session against the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

One of their signs said "A Million Moms" demanded gun control.

I thought about this.

A few years ago, Lewis Farrakhan convened the "Million Man March", on behalf of which about a hundred thousand men marched on Washington for a bunch of Farrakhan-y causes.

Score check: "Million Man March". Peaked at around a hundred thousand. Currently in the thousands, if it exists at all. And I'm not sure about that.

A few years later, a group of Sarah Brady's functionaries kick off the "Million Mom March", which may have mustered 100,000 "moms" at its peak, with its goal being to disarm potential crime victims and make America's streets safer for criminals. Most recent estimates of its membership are right around 30,000; a few years ago, the organization cut its staff from 30-something to five, and was evicted from its offices. Guess those "million" "Moms" aren't committed enough to put their money where their million mouths are.

Score check: "Million" "moms" claimed. Perhaps 30,000 on the street, and that's on a sunny day and if someone brings refreshments. Feeble.

But I see how the game is played.

So it's with great pride that I announce the formation of:

A Billion Americans For Freedom

That's right. All One Billion of us - I'm merely their spokesperson! - demand our due!

• An end to victim disarmament!
• Lower Taxes!

You can not ignore A Billion Americans with their voices crying out in unison (via me, their spokesperson)!

We are a Billion strong! Hear us roar!

Ahem

Ahem - The Fraters' Saint Paul commented on last week's secret meeting between he, King from SCSU Scholars, and me:

"It was a fine time and both gentlemen proved to be entertaining and provocative conversationalists. I left the 90 minute meeting with even more respect for the amalgamation of intellect brought together under the Northern Alliance banner.

So far, so good. I agree.

But then he swerves into the weeds:

I also had the honor of participating in a kind of sartorial devolutionary line up. As we stood up and walked to the exit, I noticed King was wearing a bespoken suit, I was wearing Stillwater casual office slob chic attire, and Mitch was wearing sweat pants.

Saint's powers of observation are as dissipate has his sartorial sense is natty. I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt - which, if "clothes make the man", is probably approriate. I haven't worn sweatpants outside of a weight room or my own yard since college.

The Saint continues:

I also noticed that height positively correlated with dressing down. Not sure what that says about Darwin or the ascent of man, but as I walked into the cold January St. Paul night, I had renewed faith for the theory of creationism."

When I'm on my own time, the post-Sinatra, GQ ideal of the perpetually-Docker-clad male bounces off me like Hesiod's spittle. I dress for the occasion; at work, I'm businesslike; On a date, I try to impress. Out for a drink at a neighborhood bar with a bunch of bloggers? I try not to smell like cat litter.

That is all.

It's The Mileage

There is officially a site for everything, as we see with "World66", a site that generates maps of where you've been.

Here's where I've been world-wide.

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Ooof - that's not much of the world. How about the US?

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

I need to get out more...

12:25 AM...

...on February 4, 1993, a little, rashy, red bundle slid into my life and this world, with his forehead pushed down over his face, looking like a little pit bull (and like a pit bull puppy, we didn't see his eyes for quite some time). He was two weeks late - a pattern repeated at bus time every morning to this day. I fed him his first bottle at about 3AM that day, and I've been feeding him ever since. Usually from plates, lately, but with boys that age you take nothing for granted.

Today he looks more like Calvin, but he's 11, and the tallest kid in his class, and his eyes turned out a shade of hazel that is going to have all the little girls cooing (and give me heartburn) in a few years, and he's a class clown and an artist and a natural guitar player and a just plain fun boy to be around.

Happy Birthday, Sam!

Now get your homework done.

The Personality

We've seen a number of replies to Powerline's Hindrocket's pessimistic appraisal of Bush's odds in this election (Hindrocket alone among the Northern Alliance picks Kerry to win the election).

Jay Reding had a good piece on the subject, as well as the Captain. I also commented yesterday.

But there's a bit in Reding's reply that I thought deserved some elaboration. Hindrocket said "The first is that he is associated with bad news--a recession which he inherited, and the Sept. 11 attacks for which he bears no responsibility. But the fact, fair or not, is that most people associate the Bush presidency with troubled times." Reding replies:

I don't believe that the American people reject political leaders just because they are associated with bad times. Abraham Lincoln led the country through the darkest hour in its history then or since and still won re-election (in fact, I believe the election on 1864 is the best historical analogue to 2004 for reasons I'll go into later).

Which Jay does - read his piece.

And I thought - to what extent do the American people impose their fortunes on a sitting, first term President during elections? And why?

Let's look at first-term presidents that had international and/or economic crises to deal with, going back to the dawn of economic records, the 1850's. For purposes of this post, let's limit it to presidents since the rise of the mass media; while I think the same patterns hold true before this, they're more pronounced since then:

First-Term President: Herbert Hoover
Economic Crisis: Crash of '29
Notes: Hoover had all the intellectual talent it would have taken to solve the problem; Hoover was perhaps the greatest technocrat ever to serve as President. Which may have been his undoing - he brought his tinkering, engineering personality to the White House. Hoover was the Jimmy Carter or Al Gore of the 1920's, more interested in manipulating the levers and pulleys of government than in leading the people.

First-Term President: Franklin D. Roosevelt
Economic Crisis: Great Depresson
Notes: Proof that leadership - even in the wrong direction - is frequently more important than having the right direction in the first place. FDR won re-election handily, and two more after that.

First-Term President: Truman
Economic Crisis: '47 Recession
NotesTruman was a special case; lots of economic and foreign policy issues, and lots of special circumstances getting him in and out of office. Technically, his first full term was his last. Hard to count him.

First-Term President: Eisenhower
Economic Crisis: '53 Recession
Notes: Mild recession (and a post-war one at that) - but Ike's leadership style promoted the sort of stability that both mediated the recession and got him re-elected.

First-Term President: Kennedy
Economic Crisis: '60-61 Recession
Foreign-Policy Crisis: Cuba, Vietnam
Notes: Responded aggressively to recession, cutting taxes. Responded aggressively to Bay of Pigs, creating Vietnam. Can't win 'em all...

First-Term President: Nixon
Economic Crisis: '69'70 Recession
Foreign-Policy Crisis: Vietnam War
Notes: How did Nixon survive his first term?

First-Term President: Ford
Economic Crisis: 1974-5 Recession - continuation of doldrums from Nixon administration
Other National Crisis: Fallout from Watergate.
Notes: Ford didn't have the time or mandate - or, possibly, potential - to lead the nation from these crises.

First-Term President: Carter
Economic Crisis: 1979-80 Recession Stagflation - simultaneous inflation and recession, double-digit unemployment.
Foreign-Policy Crisis: Iran Hostage Crisis, losing cold war.
Notes: Carter had a full plate - of problems. Unfortunately, his plate empty when it came to leadership ability. He was as inspiring as sauce-free spaghetti. He lost the '80 election, and has gone on to serve as a national laughingstock for 20-odd years.

First-Term President: Reagan
Economic Crisis: 1982 Recession - serious unemployment.
Foreign-Policy Crisis: Cold War, Grenada, Lebanon.
Notes: Despite massive problems and a hostile Congress, Reagan persevered politically (winning a massive, historic set of tax cuts) and won the '84 election by a historic landslide.

First-Term President: George Bush 41
Economic Crisis: '91 Recession
Foreign-Policy Crisis: Gulf War, Somalia
Notes: The elder Bush squandered the Reagan legacy and superhuman popularity after the Gulf War by caving in to his legislative opponents, waffled on taxes, and lost the '92 election (albeit with a lot of help from Ross Perot).

So on the one hand, we have Hoover, Truman, Ford and Bush I that fell afoul of their circumstances, and FDR, Ike, JFK and Reagan leading the nation out of the circumstances (or providing leadership and, in the cases of JFK and Reagan, economic reform while the economy did the job by itself), with Nixon has an in-between case.

What does this tell us? More or less what the Fraters' Elder says - "It's the personality, stupid."

Powerline's Hindrocket may be right - the President may fall victim to the combined recession and war-weariness - it really does depend on the type of leadership the President applies.

So what kind of leadership is the President applying?

If you're Virginia Postrel or Hindrocket, you say "not enough".

If you're Thomas Lifson (Via Big Trunk), you say "yeah, so what - it's intentional, so far".

A commenter to one of my threads yesterday echoes Lifson's point, and unintentionally echoes the same precise point made by Dinesh D'Souza about Reagan:

People always underestimate Bush... at their own peril. One gets the sense he cultivates this.

So is Bush letting the Dems have their day, and saving his campaigning, his money and his momentum for the stretch, where it (note to Howard Dean and Wes Clark) matters?

If so, is it a wise move?

Buck Up, Bucky Badger

The Wisconsin Legislature's attempt to override Governor Doyle's veto of a concealed carry reform law failed yesterday.

By one vote.

DC from Brainstorming - Shot in the Dark's favorite cheeseblogger - says:

I'm annoyed with people who disregard facts.....No......misrepresent facts......because they believe they are elite, and know what is best for us "little people".

Welcome to life in Minnesota, until last year. Get used to it.

It took Concealed Carry Reform Now seven years to get the Minnesota Personal Protection Act passed. In 2001 and 2002, we actually had all the votes lined up to pass the bill - but Senate majority leader Moe bottled it up in DFL-controlled Senate committees until it died. It wasn't until we controlled the House, got a more moderate Senate, and got Tim Pawlenty in office (who, unlike Ventura, was actually committed to reforming the law for Minnesotans who weren't sitting governors) to get things changed.

Hang in there.

A Not-So-Obvious Point

A Not-So-Obvious Point - Powerline's Rocket Man tackles the current Democrat trope - that Bush was AWOL/deserted the Guard.

The post as a whole is a fairly complete digest of the facts - which have been gurgitated for the past four years, and will no doubt require full court reiteration this year for those who can be saved.

But in the interest of absolute accuracy, I have to point this out. Rocket Man says:

The Democrats would have voters believe that while John Kerry was risking his life in Vietnam, George Bush was skipping Guard meetings in Alabama. But note the chronology: The peak of American involvement in Vietnam was in 1968 and 1969. It was in those years that Kerry piloted a boat on the Mekong River. At that time, Bush, who is 2 1/2 years younger than Kerry, was training to be a fighter pilot,

...all of this is true.

and could reasonably have expected to be posted to Vietnam at some future point.

Probably not true.

Bush flew the F102 Delta Dagger, a plane designed for shooting down Russian bombers and not much else. The plane served with Air Defense Command (ADC), a no-longer-extant part of the USAF intended to...well, shoot down Russian bombers and not much else. The F102 wasn't built to dogfight with planes like the nimble North Vietnamese MiG-17s, or drop bombs - like the F4s and F105s and F100s of Tactical Air Command. It certainly couldn't carry nukes or jungle-flattening loads of conventional bombs like the B-52s of Strategic Air Command, either. Both TAC and SAC served in Vietnam - ADC never did, to the best of my knowledge (Fingers? Am I right?)

ADC - and the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard units attached to it never fired a shot in anger; Democrats will no doubt say "Hah! Because there was never a threat of an air attack on the US!" Well, in hindsight, that's both right and wrong, as we found on on 9/11.

Anyway - Bush flew the F102 (some Democrat moonbat acquaintances of mine said he never got his wings, which is poppycock), and probably would never have been deployed to Vietnam.

As a side note, though - the Democrats are really piling on the National Guard, lately, making it sound like Powderpuff Football. Do they have any idea how many people in this country are in the Guard? And how that line of rhetoric sounds to them?

And how few of them wind up in Quinnipiac polls?

Coming Soon to Minneapolis -

California's State Assembly is pondering a resolution that would encourage feng shui in building codes.

The resolution, which has yet to pass a committee vote before going to the full Assembly, is meant to encourage planning agencies, building departments and design review boards to provide for the use of feng shui principles, which often touch on the placement of doors and staircases, the position of buildings and the alignment of objects in rooms. It aims to help people live in harmony with nature by promoting the flow of chi, or positive energy, and neutralizing or avoiding negative energy.

"The structure of a building can affect a person's mood," the measure says, "which can influence a person's behavior, which, in turn, can determine the success of a person's personal and professional relationships."

Mr. Yee said: "We need to allow the expression of one's culture. That's why people come to California."

Look for one of the Greens on the Minneapolis City Council to introduce this.

Single-payer homeopathy soon to follow...

'Splain Me Somethin'

So at the beginning of January, Mark "Revolutionary Gonad" Gisleson leaves his resume writing service to join the City Pages full-time.

During that time, he pointlessly attacked Fraters Libertas, and made statements that even Steve Perry, the CP's crypto-Maoist editor, had to disavow, if only sotto voce.

Then, he left the City Pages - all in three weeks. He's back in the resume business (and, to give credit where due, his business site is as useful, helpful and rational has his political writing was fevered and delusional).

That was a fast job arc, even for a City Pages writer.

What happened?

Concealed Carry in Wisconsin

A vote to try to override Wisconsin governor Doyle's veto of the state's proposed concealed carry bill is scheduled for a vote in their legislature today, according to DC of Brainstorming:

"[Thirty]-Six states have already passed concealed carry. We need 66 votes to override Governor Doyle's veto. All 59 republicans are expected to vote for the bill. Seven democrats voted to pass concealed carry in "

DC links to a fisking of an anti-veto Milwaukee Sentinel op-ed in Milwaukee blog Boots and Saddles. All the material in the MilSent piece should look depressingly familiar - it's the same Brady Factory Campaign the Strib and PiPress spent seven years regurgitating (and which is refreshingly absent from the press today).

Good luck, Wisconsin. I'm pulling for you.

Above It All?

Among the Northern Alliance, Powerline's Hindrocket is the only person predicting a Kerry victory.

The reason's not a bad one:

But President Bush, sadly, is too inarticulate to make his own case. He is a good man and generally a good decision-maker. At one time I thought he would become one of our greatest presidents. But he lacks the talent to defend himself against the torrents of hate that are being unleashed against him by the Democrats--an outpouring of viciousness that has no parallel in our history.

But there is a parallel; Reagan.

The left cordially detested Reagan. And they did it for many of the same reasons they hate Bush; he didn't play the same academic paper chase they all did; he gleefully ignores their ideals of "intelligence", to say nothing of their politics. And he outmaneuvers them politically at nearly every turn.

Reagan ignored the hate - in fact, he didn't dignify it with a response. He stayed on message. He let his opponents make him their subject - while he focused on the subjects that mattered.

Is that what Bush is doing? Is he letting the Democrat orgy of hatred and concurrent self-adultation play itself out in the media before focusing the nation and himself on the real task at hand - the war, the economy, and the presumptive choice between a flawed conservative and a perfect fabian statist?

I don't know. Karl Rove is no Lee Atwater. I have a hunch, though; if nothing else, Bush is adept at incorporating behavior he admires into his own act, and so far in this war he's shown his admiration for Reagan; his drive, and above all his focus on the key mission.

Hindrocket continues:

He has made, really, only one major mistake, his failure to control spending. But that mistake, together with a terrible run of bad luck, will, I am afraid, cost him his presidency.

I'm far from complacent about Bush's odds. I also have a thin crust of faith that the American people, in the end, aren't superficial enough to choose the likes of Kerry - and that Bush knows what really matters, politically.

The message; the war, the econony, the tax cuts.

It's what Reagan would have done.

Son of Signs I Need a Life, Part II - Stories Liberals Tell Themselves

Yesterday, Jeff Fecke of Blogomodleft left a comment under my "Conservatives and Bush" piece. It contains a number of tropes, memes and urban legends that even moderately reasonable Democrats are telling themselves these days (and while Fecke is by no means moderate - no more than I am - he's relatively reasonable).

Jeff's points are presented out of order - and my apologies for superimposing Fecke's views on the entire Democrat party, but I don't think it's entirely an inapt thing:

Oh, fwiw--yes, it's a January poll, but here's your latest Quinnipiac Poll:

Kerry 51%
Bush 42%

Invincible my ass.

I have no idea how vulnerable your ass is, but I digress.

No credible pundit on the right has ever called Bush invincible - any that did more than a few weeks before the election were either hopelessly deluded or trying to move papers. I think there's an interest in the left media in portraying Republicans as thinking that - to set their guy up as an underdog, of course. But I don't know a genuine Republican who doesn't know Bush can be beaten.

That being said - I doubt Kerry's the guy to do it. Sure, he's leading in a meaningless poll today - he's had entirely favorable press for the past three weeks, the majority of the American voting public has no idea of the baggage he brings to the table (not everyone is an amateur pundit), his negatives are correspondingly low - if he weren't doing very well at this point, he'd have a lot to worry about.

But he still does. He's a Massachusetts Liberal - worse than Ted Kennedy. That's not invoking the "L" word like a bed-time story used to scare the kids; liberalism has consequences. He has a twenty-year voting record that will not play in the hinterland. He has his schizophrenic record on the war, terror, and Hussein - voting against the '91 Gulf War, but for this one - but only in a way that ensured we couldn't do the job.

He's seen as a moderate today only because Howard Dean took all the flak from the left until his recent implosion, shielding Kerry from embarassing allegations of liberalism. Without Dean to soak up the "Liberal Moonbat" accusations, who'll protect Kerry? Kucinich?

And then we get past perceptions, and get down to substantive issues - like his long record in the seventies of sucking up to Hanoi Jane Fonda. Even worse was his shameful abandonment of the POW/MIA issue in the eighties - in the interest of "normalizing" relations with a homicidal dictatorship. How will that play in Sturgis?

Badly.

And that doesn't even scratch the surface of a voting record that rivalled Paul Wellstone's for being off-the chart left.

But the surface will be scratched.

I am predicting a John Kerry victory, and I'll tell you why: Democrats are pretty much ready to vote for Satan Himself if it will get George W. Bush out of office.

Which is how Republicans approached their campaign against Clinton.

In 1996.

Unfortunately for Kerry, it's a truism of politics - you rarely win running against something - and Bush Hatred is the only issue Kerry has. He's illiterate on the War on Terror, illiterate and hypocritical on Iraq, he's peddling Ted Kennedy in a world that's looking for JFK, against a president that has - get this - been successful in one of the most difficult first terms since Lincoln's.

Meanwhile, Republicans are disenchanted with Bush, and while most will vote for GDub, few are excited about it.

"Republicans are disenchanted?" What?

All Republicans?

Or just all the Republicans the Daily Kos chooses to quote?

News for ya - I was always disenchanted with Bush. I said it the other day; I supported Forbes. I gritted my teeth at the convention. And I voted for him rather than a write-in because I figured he needed every possible vote to keep Algore out of office. Would I rather he spent less? Hell yeah!

Do I think John Kerry would spend less? Hell no. And any Republican...no, any voter that does - or worse, mistakes "Deficit reduction" for "cutting spending" (stealth talk for "tax hikes") is deluding themselves.

Fortunately, I don't think we get deluded that easily.

In 2000, the situation was reversed; the Republicans wanted desperately to end the Clinton/Gore era, while the Democrats were only marginally in favor of continuing it.

Which is why so many of them crossed over, right?

In a close election (which 2000 was, and 2004 is going to be), the depth of support of a candidate matters greatly. John Kerry will have every monetary and human resource the Democrats can spare this fall.

Doesn't matter. Bush will have the same resources (and more), and one thing neither Kerry nor George Soros can buy - the knowledge on the part of most people that the War On Terror - the only issue that really matters - is in vastly better hands with Bush than with the vacillating, opportunistic, vacuous, commie-coddler Kerry.

The same cannot be said about 43.

Keep telling yourself that - not just you, Jeff, but all Democrats. We are a fractious lot, we Republicans - in our caucuses, the pro-lifers square off against the libertarians, and come near to blows. And yet, we finally learned how to come together, in time to elect Pawlenty, Coleman, Kennedy, Kline - most of them candidates that the "conservative base" was ambivalent about, all of them upset winners that left the pundits of the left scratching their head. Or worse.

So pack a lunch, GOPers.

I will. Even money I'll be dining on Democrat Expectations.

Besides, Jeff - your prediction curse has already swallowed one candidate; Mad Wesley Clark is DOA. Are you sure you want to add your support to all of Kerry's other upcoming problems? :-)

If Perception Equals Reality...

...then I'm really screwed.

Hugh Hewitt commented on our Northern Alliance get-together/group lunch/Loya Jirga last Saturday:

Great fun with the Northern Alliance ladies as well at our gathering on Saturday.

So far, so good.

Observations: If Northern Alliance members were pop/rock stars:

Big Trunk: George Harrison [Not bad...Ed.]

Captain Ed: Don McLean [Also not bad...Ed.]

Mitch Berg: Tom Jones

< screeching sound > Tom Jones?

Criminy, Hugh - I've always spoken so highly of you!

Back before I became follicle-challenged, I heard "Paul McCartney", or "the lead guitar player from Soul Asylum". I even heard "James Honeyman-Scott", the first guitar player for the Pretenders (the observer even thought it was accurate down to the heroin-chic shabbiness).

But Tom Jones?

If I have to put up with that, at least I should have women throwing underwear at me.

Onward:

St. Paul: Tommy James [I met Tommy James once. St. Paul is no...well, wait a minute...]

Hindrocket: Gordon Lightfoot [Good catch - Ed.]

Atomizer: Clay Aiken [Hmmmm...Ed.]

JB Doubtless: Elvis Costello [That one actually works - Ed.]

SCSU Scholar King: Santana [Although with an afro, he'd look like Kim Thayil of Soundgarden - Ed.]

Spitbull's Warrior Monk: John Prine [I've met John Prine. Even carried his guitar case. Warrior Monk is...well, not a bad resemblance... - Ed.]

Spitbull's Eloise: Linda Ronstadt [I've met Linda Ronstadt. Three Eloises in the same dress might look like Linda Ronstadt - Ed.]

The Elder: Cher. [Have I mentioned that Billy's Lighthouse makes an amazing Jalapeno/Jack burger? - Ed.]

Calling them as I see 'em.

Ditto.

Oops. Wrong host.

I mean, "Nice meeting you, Hugh!"

Signs You're Over

Sites dedicated to hating you are declaring "Mission Accomplished".

Jon Chait is bagging his anti-Dean blog.

He's now free to continue his spittle-flecked hatred of George Bush.

(Via Blogomodleft)

"...And the #1 Sign I Need A Social Life..."

...is when you start fisking comments to your own blog.

Although "Fisking" is perhaps too harsh a word. The commenter in question, "Flash", is the type of Democrat we have to count on continuing to exist if our two-party system is to survive; moderate enough to be responsible on many key areas. There are a lot of them out there - outstate DFLers like Bob Lessard, Eastsiders like Randy Kelly, southerners not too far to the left of Zell Miller. They don't control the party, of course - which is why the Minnesota DFL is led by the likes of Ellen Anderson, why the Minneapolis DFL's communications read like Pravda, and why John Kerry is seen (erroneously) as a moderate option to Mad How. But they're out there. So let's not call this a Fisking. It's just...feedback.

Flash wrote in the comments to a post from last week:

In the 2003 SOTU address, GW states:

"We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him."

While using the word disarm 10 times throughout the speech he mentioned the UN ONLY in the context of disarmement. He only mentions terror ties while discussing the fear of sharing SoDamns WMDs with them. He only talked of attrocities by SoDamn as the reason to get WMDs out of his hands, not as a pretext to war.

Does anyone think the subtext of those remarks wasn't perfectly clear, especially as most of the invasion force was already in place?

To have said "Disarm or get ready for an invasion", in addition to being stratetically bad pool, would have been portrayed in the media as "foaming at the mouth and mongering war". No need for that.

I ask all of you, if SoDamn Who'sInSane could have proven he had disarmed would that have been the end of it. That is clearly what GW implies, and why that is the ONLY reason he used, at the time.

But the other three justifications mentioned in Berg's Law had been iterated many, many times in the previous year; the resolutions, the human rights record and the support for terror. One address, even a SOTU, doesn't a complete policy make.

It is clear, in GW's own words, that the other 3 reasons you give as justifications for war, are really reasons to disarm the man, NOT a pretext to war itself. So much for Berg's law.

Let's take this exactly word for word. "Reasons to disarm" Hussein - precisely how does anyone expect Hussein to have been involuntarily disarmed?

Was there any rational means short of an invasion? Especially given that the UN's inspection program was not only ineffectve, but was in fact designed to be worthless?

I think Berg's law stands...

Noted In Passing

If she were alive, my grandmother would be 100 years old today.

You may not have heard of my grandmother, Bea Berg. But if you're an upper-midwestern Lutheran - or been in the home of one for any length of time - you've seen her work.

You've seen "Amazing Grace", the picture of the old man saying grace? Apparently, my grandmother was working at Eric Enstrom's photo studio in Bovey, MN at the time, and had some hand in producing the original photo. Exactly what hand, I don't know - dark-room, hand-coloring (I was amazed the first time I learned that the picture was a photo, not a painting), but my Grandma had a hand in it.

Conservatives And Bush

Yesterday, I asked the Northern Alliance to comment on the question - how will the conservative base react to President Bush's free-spending ways?

I went to the 2000 caucuses without any delusions about Bush's conservatism. While it's a time-worn principle for the media to call anyone to the right of Roger Moe a "Paleoconservative", Bush has clearly been no such thing at any point in his career. Oh, sure - he's a social conservative in all the ways that make the social conservative crowd happy; pro-death penalty, pro-life. There's nothing wrong with that - except the myopic notion that being socially conservative makes one conservative in any other way. He's also a conservative in the way that I expect any president to be; he favors a strong military (and acted on that belief even before September 11, thank God).

But he, like his father, has never been a fiscal conservative. Which was why I supported Steve Forbes for President, until the moment George Bush was nominated.

Will the conservative base defect in droves? Well, on the one hand:

• I think the real conservatives - the ones we'd have called Buchanan conservatives four years ago - were already marginalized and driven out of any serious influence in the party well before the 2000 GOP convention. Have they gotten any more intransigent? Well, the ones that care about defense and prosecuting the war on terror had better not have, since maintaining the safety of this nation is job #1.
• Conservatives are, if nothing else, realistic. Of course, to seriously ideological conservatives, "realism" is dangerously close to "pragmatism", a notiong that serious ideological conservatives like Jason Lewis sniff at - the idea of, if not selling your soul, at least negotiating bits and pieces of it away for short-term gain, in this case trading ideology for votes. "What difference does it make if you win the election, if you sell you political soul to do it" is an accurate paraphrase. It's all or nothing at all to these people. And yet, what is the option? Staying home and giving a John Kerry a better shot at winning? Because...
• As dismal as Bush has become on the spending front, there are two crucial things to remember:
  1. Spending can be undone; Americans killed by terror can not be brought back to life.
  2. If he pays lip service to fiscal conservatism, then it's more likely we can make him cash the checks his lips are writing.
  Bush may have triangulated his way out of conservatives' good graces in order to win some liberal votes - but that's un-doable, just the same way Bill Clinton had to reign in his inner (and his wife's outer) liberal in 1994. Does anyone really think Kerry can be won over through any means?
• And getting Kerry elected - even if through the back door, because conservatives stayed home out of misplaced ideological purity, more or less the wal Algore lost in 2000 due to Nader's influence - would give us results that should be unacceptable to Americans of all stripes, not just Republicans; the War On Terror would be come another law-enforcement exercise; the military would be plunged into another Clinton-era set of doldrums; worst of all, we'd have a Massachusetts Liberal at the helm.

I think frequent correspondent James "Oughtta Be A Blogger" Phillips has the right idea, when he writes:

Essentially, it is as if conservatives are in a Chinese restaurant. They look at the menu and order Beef Stroganoff. It ain't on the menu folks, and no matter how loud you scream you want it, the waiter ain't gonna bring it. So get over it.

I am going to vote for Bush. But I will think twice before I give him money again. My money is going to go to the Congressional and Senatorial candidates who can and will say "no" to their own President.

Absolutely.

Now, neither of Minnesota's Senate seats are in play for this election. All the house seats are - and none of them have especially heated up yet. Being a District Four resident "represented" by Betty McCollum, it's a moot point - even a Rockefeller Republican would be a big improvement.

But that may indeed be our best shot at curtailing the President's spending; making sure we elect Congresspeople who know that defense is the top priority, but who aren't afraid to go toe-to-toe with the President on the B-list issues like spending.

What do you think?

SIDE NOTE: Mark from Classically Liberal notes:

I think the number of conservatives sitting on their hands will be a pretty small percentage, less than 5%. I get the feeling that for all the carping about Bush and his (rather serious, in my opinion) flaws this is mostly healthy venting. I find it unlikely that when push comes to shove in November that conservatives would rather de facto vote for the Democratic candidate by staying home.

No argument.

The Session

The 2004 Legislative Session will be getting underway today. It's going to be a doozy.

It will pit Governor Pawlenty - hot off a very successful freshman year in office - against a DFL-controlled Senate that is down, but by no means out - and desperately yearns to recapture the unfettered hegemony of its one-party glory days.

We should expect big things from this legislature.

Or...maybe not.:

So while there may be sound and fury in the early going over the most controversial issues, this also might be a session in which few things are settled and legislators go home by their unofficial Easter deadline, a goal seldom realized in recent years.

There's also a chance that legislators will decide to put some of the most explosive disputes -- death penalty, tough new tax and expenditure limitations and a gay marriage ban -- on the November ballot for voters to resolve.

Which, of course, will be the most interesting outcome of all.

Despite all the media attention to divisive issues, recent opinion polls seem to show that the public is not overwhelmingly eager for any big changes in particular, according to at least one veteran observer, Sarah Janecek, editor of the Directory, a biennial guide to the Legislature.

"Nothing seems to be really resonating -- the public isn't clamoring for anything," Janecek said. "There is no clear mandate to do anything but bond," given the strong local interests for projects ranging from commuter rail to state college campus projects to Minnesota Zoo improvements. "The conventional wisdom in and out of the Legislature: Leave well enough alone."

Where was it written that Sara Janacek is the token Republican pundit?

The next question is interesting:

"Among the key political questions to be answered: Should DFLers allow the various ballot questions to go before the voters in November, in the hope that an agenda that could be portrayed as pro-death, anti-gay and anti-government will galvanize the liberal and moderate base, and in the process help the Democratic presidential candidate and DFL House members?

Janecek says some Republicans are worried that a batch of conservative ballot initiatives could 'crank the opposition up beyond a fever pitch.'"

Weren't they worried about this last year?

The Strib includes a digest of analysis of specific issues from the paper's stable of political reporters. Issues by issue, here's what they saw:

• Death Penalty: Conrad DeFiebre says "The Legislators will listen to Gov. Tim Pawlenty's plan to bring the death penalty back to Minnesota nearly a century after it was abolished, but they are more likely to go for life-without-parole sentences for the most dangerous sexual predators." Mitch says: I have a hunch that this may be the real motive for the GOP anyway. They'd never get the DFL to agree to reform Minnesota's "catch and release" penal system by asking for something as pedestrian as sensible, responsible reforms. But if those reforms are presented as a fall-back position to the death penalty - something that I doubt will pass, no matter how outraged we are about the disappearance and apparent murder of Dru Sjodin - it might work.
• .08 BAC for DWI: DeFiebre says about the potential for lowering the drunk driving limit: "With the scheduled financial penalties mounting to about $70 million by 2007 and highway deaths on an upward trend, there's growing consensus that the state can no longer afford to condone driving at levels of intoxication that nearly everyone agrees cause impairment. More and more policymakers, including Gov. Pawlenty and House Speaker Steve Sviggum, say it's time for a change." Mitch says: Unfortunately, probably true. The reduction in BAC limits is stupid, but money talks, and principle walks.
• Commuter Rail: DeFiebre, again: "Prospects appear good for Northstar. And House Transportation Finance Chairman Bill Kuisle, R-Rochester, said he expects passage of the busways. As for roads, there will be attempts to put as much as $100 million for projects into the bonding bill. Pawlenty says he can implement his plan to add privately built toll lanes to metro freeways without legislative action. But some legislators may try to block the plan, at least until "sane" lanes on Interstate Hwy. 394 are opened to toll-paying solo drivers and the change is evaluated" Mitch says: I think it's a big win for Pawlenty. I think the Northstar Line has serious potential to be self-supporting - which would go a long way toward stealing the transit issue from the DFL (and their fixation on light rail and pie-in-the-sky schemes based on massive social engineering). Meantime, the toll lane plan will give us a start toward moving road construction toward being user-fee supported - which makes Mitch's inner libertarian all warm and fuzzy.
• Stadiums: DeFiebre says "The committee [appointed by Pawlenty] is set to deliver its full recommendations to Pawlenty on Monday. But that will only set the stage for what promises to be a vigorous debate in the Legislature over public subsidies for billionaire owners and millionaire athletes versus the teams' role in Minnesota's quality of life." Mitch says this is going to be a high-profile exercise in triviality. We'd be nuts to play the game - the state government should not be subsidizing stadiums any more than they should be subsidizing any other form of recreation or, for that matter, subsidizing poverty.
• Gay Marriage - Mark Brunswick says "House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, predicts the House will pass a bill to put some version of the [anti gay-marriage constitutional] amendment on the ballot this fall. The issue has great currency right now on a national level, with conservatives pushing President Bush to make a more prominent statement on the sanctity of marriage. It is also believed to be a strong election year get-out-the-vote issue. New Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar has not signaled how he feels about same-sex marriage but says his caucus is very cautious about tinkering with any constitutional amendments." Mitch says this will be a bellwether issue to determine exactly how far to the right Minnesota has swung in the last decade. As to Johnson's remark - this is going to be interesting. I'd suspect that most of the outstate DFL - including Johnson's constituents in bucolic Willmar - have very different feelings about this issue than do most of the DFL's metro-area far-left base. They may be stuck between a rock and a hard place; they don't dare go soft on a core issue (perhaps the core issue) for their gay base, but the outstate DFL will have a hard time going along with it. This will be interesting.
• Expanding Gambling to pay for a Stadium: Mark Brunswick says: "Senate Minority Leader Dick Day, R-Owatonna, a sponsor of the Canterbury Park bill, is optimistic about its chances in the Senate, but Gov. Pawlenty hasn't supported expanded gambling proposals in the past and in all likelihood will continue to feel that way.

  Look for the stadium debate to enter the picture, with the possibility that casino-owning Indian tribes will be asked to contribute to a stadium as a potential counter to expansion. Some tribal leaders are up for election in the spring and a compromise may not sit well with their members." Mitch says it'll never happen. Minnesota's puritan instincts cross party lines.

• Health Care - Patricia Lopez says: ""Major health care reforms often have taken several sessions, and action is more likely in 2005. Pawlenty's Web site is up and running. Whether he will be able to use it to cut costs for state employees' drug purchases depends in part on how much opposition it gets from the federal government, which opposes reimportation." Mitch says this, along with holding the line on the budget (and succeeding at it) may well be the issue that makes or breaks Pawlenty as a national politician. Even if he "loses", he could gain the sort of national exposure, on a very ecumenical issue, that could make him a bipartisan household name. Watch for Pawlenty to ride this like a mechanical bull.
• Spending Caps: Lopez says: "Rigid caps will be a tough sell to all but the most fiscally conservative legislators, but many are expressing interest in other types of tax and expenditure limitations already adopted by more than half the states, as are administration officials." Mitch says - hard sell. I bet this one gets dropped to gain capital on other issues.
• Standards: Norman Draper says "Social studies will be a tougher sell for Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke than the language arts and math standards she helped shepherd through the Legislature last year. Revisions that give teachers more choices and tilt the standards more toward the political center have muted some of the criticism that erupted over them last fall. But big issues remain: Are the hundreds of requirements too bulky? How much will it cost financially strapped schools to implement them? Will teachers have the time and students have the smarts to get through them?" Mitch says this is the social battlefield of this session - and yet another issue where Pawlenty's long-term interests are served, win or lose. Beating the teachers' union or fighting them to the end - either result works.
• Abortion - Jean Hopfensperger says "Prospects look good for abortion opponents, who now boast friends in House leadership, Senate leadership and the governor's office. A child support overhaul is in a good position to move forward. Senior citizens and parents of disabled children also have the ear of committee chairs in both houses; finding the money to help them is the problem. Restoring cuts to child care will be tough." Mitch says this is an issue that the relatively moderate Pawlenty can afford to give a little on, to buy votes for issues that are more clear-cut for him. I'll bet he does.

We'll see. It'll be an interesting session.

Confirmation

I usually hate those "What Candidate To Is Right for You" questionnaires. The questions never reflect the nuances that have to go into developing a real, informed, adult opinion on any serious issue.

But, like the Monkeys, I took the AOL Presidential Match Guide. The results, ranked in order:

1. Bush (with 100% compatibility, which is absurd, because he spends too much)
2. Lieberman
3. Edwards (these last two are probably accurate - if you held a gun to my head and said "Vote for a Dem", and the gun wasn't big enough to kill me instantly but would only leave me in a chronic vegetative state, I'd vote for one of these two)
4. Dean (I thought he ranked here because of his stances on guns, until I saw 5-8)
5. Kerry
6. Clark (huh? I think Kerry and Clark are equally dismal!) Actually, the scary part is that Edwards and Clark's compatibility rankings went fro Edwards' 58 to Clark's 56% - which may show how little truly separates these four guys...
7. Sharpton
8. Kucinich

No surprises...

What the Super Bowl Means To Me

Mere weeks until pitchers report for spring training.

I like pro football for purely social reasons; few things are more fun than gathering around the TV with a bunch of guys, beer, pizza and chips. And beer.

But as far as intrinsic entertainment? Just a few more hours, and that great annual time suck, NFL football, will be over, and America's real rite of spring, baseball, will be underway again.

Don't get me wrong: If the Bears were in the Super Bowl, or even in the chase, it'd be another matter. But they're not. So...

I predict New England 225, Carolina 3. Which should tell you more about how little I care than about how I think the game will go.

And good riddance to another Bear-less "Super" Bowl.

Call it Practice

So I have a question for the Northern Alliance, in the spirit of the grilling our Commish gave us yesterday, and in practice for the big secret project...:

The press these days is gleefully touting the degree to which Bush's free-spending, neo-Tip-O'Neill ways are eroding his support from the conservative base.

What do you all think? Is the base going to stay home? Defect to an heir of Pat Buchanan? Write in Steve Forbes?

Will they respond as Sullivan seems to think?

Or will they take Jay Reding's advice, keep their minds on the real issue (the war on terror) and vote for lesser of the evils on the ballot?

My two cents tomorrow or Tuesday - but I thought I'd toss this out to my fellow muj as well.