Shot In The Dark

Heroes

While we were waiting in line to talk with Michael Medved on Wednesday, Captain Ed and the Elder and I came upon an interesting point: as a society, we tend to spend a lot more time mourning our dead than revering our heroes (at least, the heroes that live).

The theory is that our enemies - the Islamofascists living in societies that are mired philosophically in the seventh century, like Visigoths with RPG-7s - take this reverence and shared grief as a sign of weakness, and that our allies, the civilians in these same countries, see it as a sign that we as a culture might cut and run out on them.

Maybe we need to do something about this.

We do, of course, have a long tradition of revering and collectively mourning those who make the ultimate sacrifice; our nation's earliest heroes were Crispus Attucks and Nathan Hale, men who were famous more for their deaths than for what they accomplished.

And yet, up through World War Two, everyone could name our heroes, too; during the Civil War the Union had David "Damn The Torpedos" Farragut and Phil Sheridan and Joshua Chamberlain; for the Rebs, John Pelham and Jeb Stuart were household words. In World War One, Alvin York and Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Whittlesey, and their feats, were well-known.

In World War Two, of course, the heroes came thick and fast; those who died in the line of duty - Colin Kelly, Howard Gilmore, the five Sullivan brothers were inspirational models of sacrifice to a nation not yet inured to being at war - but many more heroes lived; Jimmy Doolittle, George Gay, Joe Foss, Pappy Boyington, Richard Bong, and innumerable Marines, tankers, pilots, paratroopers and grunts had their exploits retold in the papers and at thousands of war-bond rallies from coast to coast.

During Korea, and by Vietnam, though, heroism didn't play so well; war-weariness, moral ambiguity, and a press that saw itself as a counterweight to the war effort all conspired to subdue reporting of heroism; by the end of Vietnam, a generation of the "elite" regarded war heroism as a benighted, obsolete thing.

And they run the media today.

Which leads us to our situation now; the media focuses on coffins and polls and the tragic heroism of the Pat Tillmans of our nation; we have to dig hard to find the stories of our American kids in their tanks and IFVs and squads who are, beyond any doubt, performing every bit as well as their great-grandparents.

So where are the stories?

I don't know. But I want to find out.

If you're in the service, and know of such a story, let me know. If you know of people who know these stories, I'd like to hear about them.

If I get enough, I'll make it into an entire new site.

Since 9/11, we've had a wealth of stories about our sacrifices; of our strength in the face of loss; of our resiliency in the face of tragedy; of the Pat Tillmans and NYPD and FDNY heroes and so many more. God bless them as He has blessed us with that strength and faith and heroism in the first place.

But America - and the world - need to know the other side of the coin; that America produces men and women who not only take it and go on to fight, but issue superhuman smack on those who'd do us ill; that the "rough men [who] stand ready to do violence on [our] behalf" of Orwell's famous quote are cut from the same cloth as those who fought their way home from Chosin and who survived the Bulge; that as Patton said, we don't just die for our country - we make the other poor dumb sonsofbitches die for theirs, and we do it very well.

We have live heroes, too. And I want to get their stories out.

If you know these stories, please lend me a hand with it.

UPDATE: Regular correspondent, pilot and old friend Colonel Fingers writes in the comments:

Today's "live heroes" don't consider themselves as such. In fact, the "dead heroes" probably would tell us "don't call me a hero, I screwed up and let the bastards get me!" Today's "heroes" are men and women who have made the conscious decision to put country before self and join a team of professionals whose "job" it is to stand a post between all that is evil in the world and our free society. These folks don't like to toot their own horns because they're just doing what everybody else in their unit is doing and consider themselves equals and a reflection of our society (if they only new how special they were).

I agree wth everything the Colonel says.

And I stand by my point. I know the heroes of this war wouldn't consider themselves as such. Either did Alvin York or Audie Murphy, when you got right down to it.

It's not about them, really - that doesn't sound right, but work with me, here. It's about the rest of our society.

I'm under no illusions that I'll get a groundswell of contributions on this subject; things don't work that way. But it's something our society - the larger society, the part that still gets its news from Dan Rather and thinks Chris Matthews actually is a hardball smashmouth interviewer - needs to hear, and hear consistently. Even systematically.

Because like Vietnam, this war may be won on the battlefield - but it can be lost here. I have more faith in our people than that - but there's nothing wrong with reinforcing faith.

Matthews Remembers Hardball

Watched Matthews on the Today show.

Matthews, of course, has been ripped over and over this past week for his relentlessly pansylike interview of John Kerry - softball after pathetic softball.

This morning, being interviewed by Matt Lauer over his interview with Donald Rumsfeld, Matthews noted that Rumsfeld had said there was no direct connection between Iraq and 9/11.

Matthews: "...it took me eight tries to get that answer..." (emphasis added).

He tried eight times to get Rumsfeld to "admit" something?

Eight?

That's about eight more tough questions than he tossed John Kerry.

JB Doubtless Was Right

Petty crime seems to have dropped during the bus strike.

Don't expect the usual suspects to be happy about that, though.

• Police calls at the Mall of America, especially on weekends, were down by as much as 21 percent.
• Arrests in downtown Minneapolis had dropped.
• In St. Paul, police calls for so-called "quality of life" complaints, such as narcotics sales near bus stops, also had fallen.Damned racists, worried about "quality of life". Why would good Saint Paulites - like me - care about that?

  I digress:

  After the metro area's first transit strike in a decade, the possible relationship between the strike and crime has become a much-debated -- and politically touchy -- issue. Critics complain that the focus unnecessarily paints an unflattering portrait of bus riders.
  Police contend that the figures, while showing drops in possible criminal activity, may have uncertain meaning and caution against hasty conclusions.
  At the Mall of America, police said complaint calls dropped noticeably when comparing the weeks immediately before and during the strike. "Did we see a decrease in the 'regular' people we would see out here? I can say, yes, we did," said Sgt. Jeff Schwiesow, a Bloomington officer who commands a police patrol at the nation's largest shopping mall.
  "We did some internal tracking. This question came up," he said. "The people that we've seen before, that usually [cause] some type of disturbance, but not enough to get arrested, weren't here."
  Though crime statistics have many variables, and in Minneapolis must be judged against a general decrease in crime, police said there was a drop in crime that typically occurs near bus stops or is committed by petty criminals who tend to move about using the bus system.

  Did the usual crowd of poverty pimps chime in?

  What do you think?

  Jon Pratt, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, also said such comparisons are unsettling. "I wouldn't say it's a disservice to draw those connections. [But] there is kind of a sport in picking on the poor and trying to point out their foibles," he said.

  "There was a lot of extreme generosity during the bus strike," he added.

  How disgustingly patronizing.

  Noting crime has nothing to do with "picking on the poor". Criminals, however, prey on the poor more than anyone; the poor are disproportionately victimized by criminals, in all parts of their lives as well as well as during the bus strike.

  Vile.

  Read the whole thing. Note especially the public figures that are crab-walking away from this study.

  Posted by Mitch at 06:50 AM | Comments (2)

Terror Drops

According to the left, attacking Iraq was supposed to make the Arab Street fly into a paroxysm of rage - and bring terrorists out of the woodwork.

How has that played out? Hint: how has every other trope of the left played out?

Got your answer? How do you think it's going?

According to the State Department:

There were 190 acts of international terrorism in 2003, a slight decrease from the 198 attacks that occurred in 2002, and a drop of 45 percent from the level in 2001 of 346 attacks. The figure in 2003 represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969.
A total of 307 persons were killed in the attacks of 2003, far fewer than the 725 killed during 2002. A total of 1,593 persons were wounded in the attacks that occurred in 2003, down from 2,013 persons wounded the year before.
In 2003, the highest number of attacks (70) and the highest casualty count (159 persons dead and 951 wounded) occurred in Asia.
There were 82 anti-US attacks in 2003, which is up slightly from the 77 attacks the previous year, and represents a 62-percent decrease from the 219 attacks recorded in 2001.

Read the whole fascinating thing.

Deadly Month

The Today Show notes that 126 Americans have died this past month. They are agog at the casualties.

Un-noted; that is almost exactly the death toll in the four days of the ground phase of the first Gulf War.

Spirit of America

Spirit of America is getting noticed in the big media.

The column describing Spirit of America's effort to raise $100,000 for the TV stations appeared in this space 14 days ago. Since then, the following has happened: Jim Hake, Spirit of America's entrepreneur founder, says they have received $1.52 million. Some 7,000 donations have come from every state, and one from . . . France. Mr. Hake purchased all the needed equipment and had suppliers ship directly to Camp Pendleton. Federal Express donated domestic shipping costs.

I'll note here that Hake is scheduled to appear on the Northern Alliance Radio Network tomorrow. Please tune in (if you're in the Twin Cities).

Speaking of Twin Cities:

Stanley Hubbard at Hubbard Broadcasting Inc. in Minnesota has offered several hundred thousand dollars in state of the art digital television equipment. That equipment would provide satellite uplink and downlink capability, allowing the Iraqis' TV stations to get program content from elsewhere in the world.

Countervailing Al Jazeera should get a lot easier.

The effort is apparently going over big:

Mr. Hake has received five new requests from military in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, the live war that faded from view until Pat Tillman, the former NFL player, was killed there. A Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan requested soccer equipment for a village team: "They compete regionally but have no equipment save a couple of soccer balls." The team's equipment will soon be shipped.
Sounds like small potatoes. But in the relatively alien worlds the U.S. now finds itself, represented by its soldiers, this is what must be done if we hope to extinguish terrorism and restore self-government in lands taken over by terrorist networks.

Tellingly, Mr. Hake has also received a request from a Coalition Provisional Authority office in Iraq. The CPA of course is the U.S. government agency officially tasked with restoring Iraq, and funded by Congress (i.e., the American people). That the CPA itself would ask Jim Hake for help suggests that peacetime rules and red tape are smothering a wartime effort--whether by the CPA, private contractors or the military.

More on this tomorrow.

Required Reading

It takes a lot - an awful lot - to choke me up. My emotional threshold is incredibly high; call me jaded, call me anything you want (except cynical).

But this piece did it.

You need to read the whole thing.

Society Sees Red

I've always had a jones for redheads.

Which is no big shakes, societally-speaking. But as I waited to pick up my kids at the movie theatre the other day, I noticed something for the first time in my poster-observing life; nearly every leading lady in nearly every poster was a redhead.

New trend?

Blondes have, of course, been the big ticket in movies since time immemorial, and brunettes are all over the place too. But redheads in movies always seemed a rare thing.

And yet from Lindsay Lohan to Julianne Moore to Kate Winslet to Nicole Kidman, redheads seem to be in vogue right now. Not just in the movies, either - "Grace" and "Roz" and many other redheads dot the TV screens.

You're even seeing redheaded TV news anchors and correspondents; consultants used to relentlessly hound them into blond-or-brunette dye jobs; if even broadcast consultants - reactionary enough to make Kim Jong-Il look like a Berkeley hippie - are on board, it must be a trend.

Maybe more tellingly, redheads seem to be popping up in a lot more advertisements. And they seem to be depicting objects of desire in advertising, in a way that, as long as I can remember, has been the province of the va va voom blonde or the exotic brunette.

Apparently not everyone shares this view - but I think there's something to it.

Frustration

When it comes to this blog, I have all sorts of days.

Some days, the stuff practically writes itself.

Other day - three weeks ago, for example - I have the most horrible blogger's block.

Most days are somewhere in between.

Today? The most frustrating of all. I have about ten pieces in my "Drafts" folder, all of them posts I'm dying to publish, none of them ready to go at all. Some things I've been pecking away at for weeks and don't want to give up on; others that are ideas I dash off while I'm at work and haven't had time to develop; still more that are almost there but need just a little more time...

...which is, of course, in incredibly short supply.

Blogging was so much easier when I was unemployed.

Medved

I had the pleasure of meeting not only Michael Medved last night at the Patriot Forum - I also got to meet a lot of Patriot listeners for the first time.

What a blast!

Medved's speech was, as you might have expected, sharp, incisive, and blazingly intelligent. His commentary on the presidential campaign and the state of the nation was - this is rare in the world of talk radio - straight as a laser beam and consistent as the sunday churchbells.

Captain Ed, Saint Paul and the Elder were also there - so it was sort of a public debut for the Northern Alliance Radio Network as well.

The Elder wrote about the show, and has photos.

The Next Kangaroo Court

Two weeks ago, when John Kerry's mouth started getting him in trouble, the media pulled out the Clark testimony and the 9/11 commission. It drew some attention away from Kerry's budding meltdown.

But the hearings are over. What next?

Well, Kerry's been flailing away, trying to re-open the "Bush's National Guard Service" trope. The Democrats may have harmed themselves more than helped with Senator Frank Lautenberg's senile-sounding "Cheney the Chickenhawk" rant in the Senate yesterday.

I got a hint from Russert this morning on the Today show; questioning what happened on Air Force One on 9/11 - "what were the threats, and were they credible".

We've gone from "What did Bush know and when did he know it" to "Why didn't Bush fail to defy Secret Service protocols for emergencies".

Six months til the election. Smell the desperation.

This Greatest Evening...

...on God's Green Earth.

I'll be at the Patriot Forum, along with fellow Northern Alliance members Captain Ed, The Elder and Saint Paul.

Hope to see you there.

Post Punk

My love of punk goes way back. The Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys, the Clash, the Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers...all the way back to the birth of the form.

Except for Patti Smith.

Patti Smith always bored me stiff. Self-indulgent, pompous, inaccessible, self-absorbed in her artiness, she struck me as more of a hippie-via-the-Village than a genuine punk.

Jim Farber of the New York Daily News,

agrees:

At times, Smith seems to suffer from a messiah complex, an impression deepened by her frequent biblical imagery. Somewhere along the line, Smith turned into the Mother Teresa of CBGBs. Unfortunately, her new songs not only wind up as well-intentioned mush, they confirm the warmongers' worst image of peaceniks - as wimps.

Smith belonged to the earliest wave of Greenwich Village punks - contemporaries of Lou Reed who hung out with William S. Burroughs, who saw themselves more as (and acted more like) beat era writers and poets than rock and rollers.

Smith numbered among her good friends Robert Mapplethorpe, and the parallel is blindingly obvious; her music, like his photography, is art that's intended to shock, to render discomfort, to make the art consumer uneasy.

Nothing wrong with that as such - it's a philosophy that's united American artists from Mark Twain to the present. But like Mapplethorpe, Smith represents a strain of American artist - of but not in the Sixties, post-hippie but awash in post-romantic existential despair and nihilism - that sounds self-absorbed and silly in the best of times, and mindlessly trite after 9/11.

How trite? "Radio Baghdad" proclaims the Saddam-era Baghdad an intellectual and cultural center, while calling the post-liberation city a sea of rubble (which I'm sure is meant as metaphor, since the city would seem to look less like Stalingrad than does Los Angeles these days).

Read the article, natch.

Ugly

I was watching some of the footage from the President's visit on Monday.

It shows some of what's at stake in this election.

The biggest impression I got? Channel 11 showed some footage of the anti-Bush demonstrations outside the Convention Center.

In and among the usual detritus of these protests - the big Bush and Cheney puppets, the misspelled placards, the relentless "I was a hippie" mien of most of the fifty-something protesters - I saw what I think is a key barometer.

The anti-Bush crowd is angry. Oh, yes they are. But it's not the purposeful sort of anger - the kind you saw at Ground Zero, or at Concealed Carry Reform meetings in, say, 2000. It was the blind, frothing hatred that springs from impotence.

I saw some footage of an otherwise-gorgeous, twenty-something brunette in a paroxysm of rage - a probably-pretty face twisted into a hate-rent caricature, spittle flying, all but convulsing and falling over from the intensity of her tantrum.

I saw an interview with a fiftysomething woman whose entire presentation screamed "retro-hippie"; unkempt hair, saggy face on a potato-shaped head, the same homemade-looking hemp clothing (at least I hope it was homemade - it looked like it had been stitched together from brightly-colored potato sacks) ranting "BUSH STOLE THE ELECTION! HE WAS APPOINTED BY THE SUPREME COURT! HE'S KILLING THE POOR!"

Hatred doesn't sell. Oh, it might win Minnesota, although I'm going to do my bit to try to prevent that. But nationwide? No way.

PS: Let's take stock:

• Uninformed opinions
• Rampant illogic
• Frothing-at-the-mouth hatred

...isn't this what conservative talk radio is supposed to foment?

Fold

There are two issues on which I strongly differ with the Minnesota GOP.

One is commuter rail - and I'll be writing about the House Republicans' mistakes in this area in the next few days.

The other? Gambling.

There's a move afoot in GOP circles to expand gambling beyond the Indian-only status quo.

Huge mistake on two counts.

First: Gambling inevitably costs more than it brings in. No exceptions. That's not conservative.

Second: This was supposed to be an Indian franchise. Forever. And that's the way should be. If you assume that our society owes Native America for having taken their homeland and pretty much wiping out their people and culture (since the end of the wars), then giving them an eternal franchise on gambling is not only fair - it's perhaps the only form of "affirmative action" that can ever be either meaningful or effective.

No. Do not expand gambling.

First Birthday

The Minnesota Personal Protection Act turns one year old today.

Lest we forget, let's step back in time and reminisce about what the DFL predicted would happen.

Shootings over fender-benders: Zero.

Gunfights in bars between legal permit holders: Zero.

Gallons Traces of blood in gutters put there by legal permit holders: Zero.

Shootings by legal permit holders: Zero.

Percent of lying piece of filth "Senator" Wes Skoglund's rhetoric that came true: Zero.

Degradation in Minnesota's "quality of life" cause by ending victim disarmament: Zero.

DFL Party credibility on this issue: Zero.

Amount of credence you should allow the DFL on this or any issue: Zero.

Amount of accountability exacted upon the DFL in the media after eight solid years of lies on this issue: Zero.

There's a birthday party today at the Capitol. I'm going to try to be there. If you support the MPPA, it's important you try to be there as well; you can bet the jobless, always-ready-to-picket-for-someone instaprotesters from Code Citizens for a Pink Minnesota will be there, parading in front of the cameras that will duly find exactly the right angle to make them look anything but insignificant (and doddering). We need to make the differences too obvious to ignore.

I"ll hope to see you there.

Sniping

Nick Coleman constantly derides the death of "Minnesota Nice". Yet it's on full display at the Minnesota Senate these days.

Of course, as any real observer of Minnesota and Minnesotans knows, "Minnesota Nice" is just a pseudonym for a sense of passive-aggression; a "Minnesota Nice" person will talk about the Timberwolves to your face, and stab you in your back when you turn away.

Steve Kelley and the Senate Education Committee are "Minnesota Nice".

First things first: I'm not an especial supporter of "No Child Left Behind', at least not in its specifics. I think it puts too much emphasis on testing, and not enough on critical thinking, or even the teaching of thought.

And state Education Commissioner nominee Cheri Pierson Yecke is a major proponent of NCLB. But in a larger sense she supports something that Minnesota public education desperately needs; accountability.

And that just won't do, for Minnesota's educational/industrial complex.

In a 6-4 vote that followed party lines and left Republicans fuming, the Senate Education Committee advised the full Senate not to confirm Yecke, who stepped into the job more than 14 months ago...Even Yecke's supporters concede that the embattled commissioner has been a lightning rod for the Pawlenty administration. She has stirred up controversy with her support for more student testing and new academic standards for all Minnesota students, and has alienated many teachers and other educators.

DFLers on the Education Committee recommended rejecting Yecke because of what they said is her polarizing influence on the education community, dividing it into antagonistic pro- and anti-Yecke camps. That's bad for education, they said.

Right. Because diversity is a bad thing.

Because adults can't differ on things like this. (Any of you private sector employees out there - does anyone care if you like your boss or her policies or not?)

And goodness knows the DFL ideologues that run the Education committee aren't fiercely ideological. Are they?

"I think the issue here is what is causing the polarization," said Sen. Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis. "And I think the issue of qualifications involves more than just having a diploma. I think it's broader than that."

In response to a Republican legislator's comment that an education commissioner didn't have to be a healer, committee chairman Steve Kelley, DFL-Hopkins, responded:

"I'm not looking for a healer. But I'm not looking for someone who by her rhetoric or otherwise is an active divider."

That "rhetoric", of course - the "rhetoric" of opposition to the Teacher's Union's agenda.

Go into a public school (as I have to do, but hopefully not for much longer). Mention Pol Pot. Talk about Adolph Hitler. Discuss Jeffrey Dahmer. You may or may not get a reaction (many teachers might not know who any of them are).

Mention Yecke or Pawlenty (or, for that matter, George W. Bush). Watch the teeth and fists clench, feel the steam shooting out their ears.

No. I'm not exaggerating.

Kelley said he didn't know when the committee recommendation would wind up on the Senate floor, but said he would suggest to Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, that the Senate act quickly on the matter and vote Yecke up or down rather than taking a third course of action: laying the confirmation aside indefinitely.

"I just want to get closure on this," Kelley said. Asked what action the full Senate might take, Kelley said he couldn't predict.

Steve Kelley is the Tom Dashcle of Minnesota.

Hoity-Toity Literary Thread

I got this from Red-Headed Ramblings, - it's a list of books you have (or have not read).

Proceed at your own risk. Don't operate heavy equipment.

Books I've read are in bold. Comments are bracketed.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
[Although it's on my short list] Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury [I never liked Faulknor]
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust [Auf Deutsch!]
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World [perhaps the only Libertarian in the world who never did]
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis [Auch auf Deutsch]
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain [Noch eine auf Deutsch - aber ich erinnere gar nichts]
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar [As if]
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye [Hated it!]
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [should be required reading]
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace [Worth the effort]
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Enh. I need to take a vacation and bring some along.

Has Anyone Told John Kerry?

Hot potato in the Sudan!

Sudan has ordered the removal of Syrian missiles and weapons of mass destruction out of the African country.
Arab diplomatic and Sudanese government sources said the regime of Sudanese President Omar Bashir has ordered that Syria remove its Scud C and Scud D medium-range ballistic missiles as well as components for chemical weapons stored in warehouses in Khartoum. The sources said the Sudanese demand was issued after the Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry confirmed a report published earlier this month that Syria has been secretly flying Scud-class missiles and WMD components to Khartoum.

But...isn't there plenty of space to put missiles in Syria?

Why would the Syrians be flying missiles and WMD components to a country like the Sudan, which has been the AAA farm club for the Islamofascists?

The sources said the Bashir regime has been alarmed over the prospect that the United States would discover the Syrian arsenal and conclude that Damascus and Khartoum were cooperating in the area of missiles and WMD. They said this would have delayed or dashed U.S. plans to lift sanctions from Sudan.

And why would the Sudanese do this?

Why would the Bashir regime be nervous about this?

I don't wanna keep seeing the same hands, here...

The Clark Of The '04's

Soundfury on why John Kerry is the new Wesley Clark.

One of several money quotes:

In an electronic age further buttressed by the Internet evolution and the later blogosphere revolution, his record caught up to him at warp speed. He just couldn't outrun what he had said on camera. All the discrepancies between what he claimed he hadn't said and what he, in fact, had said finally collapsed under their own weight.
And much like Wesley Clark's sworn testimony became the weapon used against him, I have to wonder if today doesn't spell the end of John Kerry's presidential aspirations.
John Kerry has become, at least for the blogosphere if not for the GOP, the gift that keeps on giving. You know all the waffling, the reversals, the "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" nonsense that we must actually treat seriously because, well, he is the de facto Democratic nominee.
He can try to finesse the vote for war in Iraq and later voting for against the aid package, to give all the pie-in-the-sky promises for $10 million new jobs, middle-class tax cut, balanced budget.
But three decades of obfuscation just came due. Getting caught red-handed with your own words, on camera, over three decades ago--and giving a haphazard, resentful, annoyed reply--just rings of NIGYSOB.

Read it all.

While this campaign is far from over, I have to say at this point that I have to feel for the people - some of them friends - who started the campaign believing that Howard Dean was the it candidate, then switched to Clark, and finally swore Kerry was the guy.

It's gotta be rough.

(Via The Professor)

Wetterling To Run

It's impossible not to feel sympathy for Patty Wetterling.

Wetterling is, of course, the mother of Jacob Wetterling, whose kidnapping (along with that of Fargo girl Jeana North a few years later) forever scuppered the feeling that small towns are safe places to raise children, has become the poster adult for grassroots anti-crime activists.

But now she wants to run for Congress.

The Strib tells the story:

Patty Wetterling, who transformed anguish over her son's 1989 abduction into a pioneering crusade for child safety, has decided to challenge Rep. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., for his U.S. House seat.

Wetterling, 54, of St. Joseph, Minn., plans to formally announce her candidacy on Wednesday or Thursday, two Democrats familiar with her plans said Monday.

"Yes, I believe I'm going to run," Wetterling said in a phone interview. "... I thought about it a lot, and I believe it is the logical step for me to continue doing the work I've been doing."

This is wrong on so many levels.

While Wetterling's work has been admirable, picking the DFL for a party is just...wrong.

They're the party of catch and release. The party of uncertain civil committment for sex offenders. The party of victim disarmament.

Not to blame the DFL for the crime, or any specific crime - but they created an environment in Minnesota where crime was easier to commit, and to get away with, than in nearly any other state.

Wetterling has widespread name recognition and could capitalize on the fundraising connections that she and her husband developed.

The Wetterlings created a foundation to focus national attention on missing children after a masked man stole away their 11-year-old son, Jacob. But Patty Wetterling is untested politically and is jumping into a pricey campaign a mere six months before Election Day.

Two experts in congressional politics rated her a long shot in an era when 99 percent of incumbents win reelection.

"Here's the harsh reality," said University of Minnesota political science Prof. Lawrence Jacobs. "She's a sympathy candidate running against an incumbent."

Not just an incumbent, but a very good one. Mark Kennedy is a serious candidate to run against Mark Dayton. He's a fine representative - worlds better than Bill Luther was - and the Sixth CD is lucky to have him.

Wetterling, well-meaning as she was, was a key piece of propaganda used to bash the loathsome 1994 Crime Bill through Congress. The bill - which enacted many of the facets of the Patriot Act that liberals and fundamentalists Libertarians are most exercised about - has done virtually nothing to fight crime. Not Wetterling's fault, of course - but her willingness to attach her name (virtually a sainted one in these parts) to such trite, opportunistic legislation doesn't bode well for the Sixth's future in Congress if she's elected.

"I didn't really seriously consider it until last Wednesday," Wetterling said. "I do not have money to run a campaign. I do not have a committee in place. I don't have a platform."

But, she said, she "would be fighting for a safer world for kids and for the future of our children."

Wetterling declined to say where she stands on issues such as tax cuts, the war in Iraq and abortion -- issues that could be at the center of many congressional races this fall.

"I have voted predominantly Democratic," she said, adding that as a congresswoman she would "make accountable, reasonable, responsible decisions."

Then when it comes to Iraq, taxes, abortion, victim disarmament and foreign policy, she's in the wrong party.

I'd urge Wetterling to reconsider this decision. She has done so much good in the grass-roots and private sectors; it'd be a shame to see it squandered by attaching herself to the DFL.

Priorities

Top story on the Today show this morning:

Michael Jackson fires his defense team.

#2 story?

Tribute to Pat Tillman

Nice to know the media knows what's news.

Further evidence, I think, in the thread Instapundit was running over the weekend, on the media. There was a time that the media reported the news. Today, it is an institution unto itself.

Jay Reding has a great piece on he subject (which is part of Reynolds' thread):

The media, especially on the national level, is a cloistered and insulated group. If it doesn't appear on the AP newswires, it doesn't happen to them. If a Republican or conservative group does something, there must be a bad angle to the story. If a liberal group does something, it's automatically assumed to be good. The system of bias is pervasive - while the news may be largely corporate-owned, there are few examples where corporate interference skews the news - if anything, there's a demonstrable preference for bashing corporations for "poisoning the air", "harming children", etc. There's an equal preference for government solutions for all problems, from more regulation to new government programs. From the reporters working the field to the editors ultimately responsible for the decision to print a story you have a group of people whose political worldviews are almost entirely homogenous - and this bias shows in the reporting that comes out of news agencies like The New York Times and CNN.

This isn't to say that this bias is all-consuming. If John Kerry were caught in a meaty sex scandal the media would pick up on it (although not after a great deal of vacillation) - after all, sex sells more papers and gets more ratings. Liberals love to use the Clinton scandals as "proof" that the media really isn't liberal, which ignores the fact that the media tried to avoid the story as much as it could in the early days of the scandal, and only flogged it when it was good for ratings, while still providing a certain amount of pro-Clinton spin. The Clinton scandals were not the rule, but the exception, and the treatment of Clinton in 1996 and on other issues was highly preferential.

What does it say about the media - I'm looking at the Today show, but I think it's endemic across the industry - that they're so cynical that they think the news-watching public cares more about Michael Jackson's farce trial than about the war that so many of our friends, relatives and co-workers are overseas fighting right now.

They - the media - seem to live in a world completely unlike the rest of ours. And as internet journalism becomes the news source of choice for more and more of us, it's only going to get worse; the major-media audience will itself become less and less critical, more and more resembling the tabloid media.

That Bush seems to be doing his best to speed the marginalization process is a good thing.

Painting Party Update

As I mentioned a while ago, I'll be painting my house...

...but not this coming Saturday. The weather doesn't look like it'll be cooperating.

I've put it back to May 15. More details soon.

MPPA - First Birthday Party!

The Minnesota Personal Protection Act turns 1 on Wednesday.

There's going to be a party on Wednesday at the Capitol, and all supporters are invited.

Joel Rosenberg notes:

I do hope that everybody on the pro-self-defense side who shows up treats them not only civilly -- and of course we will -- but in a very friendly way. As misguided as these folks are -- they haven't, apparently, noticed that the sky isn't falling -- most of them really do mean well. As few of them as there are, they're still engaged in something that's good in principle: they're expressing their views, and petititioning their government.

On the other hand, I'd encourage them to rally on the space that the Capitol authorities have reserved for them across the street from the steps, rather than crowding onto the steps at 11:30, where we'll still be setting up for the noon rally. The Capitol folks will probably still be stringing wires for the PA system, and I know that they'd not want to interfere with the authorities.

Mostly, though, I'd invite them to stick around, and have a piece of cake.

I'll hope to see you there, work schedule permitting.

Ghastly

The headline on the Democratic Underground story says "Dumb Jock Killed in Afghanistan"

Which is all I should expect from Democratic Underground.

And yet it's still depressing.

Were the Nazis heroes? Didn't they also die for what they thought was right? Haven't we all learned by now that *everyone* is doing what they think is right. The question is, what can be observed about their actions. Fighting in Iraq or in Afghanistan means you're fighting for the wealth and power of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, et al. We now have pipelines being built across both countries. Was that worth dying for? Does dying for pipelines make one a hero? Conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq are worse than before the invasions. In Afghanistan the Northern Alliance is (supposedly) in power, which is composed of some factions that make the Taliban's record on human rights look near respectable. In Iraq soldiers are dying daily because the Iraqi people refuse to become an occupied nation, a US colony. That is not going to stop, ever. We've learned that lesson time and time again. Wherever you find colonialism, you will find resistance. History has taught that the resistance always wins except in cases of undeterred genocide (such as the genocide of the Native Americans).

To be honest I wish I could feel sorry for the guy, but the truth is I really feel nothing at all. To many have died and too much money has flowed into the pockets of Dick Cheney to even worry about it. Either people will wake up, or they'll continue to waste their lives and the lives of others for the profits of a privileged few. How long will we have to wait for people to embrace a proper remembrance of all the lives that have been lost in the past years?

These people will be calling the shots if John Kerry wins the election.

Why Bush Will Win

As much thrashing around this issue as I've done, nobody has put it quite as well as our guest last week on the Northern Alliance show, area polymath Vox Day:

Why will Bush win? At first, I assumed this would be the case because of the homogamy issue. But now, I believe this because the Democrats nominated a candidate who combines Bob Dole's likeability with Bill Clinton's trustworthiness.

It's close.

More later.

Fantasy World

I've often felt that people - mainly but not exclusivey Democrats - should be required to take a basic knowledge test before commenting on military matters. Lately, the number of liberal commentators who've joined the "Legion of the Invincibly Ignorant" is overwhelming.

Case in point: "Brad", at his blog "Sad Parade".

In a piece last week (which I discovered after Michelle Catalano slimed an especially ignorant comment of "Brad"'s), he said:

But here's what gets me angry. As reported in the Post:

An Afghan military commander, Zakim Khan, said earlier this month that 700 troops, including 100 U.S. soldiers, were involved in operations to track down high-level terror suspects in the area of yesterday's ambush. See anything wrong with that? It's ridiculous enough that only 700 soldiers were involved in this critical mission. But only 1 in seven of them were Americans. Just like in the Tora Bora operation in December 2001, our Defense Department remains not committed enough to eliminating the real threat to America, and letting them slip over the border into friendly Pakistan.Stop right there.

Brad: How many US Special Forces guys led the Northern Alliance (the Afghan one, not this one) to a stunning victory over the Taliban - something over 100,000 Russian soldiers couldn't do?

100.

100 Green Berets on the ground, backed by a few thousand airmen and a "fire brigade" of a few thousand soldiers and Marines.

In counter-terror and counterinsurgency warfare, a small number of well-trained, highly motivated men are frequently more effective than larger units of regular troops.

Which is what we learned in the Tora Bora, which was not a special forces operation, but rather a standard, regular Army operation involving troops from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions. The men were not prepared for the sort of short, sharp, unconventional campaign that the Tora Bora required, and suffered casualties and fell short in executing the mission accordingly.

It had nothing - no, less than nothing - to do with numbers. Not that I'd expect a liberal blogger like "Brad" to know.

Had Bush concentrated the war effort here, where Tillman was serving, rather than pulling troops and diverting funds to Iraq ($700 million, according to Bob Woodward, all without Congressional approval!), we might be a little safer from al Qaeda. Instead, what the misguided and unnecessary and quagmire-ish Iraq campaign has done is fulfill Osama bin Laden's prophecy of the United States invading and occupying the Holy Land.

I'm only answering this because it's the sort of idle speculation that seems to pass for thought about foreign policy and the war on terror to too many Democrats, especially lefty bloggers.

First: Iraq is not the Holy Land. Saudi Arabia is - and the fact that we haven't invaded the home of so much terrorism money and manpower causes many on the left to smirk like a toddler that just made a good pants and declare the President "hypocritical".

Second: Iraq is hardly a quagmire, although "Brad" will join many liberal bloggers in repeating the trope in the hopes that the ignorant will believe it.

Third: Confining the war to Afghanistan would be utterly pointless; Al Queda has moved on. We needed to, as well.

Fourth: Invading Iraq was necessary - but to know that, you'd have to be aware of the limits on Liberal thought on foreign policy best codified in "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary (In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive.)

Which leads, inevitably, to statements like this:

Do the neocons ever pause to wonder if this action alone breeds terror?

Sure.

Compared to the simple facts that we are Americans, democratic, observe laws other than Sharia, let women get educations and hold office, and tolerate religious diversity, though, it's really not such a big deal.

Why do I single out "Brad"? because he left what may have been among the stupidest possible comments in Michelle Catalano's post about Tillman's death. "Brad" is a poster child for the sort of detached, fantasy world approach to the reality of the war on terror that I've read - no worse than the likes of Atrios and Kos, but somehow more depressing in its own way, watching the little swarm of ideology-addled halfwits that sprang to his defense on Michelle's blog (which is easily one of the most substantial and eloquent blogs to have sprung from 9/11 and the war).

There's never enough time or energy to fight bilge like that - although here, and now, I am.

Update

For the benefit of everyone that called on Saturday - Saint Paul from Fraters is under the weather.

Zithromax and intensive bed rest, that’s the state of Saint Paul these days. Under normal circumstances that would be paradise. But this week my rebelling useless organs have cost me hugely. A certain highly valued social interaction on Thursday, then on Saturday a chance to met MST3's Mike Nelson who appeared on this week's Northern Alliance Radio. I did get off a call to the show, but in my fevered, delusional state I fear I came off more as a typical caller to Rabuse on the Right than the smooth, honey dripping radio pro you've come to know and love.

Actually, Rabuse black-listed you from his show, Saint. It was that bad.

Get well soon. You have a lot of damage to fix. Plus that other social interaction on Wednesday.

Definition Of Perfect

Too wet to do much yard work...

...yet dry enough to take the bagpipes to Como Park, find an isolated spot in the woods, and let 'er rip.

These are the good days.

JB Doubtless Loses It

The upcoming debate on the Northern Alliance radio show between the Fraters' JB Doubtless and I is rapidly becoming less a programming idea and more of an intervention.

After reading this piece from today, I'm starting to worry:

I have to say that I picked up the Sounds Of the 70's the other day and Afternoon Delight is a great freaking pop song. The harmonies are fantastic--how often do you hear four part girl/guy harmony done to perfection?

Constantly. Listen to any decent church choir.

I mean, oy, vey - Peter, Paul and Mary did great harmony, but the music was still bilge. The Starland Vocal Band?

Words fail me.

Abba perhaps, and I love Abba. I challenge anyone to listen to last "Afternoon delight" they sing at the end of the song--an amazingly complex and beautiful melody with distinct harmony--and not tell me it's a gem.

I started in radio in 1979. I heard the song a million times. I could probably still sing Bill Danoff's part from memory. The Seventies were chock full of great vocal harmony; for faux folk groups like the SLVB, it was as essential as being able to strum a guitar. It was technique, pure and simple - like screwing a lug nut onto a wheel.

It's like saying "Al Franken hit that break without talking all over himself - it's a good show!". No. It's competent.

However, JB touches on a guilty pleasure:

I also think the Sammy Johns song "Chevy Van" is an amazing piece of music. Yeah, I know, it's funny and all with the 70's references, but it tells a concise story of a time and captures the zeitgeist while delivering a hooky chorus.

And sex!

Actually, Chevy Van was one of a bunch of singer-songwriter hook-crazy tune-fests that perfectly summed up the world of the one-hit wonder for that decade; "Shannon" by Henry Gross, "Sky High" by Jigsaw, " and about half of the K-Tel compilations between 1974 and 1976, before Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles trademarked the entire genre in 1977. They were manipulative, formulaic, totally guilty pleasures - and as guilt has faded over the years, I can bring myself to listen to them one more time.

JB concludes:

I plan to review all of the songs on the compilation in the next few days. Good lord, there are some seriously dreadful pieces in this collection, but also a few lost gems that deserve more recognition.

And I plan on belting out both Chevy Van and Skyrockets tonight at karoake with the Doubtlessette. She has yet to hear me sing, so it should be interesting...

And I think the NARN staff would pay good money for a tape of this for next week's broadcast...

Epitaph

Since the reports yesterday of the death in action of Pat Tillman, a lot of outlets and blogs have been citing this 2002 piece by Peggy Noonan, written when Tillman entered basic training.

I liked this part:

Men entering basic training don't break for interviews, she said. Besides, "he has asked not to have any coverage. We've been respecting his wishes. And kinda hoping he'd change his mind." Mr. Tillman would, of course, be a mighty recruiting device. The Army might have enjoyed inviting television cameras to record his haircut, as they did with Elvis. But Mr. Tillman, the Fort Benning spokesman says, "wants to be anonymous like everyone else."
Right now he has 13 weeks of basic training ahead of him, then three weeks of Airborne School, and then, if he makes it, Ranger School, where only about a third of the candidates are accepted. "It's a long row," said the Fort Benning spokesman, who seemed to suggest it would be all right to call again around Christmas. Until then he'll be working hard trying to become what he wants to become.
Which I guess says it all.
Except for this. We are making a lot of Tillmans in America, and one wonders if this has been sufficiently noted. The other day friends, a conservative intellectual and his activist wife, sent a picture of their son Gabe, a proud and newly minted Marine. And there is Abe, son of a former high aide to Al Gore, who is a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, flying SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. A network journalist and his wife, also friends, speak with anguished pride of their son, in harm's way as a full corporal in the Marines. The son of a noted historian has joined up; the son of a conservative columnist has just finished his hitch in the Marines; and the son of a bureau chief of a famous magazine was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army last month, on the day he graduated from Princeton.

As the Vietnam-era song said, "Something's happening here." And what it is may be exactly clear. Some very talented young men, and women, are joining the armed forces in order to help their country because, apparently, they love it. After what our society and culture have been through and become the past 30 years or so, you wouldn't be sure that we would still be making their kind, but we are.

I think that's the part that bothers so many of the baby boomers that dominate the left today; so many young people actually believe in this country.

New To The Blogroll

New blog, Friends of Saddam, is devoted to covering UNSCAM.

I'll be reading it regularly.

Simply DeFreakingPressing

It's 3:45 AM, and I flipped on the TV to an infomercial...

...starring Roger Daltrey.

It's for some Time/Life classic rock CD collection.

Worst part of all - it's a long-form 30 minute ad featuring a lot of depressingly blah-looking middle-aged people talking about how this was the music they remember from when they were kids.

Now, that has to be BS. I remember most of this stuff from when I was a kid, and there's just no...way...

...where's that "Delete" button...

Accomplishment For The Week

For my entire life, one of my ambient goals has been to contribute a word to the English language.

I'm gratified, then, to see the number of people that are referring to "Err America" as FrankenNet, at term that - to the best of my knowledge - I coined on the Northern Alliance broadcast a few weeks ago.

It's good to have a mission!

Tillman KIA

Pat Tillman - the NFL D-back who shocked the world by turning down a multimillion dollar contract to join the Army after 9/11 - has apparently been killed in action while serving as a Ranger in Afghanistan.

(Via Baldilocks)

Credit Where Credit Is Due

I've said it many times; nobody can take anything away from Kerry for having served in combat, whatever his motivations, his actions after he left the service, or the disposition of his naval career.

However, we may need to make sure he was actually present for everything he claimed:

According to a piece in today's Boston Glob, however, there seem to be questions on that count:

On the site, the Massachusetts senator is described as the skipper of Navy boat No. 94 during several actions in late January 1969.

However, Edward Peck, who was the skipper of the 94 before Kerry took over, said combat reports posted by the campaign for January 1969 involve action when he was the skipper, not Kerry. Peck, who was seriously wounded in fighting that took place on Jan. 29, 1969, said he believes Kerry campaign aides made a mistake in claiming Kerry as skipper of the 94 at that time.

Perhaps he, too, was at the dentist when he was supposed to have been in command of Swift Boat 94...

I Just Don't Get It...

I love New York.

I apparently am New York.

Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"

New York
You're competative, you like to take it straight to the fight. You gotta have it all or die trying.

Close...

I always wonder about these online surveys. So I tried again, giving the answers I might give after a less-wonderful morning - changing my favorite activities to violence and drinking. My answer:

Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"

New York
You're competative, you like to take it straight to the fight. You gotta have it all or die trying.

OK - so I gave the sorts of answers my Greenie friends might have given...

Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"

San Francisco
Liberal and proud, you'll live your lifestyle however you choose in the face of all that would supress you.

Hm. All righty then.

Who Knew?

Not me - in the case of the seven questions that cost Team Fraters a three-win streak at Keegans last night, in my first shot as a ringer at the weekly contest.

May have to try that again sometime.

Tomorrow's Show

In the not too distant future,
tomorrow AD,
on Northern Alliance Radio
Saturdays, noon to three.
We'll be talking with Nelson, Michael J.,
about all the thing that he's doing today,
about all the do's, and all do nots.
So we'll have Mike. But no robots...

Alliance Roll Call!
Elder! Mitch! Brian! Jaaaaaaaaaay....

Not to mention Doug Tice of the Pioneer Press and Yale professor Charles Hill, on John Kerry as a literary character.

Tune in!

While We Argue About Coffins

While the Today show discussed the military coffin controversy, they ran a loop of the various coffin photographs.

Over.

And over.

We wouldn't be looking for a Cronkite-like "This war is unwinnable" moment, would we?

Northern Alliance - Trendsetters!

Last night, lefty anonyblogger "Atrios" apparently filled in for Janeane Garofalo on Majority Report, FrankenNet's nightside show. This followed a week after the Northern Alliance's first-ever blogger-hosted national talk show (and I'll stifle a chuckle and call FrankenNet "national"). I am, of course, going strictly by the show blog and the comments from Atrios' blog.

However, when you read the comments on the show blog thread (all 500-odd of them) there is scarcely a mention of Mr. Atrios' debut, and are quiet about his performance.

Did anyone hear how he did? I'd be extremely grateful if someone could leave a review, either via email or in the comments.

Take Your Kids...and...er...?

Lots of people have squawked about "Take Your Child (nee daughter) to Work Day" since it started a little over a decade ago.

Today? Of all people, it's the schools that are raising a fuss:

Now another problem threatens the annual event, happening today: Schools are beginning to protest, too. Some, such as Minneapolis Public Schools, have gone so far as to refuse to excuse children who skip school to go to work.

Right.

When I was a kid - at least through high school - our schools took exactly one day off (Easter) between New Years and Memorial Day. The only exceptions were blizzards and if our basketball team made it to the semifinals.

Nowadays, for the six weeks before Easter, my kids have had at least one day out of school every single week for the previous four to six weeks. Teachers conferences, "in-service", training, in-service training, training conferences, conference service, in-conference service training, you name it.

But for goodness sake, don't let the kids out of school to actually learn something about their parents' worlds!

Don't get me wrong - I think "take your kid to work day" is a misguided piece of feminist victimology at its very core:

"The real idea of 'Take Our Daughters' was originally not about work," she said. "It was about how to do what the resilience research said the girls needed: Help them have strong relationships with adults in their world."

After complaints, the founders decided to include boys. They tried to apply the same principle they had with the girls -- encouraging boys to explore traditionally female undertakings such as child care or community volunteering -- but "the men said no, that would punish their sons," [Ms. Foundation president Marie] Wilson said.

But these days, I'm starting to think that time out of school doing something productive causes less damage than being in school.

More on this later.

Unbearable Dreariness of Being Nick Coleman

Elder from Fraters said it well yesterday:

After my latest lengthy lambasting of Nick Coleman yesterday, I was left in a bit of a funk. What was the point anyway? How many times have I pounded on this worthless bastard in the last few months (please don't remind me)? How many hours have I spent dissecting his pompous pontificating? As Saint Paul likes to say, that's time we're not getting back.

Shouldn't I be doing something more productive? Something worthwhile? Something that would mark my all too short time here on earth for the good? Is this really all there is?

Truly a great question. One needs to wonder.

Nick Coleman is a constant irritant, of course; back in grade school, he must have been one of the kids that tattled on those of us who were playing tackle football in the far corner of the playground; today, he's a joyless scold, so seemingly distraught by the injustices of life that he's incapable of enjoying his incredibly posh-yet-well-paid job, his new family, his too-bootylicious-for-him second wife...

No, in Nick's world, it's all about one thing: the eternal poor against the eternal rich.

The problem, in Coleman's world, is that they are precisely that; eternal.

That may be one of the reasons Coleman has always rubbed me the wrong way - in his world, the poor and working class are a big fraternity, united in their eternal struggle against the "big cheeses" that swarm just outside the city limits, patrolling gated streets in Lexi with assault rifles, upending public buses and slashing wages to the plucky poor.

What garbage.

I say this because I was poor. Incredibly poor. How poor?

Not just "I was a poor college kid" poor, although I certainly had no spare change when I was in school. Not "I was a starving artist"-poor, either, although when I was single and in my early and mid twenties I never made much (but never spent much either).

No, I'm talking about the first three years of my married life, way back when. When I and my ex-wife were married, I was working part-time at a radio station and part-time spinning records in bars. She was a waitress. On our 1991 income tax forms - the year my daughter was born - we made $18,000. Together. I was working hard trying to find my next real radio job, in the midst of a recession and the Limbaugh revolution, when a lot of talk stations that used to hire 27-year-old kids to work mid-days for $24,000 decided to carry Limbaugh for free instead.

The pregnancy, and the birth, and then another. More job churn - all of our jobs tanked, and I was working for $6.50 per hour as a legal document coder, and my wife-at-the-time was pregnant again. On the day my son was born, we got eviction and power shutoff notices simultaneously.

I can remember more horrifyingly stressful days in my life - actually only one. At one point, we were less than 24 hours away from having to find a homeless shelter for two adults, a 12 year old, a toddler and an infant.

We got some help - the Salvation Army helped with the power, and we worked out an 11th hour deal with my landlord. Six weeks later, I got my first technical writing job, which started us toward the middle class, where by the grace of God I've managed to stay.

I was nervous last year, of course; four months of complete unemployment followed by five more of hand-to-mouth contracting brought back a few bits of deja vu as some of the sights, sounds, smells and nervous tics of poverty came back to me; the taste of government cheese; the monotone of the unemployment worker; the smell of just-about-to-turn produce at the budget grocery; the heft of the letters and the background noises on the phone calls from bill collectors.

And I remembered - not that I'd ever forgotten - what it was that I loved most, back on my first climb out of poverty in 1993-94; not having that existential panic; not wondering if my kids would grow up thinking that this was normal, the way life was supposed to be for them; not having to endure the condescending nods of the government workers, the unemployment and medical assistance and food shelf workers and bus drivers who treat you, endlessly, like human product warehoused within the city limits. Not having to climb up the steps onto that farging bus, listen to the driver's curt grunt, to endure the slow, cold in winter, hot in summer, teeth-rattling, diesel-stench ride, sitting next to people who at best were just like you, desperate to get out, to move up, to have one less worry tomorrow than they did today. Or people who at worst were the sort of people you looked at and felt the gnawing at the back of your skull - "Am I turning into that? The poverty-pudgy guy with the porkpie hat and the vacant, glazed stare at the passing storefronts? The supernaturally-alert bipolar, walking like she was pursued, eyes never blinking, darting back and forth like a hawk on espresso? And then, to add insult to injury, having to read the paternalistic, eternal condescenscion of the likes of Nick Coleman, who drive in and stand around the food shelves and cry their crocodile tears and drive back to their homes in North Oaks and Edina

People like Nick Coleman and Steve Perry think that a mass transit system is the hallmark of a significant metro area; that it forces all strata of a city to rub shoulders a couple times a day, bringing some sort of magical cross-pollination, as if prosperous suburbanites need to be exposed to some fictional nobility inherent in poverty, to be yelled at by schizophrenics and walk through puddles of urine to be truly well-rounded people (or well-rounded "big cheeses", in Coleman's curiously pre-1950 parlance).

Sorry, Nick. Try again, Steve. I got plenty well-rounded - in ways you can not imagine. Most of the people on those buses, the ones with whom you imbue so much fictional, specious nobility, would cut your throats to drive to work at their own speed, to not be dependent on the wills and agendas and schedules of others, to not have to endure the humiliation of being represented in the public forum by your impotent bloviation.

That, I can remember like it was yesterday.

Everyone's First Boss

Last week, I posted a little piece on my history in radio. The response was interesting - Hugh Hewitt gave me a shout out, and I got a lot of great feedback in the comments section as well as some terrific, welcome email.

Including one that got me thinking.

One of the most interesting comments came from a fellow I remember from my fairly early childhood - Dewey Heggen. When I was in early elementary school, Heggen was the anchor at KXJB, Channel 4 in Fargo - one of the two TV stations we got in Jamestown. Along with weather man Jim "Captain Jim" Rohn (host of "Captain Jim", the coolest kids show in the world when I was four years old) and legendary sportscaster Jim Adelson (a man who could have been the model for Ted Baxter - but in a good way, if that makes any sense), Heggen was the face of TV news when I was a little kid.

And he was my entree into being a news guy and interviewer: When I was six, and the great floods of 1969 swept across North Dakota, I watched as Heggen reported (from a helicopter, if I recall correctly) on the flooding in Fargo, Jamestown, Grand Forks and along the Souris ("Mouse") River in Minot. Toward the tail end of the story, Heggen stopped by Jamestown to meet his (I guess) old friends Gordon Olson, George Gaustad, and my dad. We met at Olson's driveway. "Mr. Heggen", I asked, "are there rats in the Mouse river?"

Although you'd never have known it, Heggen and I have one thing in common - we both got our start in radio at KEYJ Radio (AM1400) in Jamestown, North Dakota. And from the day it went on the air in 1954 until the day in 1979 when he sold it to a couple of weaselly dimbulbs from out of town (a couple of the most intensely dysfunctional people I referred to in my post from last week), the voice and face and brain and barking, drill-sergeant-like hypothalamus of KEYJ was Bob Richardson.

Bob Richardson may not have been the last of his breed, but they certainly went out of warranty after he left the business. He had all the audible trappings of a radio guy - the kind of voice you could hear at a gas station and instantly recognize. He was a solid Republican, and unlike most media people today, made damn sure the station was up-front about the station's political stance.

And he had something that has disappeared from almost all the news media today; a commitment to the community that supported his station. He showed that in big ways - broadcasting games for teams from towns barely big enough to field teams, keeping a fulltime news director on staff long after it was economically viable, and - most importantly to me - committing to hiring local kids to work at the station part-time, and letting them grow as far into the station's operation as they could.

And working for KEYJ and Bob Richardson was certainly a learning experience.

First: There was no more thorough teacher of the craft of broadcasting than Richardson. No graduate of any broadcast school got a more intense induction to the fundamentals of radio than all of us high school kids that Bob took under his wing. We learned it the old fashioned way - the same way Marines learn to shoot. Bob Richardson was crusty enough to make Lou Grant sound like Phil Donahue. I doubt that any of KEYJ's many graduates will ever forget the calls from Bob, which could come at any time from the sign-on at 5:55AM through sign-off at midnight, correcting pronunciations, chiding for choices in records (this was ten years before computerized playlists, fifteen or twenty years before computer tracked music), or sometimes just yelling.

But the lessons were good: "Say it, don't read it". "You're not a disc jockey." "You're a reporter who plays records." "Don't bury your lede." "Get your facts straight - and correct pronunciation is one of those facts." "Nobody remembers the Beatles." (Yeah, he was opinionated, and he wasn't always right).

To call Bob gruff would be to call Mark Steyn "clever". But along with the instant, frank, and sometimes earsplitting criticism came timely, tangible and meaningful praise, when you finally got it right; a "good job" from Bob was hard-earned, so it stuck with you. And he and his wife Norma always made sure you knew they appreciated your efforts; to a high school kid, their annual station Christmas party was a Trump-like extravaganza (my horizons were pretty limited in 1979), and they rewarded effort with opportunity. Bob's high school part-timers could move on to doing news, calling play-by-play, writing and producing commercials, learning everything there was to learn about the business.

The station's alumni include a number of serious broadcasters; LA megajock Shadow Stevens, his little brother Dick (a high school pal who hosts a syndicated morning show), and other Ingstad brothers who are mainstays of the west-coast production business; a generation of broadcasting professionals throughout the Midwest, who've managed stations and networks and made a huge mark on the business. Other graduates moved into other fields - politicians, pharmacists, soldiers, teachers. They're as different as a bunch of people can be. The only things, I suspect, that they have in common are a great education in professionalism and integrity from a legend in the business, a huge whale in a tiny pond.

And a distaste for loud, impassioned late-night phone calls.

And...Cut!

Even liberals can't get everything they want in court, according to Drudge:

Al Franken and the gang at Air America Radio, the recently launched liberal talk-radio network that became embroiled last week in a financial dispute with the owner of its Chicago and Los Angeles stations, will broadcast over WNTD-950 AM in Chicago for the last time on April 30, the CHICAGO TRIBUNE is reporting in fresh runs.

TRIB reporter John Cook: "The network also said it will remain off the air for the time being in Los Angeles, where it was yanked off its station there, KBLA-1580, last week by owner Multicultural News Radio. "The announcement settles an acrimonious legal and public relations battle between Air America and Multicultural. It also means that Air America must seek new homes in the nation's second and third-largest markets less than three weeks into its short life."

Wow. One month, and they're out (I'm thinking) a third of their total audience.

Still no statement from FrankenNet's website.

This might be a good time to offer an amnesty to Sue Ellicott...

The Hellish World of Nick Coleman

The buses are running again. Nick Coleman can stop prowling the nether regions of the cities, looking for the most disaffected bits of the thin film of people who even noticed that the buses were gone.

So is he happy?

What, are you kidding? It's Nick Friggin' Coleman, the man who bears all our pain.

I was going to fisk this piece - but the Fraters already did it", and did it very well.

Still, there's one bit here that keeps coming up, whenever the perpetually indignant and fashionably depressed start talking about our transit shortcomings.

But if you want to know how a metro area with pretensions to greatness...

Let's stop right there.

Last week, the City Pages slugged its front-page article " Bring Back the Buses
For Chrissakes... Milwaukee's got public transit. (Omaha, too.)"

So in the minds of the perpetually-indignant and fashionably depressed, being a major city has nothing to do with

• museums
• a cultural scene
• the presence of a critical mass of business that create both jobs and innovation
• universities and colleges
• a music scene (albeit a badly atrophied one)
• a couple of million people.

No. It's little white boxes to carry people from here to there.

By this logic - and I giggle whenever "logic" and Nick Coleman turn up in the same sentence - then every time New York's transit system strikes, it becomes a Grimy Omaha. For that matter, Los Angeles isn't a major city at all.

Back to Nick:

...could allow its rudimentary transit system to sit idle for six weeks before the big cheeses got interested enough to settle it, take a spin on the 69 bus.

The people on the No. 69 don't have clout or friends in power.

No, but the drivers certainly did.

Check the list of people Coleman talks with:

• People like a 46-year-old woman named Soong Sook, who rode from the East Side to a charity store on West Seventh to pick up some clothes for her grandkids.
• I saw only one person going to an office job.

  Maybe there are more. Maybe they will come back when the parking deals they made during the strike run out. But many No. 69 regulars don't make parking deals. They just make do:

• Doug Lyons, 55, a carpenter who had a stroke, uses a cane, and was taking the bus to look for a new apartment.

• Tom Garcia, 53, injured his neck in an accident and was riding downtown to transfer to the 63 bus back to Johnson Parkway, to a light-duty landscaping job for a friend.

• Beverly Weiss, 65, gets Social Security but works in the kitchen at St. Joseph's Hospital because "you can't live on what you get from Social Security." She spent the strike walking to her job and cursing the politicians and the union and the big shots who didn't seem to care about people like her.

  "You don't want to hear what I yelled at them," she said. "It wasn't nice."

• Augustine Cortez, 48, said that he was taking the bag of clothes on his lap to wash them at the coin laundry.

  I have just enough Spanish and he just enough English for us to communicate, but Lunes is washday everywhere, I guess.

• And there was a 49-year-old woman named Victoria, wearing a Vikings stocking cap, who was on the first leg of a two-hour, one-way trip from the East Side all the way to Eagan where she works as a clerk at a shopping mall.

• And a veteran named Bill Pipe who was on his way to the VA to take a class in how to quit smoking.

• And a woman named Lisa Bailey, who has a learning disability and whose left arm was in a cast. She got on the bus with a bag of plastic juice bottles that she was going to drop off at a recycling center because her apartment building doesn't recycle plastic.

  "Where's all the free newspapers at?" she asked as she made her way down the aisle, looking for evidence that a disastrous transit strike was finally over and that she was on board a party bus.

So after a strike where a DFL-leaning group, the drivers, struck to get benefits far out of touch with the reality of their jobs, and are defeated, Nick Coleman takes a ride through a series of neighborhoods where the DFL-dominated social services bureaucracy have traditionally warehoused those too addled by disability, bad "luck" and lousy choices to function in society, and uses it to condemn...everyone that's not on the bus.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece that was actually, if backhandedly, complimentary of Coleman. He responded with an email that was snide and curt, and manage the very difficult feat of being about two lines long and yet still plodded interminably, just like his columns (or his late and unlamented radio show).

Nick Coleman is a lousy writer - I'm told he had his day as a writer, but it's in the deep, dark, dank past. He lives in a fantasy world - the same world Lori Sturdevant lives in - where DFL and pseudo-DFL Republican government made all things wonderful, until the ickypoopy unwashed masses ruined it all and turned everyone ugly and hateful. He is the Sid Hartman of news columnists.

Worst of all, though - he's completely irrelevant.

Why FrankenNet Is Doomed

When we first addressed FrankenNet two months ago, I predicted that the network would last - in some form or another - for perhaps a couple of years. I predicted its first major affiliate would desert in a year - which proved to be both charitable (it took two weeks to lose two of its three biggest markets, and they needed a federal injunction to get one of them back) and delusional on my part (they have no truly "major" stations, mostly little 5,000 watt potwarmers on the right of the dial - no 50,000 watt "Boomers").

But there's much more.

Let's forget for a moment FrankenNet's air talent; I've shredded them, and the LATimes' David Shaw shredded the shreds from the left.

No, beyond the fact that it's mostly just bad radio, it's also lousy business and terrible politics.

Look at the FrankenNet website. Look at where they're on the air:

New York City - WLIB 1190
Chicago - WNTD 950
Minneapolis - WMNN 1330
Portland, OR - KPOJ 620
Riverside, CA - KCAA 1050
West Palm Beach, FL - WJNO 1290
Plattsburgh/Burlington - WTWK 1070
Key West, FL - WKIZ 1500
Chapel Hill, NC - WCHL 1360
XM Satellite Radio - 167
Sirius Satellite Radio - 125

Forget satellite for a moment; most of the stations are above 1200 on the AM dial. Fact of physics - the higher on the AM dial you go, the shorter your range per watt of power. In effect, in a metro area, any 1-5,000 watt station above 1000 kilohertz will be in effect inaudible to most of the city.

Note, also, that at least two of these stations - in Chapel Hill and of course here in Minneapolis - don't carry the network at all; they merely broadcast Franken (and in the case of WMNN, only for about 4-6 more weeks), and Chapel Hill only carries two hours of it!

Now, let's talk politics. Add in the stations they claim (on their website) that are coming on the air in May:

Coming Soon
San Francisco/San Jose - KVVN 1430
San Francisco/Berkeley - KVTO 1400
Sacramento, CA
Colorado Springs, Co
Portland, ME
Santa Fe, NM
Boulder, CO
Dish Network

Rush Limbaugh is heard in every Blue state. He's heard on powerful, low-dial stations in New York, LA, San Francisco, Miami, Boston, the Twin Cities - every key Democrat city.

Quick - find a red state, much less red city, with a FrankenNet affiliate. Chapel Hill, right? But that's a college town, which can be expected to have a collection of liberals in a conservative state - and remember, Chapel Hill only carries two hours of Franken's show.

Boulder. New York. San Francisco.

Choir, meet your preacher.

Columbine Anniversary

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Columbine Massacre.

Katie Couric noted that "the horror of Columbine still reverberates"

She was right - but not in the way she figured.

Schools today are "guarded" by practical things - metal detectors, x-rays - and things that are of no use whatsoever; "zero tolerance laws".

Government often acts in ways that are oddly human in scope - taking measures that serve no use other than to make government, and people in government, feel they've done something. Anything. It's not about whether something useful got done - it's about whether they feel like it did, and whether some government checklist was duly checked. As long as the list is checked, some government official has his or her ass covered if something does in fact go wrong.

Problem is, I can see the "Zero tolerance" rules doing vastly more harm than good. They don't teach kids that violence is wrong - merely that authority is stupid, petty and anal-retentive. Which in many ways is a good life lesson, but it's completely irrelevant to dealing with school violence.

Predictably, the teachers union's line today is that budget cuts and "No Child Left Behind" have made it harder to teach the lessons of Columbine.

It's Bush's fault, obviously.

The real lesson today? It comes from Israel. The intifada has destroyed life on a scale Harris and Klebold could not have imagined. Coincidentally (?), since terror became a fact of life in Israel thirty years ago, Israeli teachers have carried handguns in class - and are required to carry them on field trips. The intifada has struck no schools.

A teacher with a .38 and a well-placed shot or two could have ended the Columbine massacre before, or as soon as, it started.

Was Mylroie Right?

New allegations have surfaced - in the major media, no less - of video evidence that Timothy McVeigh did not act alone:

A Secret Service document written shortly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing described security video footage of the attack and witness testimony that suggested Timothy McVeigh (news - web sites) may have had accomplices at the scene.

"Security video tapes from the area show the truck detonation 3 minutes and 6 seconds after the suspects exited the truck," the Secret Service reported six days after the attack on a log of agents' activities and evidence in the Oklahoma investigation.

The government has insisted McVeigh drove the truck himself and that it never had any video of the bombing or the scene of the Alfred P. Murrah building in the minutes before the April 19, 1995, explosion.

Several investigators and prosecutors who worked the case told The Associated Press they had never seen video footage like that described in the Secret Service log.

The document, if accurate, is either significant evidence kept secret for nine years or a misconstrued recounting of investigative leads that were often passed by word of mouth during the hectic early days of the case, they said.

If true, it's about time.'ve always felt it completely asinine to presume that someone like McVeigh - even with someone like Terry Nichols - could have done the job himself.

No part of this story - at least, as it played out officially - ever passed the stink test for me.

Ripped From The Headlines

No, it's not - it's fictional - but this faked interview with John Kerry is no less surreal than the real thing, these days.

Illiterate Report

I used to criticize the juvenile writing, perfunctory intellectuality and scattershot spelling of the late, unlamented Rushlimbaughtomy.

After reading the show blog for FrankenNet's evening show, "Majority Report" (starring Janeane Garofalo along with Sam Seder, who is apparently the driving force behind the blog) I realize that there is still much room below that already low bar.

(Via the Monkeys)

A Picture (And a Quote) Is Worth A Thousand Words

Remember this the next time Michael Moore wants seven bucks and two hours of your time.

Fearless Prediction

By this time next year, no rational person will doubt that there was a Middle Eastern involvement - Iraqi, Hamas, PLO, Al Quaeda or some combination - in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Stupid Kids

Blender Magazine just published one of those meaningless-yet-addictive "Worst Records" lists - the kind of thing I could sit and write for days.

The list itself? Just fine.

We Built This City is the single worst single ever constructed, according to Blender's ranking of reeking tunes.

You have to go down a few grafs to find the creeping idiocy.

Blender editor Craig Marks starts off OK:

Starship's 1985 anthem, the runaway No. 1 stinker, "seems to inspire the most virulent feelings of outrage," editor Craig Marks says.

It was an outrageously bad song (although it's not as bad as the accompanything video).

But then he steers into the weeds:

"It purports to be anti-commercial but reeks of '80s corporate-rock commercialism. It's a real reflection of what practically killed rock music in the '80s."

I'm guessing Craig Marks was born in 1970 or so.

Of course, it depends on how you define "rock" and "commercialism", but Marks - like most music critics - is wrong. The '80s were not only one of the better decades in the history of pop music - but the last decade where rock was a viable form of music.

"Rock" - or rock and roll - is basically dead today. And whatever "rock" there is is either controlled by one of five or so immense music conglomerates, or so "independent" that it doesn't really matter except for the bands' tiny coteries of fans.

The eighties - or, let's be accurate, the period from 1981 to about 1986 - were a period where the line between "alternative" and "Top 40" blurred, when "do it yourself" bands could still dream of getting somewhere.

Can you imagine a group like the Replacements coming out of Minneapolis today?

No. You can't. Since the eighties, it's really not been possible. Oh, there's a thriving little indie scene, but how many of the boutique-y labels and electronic-huh groups and KUOM-fodder indie bands will ever grow to have any influence beyond their hardest-core fans?

None. It hasn't happened since...

...the eighties.

Dum Komsrvativs.

Brian at Boviosity noted this:

Oh, I also learned that right-wingers have an easier message to get across because they simply tie everything into smaller government and personal responsibility, messages that stupid people like. And these stupid people ignore the left because the left doesn't have a single message like the right, and doesn't have any guiding principles since they take such an intellectual and subtle approach to everything, a fact which leaves them open to false charges of having no principles.

Ooooh...kay.

That's not the half of it.

With all due respect to my liberal friends and relatives, it takes more brain, not less, to be conservative.

From earliest childhood, we are all taught that you should help other people. A second-grader can articulate the main tenets of liberalism; give people what tey need. That same second-grader has the same grasp of the consequences that Ted Kennedy does - "Who'll pay for it? Who cares! Someone will!"

If that sounds dismissive, it's not meant to. [Not much - Ed] Big-L Liberalism - at least at its innermost level - embodies some good human instincts, the kind of things we try to teach our kids...

...at least from the supply side. Yes, each of us as people should do our best to help other people. It's an ideal that crosses political boundaries (although Al Franken would probably have trouble with that notion), and fails to cross it in equal proportion.

But when you're a parent, sometime between second grade and high school graduation you have to teach your kids about consequences. It's a hard step to take - not only giving your kids consequences for their actions, but trying to teach them that in the real world, even doing the right thing can have its consequences.

We teach our kids that fighting solves nothing - but eventually they learn that sometimes fighting is sometimes even thrust upon the just and moral (especially if you're Rich Lowry and you offend Al Franken).

We teach our kids that all people are created equal - but over time they learn that once you leave the moral plane, not everyone is equal in every way. My friend the car mechanic can't write a blog; I can't rebuild carburetors (although nothing yet prevents either of us from learning).

We teach our kids - most of us, anyway - that gratification is often best delayed, and that sometimes hard work and patience is the only answer. That's just as true of helping people as it is of ones' own life. You need to try to help - but sometimes the best help isn't the obvious solution. The addict may benefit more from denial of her addiction than from feeding it.

Instant gratification is no more the right answer in the social realm than it is in ones personal life.

It's very counterintuitive to most people, taking life's hard lessons and superimposing them on the way we govern ourselves. We don't want our nation to fight - but sometimes war falls out of the sky on you. You treat people equally - but levelling out the peaks to fill in the valleys is dangrous.

It's hard to do - and it takes a mind that has learned to think dispassionately and analytically about one's government and the world around it. Which is why so many of the young trend to the left, and why so many conservatives are being born in college these days.

No, not all conservatives are brilliant - in fact, lots of single-issue conservatives (whether the issue is jet skis or gun control or abortion, as worthy as the issues are) deal just as much in jerking knees as the most myopic Wellstonian.

But conservatism - real conservatism - is about seeking answers that may be counterintuitive (read, may take some mental energy to find) - but that do much more good, or cause far less damage, in the long run.

Gratification is easy. Grace is difficult.

Woo Hoo! A Review!

The City Pages' Paul Demko reviews last week's Northern Alliance appearance on the Hewitt show.

Minnesotans can be proud to know that some native sons are representing on right-wing talk radio. The Northern Alliance Radio Network has been running locally on The Patriot, AM-1280, for several weeks now on Saturday afternoons. I regret to admit that I've only caught snippets of it so far, being as they're up against the redoubtable Jack Sparks.

Hey, if I wasn't on the air Saturdays, I'd be listening to Sparks.

Could it be that we and Demko have something in common, besides twang radio?

Let's see:

This afternoon (and again tomorrow), however, the cadre of conservative bloggers went national, guest-hosting the Hugh Hewitt show. (Lileks has long been a regular on the program.) For talk radio neophytes, they seem to be holding their own: foaming at the mouth about the Gorelick memo, ranting about the liberal media, and glorifying John Ashcroft.

OK, I guess not.

Still, other than the foaming and ranting bit (he obviously mistakes us for Savage), and the Ashcroft bit (we didn't glorify - merely gave credit where it was due), it wasn't half bad.

Stop on by sometime, Paul!

No, really.

Capturing The Base

Captain Ed tips us off to a hilarious drubbing of Air America by LATimes media crit David Shaw.

Shaw is, as you read in the article, an unabashed liberal who wants very much to see Air America on the air - preferably, one supposes, as a result of market rather than judicial action .

He's not especially hopeful.

He opens with his real feelings about conservative talk radio:

OK. That's about what I expected — liberal paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy to match the conservative paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their ilk have used to turn talk radio into a powerful forum that liberals now blame for every social and political malady this side of tooth decay.

Not a whole lot to the right of Brian "Howler Monkey" Lambert, really.

And yet...:

Unfortunately, I greatly overestimated Air America's potential. Granted, Air America is only a few weeks old — and at midweek, it was off the air, at least temporarily, in L.A. and Chicago, amid a dispute with the owner of the stations in those cities over payment for air time. But paranoia and conspiratorial idiocy would be a big improvement on what Air America has been broadcasting.

Shaw notes the smug, collective-y mentality of the show - almost all of which involve casts of comedians and NPR rejects jammed into studios, in on the same jokes.

Which aren't that good to begin with:

The Air America hosts seemed equally shortsighted in their preoccupation with sex, another subject not designed to win over moderates. Shortly after opening his show, Maron, one of three hosts who felt compelled to mention his sex life, started talking about having sex with his "much younger" wife and thinking, "Wow, I'm really good at this" — only to suddenly feel very old when she said, "Don't kill yourself."

Maron also ticked off a mock list of chores the president would do that day — including ordering "an extra inch" for his penis.

Putting someone like a Marc Maron (or Lizzzzzzzz Winstead) in as host of a show is part of a larger, grotesque miscalculation, indicative of the sort of condescenscion this effort represents. The talk radio audience - the conservative one - comes to talk radio for...what? Entertainment? Sure - but that's a secondary issue. The conservatives in the audience are used to the major media condescending to them, talking down to them...

...something Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt don't do, and Limbaugh does only in a very theatrical sense.

On the other hand, even the liberal Shaw notices the smug, condescending undercurrent on the network:

All Maron's comments drew hoots of supportive laughter from co-hosts Sue Ellicott and Mark Riley. In fact, I think what ultimately annoyed — and disappointed me — the most about Air America was all the false, aren't-we-funny, aren't-we-smart laughter that virtually all the hosts gave each other. Four of Air America's six weekday programs have co-hosts — and two have three co-hosts apiece, liberal collectives that stand in stark contrast to the individual, every-man-for-himself approach of the conservatives. Maybe that's one reason they don't work as well as, say, Limbaugh's solo effort.

It shouldn't take a village to raise a radio program.

Of course not.

But I think Shaw misses the point. It's not just that it's a village; the Northern Alliance is a village, of sorts, and it's a format we're going to stand by.

But there's a difference; the various FrankenNet collectives are like little graduate seminars, laughing at everyone that's not on their (perceived) level. Talk radio - whether solo operations like Hewitt or groups like the Northern Alliance - see themselves and the audience as a free association of equals, with a market relationship; the hosts provide something they hope the audience is interested in, the audience either finds traction and enjoyment or they don't.

As opposed to relying on a federal judge to get the message out there.

The Cambodian Parallel

The media - and the entire left, really - have been wallowing in supposed parallels with Vietnam since long before the first Green Beret landed in Afghanistan.

There are two legitimate ones that the left media misses.

The first - that the current action in Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle may be a parallel with the Tet Offensive in the sense that it shows some signs of a guerrilla movement shooting its bolt in an attack with more political and P.R. than military purpose.

The other? This enemy, like the Viet Cong and the NVA, has allies that are providing a safe haven across a border that is currently inviolate:

The United States has been fighting what officials term a silent war with Syria which killed at least five soldiers over the weekend.
U.S. officials said U.S. Marines have deployed along the Syrian border to stop the flow of insurgents and equipment to Iraq. They said Marines have engaged with both Sunni insurgents as well as some Syrian security personnel along the border in clashes that have intensified over the last few weeks.
The U.S. military presence – increased by more than a third over the last two months – was said to be focused on the western Iraqi towns of Al Qaim and Qusaybah, regarded as key points in the smuggling of insurgents and weapons from Syria to Iraq.

How bad are the provocations? Apparently very much so.

The border is no less porous than that of Cambodia was, 35 years ago:

"It is a large border and at nighttime there's a lot of wadis and places where individuals can go in and work their way across," Sattler said. "But once they get across they still have a vast portion of desert to come through, and we constantly patrol that to either A. deter them because we are out there in such force, or B. catch them and go ahead and bring them to justice."

U.S. officials said that despite numerous warnings Syria continues to allow Al Qaida-aligned insurgents to enter Iraq. The officials said Syrian border guards have been bribed to ignore the infiltration of insurgents into Iraq.

So far, they said, the Syrian military has not engaged the U.S. Marines along the Iraqi-Syrian border. But they said in some cases Syrian border guards were involved in clashes between insurgents and U.S. troops. They did not report casualties among the Syrian guards.

So on the one hand, there is talk of the waxing power of the moderates in totalitarian Syria. On the other, there are rumors that Syrian special forces were involved in the massacre in Fallujah two weeks ago.

Big difference with Cambodia - I think (or merely hope) our government will have the nerve and will to engage Syria, even liberate it, should the provocations grow any more brazen.

How far on the block do they want to put their heads?

Yow

So I finally got around to converting this site to Movable Type - which was an interesting four-hour exercise in learning "Cascading Style Sheets" yesterday (If you don't know what they are, don't worry, you probably aren't geeky enough to need to). Part of the process involved importing my old Blogger posts to the Movable Type system.

Nearly three thousand posts.

I had no idea I'd written that much...stuff in the past 26 months.

It adds up fast...

Oil And Terror

"But there's no link between Hussein and terror!" has been one of the standard bleats of the left since the run-up to the liberation of Iraq.

Never mind the wanton violation of Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary that the statement represents. It's also just plain untrue, as this long-awaited article by Claudia Rosett shows us.

The article starts strong...

Beyond the billions in graft, smuggling, and lavish living for Saddam Hussein that were the hallmarks of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, there is one more penny yet to drop.

It's time to talk about Oil-for-Terror.

Especially with the U.N.'s own investigation into Oil-for-Food now taking shape, and more congressional hearings in the works, it is high time to focus on the likelihood that Saddam may have fiddled Oil-for-Food contracts not only to pad his own pockets, buy pals, and acquire clandestine arms — but also to fund terrorist groups, quite possibly including al Qaeda.

There are at least two links documented already. Both involve oil buyers picked by Saddam and approved by the U.N. One was a firm with close ties to a Liechtenstein trust that has since been designated by the U.N. itself as "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." The other was a Swiss-registered subsidiary of a Saudi oil firm that had close dealings with the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's 1990's heyday in Afghanistan.

...and it never lets up.

Read the whole thing.

New Cube

Moving upstairs today.

Good news - I'm in a window cube on the nineteenth floor, with a positively glorious view of North and Northeast Minneapolis. The view I had 'til Friday - from the tenth floor - was spectacular enough. After ten years of working either in blah suburban office complexes or drab incubators in the city, my very soul is sighing with visual delight.

Bad News - Still no network connection or phone.

It's a net gain.

Couric's Comic Bias

Katie Couric, interviewing Deputy Attorney General James Comey about the move to renew the Patriot Act:

What about people who are rounded up, imprisoned and kept for months without trial?

Bless his heart, and unusually for a Bush administration appointee, Comey actually got it on the air that:

• The so-called "Mass roundups" were INS operations - conducted under pre-Patriot, pre-9/11, pre-Bush regulations.
• Nobody is imprisoned in Guantanamo under Patriot measures. Gitmo is a POW camp.

Before that, Matt Lauer was going to comical lengths - far enough to make Bob Woodward uncomfortable - in questioning Woodward about his new book.

As if it'd be unusual for the President to plan a military operation without announcing it to Congress...

As if, in fact, it wasn't something Clinton should have been doing from the moment he declared "regime change" in Iraq a goal.

Atrios Watch

There's a trend among left-wing blogs - lots of them have a naive faith in the writings of "Atrios", whose "Eschaton" is an anonyblog with immense traffic.

Atrios seems to have perfected a style of blogging that would seem to have propagated itself among a lot of smaller lefty blogs; take a piece of news, carefully excise context, deliver it with an ironic comment, and call it an indictment of the President/conservatives/conservatism/whatever the target of their ire is.

I took a while today to go through "Eschaton". Dreary.

For example, this piece:

The first part of April has been the bloodiest period so far for U.S. troops in Iraq. There were 87 deaths by hostile fire in the first 15 days of this month, more than in the opening two weeks of the invasion, when 82 Americans were killed in action.

Right. The first week of the war was the last time we faced any organized resistance on the part of Iraqi troops. After that, no Iraqi military units fought us - merely hit-and-run attacks by Fedayeen that killed relatively few troops but caused a lot of consternation on the part of the media.

The current battles in Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle are the first large-scale organized action the enemy has really offered.

And while we've suffered the heaviest casualties of the war, Atrios (like the media) completely ignores the accomplishments of the troops - and the strategy. The Shi'ite radicals have marginalized themselves politically, and exposed themselves to exctinction militarily. Sistani, the main Shi'a leader, has disowned them after seeing the near-omnipotence of a US military that moves with deliberation to destroy its opposition rather than coddle it.

In short - Americans died in record numbers (in the context of a war with record low casualties), but we are in the process of winning a victory we'd have had to have won at some point - and at some cost - anyway.

Then Atrios steers into complete absurdity:

"This has been some pretty intense fighting," said David Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization. "We're looking at what happened during the major battles of Vietnam."
The last time U.S. troops experienced a two-week loss such as this one in Iraq was October 1971, two years before U.S. ground involvement ended in Vietnam.

Right.

But October of 1971 was a time when we were cutting down our involvement in Vietnam. By Vietnam was standards, it was a slow week, and getting slower. Much slower.

This past month in Fallujah and the Triangle have not been a "Slow and slowing" period. This is more the Iraqi evquivalent of the Tet Offensive - a spasmically violent, possibly last-ditch effort by a powerful, well-armed but beleaguered guerilla movement (backed by North Vietnamese during Tet, and possibly Syria and Iran today). Both failed, although both cost the US dearly.

How dearly? We've lost 87 American dead in two weeks.

In Tet? Two thousand dead.

Two Thousand.

They have one thing in common; both were US victories, intended to shatter the resolve if the US home front.

In Tet, it worked. Today, despite the best efforts of our anti-Bush media and the likes of Atrios, it will not.

Atrios' popularity is a symptom of the historical illiteracy of the American left - and the gaping ignorance of all too many left-wing bloggers.

I'll continue to fisk Eschaton - partly for the fun of it, partly to show the various leftybloggers the house of cards they've put themselves in.

Welcome to MT

I've joined the 21st century and switched to Movable Type.

Let me know if your browser barfs.

UPDATE: Wow. Fast. No more of the "Wait a minute or two and see if Blogger barfed..." syndrome that I got so very used to after two years on Blogger.

Neat!

UPDATE: I was remiss in not thanking Captain Ed for installint MT in the first place. Thanks, Ed!

Case Closed

They found Dru Sjodin on Saturday.

Now, I'm perfectly happy, on conservative grounds, that neither Minnesota nor my homestate (and site of the primary crime scene), North Dakota, have the death penalty.

However, since this is a federal case (the killer crossed state lines - the secondary crime scene is in Minnesota), I'm not especially broken up that Alfonso Rodriguez, primary suspect, faces a death rap.

I think there are a million potential executioners in northern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota.

We don't know, yet, what happened at the kidnap scene, at the Columbia Mall parking lot in Grand Forks. All I know is that my long-time lesson to my kids - always fight back, never get in a car, even if they point a gun at you - you're more likely to survive a gunshot than a trip in someone's car - just stay out of the car, run and make all the noise you can - just got underscored.

Mark Your Calendars

Two weeks from today, May 1, I'm having a painting party at the Berg House.

Pizza and beer will be provided. After the painting is done for the day, natch.

Weather permitting, of course.

Stay tuned for details.

Sigh

So all last week, I had to practically blast the kids out of bed, just barely in time to get to their bus stops. "I'm tiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiired".

So it's Saturday morning. Kids were up late watching a movie. Sound asleep. I got up early to do some show prep, then poured the ultimate luxury, a long, hot path. I settled in.

Thirty seconds pass.

Knock knock knock. "Daddy? I gotta get in there".

7AM. Half an hour earlier than on any school morning.

All Talk

Radio has been a two-edged sword in my life. Radio was my first big passion. It is also an industry full of deeply, crushingly dysfunctional people - and I was one of them, when I was in the business. Maybe worse than most.

Radio was my first really bad crush. I got into it when I was 16. The first time I got fired from a radio job - when I was 17, and the station I started at was bought by some people from out of town who fired everyone and started over from scratch - I reacted like any high school kid acts when his first love dumps him; I mooned around the house, got depressed, figured I'd never love like that again. Then I found another, and forgot about it.

The first really serious love of my life was talk radio. We met when I was 22, just out of college, in one of the strangest incidents I've had happen to me. I got on the air, got my own talk show, and fell deeply in love with the business - and, more importantly, what I felt the business made me.

And when, after about two years, I got caught in one of Hubbard Broadcasting's spasms of firings, it was just like I'd broken up with the biggest real love of my life. I was 24, and like a lot of people in radio, had spent all of my mental and emotional energy on my career; I'd spent no time on any form of self-awareness. So it was only in retrospect - years later - that I could see that I spent several years in a self-perpetuating spiral of depression, failure and misery. The harder I worked to get back into talk radio, the farther the goal seemed, and the worse my depression got.

By 1989, two years after I'd gotten diced at KSTP, I didn't think life could possibly get any lower.

It did. But not forever.

------------------

The Northern Alliance filled in for Hugh Hewitt last Tuesday and Wednesday night.

How did it sound? I'm always the worst possible judge - like a lot of radio people, I hate the sound of my own voice, at least on tape after the show, when your own mistakes, "ums", ahs, and bobbles practically jump through the speakers at you. But a bunch of emails and a compliment or two can't all all be wrong, so I think I'll be cautiously satisfied...

The rest of the guys, by the way, have actually really warmed up to doing the show. Peoples' timing is coming along nicely; cues that used to get dropped are getting picked up; interviews that used to have gaps and ums and ahs are now tight and fairly incisive. And, as Lileks noted in his Bleat the other day, group talk shows are usually complete train wrecks; if you remember any of the mid-nineties incarnations of the Barbara Carlson show, or for that matter any of the various "Morning Zoo" radio shows that were in vogue in the eighties, you know what I'm talking about.

In fact, given what I remember about the business - radio, TV, the media in general - it's really an incredible exception - a radio show full of non-radio guys! I think that helps.

The industry is a breeding ground for dysfunctional people. It's no wonder; people usually start in the business at a very impressionable age (late teens, early twenties), when so much of one's adult personality is formed. It's a crappy field for people who want to have a life like everyone around them You almost never quit a job; you get fired, for every kind of reason. If you stink on the air, sure, but if your boss is replaced, you can count on the new boss bringing in a clutch of their own people; if your station is sold and the format changes, or just sold, or (these days) goes from being a live to a satellite operation, it's back to the trades, looking for that next job. As competitive as the field is, it requires monastic dedication not only to advance, but to stay employed. And it draws that dedication - you could call it an addiction, because being on the air is truly addictive. It's not a recipe for well-rounded human beings.

A lot of radio people act like addicts, in fact. Disk-jockeys at small-town stations are like alcoholics - enduring a long, slow slide until death, rehab, or going into insurance sales. Major market jocks? They're smack junkies, stylish enough, but having to chase harder and harder to get the bigger fix market. Talk radio? It's one of the tonier drugs - the people are usually smart, witty, very sharp; think cocaine in the seventies.

And, like all addicts, once you scratch under the surface, the pathology is the same. I say this admitting to being, metaphorically, a guy who started bogarting other guys' chiba when I was 15 and graduated to hoovering up stray granules from other peoples' coffeetables by the mid-eighties.

I started in the business in 1979, at KEYJ in my hometown of Jamestown, North Dakota; I spent a year hanging around the station with my pal, Dick Ingstad (younger brother of radio megapersonality Shadoe Stevens and himself a major syndicated personality today), so owner Bob Richardson figured he'd save himself some liability if he just hired me and got it over with. I worked at a couple of stations through high school and college, and learned two things: I loved being on the air, but being a disk jockey bored me stiff; I loved doing news, and sports, and pretty much anything but sitting and playing records (Records! That's how long ago I started in the business!). I was sick of the racket already, and moved to the Twin Cities after college figuring I was done with radio forever.

I had never heard of talk radio. It didn't exist when I was in high school and college, not in North Dakota. So when I moved to the Twin Cities and, through bizarre circumstances (subject of a post on its own) got a job at KSTP-AM as a phone screener for Don Vogel, it was like a whole new world opened up for me. People arguing politics with other people? People acting juvenile? And getting paid, for doing things I gladly do for free?

It didn't take long before, as Don put it, I got the talk radio infection. I started nagging boss Scott Meyer to put me on the air - and, eventually, Scott took the huge risk of putting me on the air from 2-4 AM Monday mornings.

I was 23. I jumped at it.

I was amazed; there were so many people up and awake at 3AM, with the radio on. I became a minor (very minor) celebrity among insomniacs, third-shifters, aspiring novelists (James Lileks was an occasional caller), neo-nazis...it was love.

And as self-illiterate as I was, I realized one key thing - I loved doing talk radio. Call it "extreme barroom conversation", if you'd like; it probably fits. I love conversation, and that's what talk radio is, to one extent or another.

And then it ended. I spent probably three years looking, constantly, for the next job, during which time I became so depressed that I, basically, fell off the face of the earth. I disappeared from my friends' radar (and for most of them, I never reappeared).

At the bottom of the spiral, I was 26, working as a night-club disk jockey; up all night, asleep all day. The search for the next talk gig became more and more desultory.

Then I met the woman who became my ex-wife, right around the bottom of the spiral. In Hollywood, that'd be where things start improving. Nah. It was a bad idea - hence the divorce. But we had two kids, and when they came along I had to get my act together. I left radio behind for good, and figured I'd never go back.

Didn't want to, really.

---------------------

So today we'll do the seventh local Northern Alliance Radio Network show, after doing two Hugh Hewitt shows. And I'm having the time of my life. I'm doing talk radio, without it being my entire reason for existence. I'm having fun argung politics with complete strangers, without the underlying desperation of needing it to be forever. I can see the guy behind the mike, reflected in the window to the control room, and know that he's done things other than talk into the mike and beg for the chance to talk into others. The same guy, just less desperate, less monochromatic, more interesting, less angry...

...er, no. Not less angry. Can you believe that allegedly-rational people would vote for John Freakin' Kerry?

Anyway - if it all ended tomorrow, I'd be happy enough - it's a blast, but it's not my life. Which is a good thing. It's like being able to take a social drink after coming out of rehab, and not having to worry about a relapse.

Anyway - tune in!

Another Tricky Day

Felt really sick this morning - although, being a good free-marketeer, I went to work anyway.

I have a magnum opus or two in my "Drafts" folder, which I'll finish and post tonight.

Tune in, by the way, for tomorrow's Northern Alliance Radio Network broadcast - we'll have a slammin' Week in Review, plus interviews with Bob Tyrell, columnist and freelance pundit Vox Day, and retired New York Times sports reporter Jerry Eskenazi.

Join us!

The Dog Ate Our Financing

Air America FrankenNet, the liberal talk radio network that launched two weeks ago with much ballyhoo and saturation coverage from a media that desperately wants to see it succeed, seems to be having trouble. Yesterday, Drudge broke the story - the network's Chicago and Los Angeles affiliates threw FrankenNet employees out of the studios and change the locks after a million dollar check bounced (says station management) or was stopped (according to FrankenNet spokespeople).

Here's what a FrankenNet representative has to say.

Highlights:

After just two weeks on the air, Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network featuring Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and that really loud woman from Florida, appears to have encountered serious cash-flow problems.

Stop the presses!!! There?s nothing more exciting than half a story from a third hand source!!!!

Insiders tell SLUDGE, that the reason the network was pulled off the air this morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, was because, the owner of both stations, Arthur Liu of Multicultural Broadcasting, said, the network bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million! The run-on sentence, tortured grammar and the exclamation point clearly means it?s true!!

Only it isn?t.

Normally we?d let this go because ?habitual liars? like Drudge are laughable, and ridicule is our business.

Which is a good thing, because talk radio certainly wouldn't seem to be treating you well.

Onward:

But Arthur Liu --- not funny. He lied to us, he ripped us off and now we?re chasing him down with a pipe wrench. It?s a metaphor.

Right.

So was "We start bombing in five minutes".

No, wait. That was a joke.

I get so confused when I have to deal with the greater minds in liberal talk radio.

Back to FrankenNet's response:

Here?s what really happened:

This Liu-ser was ripping off our boss Evan Cohen big time (he can?t do that, that?s our job). Evan found out about it and he stopped payment on a check to keep Liu-cifer from ripping him off even more. You can touch Evan for the occasional meal or drinks but a million bucks is crossing the line. And if we ever get low on cash, we can always call Barbra Streisand. Or any of the Baldwins. Except Stephen.

So let's accept this completely at face value.

FrankenNet may not be in the toilet financially. However, they'd seem to be completely inept at negotiating contracts, or getting relationships with affiliates.

After two weeks, two of your affiliates are already ripping you off? To the tune of a quarter mill per station per week?

That comes to $10,000 per broadcast hour per station.

Say the words out loud: Ten Thousand Dollars Per Broadcast Hour. Per station.

If we're to believe the press release, that's above and beyond what FrankenNet is already paying for its airtime.

That's right. Paying for airtime. FrankenNet has had to either buy every station that carries it, or buy the time at thousands of dollars per hour.

So maybe FrankenNet is still solvent; I'm sure Barbra Streisand or George Soros values the McCain-Feingold loophole that the "network" provides them.

The memo - which has a Franken-y cadence to its writing, as differentiated from the "Ummmms" and "Y'knows" and audible mental strain that marks Franken's spoken cadence - continues:

So we got screwed, Liu?d, and tattooed. How Liu can you get? In Liu of payment. Liu?d and lascivious behavior. These write themselves. [But FrankenNet has staff writers for all its shows, anyway...Ed.] What we?re getting at is that we hate him.

So now everyone?s saying we?re going down the dumper in Chicago and Los Angeles, but what they don?t tell you is that we?re still on in Portland. And we OWN Portland. And let?s not forget Riverside and Plattsburgh. And New
York. And streaming on the internet. And XM. And Sirius. Actually we?re fine.

So cool your jets. Air America Radio isn?t dead, we?re in court and we?re going to slam Liu?s head in a car door. Another metaphor. We hope to be back on the air tomorrow or the next day in those markets.

We'll be waiting.

And let's be clear - it's another violent "metaphor". Just like tackling hecklers and threatening conservative journalists. And like...

Arthur Liu, I wouldn?t show your face around here.

Or Riverside. Or Plattsburgh.

DEVELOPING??

I thought it was conservatives who were supposed to be hateful degenerates?

The FrankenNet press release gave the office phone and website for the owners of the stations, Multicultural Broadcasting of New York. They've also used their remaining stations (including WMNN in Minneapolis - a station I'm taking off my presets tomorrow) to attack Mr. Liu:

Jean Heinemeyer, general manager of Multicultural's New York station, said the station has been flooded with calls from irate Air America listeners over the past 36 hours.

And he lashed out at a tongue-in-cheek Air America "press release" in which the network was going to resolve the matter, vigilante-style, by putting a crowbar to Liu's head.

"It's more than sophomoric," said Heinemeyer. "It's disgusting and frightening."

The release was removed from the site Thursday.

No. It wasn't.

Unspellchecked

Unspellchecked - I finally made it out to the Air America website - while I still can, if the news from LA and Chi is any indication.

I got as far as the page for "Unfiltered" - featuring Lizzzzz Winstead, Chuck D and Kirk Cameron.

This caught my eye, empasis added:

This uncompromising program puts politics and culture through the ringer, uncensored and unfiltered.

Ringer? As in, substitute player? I suppose it'd be possible for a stand-in to eat some policitics and culture and have Lizzzzz Winstead waiting with a baggie on the other end of the alimentary canal. But I suspect the word they were looking for is wringer, the dual-roller contraption that "wrings" water from wet clothes. I suspect that's the metaphor they were looking for.

I thought liberals were the educated ones?

UPDATE: I'm told the person in the photo at the top of the Unfiltered page is not, in fact, Kirk Cameron, but is in fact:

Rachel Maddow, a rabblerousing broadcaster with a doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford.

Hm. Apparently she's a rabble-rousing PhD who can't be bothered to read her own promotional copy.

Zzzzz

Zzzzz - Part of it is the excitement of doing two national talk shows back to back. Part of it is the weather and the crazy schedule lately.

But I got home from the studio last night, fed the kids, told them to hit the sack, and basically flopped into bed. I was exhausted. No blogging - not even to update the story (below) about FrankenNet going off the air in Chi and LA because they bounced their air-rent check.

Blagh. There will be more - much more - when I get home from work.

The O'Franken Non-Factor

The O'Franken Non-Factor - I finally listened to a few segments of the O'Franken Factor - Air America's flagship show, and the only show on the lineup that can be heard in the Twin Cities, via three hours of leased time on a tiny little news staton that will be ditching their current programming to go all-Catholic in about six weeks, here.

First thing to jump to mind? They spent an awful lot of money gathering an awful lot of "talent" (more on that later), and probably much more to buy either anemic radio stations or time on even more anemic ones...

...to sound like a small-market show hosted by someone who's very, very new to talk radio.

Seriously - I strongly doubt that Al Franken would have been hired on his own merits in Fargo or Duluth. His delivery is awkward and halting, and I say that as someone who's underwhelmed at his own national debut (but then, I've not been ballyhooed as the radio messiah of any major American political philosophy).

And the material? Ooof.

I heard him interviewing Johnathan Alter about...

...Bill Bennett's gambling. I asked myself, "I know they spend a lot of time on preproduction on Air America FrankenNet - but did they record their interviews six months ago, too?"

From The Left...?

From The Left...? - So yesterday, Attorney General Ashcroft gutted Jamie Gorelick.

It barely made headlines.

What did the left-wing blogosphere have to say about it?

This is all the Daily Screw 'em Kos had to say - along with a bunch of strawmen about the President's speech (note to addled pundits; saying "I wouldn't change anything" isn't the same as saying "I'm perfect").

Josh "ua Micah" Marshall? (crickets chirping). I guess he's still obsessing over the PDB. (By the way, in a field of players that are generally illiterate about military matters, Josh Marshall may be the least militarily-literate left-wing blogger. Read TPM and see if you can disagree...)

Matt Yglesias? We'll find out in the third hour of the Hewitt show, today.

Payola

Payola - Scott Ritter's connection with an Iraqi-American who was on the "Oil For Food" gravytrain are being examined:

A Detroit-based businessman of Iraqi origin who financed a film by Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector, has admitted for the first time being awarded oil allocations during the UN oil-for-food programme.

Shakir Khafaji, who had close contacts with Saddam Hussein's regime, made $400,000 available for Mr Ritter to make In Shifting Sands, a film in which the ex-inspector claimed Iraq had been "defanged" after a decade of UN weapons inspections.

The disclosure is likely to raise further questions about the operation of the oil-for-food programme, which is already the subject of Congressional investigations and a separate high-level UN inquiry.

Yes. It is.

And it should raise questions about Scott Ritter, who became the left's favorite establishment figure when he suddenly went ballistic against President Bush in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq.

Mr Khafaji financed Mr Ritter's film in the same period as he received "allocations" for Iraqi oil, handed out by Baghdad on a discretionary basis as part of the UN oil-for-food programme between 1995 and 2002.

Recipients of the allocations were able to sell the oil to international traders for between 10 cents and 30 cents per barrel. A 1m-barrel allocation could net as much as $300,000 in profit.

The scheme was set up in such a way that beneficiaries' names were not recorded by the UN, and allowed them to claim they received no money from the Iraqi government.

Mr Khafaji says there was no connection between the oil allocations, which he says he sold on behalf of his "family", and his relationship with Mr Ritter, an ex-Marine who shifted from being one Saddam Hussein's toughest critics on weapons of mass destruction to being an opponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

That would be interesting to dig into, wouldn't it?

At the very least, Mr. Ritter's stance is completely tainted. At worst, he's in effect an Iraqi agent.

Time to find another stooge, I guess...

Another Light Day

Another Light Day - Hosting Hewitt's show again tonight - 6-9 Eastern, 3-6 Pacific. Here's the list of stations - if you're nearby, tune in!

May post later today.

The Fraudier Fraud

The Fraudier Fraud - John Ashcroft shredded the 9/11 commission yesterday, all but dragging Jamie Gorelick from behind the rostrum by her hair and yelling "This woman wrote part of the policy that erected the wall between intelligence and prosecution", even declassifying one of Gorelick's memos (read: "smoking gun") which called for, as Ashcroft put it, "Draconian barriers" between the two parts of government most responsible for fighting the war before it became a military war.

So what did the media report? If anything, variations on "Ashcroft on the defensive", and "The FBI blew it".

Never - not in one account I've read so far, and I've read a bunch - did they read "One of the inquisitors on the 9/11 commission was a key architect of the system that made the FBI and CIA's job completely impossible. Not one example of "This commission's work is fatally compromised" - as they would if Gorelick had been a Republican, and the President a Democrat.

This "commission" has gone beyond comedy.

Misery

Now as far as I'm concerned, the only legitimate index is the Berg Consumer Confidence Index, which jumped from a 12 well into the seventies last year when I finally got a job after four months' unemployment and five months of miserable underemployment. Self-centered? You bet.

Isn't that how all people look at world events? Reagan said "A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A depression is when you're out of work. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter is out of work". Extend that; the war on terror wasn't a war until we - all of us - saw the planes ramming into the towers.

I suppose it's natural that John Kerry's miserable "Misery Index" is no less self-serving; he's trying to get elected.

Proboem is, it's a fraud, as Trunk from Powerline shows us in citing a recent "Political Fact Check" article:

The Kerry index is, to put it mildly, selective. Rather than use all consumer prices, the Kerry index cherry-picks three items that have gone up faster than the overall rate of inflation: college tuition (at public four-year universities only), gasoline, and health care.

Read the whole thing - and remember, King from SCSU Scholars promises an even more thorough debunking shortly.

So Tune In

So Tune In - Tonight, 5-8 Central, as the Northern Alliance fills in for Hewitt.

The Drive

The Drive - Northern Alliance colleagues King Banaian and James Lileks both talk about a subject near and dear to my heart; the drive from the Twin Cities to Fargo.

Actually, that drive is only part of the story for me; when I visit my parents, the real trip only begins when I get to Fargo; Dad lives 100 miles west of Fargo, while Mom is about 150 miles beyond that. When my parents divorced, my dad got the eastern half of the state while Mom got the west.

As a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so does a trip to my parents' place start (once the heart-stopping slalom through the northwest metro road construction is over), with the second-most wretched drive I know: St. Cloud to Fergus Falls.

Lileks describes it thus:

...once you clear the great urban smear that extends 40 miles west, it’s you and the highway. Nothing to see; move along. After St. Cloud come the Expanse - 70 + miles with only two towns of any note, Melrose and Freeport. The latter has a smiley face on the watertower. I’ve always wanted to stop by. I never have.

And it gets worse; dreary radio, identical yet unmemorable towns, and the sense that you've seen the same little copses of woods and shelter belts before...and before that...and before that...

King notes:

Indeed, as you roll up that road you get churches that dwarf places like Albany, Freeport, not to mention the mega-chapel at St. John's in Collegeville. But after Freeport comes pretty much nothing before Alex, and after that a few lakes and fade to Fergus.

And then, just west of Fergus Falls, the world changes. The sky kicks the niggling, petty woods and hills to the proverbial curb, and if it's a partly-cloudy day you are treated to one of this world's most glorious spectacles; a day in the life of the prairie sky. The billowing cumulus billows buck and break across the gorgeous blue, rearranging themselves so that every few minutes, it's another vista; near sunset, the sun reflects off the tops of the clouds in a molten pink blur that, when I was a kid driving from Jamestown to my grandparents' place in Bismark, I used to imagine was immense lakes of pink dishwashing detergent...

...and much more, all of which is the only thing that makes the Ypres-like quagmire of the slog from St. Cloud to Fergus "Fungus Flats" Falls bearable.

I said, of course, that it was the second worst drive I know; of course, Central Wisconsin from about Black River Falls to just shy of Madison is worse. "Oh, look. Another hill. Trees. Fields. Fields and trees. Fields, hills, trees and more hills". I'm convinced that "Tomah" was Chippewa for "Too tired to go on".

Big Things

Big Things - This is going to be a huge week.

The fill-in slots on the Hewitt show are, obviously, getting a lot of my attention this week. Tune in tomorrow and Wednesday at 5PM Central, and bring a friend.

And, thanks to Captain Ed, I finally have Movable Type working on my server. Which is good, except I hate hate hate the default page design templates that ship with the system. So one I get done with the show, I'll be teaching myself Cascading Style Sheets.

Blogging may be a little light this week. But only a little.

Ghoulish

Ghoulish - The top story from Iraq this morning, according to Katie Couric? A 20-year-old woman from the Wisconsin National Guard was killed in action. The woman has two sisters, also in the GUard.

The Today Show pitched the story as "A modern-day Saving Private Ryan"; the family is working through channels to try to ensure their other two daughters aren't sent to Iraq as well.

Couric finished the interview by asking "What do you think about the situation in Iraq? Do you agree with it?" That's what her voice said; her tone said "Please undercut the Administration before we cut to break...".

The father stuck it to her - re-telling his daughter's stories about seeing Iraqi women looking her in the eye, having lives worth living...

Naturally, no mention that the uprising is nearly beaten. No mention of the 90% of Iraq that is peaceful.

Got Clue?

Got Clue? - I'm not asking that in the post-ironic "get a clue" sense of the term. I'm talking about the classic whodunnit board game "Clue".

It would seem to be where most of the american left learned its investigative skills.

The "PDB" - in the media, there is only one - says, in essense, "Bin Laden wants to hurt us. Among many other possibilities, he might hijack planes". In other words; in and among all the things Bin Laden had already done on Bill Clinton's watch (huge car bombings, assassinations), they might do...what terrorists have always done. Hijacking - something that until 9/11 had always been a publicity stunt, but rarely lethal.

No mention of using planes as cruise missiles to topple skyscrapers and attack the political and military command structure directly.

According to the nattering left, though, based on the next of the PDB, the President should have been able to guess, just like the climax of a game of Clue - "Al Quaeda, at Logan Airport, on 9/11, with the planes, into the World Trade Center, at 8AM".

Read it yourself. Be honest - what does it tell you? Don't be like some on the left, who think that high office grants some sort of absurd clairvoyance.

What does the PDB tell you?

Captain Ed has been doing some great analysis of the PDB and the 9/11 commission's work, and he's been linking to even more.

Start the Sanity!

Start the Sanity! - A common feature among many lefty blogs, both big and small, is a near-maniacal obsession with the daily dip and swoop of the polls. Kos even has each of the major polls' latest results lined up in the margin of his blog, like stock tickers.

I've always felt this obsession with polls was wrong-headed to the point of comical; when polls the day before the 2002 elections were giving Walter Mondale a win over Norm Coleman, then what do you say about polls six months early?

Deacon from Powerline says it:

In essence, the advice is (1) pay most attention to polls about President Bush's approval rating and (2) among the head-to-head polls, focus on those that are limited to likely voters and that include Nader in the mix. With respect to approval ratings, the RCP rule of thumb is "an over 50% job approval for the President should translate into a Bush victory. A 45% - 49% job approval will mean a close race, but I would give President Bush the advantage. A 40% - 44% job approval for the President would translate into a dead heat race, and below 40% and you would have to give the advantage to Kerry." As of Saturday Bush's RCP Average job approval is at 49.6%.

Read the whole thing - although I've just quoted most of it - as well as the Real Clear Politics piece it links.

Syria Attacks? - Remember back

Syria Attacks? - Remember back when President Bush's approval rating was in the sixties and seventies, and Iraq had fallen, and Iran and Syria were being very quiet?

Notice how things start to get dicey now that the President would seem to be in a close fight with the vapid empty suit Kerry?

Think it's a coincidence?

Can you read this piece from the Belmont Club and still think so?

The piece regards the apparent kidnapping last week of two membergs of Germany's elite counterterror police unit, Grenzschutzgruppe (GSG) 9, which is operating out of Jordan to protect German interests and citizens in Iraq:

Spiegel is reporting that 2 GSG-9 personnel are missing after an ambush on a convoy between Baghdad and Amman last Wednesday. GSG-9 is the elite German counterterrorism force. The delayed release of this information means implies that a thorough search for these guys has yielded nothing, they are presumed lost and no point in keeping it hidden any longer. It has all the hallmarks of a professional counter-intelligence operation. The GSG-9 men, like the Blackwater contractors, would have been consummate professionals. Mounting surveillance on men of this caliber is nothing regular "insurgents" could do. This it implies the use of static and moving posts with first class communications to track the men. Nobody can do that but the intelligence department of a State or an extremely dangerous terrorist organization like Hizbullah. That party wants to know what we know and thinks this is the best way to do it.

Emphases were added.

Now, read this, excerpted from a subsequent posting:

When the Blackwater contractors were murdered in Fallujah, an operation some speculated was organized by Syrian Special Operations, US commanders probably saw it for the signal that it was. They had arranged media coverage of the outrage for a reason. It was followed by Shi'ite attacks on coalition bases, one attack per ally and a wave of kidnappings. Then Moqtada al-Sadr conveniently seized one of the holiest sites in Shi'ite Islam, the Golden Mosque and proclaimed he was going to die there. Two New York Times staffers were kidnapped and conveniently held in the Golden Mosque, an incident described in Belmont Club's The Time Traveller. There, they were allowed to glimpse preparations for the final stand. The script written for CENTCOM to follow was probably this (what follows is speculation). Small Marine units would rush into Fallujah to recover the Blackwater corpses and trapped themselves. The Marines would mount a desperate rescue which would create heavy civilian damage. In the meanwhile, Sadr would attack the coalition partner's bases and flee to the Golden Mosque, where his presence would be confirmed by newsmen who just happend to be to imprisoned there and later released to tell the tale. CENTCOM would destroy the mosque from which he had 'just left' or perhaps only occupied by a double. Catastrophe would follow on catastrophe, necessitating the postponement of the June 30 transfer of power.

Let's put the pieces together:

• When Iran and Syria were faced with a nation that was overwhelmingly behind the president, they became very polite - or at least stifled their more egregious external, anti-western terror activities.
• Now that these dictatorships see that the US' resolve seems to be dissipating - the vapid empty suit Kerry is winning in some polls! - they start to play the only card they have; attacks to play to the world media.
• They use their proxies in the Shi'ite population to try to create a Mogadishu on steroids - attacks on every coalition partner, kidnappings, and the scattergun attacks against the US, in hopes that it will have the same results as the attack in Somalia.

The Bush Administration is unlikely to be so manipulated - but as we saw in Spain last month, not everyone's in the same boat. For that matter, if his nation is seized with psychosis and elects John Kerry, anything is possible.

The stakes in this election are the highest of any since 1980.

Shakedown Cruise

Shakedown Cruise - Today's Northern Alliance Radio Network started kind of rough - microphone problems - but by the end of the show we were clicking on eight cylinders (and driving a four-cylinder car, ironically).

Not my favorite performance, speaking for myself, in the past six shows, but it's probably a good thing; I probably got the rough show out of my system, before...

...before the worst-kept secret in the Blogosphere; the Northern Alliance Radio Network is filling in for Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 5:00.

Most of the NARN crew is going to be in, and we have a couple great episodes full of guests and topics lined up. Our staff here in the Cities is top-notch - producer Joe Hansen and Ops guy Pat Campion. Out in LA, producer "Generalissimo" Duane is...well, available and hopefully fairly adequate, for a California Angels fan.

So spread the word - the local guys are gonna buckle up their overalls and put on some shoes and do some big-city radio!

The Today Show

The Today Show - Floating In a Contextless Universe - I don't know why I do this, but here goes:

1. On the Today show, after his context-mangling performance at the 9/11 hearings, he ranged from the sublime - "Al Quaeda is more like Pol Pot" - to the ridiculous; about the invasion of Iraq, he says "in some was we're providing [young Arab radicals] an excuse to join the jihad"

2. A subtle yet sickening example of spin. Kerrey said, when asked about the risks in Iraq, that the situation could [emphasis mine] evolve into a civil war.

   Not sixty seconds later, Katie Couric, in an interview with White House staffer Dan Bartlett, said: "...today, you see people who formerly supporter the war saying that we're on the brink of a civil war..."

   He said no such thing.

3. Tim Russert is referring, over and over, to "the September 11 Families". This "organization" represents 1/2 of 1% of the families of the victims. Why are they given full credence as representatives for the victims?
4. For the fiftieth time this morning, an anchor is referring to "the first anniversary of the fall of Hussein", over tape of the statue being pulled down, with full ironic juxtaposition wedged into their concerned tones. "Look! It's been a year, and Iraq isn't a sandy New Hampshire yet!"

No bias here...

Poetic Justice?

Poetic Justice? - ‘I feel nothing over the Kos' loss of advertising. He isn't in politics because of orders,or because he is there trying to help the people make America a better place. He are here to write blogs for profit. Screw him.’

Fantasy Life

Fantasy Life - John Kerry lives in a wondrous world where lollipops grow by the sidewalks and the skies rain Shiraz.

First, his claim that he'll create ten million new jobs in America. Details, anyone? Any details at all?

No, I didn't think so.

Then there was his speech in Wisconsin yesterday, where he said that the us has to “We ought to be engaged in a bold, clear, startlingly honest appeal to the world,” Kerry said. “We need to share the decision-making and the responsibility.”

Right. The world is our psychotherapist.

Better idea, Kerry and supporters; let's let the world share with us the responsibility for their decisions; Chirac's complicity in Hussein's regime, and French companies' involvement in the rape of the Iraqi people, including the mass-murder of the Marsh Arabs.

Fascinating, isn't it, that politicians like Kerry and his supporters - who marinaded in self-righteous fury about US support for the likes of the Contras and the Salvadoran government in the eighties - today want to cede a veto over our policy to those who are complicit in vastly worse crimes.

By the way, Kerry is back at it:

George Bush does not have a record he can run on,” Kerry said to a packed crowd at a YMCA on the city’s north side. “He has a record he has to run from.”

Who writes this crap?

He's making Gore look savvy.

Kerry, Post Kos

Mark Steyn notes the problem for Kerry buried behind last week's Markos "Screw 'Em" Zuniga's outburst last week; trying to gauge exactly how far off the deep end the mainstream of the Democratic Party has slipped:

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the most visible faces of the Democratic party on TV were the foreign-policy grandees like Senator Joe Biden, who were eager to sound supportive and bipartisan, except for disagreements with the President over the insufficiently large font size of the Uzbek labelling on the emergency food packages dropped in Afghanistan. That kind of Democrat has all but vanished from view. In the past two and a half years, a virus has advanced through the party. It’s easy to dismiss the fellows at Democratic Underground (another site linked to by John Kerry), where the desecrated bodies had the loony Left high-fiving: ‘Death to ALL mercenaries. The beer is on me.’ But then you go back to the senator’s page and below the announcement deploring Mr Zuniga’s ‘unacceptable statement’ are hundreds of comments from Kerry supporters denouncing their man for being such a gutless wimp as to distance himself from the Screw-The-Dead-Mercenaries approach. ‘Greed is Irak’s most vicious enemy, and sensorship is America’s most vicious anemy at this hour in history,’ warns Barbara Curbelo Cusack, who writes like a middle-school teacher. ‘Go home and wash the piss out of your trousers,’ sneers Meyer from St Pete. ‘Howard Dean helped you get a spine.’ More pertinently, K.M. Thurman asks Kerry what he’s going to do with the $48,500 he raised through the Daily Kos site.

If you take a walk on the wilder side with the cyber crazies, you realise that the real liability for the Democratic party is not the loonies but the leadership: though they’re more tonally savvy and use fewer four-letter words, the party’s most prominent figures have signed on to the same worldview as the nutters — the war in Iraq was a crock cooked up by Cheney to enrich his oil buddies, etc. Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iowa, a bunch of hitherto dull, unremarkable senators bought into the central tenet of the deranged Left — that hatred for the Bushitler trumps all other considerations. Or as Al Gore recently howled, trying out his latest new accent, ‘Heee-aaaah be-aaah-tray-ud us!’ The degrees of separation between the fringe and the mainstream have vanished: Ted Kennedy quotes approvingly Karen Kwiatkowski, who calls the US a ‘maturing Fascist state’ and predicts senior administration officials will wind up ‘sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunal’.

And that's the problem; the Democrat mainstream is saying and doing things that responsible adults would have shaken their heads and clucked at ten years ago.

And this is a very bad thing; it's impossible to have a civil society with those who can't be bothered to be civil; you can't have a free association of equals with people who don't believe their opposition is equal.

Letter From A Marine

Letter From A Marine - Charlie Johnson at Little Green Footballs publishes a letter from a Marine in Fallujah, via one of his readers:

There will be no shock and awe. There will be plenty of bloodshed at the lowest levels. This battle is the Marine Corps? Belleau Wood for this war. 2/1 and 1/5 will be leading the way. We have to find a way to kill the bad guys only. The Fallujahans are fired up and ready for a fight (or so they think). A lot of terrorists and foreign fighters are holed up in Fallujah. It has been a sanctuary for them.

The media keeps skipping this part - the violence that's erupted, while widespread by previous standards, seems to be:

• in the Sunni Triangle - the heart of Hussein country, and
• in areas known to be under heavy Iranian influence. It's very much in Iran's interest to destabilize their new democratic neighbor, as Mark Steyn pointed out on Hewitt's show on Wednesday.

The letter continues:

If they have not left town they are going to die. I?m hoping they stay and fight.

This way we won?t have to track them down one by one.

This battle is going to be talked about for a long time. The Marine Corps will either reaffirm its place in history as one of the greatest fighting organizations in the world or we will die trying. The Marines are fired up. I?m nervous for them though because I know how much is riding on this fight (the war in Iraq, the view of the war at home, the length of the war on terror and the reputation of the Marine Corps to name a few). However, every time I?ve been nervous during my career about the outcome of events when young Marines were involved they have ALWAYS exceeded my expectations. I?m praying this is one of those times.

Indeed.

As someone who remembers the days when the US military couldn't seem to walk and chew gum at the same time - the Mayaguez, Desert One, Lebanon, and the huge problems in the invasion of Grenada - the military of today don't exceed expectations, they have set new ones.

Thank goodness.

Out With The Old

Out With The Old - Powerline's Deacon reminds me of something that I wrote about quite a bit last year, but haven't touched on much lately. The next year is likely to see our "allies" Chirac and Schroeder retiring from politics.

Deacon
points out that this isn't necessarily good news, on the face of it:

Basically, Chirac's party was hammered in regional elections at the end of March. As the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland put it, "French voters succeeded where the Bush administration failed: They have punished President Jacques Chirac and his center-right government." In fact, they gave the once-discredited Socialist Party control over 20 of the country's 21 regional administrations -- and defeated every one of the 19 Chirac Cabinet ministers running for local office.

Deacon points out that this isn't in itself a good thing; unlike Schroeder's erosion, the Socialists are advancing in France (the center-right Christiandemokraten are picking up seats in the German parliament).

I'm trying to figure out whether this is a silver lining or a darker one; the French socialists will be likely even softer on actually fighting terror in general than Chirac, and will likely be no less intransigent than he was in the UN.

But I can't help wondering if getting Chirach - and his deep ties to Hussein - out of office won't help.

Assuming, of course, that the Socialists weren't also on Hussein's payroll.

Anyone?

Huge Day

Huge Day - With huge news, potentially.

More later today.

Non-Factor

Non-Factor - You know your talk show is a disaster when even the choir you're supposed to be preaching to is unimpressed.

Jason Zengerle of the New Republic - certainly a back-row tenor in the liberal media choir - certainly isn't impressed:

It probably doesn't bode well for a purportedly enjoyable radio show when its most entertaining segment is one featuring Al Gore.

It gets worse.

The other two hours and fifty-five minutes consisted of a lot of unenlightening back and forth about current events between Franken and his sidekick, Minnesota Public Radio veteran Katherine Lanpher; a long and desultory interview with 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey; and an initially funny but, after continuous flogging over the course of three hours, eventually tiresome skit about locking Ann Coulter in the radio network's green room. Throw in a mix of phone calls, some jabs at Bill O'Reilly, and a taped interview with an elderly Minnesota couple who are the parents of Franken's best friend and you have "The O'Franken Factor."

If this doesn't sound like great radio, that's because it isn't. Part of the problem with Franken's show is simply that he's sorely lacking in radio experience. Although Air America's founders proclaim their admiration for Rush Limbaugh's broadcasting skills, if not his politics, in Franken they have turned their signature show over to a broadcasting novice. (Limbaugh had been on the radio for close to two decades before he went national with his political talk show.)

I think I see part of the problem:

And, while Air America has clearly tried to offset Franken's inexperience with the radio veteran Lanpher, at times her mastery of the medium merely serves to highlight Franken's own unfamiliarity with it--like when she told him to "zip it."

There you go. When Kacklin' Katherine Lanpher is your flagship performer...

Seriously - as I noted in my original piece on FrankenNet, a third of "Air America's" air talent came from public radio. That's one of the reasons the show sounds so incongruous to Americans who are used to, well, talk radio. Commercial talk radio involves a host (or two, or in the case of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, nine) and maybe a producer trolling the newspapers and internet for stories and topics they think will get the audience riled up.

Public radio - at least as it's done at MPR and NPR - is different; it acts like it wants to be TV, or maybe the glory years of radio; staffs of producers and writers back up the air talent. Back when I used to listen to the wretched Juan Williams on NPR's mid-day talk show, I would sit stunned as he floundered through the opening monologues, stumbling over words and then saying them again in that time-proven manner that everyone that ever worked at a small-town radio station knows; "He's reading this", word for word, off a script. The sort of monologue that any commercial-market talk show host would have ad-libbed off of a couple of scribbled notes - and done better.

Air America - or, let's be fair, the O'Franken Factor - isn't much different. It feels about as spontaneous as a corporate mission statement.

Dreadful stuff.

Now - do you remember the way the mainstream media crowed when Rush Limbaugh's syndicated TV show went off the air? Or Laura Schlesinger's fortunes tottered?

How do you suppose this disaster-in-the-making is going to play in the major media?

Aaaaagh

Aaaaagh - I lent out my digital camera - just in time to miss having it at the moment I discovered a classic example of sublminal Cold War pro-communist messages in Minneapolis civic architecture.

More when I get my camera back.

This is scary. Scary, I tell you.

Fake Hate Crime

Michelle Malkin notes that Tawana Brawley has just gone to college.

: "Ever since self-defacing teenager Tawana Brawley smeared feces all over herself, scrawled 'KKK' and 'nigger' on her skin, climbed into a trash bag, and blamed it on racist cops in New York, America has been victimized by wannabe victims -- warped publicity-seekers so desperate for attention that they'll fake the hate by any means necessary.

Brawley (who now calls herself Maryam Muhammad) is all grown up. But her psychologically stunted heirs continue to soak up public sympathy and squander police resources. Recent media attention has focused on the pathetic case of Audrey Seiler, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who reportedly faked her own abduction and sent 150 cops on an intensive manhunt. The search ended when law enforcement authorities discovered Seiler in a marsh two miles from her home. A store surveillance tape revealed that Seiler herself had purchased a knife, duct tape and rope found at the "crime" scene.

Experts have compared Seiler to Brawley, but the analogy does not quite fit. There will always be lone troubled hoaxers like Seiler who abuse a community's compassion for bizarre personal gratification. What made the Brawley case truly distinct and despicable, however, was its underlying political agenda. "

Malkin goes on to explain why Ms. Brawley should feel right at home...

Rocket Watch

Rocket Watch - Last January, when Hugh Hewitt gathered the Northern Alliance for lunch, he asked us all to submit our predictions for the election.

The most optimistic was Hewitt, who predicted a crushing landslide.

I felt I was being fairly pragmatic, giving the election to Bush by (if I recall correctly) about 100 electoral votes on a careful, state-by-state rundown. Turns out I was among the more optimistic voters, but not by much. Most of us predicted a Bush win, although a tight race.

The most famously pessimistic voter was John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker, from Powerline. John has consistently predicted a Kerry victory, for a wide variety of reasons.

Today, as part of his continuing job of chronicling the wheels falling off the Kerry kampaign, Rocket Man notes that the latest Rasmussen Poll shows that voters prefer Bush not only on terrorism, but increasingly on the economy as well. I don't know if this news incorporates last week's job news - while noting that Kerry leads overall, most likely due probably to uncertainty about Iraq.

So - a big question for this weekend's Northern Alliance Radio Network program is "is Rocket Man still worried?" And why?

More as the week progresses.

Those That Trade Freedom For

Those That Trade Freedom For Security - For years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR nd its cold war artifact, the Warsaw Pact, many people on the left - including many of my acquaintances in the Minnesota DFL party - said "I think the Soviets [or Poles, or Ukrainians, or Yugoslavs or whomever] were better off under the Communists. At least there was order".

I usually didn't answer "Sure. The order of the graveyard. In the graveyard, nobody is uppity".

I wish I had said that more often.

I read Hans Blix' latest descent in to lunacy - and I'm saying it now:

Iraq (news - web sites) is worse off now, after the U.S.-led invasion, than it was under Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), Hans Blix told a Danish newspaper Tuesday.

"What's positive is that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when figuring out the score, the negatives weigh more," the former chief U.N. weapons inspector was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Jyllands Posten.

"That accounts for the many casualties during the war and the many people who still die because of the terrorism the war has nourished," he said. "The war has liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, but the costs have been too great."

Blix, whose inspection team didn't make any significant weapons finds during months of searching Iraq before the war, has sharply criticized the United States and Britain for their invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein's regime.

Like that, Democrats? This is who'll be in charge of US foreign policy, de facto, if Kerry wins the election. The same people who figured life was better for Russians in the USSR - they had breadlines, but they were orderly breadlines, dammit! - are the ones who wax nostalgic for the glory days of Hussein today. The other morning, Katie Couric put it this way: "Hussein served as a referee between the different ethnic groups..." Yes. Just like a referee at a football game, Katie. A referee who shoots players who commit penalties, after making the player watch his wife get gang-raped and his kids shot in the face.

Perfect analogy.

If Iraq is Bush's Vietnam

If Iraq is Bush's Vietnam - ...then "White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded to Mr. Kennedy's remarks by saying, "Ted Kennedy is John Kerry's Chappaquiddick."

Question for Kos

Question for Kos - Markos;

You consider the four men killed in Fallujah "Mercenaries", because they are former soldiers who are using their lifetime of professional soldiering in a civilian career. They were hired by a private company, as they are by private companies all over the world, to provide security for their operations, as well as to add non-military security to peripheral government-run operations that aren't strictly military.

So answer me this, Kos; would you prefer the military provide security for private enterprises in Iraq? Had soldiers died defending a private company, would it have been better?

And with that, I big the Kos topic goodbye. I don't think we'll be hearing much more from him anyway.

Observations On Women - I've

Observations On Women - I've been single again for going on four years, now. I've been on at least one date with several dozen women in that time. And while you might cry "Jaundice", you do so only at the risk of looking wierd to your neighbors. "Jaundice" is kind of a strange thing to yell for no reason.

So don't yell "Jaundice". Think whatever you want, though.

In the eighties, there was some research that claimed that women who were single by the time they were 35 had better odds of being struck by lightning while carrying an assault rifle in a lottery line than of getting married. I used to think that was a crock. The more women I meet, the more I realize that there's probably a reason for this - although not the one anyone's thinking.

If someone is single by the time they're in their early thirties, it's a fair guess that they've decided they really don't want to "sell themselves short", or to "settle" for "less" than their absolute ideal. I think most people have a checklist with the main points they're looking for in a potential boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever.

But if that checklist hasn't had to run into life's little realities - marriage is a good place for that - then the list of "ideal" bullet points becomes more and more set in stone over time. This is a hunch, but I'll stake a few bucks on it; by the time someone gets to her late thirties, she has invested nearly two decades of her adult life in finding the person who matches every single point of that checklist. Why give up now?

Which'd explain the number of women I've met who are 37, 38, 39 years old, and who've never been married - but have endless series of "relationships" with deadbeat morons. I mean, as long as you're disregarding the checklist, why not jump on a Harley with a "bad boy"?

Our society today glorifies adolescence - and does its damnedest to preserve it. It's completely possible for someone to remain an adolescent well into his or her forties - I have friends my age who've evolved, emotionally, not a jot since their late teens. Their common thread? They've remained single the whole time. Nothing yanks you out of extended adolescence like having to deal with another person, every single day, forever. Especially when it's more than one other person. Kids are another angle to the whole thing.

Beyond adolescence, our media - especially media aimed at women, the whole "The View"/Oprah/Lifetime/Cosmo Axis of Fantasy - reminds me of the staff at a Special Olympics event, constantly reminding their audience how very, very special they are; women who succeed in business are celebrities because they are Women Who Succeed in Business (or whatever supposedly-male-dominated field)! The Gopher Women's Basketball team achieved a lot getting to the Final Four - and, unlike some of the rest of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, I enjoyed watching them play. But do you think they'd have gotten a fraction of the coverage they got if they'd been men? Check it out for yourself; in the eighties and nineties, when the Gopher's men's Baseball team dominated the Big Ten, year in, year out - check out the headlines.

And endless praise and constant attention will go to a person's head - which, with a Special Olympian, isn't a bad thing.

But unlike Special Olympians, women have no handicaps to speak of, not as a gender. Yet praise, exhortation and the Oprah-spawned sense of entitlement, combined in the mind of a person who's never had to expose her fantasies to the crushing pressure of a real, long-term, inescapable relationship, eventually adds up to a set of goals and expectations that can be met only by the kind of guy that only exists in womens' imaginations.

You see this on a date. You meet, you have a few drinks, have a couple hours of conversation ranging from passable to fascinating - and then see that "you're cool, but I want all of this in a package that includes Pierce Brosnan looks and no kids. Thanks for trying" expression by the end of the evening.

So I'm coming around. I think there might have been something to that research - women who haven't gotten married by their mid-to-late thirties probably won't - mostly by their own choice.

Because Mr. Perfect has got to be coming up. Any date now.

Are men any better when they get into their thirties? I don't know. I don't go out with them. You're on your own, ladies.

Finally

Finally - Listened to Hugh Hewitt last night, with Eugene Volokh and Powerline's John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker, talking about the Kos flap.

One of the questions was "is there any outrage on the blogging left over Kos' stupidity?" Nobody could think of any, certainly on the leading lefty sites like Atrios or Josh "ua Michael" Marshall's DNC Points Memo.

Well, there's one, anyway:

Sadly, as is often the case, when one side is outraged about something, whether the outrage is manufactured or genuine, the other side has to become outraged over the outrage, and before long hypocrisy sets in. In The Daily Kos imbroglio, it's happening again, and in the process, some on the Left are downplaying how truly offensive Zúniga's remarks were.

Look at how some Lefty bloggers are treating the situation:

He goes on to do just that. Worth a (largely sickening) read.

As I believe I've mentioned before, there was a time I considered Kos relatively rational. I even wrote for his "Political State Report", an effort that started as an interesting multipartisan project but has fallen well short of its promise, largely because Kos ended up devoting most of his time to more partisan projects.

Today? Forget about it.

News Flash!

News Flash! - John Kerry has...

...flip-flopped!

The most disturbing political attacks spewing from the droopy mouth of John Kerry are not the expected jibes over national security policy, but rather his stated disdain for free trade. Kerry’s economic ignorance aside, his anti-outsourcing routine is almost comical in light of the fact that his family’s lifeblood, Heinz Corporation, has outsourced 57 of their 79 factories to places like China, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and other such nations that Kerry exploits for political gain when decrying the loss of American jobs.

Expect Bush, Nader, and any other politicians with an interest in highlighting Kerry’s continuous string of hypocrisies to bring this embarrassing issue to light over the summer, even though there is nothing wrong with such business decisions.

The Heinz Corporation’s decision to open factories overseas is a perfect example of how a business can benefit from strategic placement of jobs where a competitive advantage exists. When more can be produced with fewer resources, everyone benefits. Putting government controls over trade will certainly benefit particular interest groups (and the pull-pusher politicians who pander to them), while hurting everyone else with higher prices. Tariffs are simply a tax on consuming international goods, while the dividends of that tax go to the protected group.

Read the whole thing.

Hollywood's Fantasy Life

Hollywood's Fantasy Life - I saw the beginning of "The Siege" with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis yesterday.

The movie begins with footage of the bombing of the Khobar Towers. It recycled the footage of President Clinton's public reaction to the atrocity; "Like all Americans, I am outraged", he said - and it all came back. The reaction I had the first time I saw Clinton saying it; he seemed detached, like the words were coming out of a tape recorder, or better yet a bit gray-haired windup doll.

Of course, the footage was followed by a scene of a CIA operation supposedly capturing a fictional sheik responsible for the bombing.

This says a lot about Hollywood, really; in their fantasy world, Bill Clinton was a decisive leader who had the defense of this nation first on his mind.

Oh, yeah - and in this liberal, anti-conservative story, one of the bad guys is...

...Iraqi.

I guess everyone knew who the bad guys were, back in 1998.

Tony Shalhoub, however, remains one of the best character actors in Hollywood.

Priorities

Priorities - Al Quaeda was such a priority under the Clinton Administration, it didn't even make their final report:

The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress — 45,000 words long — makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times.
The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it.

So in other words, yet again, Clarke lied.

Like the entire conservative media has been telling you.

Of course, the mainstream media can't possibly ignore the story. Can they?

The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.

Oy. I guess not.

Let's Mess Things Up

Let's Mess Things Up - Yesterday, Fraters uncovered this rather bald-faced leftist ploy to generate anti-Bush propaganda - an "election" open to the whole world.

They got this via email from one of their readers, who said:

A far-left group feels that the entire world population ought to participate in our presidential election, since "it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. election is almost as important to citizens of other nations as it is to Americans."

This is being pushed by, among others, a hyperfeminist leftist who's a notorious dissident former nun.

Americans who so little value their citizenship ought not go unchallenged. The results of this exercise are a foregone conclusion since it's being promoted heavily in far-left circles, and undoubtedly the numbers will be picked up and echoed endlessly in the coming months as "evidence" of the President's supposed foreign policy "failure." Perhaps Bush supporters (and those on the other side who value the quaint notion of sovereignty) could take a moment to balance the scales a tad.

As of last night, it was still a small-enough production that my vote swung the results 1%. Let's see what we can do.

If these Fraters crusades can resurrect the Google image of Rudy Boschwitz, imagine the possibilities.

But first vote.

Load of Kos

Saturday on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, Rocket Man, JB and I pretty well list up Markos "Kos" Zuniga - the proprietor of the Daily Kos, easily the biggest liberal site.

Today? The wheels are coming off. The Kerry campaign - for which Kos is the biggest internet fundraiser - delinked him, and (reportedly) the last of the campaigns that advertised on his site has dropped its ad.

So many people have fisked his petulant, self-serving reply, it almost qualifies as piling on at this point.

Not that that's ever bothered me.

"So I said something pretty stupid last week. I served up the wingnuts a big, juicy softball. They went into a tizzy, led by Instapundit.

No, Markos - it wasn't stupid. It was a vile sunday with whipped represensible, and an evil cherry on top.

And if you want to describe the wave of opprobium you whipped up a "softball" to "wingnuts", then you are just making it easier to write you off as a wanky, whiny little wanna-be wonk with a website.

And it's you that'd be the wingnut at this point.

And for a while, I was actually pretty worried.
But the final tally was -- about 30 hate-filled emails, about 15,000 hate-filled visitors, and the pulling of three advertising spots that are going to be replaced in less than a week. (I had two emails today about people wanting to advertise despite the controversy.)

Well, then. I guess it's all OK!

That was it. Oh, they're doing their best to turn me into the devil, and they're making racist comments about my heritage and family and threatening to kick my ass -- you know, typical right-wing shit.

And you use the thin film of lunatic fringe (see: Kos' comment section) to write off the vast avalanche of thoroughly justified revulsion you stirred up among the majority of people who read you.

Is John Hinderaker a "wing nut"? Am I, Kos? Mitch Berg, who used to write for your "Political State Report?"

But if that's the best they can throw at me, I'll simply echo Kerry.
Bring it on. "

And that'd be your big probem, Kos. Your website is all about echoing other peoples' ideas.

"DailyKos" is a steady diet of poll-watching, "Open threads", and recycled spin.

When you finally let loose an actual opinion of your own, people got a look at what's under the slick image; a sick, twisted little man who is going to have to pay a lot of dues to work his way back up to "partisan hack".

There are leftyblogs I read often, both to "know the opposition" and, occasionally, because they're good blogs. Kos was never very interesting, but I always thought he was a cut or two above "Hesiod"

Unlike Markos Zuniga, I can admit that I was wrong.

Staggering

Staggering - I saw "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" Saturday night at the Grandview.

This one snuck up on me.

I won't try to give away the plot - because I doubt that I could. The movie is nearly impenetrable - a labyrynth that uses chronology as convenient, and whose only unifying them (until the end) is that something is desperately wrong. Figuring out what you're watching, indeed, requires some effort. The movies feels like it has dozens of beginnings, initial meetings, conflicts, false endings, re-starts, all interweaving among each other. You know theres' a theme, but you have to work hard to figure it out. And then you're wrong. Shot in a grainy, faded art-house style, the movie leaves you profoundly uneasy - it feels disjointed, yet tells you it's not, but the solution is just...out...of reach...

It's written by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote "Being John Malkovich", itself no slouch in the "gotta think about this" department. "Eternal Sunshine" is more - more hard to penetrate, more convoluted, more casual with the distortions of perception...

And in the end, it's a stunningly lovely movie. Jim Carrey is very...non-Carrey-ey. No, that's wrong - he restrains his goofiness (mostly), playing a lonely, needy guy with a memory he can't quite shake - that becomes the movie's theme, even though it takes until nearly the end of the film for either you or Carrey's character to realize it.

Kate Winslet has been one of my favorite actresses since long before Titanic, and she only gets better, in this role as a high maintenance bookstore clerk from Lawn Gisland who has, we realize as the movie progresses, the same problem.

If you have a hard time with vexingly elliptical plots, go to "Miracle" (which I also loved, but for very different reasons - more later). If you don't like having to think - hard - about what you're watching, then veer away and check out "Hellboy".

The payoff, though - for me - was incredible. This is one of the most stunningly lovely, fascinating movies I've seen in ages. It's probably not a great date movie, unless your date also loves having to work hard for big rewards at the movies.

But I recommend this movie very highly.

(Be warned - the trailers you see for "Eternal Sunshine" make this movie look like a slightly wacky love story with an allstar cast - like a Julia Roberts romantic comedy shot in low light. It's not. It's much, much better).

Things I Really Love

Things I Really Love - A gratuitous but fun list.

• An early Sunday dinner at the Best Steak House on University Avenue. The BSH is a local chain of cheapo steak joints owned by the local Greek restaurant mafia. Not a date dinner, mind you - just myself (not that that happens often), a cheap sirloin, watching the traffic and the other patrons, mopping up the ketchup with the Texas Toast (and nobody makes better Texas Toast than the BSH), relaxing, pondering picking up the kids, looking forward to the week ahead. Which, I'm happy to say, I do, these days.
• "I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)" by Stevie Wonder. It's from "Talking Book", which may not be his best album (I said "may not", because I'm not always in the mood for "Inner Visions" - and let's be honest, either are you), but it's his best song. The chorus bleeds hope, defines the triumph of faith over experience. It was the song at the end of "High Fidelity", where it served as a nearly cathartic realization of John Cusack's character's epiphany. Standing alone, it does the same thing, and more. Wondrous.
• Being Alone. Not having to answer to another adult for who I am, and how I am.
• The Blackened Bayou Chicken at Copelands. Don't let the gray gravy put you off - this is the most wonderful chicken-shimp-calorie bomb I've ever eaten. It may be 175,000 calories, but wash it down with enough spunky-yet-drinkable Shiraz and it'll all work out.
• My marigold bush is blooming. This was my ex-wife's great moment of gardening inspiration - a magnolia in the front yard. It's still there - and it's blooming is the first tangible sign that spring has really sprung. Its blooming is sodden with metaphor - it happens early, it smells gorgeous, and it's gone in a week. And I saw the first buds this weekend.
• Doing talk radio again. I think the entire Northern Alliance enjoys doing the show. For me, it may be different. More on this in a later post.
• "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". What an incredible movie. Along with the "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy, it's the best movie I've seen in years. Review tomorrow.
• Feeling alive. "Well, duh". No, it's more complicated than that. For most of the last five years, the stresses of everyday life left me feeling numb and disconnected from the world around me - a world that I could feel was passing me by. Whatever it was, it's passing, bit by bit - so that even though life is no less stressful than ever, I'm feeling more like I'm actually in my life again, rather than floating in a raft down a river, unable to steer or much of anything. It's a nice switch.
• Whizzing on a tree. If I need to explain it to you, you can never get it.
• Re-reading my "Calvin and Hobbes" books for the hundredth time. And probably the five hundredth, too...
• Blogging. It's still fun. And a lot more rewarding than I ever thought it would be, when I started this thing two years ago.
• "Love And Hate" by Franky Perez. This is what rock and roll is supposed to be.
• Re-doing my back yard. More to come.
• Living near Lake Como.That should do for now.

  Now get outside and enjoy the spring.

  Posted by Mitch at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

Wages Of Surrender

Wages Of Surrender - Dealing with terrorism in a nuanced, multilateral, Kerry-esque way did the Spaniards so much good, didn't it?

Three terrorism suspects killed themselves and a policeman when they set off an explosion inside a building south of Madrid as police attempted to enter, Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes told reporters Saturday.

Another 11 police officers were wounded in the blast.

He who trades liberty for safety deserves neither. And, as it happens, gets neither, either.

The dead policeman was 41 and had two sons, Acebes said.

That hits close to home.

Thank God for George Bush.

Feel Like An Ant

Feel Like An Ant- I was walking to my car yesterday, down Fourth Street in downtown Minneapolis, eschewing the skyway to enjoy the brisk but lovely day.

As I walked in front of the new Federal Courthouse, I felt the temperature rise, as if I had walked into a warm room, or as if Monica Bellucci had batted her eyes at me.

And as I walked on, as suddenly as the temperature rose, it fell again.

I walked a few steps, and the temperature dropped back to normal.

I walked a few more steps before I stopped and did what must have been a classic double take. I looked up at the concave curved glass facade of the courthouse, and saw the reflection of the sun about five floors from the top.

I followed the sunbeam down to the street level, and saw where they converged in a 6x6foot spot about five feet behind where I stood - right where I had been walking.

I stepped back - and felt the temperature jump back up. It felt like it got 30 degrees warmer inside of three feet.

The cool part - I actually noticed it. I've been following a variety of James Lileks' version of Atkins for a few weeks, as part of my new years resolution to be able to see abs by the time I turn 42 - and like Lileks, the part that amazes me most is the mental energy and alertness I've regained since then. There was a time, a month or two ago, when I probably wouldn't have noticed anything at all after, say, 2PM.

I'll have to try this again on Monday...

Well, That'll Help

Well, That'll Help - After my sudden switch of domains earlier this week, my traffic - which had hit an all-time average high of around 600 visitors every weekday - plunged. I was averaging 1-200 visitors a day (not counting the two days when I was off the air and had none at all).

It's amazing what an Instalanche and a simultaneous shout-out from James Lileks on the Hugh Hewitt show will do to fix things.

And of course it's really humbling, truly, being mentioned not once but twice (according to the Commissioner today - I didn't hear that hour of the show) in the company of the likes of Evangelical Outpost, Mark Roberts, ElectionProjection, the Monkeys, Rantburg, DenBeste, Bainbridge, Washington Monthly, Flashbunny, Conservative Crust, AllahPundit, Totten, Welch, Sullivan, Johnson, Blair, Antler, Althouse, McArdle, Jarvis, Volokch, McGuire and Smash - people I read and admire - not to mention my Northern Alliance colleagues at Fraters, Powerline and the Captain.

Thanks, James and Professor! It's the best domain-warming present I've ever had!

Compassion and Kos. Justice and Jay

Compassion and Kos. Justice and Jay - I could write a lot about "Kos"' vile, despicable post yesterday, essentially spitting on the graves of the four American civilian contractors who were murdered in Fallujah earlier this week.

Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly.

Note to "Kos" - the people of the Red States - who supply a disproportionate number of this nation's soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines - know all too well that this is not a video game. It's you that needs to learn the value of the human life as something more than an artifact of puerile spin.

As we'll see:

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

I'm nearly paralyzed with rage. These peoples' hatred of the President has warped not only their sense of what it is to be American - it's eroded their very humanity.

Because they're "mercenaries?" It's in part because of "mercenaries" like LaFayette, Pulaski, Von Steuben and Kosciuszko that you have the freedom to spout your vacuous bilge without fear of being picked up in the night and dumped in a ditch with a bullet hole between your eyes.

Words fail me. It's rare, but it's finally happened.

Of all that's been written about this ghastly episode, none is better than fellow Minnesota blogger Jay Reding's tour de force post this morning. He puts faces to the names - and brings coherence to the blind desire I have to knock "Kos" sprawling right now.

(Via The Professor)

UPDATE: Kos has changed his post. Some of my commenters believe it's because of the advertising he's lost. Maybe.

Reading Kos, it's hard to see which was worse - the original, or the elaboration:

There's been much ado about my indifference to the Mercenary deaths in Falluja a couple days ago. I wrote in some diary comments somewhere that "I felt nothing" and "screw them".

My language was harsh, and, in reality, not true. Fact is, I did feel something. That's why I was so angry.

I was angry that five soldiers -- the real heroes in my mind -- were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers' hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own violition.

Nice spin, "Kos".

The fact is, the four civilians were bigger news not because of who they were, but how they died; burned to death and then desecrated by a howling mob of Saddamites engorged on bloodlust.

You can't leave that part out of story and lay any claim to intellectual honesty.

So I struck back.

Unlike the vast majority of people in this country, I actually grew up in a war zone. I witnessed communist guerillas execute students accused of being government collaborators. I was 8 years old, and I remember stepping over a dead body, warm blood flowing from a fresh wound. Dodging bullets while at market. I lived in the midsts of hate the likes of which most of you will never understand (Clinton and Bush hatred is nothing compared to that generated when people kill each other for politics or race or nationality). There's no way I could ever describe the ways this experience colors my worldview.

I'd say your original post describes it quite well, actually.

Back to Iraq, our men and women in uniform are there under orders, trying to make the best of an impossible situation. The war is not their fault, and I will always defend their honor and bravery to the end of my days.

Right. You "support the troop" but condemn the mission they're on. Nice.

I don't think it fools the soldiers.

Speaking of which:

But the mercenary is a whole different deal. They willingly enter a war zone, and do so because of the paycheck. They're not there for humanitarian reasons (I doubt they'd donate half their paycheck to the Red Cross or whatever). They're there because the money is DAMN good. They answer to no one except their CEO. They are dangerous, hence international efforts (however fruitless they may be) to ban their use.

Kos (and if you're in contact with Kos, do me a favor and make sure he sees this): Bullshit.

These were men who served the United States as soldiers for years; in at least two cases, they had been in Special Forces. They were professional soldiers, who'd devoted as much of their lives to learning the art and craft of soldiering as a doctor or a lawyer spent learning their professions.

So going overseas to train Iraqi police is a Good Thing when a soldier gets a tiny check from Uncle Sam - but once they get their check for doing the same job from a private company, suddenly it's the depth of immorality?

Put it another way: Prove these men were doing anything wrong, and by "wrong" I mean anything the larger world would consider wrong - not the pack of sycophants who clog your comment section.

So not only was I wrong to say I felt nothing over their deaths, I was lying. I felt way too much. Nobody deserves to die. But in the greater scheme of things, there are a lot of greater tragedies going on in Iraq (51 last month, plus countless civilians and Iraqi police). That those tragedies are essentially ignored these days is, ultimately, the greatest tragedy of all.

You Democrats have lots of practice ignoring soldiers.

Don't stop now, just because it's gotten you in trouble.

It's Gonna Be That Kinda Day

It's Gonna Be That Kinda Day - The good news: Wonkette is huge:

So what if Wonkette.com actually launched a little more than two months ago? Saturday night, a throng of Washingtonians (and those who love them) converged at a belated launch party a few blocks from Dupont Circle to celebrate the politics-and-gossip blog that's trying to do for the nation's capital what Gawker.com has done for New York City....the star of the night was Wonkette herself, Ana Marie Cox, the 31-year-old bundle of sarcastic insight who, as she puts it, had been "fired or asked to leave from almost every legitimate publication in Washington" before Denton plucked her from the blogging wilderness to run the site.

The bad news:

Cox now works from a cozy office in the Arlington home she shares with her husband, Chris Lehmann, an editor at The Washington Post Book World...

Ah, well.

Too Much Show

Too Much Show - Tomorrow's Northern Alliance Radio Network is going to be a great one.

First hour - my favorite, every week - the week in Review, this week with Rocket Man (from Powerline), King (from SCSU Scholars) and JB Doubtless (from Fraters). Among the usual plethora of topics, we'll be talking with Jason Van Beek from South Dakota Politics about the South Dakota senate race - which has huge national implications.

Second hour, Big Trunk and Rocketman will join King and I in interviewing Rowan Scarborough, defense correspondent for the Washington Times. We may have another surprise interview.

And in the third hour, we'll be back with Saint Paul, JB and Atomizer from Fraters, talking about the GoGo women's hoops team, and my favorite topic, popular music.

Turn it on, listen up, call in - noon to three tomorrow on AM1280.

Urrrrrge Toooo Kiiiiillllll - So

Urrrrrge Toooo Kiiiiillllll - So I have WiFi in the house - an 11b router I got for $10 after the rebate last winter.

And it works great, everywhere in the house; the whole first floor gets amazing reception. My bedroom? Check. The basement? Check. Even the front porch has fabulous performance.

But there's one spot - my reading chair, in the corner of my bedroom, where I like to sit and tap away on stuff late at night or early in the morning (or, these days usually, both)...

...where, half the time, I'll be ready to post a looooong piece to the blog (or ftp a huuuge file to work), and...

...

Wireless Connection Not Found

What do you suppose the odds are?

Wonder if my son wants to trade rooms?

The One Bad Rap -

The One Bad Rap - Howard Dean deserved most of his bad raps.

He was a flip-flopper of Kerryesque dimension - and had he remained the front-runner, that would have come out the way Kerry's past is coming out today. He was every bit the empty suit that Kerry is on foreign policy and national security, with a bit of delusion thrown in for good measure (the infamous "135,000 moderate moslem troops" canard that played so well to the militarily-illiterate MoveOn crowd, as long as no nations with six digits worth of troops to spare were actually mentioned). And he was a moonbat, oh, yes indeed.

But he got a lot of flak from the right about, of all things, rolling up his sleeves.

In this, as nothing else, Howard Dean was spot on.
I've rolled my sleeves up as long as I can remember, and unless I'm wearing an interview suit, I still do. Always - unless I'm in the job interview itself. I'll wear a suit on the first day of any job - but once the jacket's off, the sleeves roll up.

For my entire life, I've hated, Hated, HATED the feeling of shirt cuffs on my wrists. I can sit and listen to fingernails on chalkboards all day without batting an eye, and there are very few of life's petty irritations that really faze me (indeed, with two kids at home, very few I even notice anymore).

But that feeling of having shirt cuffs on my wrists drives me crazy. No matter what you do, they itch and rub and flap uselessly about, and get in the way, and inevitably wind up getting dirty or catching in something or other.

So I roll 'em up. Always have, always will, and damn the fella who gives me any guff about it.

So many reasons to rip on Howard Dean (back when he mattered, sorta). But not this one.

What Did The President Know,

What Did The President Know, And When Did He Know It? - A foreign paper reports that the President knew about one of the grisliest, most horrific acts of terrorism in history, but sat on information:

US president Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, classified documents made available for the first time reveal.

Whoops. President Clinton, I mean.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president knew of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.

Can you imagine how they'd be howling if it had been Bush?

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that a secret CIA briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, his vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of officials included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, 1994, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which . . . is spreading south".

Three days later the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, and other officials were told of "genocide and partition" and of declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".

Ms des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act."

Many analysts and historians fault Washington and other Western countries not just for failing to support the token force of overwhelmed United Nations peacekeepers but also for failing to speak out more forcefully during the slaughter.

Mr Clinton has apologised for those failures but the declassified documents undermine his defence of ignorance.

On a visit to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in 1998 Mr Clinton apologised for not acting quickly enough or immediately calling the crimes genocide.

It probably wouldn't have been nuanced enough.

The real question isn't necessarily "why was Clinton so pusillanimous" - they knew there was little US interest in the area beyond humanitarianism. Furthermore, they knew there was very little the military could have done. And they could still smell the smoke from Mogadishu (which only became a fully-realized debacle because they turned tail and fled, but let's leave that aside for a moment). It's not even "was he right or wrong".

The real question is, in these days when the liberal media is spending so much effort to plump up the rapidly-deflating Richard Clarke story, why are we needing to rely on foreign media to get these stories?

Does Kos Know This?

Does Kos Know This? - Lefty bloggers have been known to obsess over polls.

One wonders how this is flying among the Kos crowd - Kerry has dropping in Pennsylvania, a key swing state. Bush currently leads in PA. Captain Ed is on the case:

The drop mirrors the free-fall that Kerry has experienced nationwide over the same period of time. Kerry dropped from 47% to 40% while Bush's numbers held firm at 46%, and Kerry's disapproval numbers went up the same amount. Nader's entry has pulled 3% of voters away from the two national candidates, but presumably mostly from Kerry. Kerry only leads among those voters 65 and older. The Keystone poll reports responses from registered voters instead of likely voters, which tend to favor Republicans a bit more, so the news is doubly bad for John Kerry and the Democrats. The poll was conducted over the weekend, after the fallout from the Clarke testimony and book publication.

Just to remind everyone, Al Gore carried Pennsylvania by 5 points in 2000. If Bush can take Pennsylvania, it puts Kerry in a deep hole, since the Keystone State represents 21 electoral votes. Having George Bush poll this strongly in a Rust Belt state while the economy is still revving up signals a deep problem with the Kerry campaign, who should be holding onto a state so close to his own. If this continues, Kerry will take his rightful place amongst the giants of electoral flops, McGovern and Mondale. (via The Corner)

Gander moment: Yes, I know - it's still seven months until the election.

We may be talking about the campaign polling on this week's Northern Alliance Radio Network show. John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker from Powerline remains pessimistic about the President's chances. I remain agnostic about polls, but am feeling better and better about my prediction last January...

...which you'll hear about on the Hugh Hewitt show the day after the election.

FrankenNet

FrankenNet - I missed every single minute of it. I'll probably do the same today. Something about having a job (and no radio when I'm there, and lousy AM reception even if I did).

But Steve Gigl got in a listen - and The Elder showed that you really don't have to to understand what it's all about.

Stuck On Soros

Stuck On Soros - Ukranian protesters splatter Liberal Billionaire and MoveOn.org sugardaddy George Soros with water and glue.

The US billionaire and philanthropist George Soros was splashed with water and glue in Ukraine's capital Kiev by two young Ukrainians who burst into a hall where he was addressing a human rights conference.

"Soros, Out of Ukraine! You'll get nothing here!" the Ukrainians shouted as they carried out their protest Wednesday, the Interfax news agency reported. They were immediately detained and led away by security personnel.

Soros said he doubted it was just an ordinary incident. "Somebody is behind this," he was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Ooh! Can I cop to it?

I'd love to be behind anything bad (and non-lethal) that happens to George Soros.

The Soros Foundation is heavily involved in promoting civil society and the development of democratic ideas, chiefly in former Soviet bloc countries. But it is sometimes accused of interfering in countries' internal affairs...Former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who was forced to resign after a wave of street protests by the opposition in November, accused Soros of orchestrating the campaign that led to his downfall.

Sort of what he's trying to do via MoveOn.org here in the US.

George Soros is merely one more reason I hope Bush not only wins, but wins huuuuge this fall. It'll be fun to see him, Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner crying in their chablis.

Nuanced Internationalism

Nuanced Internationalism - Some of us warned you; getting involved in Kosovo was the real quagmire. "This is not only an ethnic squabble that goes back a thousand years - it's an inter-ethnic rhubarb, the hardest thing in the world to deal with. Moreover, there was no compelling US interest in sending our military to Kosovo, beyond humanitarianism - and, equally, there was no reason the Europeans, whom we have been protecting and whose economies we've been allowing to grow unfettered by the need for proportional military spending for the past 50+years, shouldn't have handled the whole thing. "And getting involved via the UN is stupid, stupid, stupid."

"Oh, no", said supporters of Clinton's effort, which started as a nuanced rejection of international sovereignty, "You're just saying that because Iraq has been so difficult."

Er, no. We're saying this because the UN can't walk and chew gum at the same time:

A pogrom started in Europe this week, with one U.N. official being quoted as saying, "Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo." Serbs are being murdered and their 800-year-old churches are aflame. Much of the Christian heritage in Kosovo and Metohija is on fire and could be lost forever. By these deeds too many of Kosovo's Albanians have shown that their rhetoric about "democracy" and "multiethnicity" is false, and demonstrates also that the international community's acceptance of them has been naïve.

How did this week's events begin? Just as in the 1930s, a rumor became a fact and prearranged plans were put into action. Members of the victimized community (in this case, Serbian children) were accused of chasing four Albanian children into a river and causing the death of three of them. Hours later, the U.N. Mission — which is what passes for authority in Kosovo — issued a statement that the accusation against the Serbs was false, adding that the surviving Albanian child had told the U.N. that no Serbs had been involved in the drownings. Nevertheless, anti-Serb violence did not abate. And today Kosovo burns still...

...Monasteries and churches dating back to the 12th century are burning; 14 have been completely destroyed so far. Their cultural significance is irreplaceable. Photographs and memories are now all that remain. But instead of protecting them, the U.N. fled.

The wave of violence has been too coordinated to be a spontaneous, popular reaction to rumors. "It was planned in advance," said Derek Chappell, the U.N.'s Kosovo mission spokesman. All that was needed was a pretext. It is clear that some in the Kosovo Albanian leadership believe that by cleansing all remaining Serbs from the area (having already achieved the cleansing of two-thirds of Kosovo's Serbs after its "liberation" in 1999) and destroying Serbian cultural sites, they can present the international community with a fait accompli. But ethnic purity cannot be allowed to be the foundation for either democracy or independence."

As Jason Van Steenwyck notes to a reader of his blog who compares the current violence in Iraq to what's going on in Kosovo:

The attacks that the reader mentions in Iraq are all hit-and-run classic guerrilla operations and terrorist tactics--hallmarks of assymetrical warfare adopted by the weaker side.

The weaker side--in this case the Islamist insurgency--adopts these tactics precisely because they cannot successfully close with and destroy the American forces. They cannot hold their own in a firefight. Although they have demonstrated the ability to gather in platoon strength or better in Fallujah and Sammarah, they generally cannot follow up successes. They have no choice but to vanish into the population as quickly as possible or die.

And they sure as Hell can't do anything so bold as to destroy an entire village within small arms range of an American base. They know that American forces would protect the village from aggression. American forces have enough credibility that the insurgent does not even try.

The fact that a mob showed up to destroy a Serb village in the very face of a presence of UN Peacekeepers tells you two things: 1.) The UN Peacekeepers are as useless as a nipple on a napkin, and 2.) UN credibility with the locals is so pathetic that the mob knew the UN would not stop them going in.

Further, if United Nations troops have "more limited mandates" than do American troops in Iraq, and if that is such a problem, then again, that's nobody's fault but the UN's.

Nuance is the opposite of clarity. Fighting terror is all about clarity.

Bush is clear. Kerry is "Nuanced" - meaning, unable to reach a decision without dithering about with worthless international deliberative bodies. Call it Senatitis. Or call it "Worthless as a national leader, especially on national security". The result is the same.