Shot In The Dark

Urban Conservative, Part II

I keep asking people this question: "Inner city minorities vote Democrat to the point that they are completely taken for granted. Why do they keep doing it?"

The reasons are obvious enough; Asians have an almost-stereotypical bent toward small business and for meritocracy; Hispanic Catholics are deeply socially conservative.

And there are no more ardent advocates of public school reform than the city's African-Americans.

Yesterday, the Scholars featured this piece on urban schools that succeed.

I'll add the emphases:

The best inner-city schools have greatly extended instructional time with more hours in the day, longer weeks, and longer years. They have terrific principals who have the authority and autonomy to manage their budgets, set salaries, staff the school with fabulous teachers and get rid of those
who don’t work out. These principals are constantly in classrooms, giving feedback to teachers—the best sort of professional development. The schools we describe focus relentlessly on the core academic subjects, insisting that their students learn the multiplication tables, basic historical facts, spelling, punctuation, the rules of grammar, and the meaning of often-unfamiliar words. They provide safe, orderly environments in which to teach and learn. But they also aim to transform the culture of their students, as that culture affects academic achievement.

“Are we conservative here?” Gregory Hodge, the head of the Frederick Douglass Academy in New York’s Harlem, once asked me rhetorically. “Of course we are,” he answered. “We teach middle-class values like responsibility.” The KIPP Academy’s David Levin has echoed Hodge. “We are
fighting a battle involving skills and values. We are not afraid to set social norms,” he has said. The best schools work hard to instill the “desire, discipline, and dedication” (KIPP watchwords) that will enable disadvantaged youth to climb the American ladder of opportunity.

After you read that piece, read this one by Joe Carter, "Thinking Like Republicans, Voting Like Democrats".

Then tell me why the Minnesota GOP has completely given up on the inner city.

Lock Step

So Powerline has linked to Andrew McCarthy's catalogue of the links between Iraq and Al Quaeda.

This follows on the Northern Alliance's interview with Stephen Hayes, whose new book catalogues in exhaustive detail the links between Hussein and Al Quaeda.

There's clearly a world of "nuance" out there.

The Strib will have none of that. In their special world, there is, can be, and shall be no connection.

Bad Flashback

In re Morgan Spurlock's documentary "Supersize Me", the Professor says:

And don't forget the McRib!

I almost had.

Thanks for nothing!

Show Me

Senator Lurch Kerry apparently interviewed Dick Gephardt for the Veep slot on the know-nothing Democrat ticket.

John F. Kerry spent 90 minutes yesterday interviewing Representative Richard A. Gephardt, as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee began the closing phase of his search for a running mate, according to a Democratic official close to both men.

In the words of a certain botoxed sage, "Bring Him Awwwwwwwn".

The "strategy" behind giving Gepper the nod is pretty obvious; get someone on the ticket who can make inroads in a battleground state, shore up the right side of the ticket, and placate labor and any swing voters who might think the Missouri representative might bring some oomph to the terminally trite Kerry foreign policy team.

Doubt it'll work.

For starters, I sincerely doubt Gephardt will play outside Saint Louis. Politically, Missouri is like Minnesota on meth; the states are based around a couple of terminally-liberal urban areas (St. Louis, KC and so on) surrounded by outstate areas that are conservative, and becoming moreso.

Furthermore, the power of the urban liberals has attenuated over the years; it was emblematic that after years of urban-special-interest dirty tricks and media shenanigans, Minnesota and Missouri passed shall-issue concealed carry laws within months of each other - stunning setbacks to liberal urban groups that had thought they owned their states' respective processes. Suffice to say, there are those who think having Gepper on the ticket won't be enough to take Missouri out of the "battleground" category.

Fritz Mondale lost the Senate race in 2002 based on the same kinds of electoral dynamics. Will Gephardt play the same way outside Saint Louis?

I think it's possible.

Open Memo To "Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change"

To: Former Diplomats and Generals (and residents of Silly, Trite America)

From: Serious America

Re: Your Prescience.

Dear Diplomats and Generals:

Where were you between 1998 and September 10, 2001?

Sincerely,

Serious America

(Via the Captain)

How Might My Monologue Have Gone?

So one of these years, I hope to do a real, proper Bloomsday - the annual worldwide celebration of James Joyce in the context of one of the protagonists from Ulysses, held on June 16, the fictional day in the book.

In fact, I'd hoped, maybe this year.

But no, I was in Des Moines. They don't have any especially major Bloomsday festivities there, not that I was aware of, and I was busy either working or driving home the whole day and evening.

Ah, well. Some people have all the fun!

Backing Into Office

As Captain Ed notes, the Dems' strategy seems to be to try to get the public to avoid any mention of John Kerry. As long as the public's attention is on anything - anything - other than Kerry himself.

First it was the Richard Clarke. Then, the 911 kangaroo court commission. Then it was Abu Ghraib. Then it was the extended (and, if McCain was to be believed, futile) courting of John McCain to serve as Veep. Then it was Abu Ghraib. Then it was Reagan's funeral. Then, more Abu Ghraib.

And now, again, a third round of ostensible interest in McCain.

Perhaps the Democrats were right to float the idea of delaying their nominating convention - only they should have held off until after the inauguration. Having no name at all on the ballot could only help Kerry's chances.

Of course, the Administration's unwillingness to actually get its hands dirty, or even get any positive PR for itself out there, isn't hurting the no-name candidacy either. If Bush doesn't start swinging hard, it could actualy work.

The Good News

I have a daughter who is 12 going on 17, and a son who's 11 going on six.

They're about 18 months apart - not much different than the age gap between my own little sister and brother. I was three years older than my sister, so my adult life has turned out, in that respect, the same as my childhood; listening to constant, low-level sibling rivalry.

I picked them up last night when I got back from Des Moines. I was talking with daughter. "How'd it go?"

"Hmph", she said. Sibling rivalry. "I hate him".

"Well, bun, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can't get rid of him."

"Hmpfh"

"The good news", I continued, "is that you both love each other very much", I said, turning on the saccharine.

"Blah", she said. "What's the real good news?"

I grinned and shrugged my shoulders.

"Oh, I know," she said. "You got a great deal on car insurance at GEICO, right?"

Serial Stupidity

Today's Doug Grow column presents a number of thorny questions.

It's a story many of us have heard before: 25 year old woman hooks up with a good-for-nothing layabout. She exhibits less than perfect common sense:

A short version of her view of their relationship: They had a child in Boston in 2000, married in his Russian home city, St. Petersburg, in 2001.

Leave out th globetrotting, and it's a story familiar in any trailer park in America.

The story turns tragic, yet stays the same:

There, they had a second child, who died -- under circumstances that aren't clear -- at the age of 15 months in 2002. Bree was the breadwinner for the family and for his parents. She worked long hours as an English teacher and doing public relations projects. He didn't work.

Oh, by the way, this doesn't happen in a trailer park. "Bree" has all the bona fides she needs to be "one of us" to Doug Grow and the MPR set:

Bree graduated, with honors, from Minnetonka High in 1993. She went on to graduate, with highest honors, from prestigious Wellesley College and then earned a master's degree in economics from Boston University, with high honors, of course.

Of course. And if someone has that much school, we have to identify with her, right?

But Bree, who turns 29 at the end of the week, has not lived happily ever after. She's living in a nightmare that began with love that quickly collapsed into an abusive relationship with a Russian, Mikhail Slobodkine. He also was an economics student at Boston University.

Grow goes on to absolve Bree:

Domestic violence cases are filled with questions that confound our notions of what is rational behavior. How can anyone get caught up in a relationship with a batterer?

Resolving the issues in these cases is never easy.

Resolving them isn't easy. But explaining them isn't rocket science. Let's recap:

• We start with the very archetype of the modern Minnesota woman - young, hypereducated, a west-suburban overachiever, the kind who just plain deserves to live happily ever after.
• She leaves Minnetonka, gets a big-league education.
• Meets a guy.
• Gets pregnant.
• Follows guy to, essentially, a third-world country
• Watches as guy falls apart
• Starts getting beaten. Spends the better part of three years getting pummeled. Stays with him, even has another child with him.
• Stays with him for nearly two years after their son dies under suspicious circumstances.
• Beatings get worse, until
• She flees Russia, leaving her daughter.
• Then she works on getting the kid out?

On the one hand, this piece has exactly the effect it's supposed to have. I'm a divorced parent. I've felt the throat-clutching fear of wondering if I was going to lose my kids through the ponderous stupidity of the legal system.

I also made damn sure I didn't give that system an excuse to screw me blue.

And while it's hard to say exactly what one will do in extremis, when the chips are down, one thing I'm fairly sure about; if I had a spouse who was trying to kill me, and who I believed had killed another child of mine, and I had another to protect - I'm fairly sure that I'd catch a later flight, and give that spouse a date with the wrong end of a baseball bat.

Easy for me to say? Bollocks. It should be easy for every parent to say. That it's not is one of the most truly horrifying parts of this story; since when are your children not something you fight, even risk you life, for?

And at the risk of falling into a stereotype - the hectoring conservative - this is where this story goes into the weeds for me. While I feel for "Bree's" loss, and the horror of her current situation, it would seem from Doug Grow's account that she has been irredeemably stupid at every turn. She got into a wretched relationship; we don't know the circumstances, but it has certain aspects in common with many similar stories that are common in America, from the trailer parks to the suburban high schools; dizzy little people (gender indeterminate) who enter into relationships for the most trivial of reasons, bring children into this world under horrendous circumstances, remain in the situation while the consequences harm them and the children, make trite and self-serving decisions all the way...

...and then expect to be insulated from the consequences.

As does Doug Grow. Damn the consequences - it's her daughter dammit; note the times Grow refers to Viktoria Slobodkine as "her daughter". Wrong, Doug: Viktoria is their daughter. And while Mikhail Slobodkine has been judged and sentenced in Doug Grow's column, the fact is that Bree Schuette left the girl with him. It's a key fact that decides the vast majority of less-dramatic custody cases in the US; the parent that leaves, loses. A very wise lawyer told me before my divorce - never leave. Never.

Doug Grow's efforts aside, I feel nothing beyond standard issue human compassion for Bree Schuette. It's her daughter that is allegedly in danger; Victoria did nothing to deserve this.

But Doug Grow grants her absolution, quoting a domestic-violence industry worker:

"This case demonstrates that domestic violence occurs across all aspects of society," Dusso said. "This young woman represents Minnesota's finest. She's from a nifty, suburban family. She's smart as a whip."

At the risk of sounding like Laura Schlesinger, no she's not. She's serially stupid; stupid about the men in her life, stupid about her choices, and finally, irredeemably, maybe irrevocably stupid about her daughter.

And she's trapped in a nightmare.

No. She got out.

Her daughter is the trapped one.

Out of Town

I'm leaving town for a two-day business trip in about an hour.

I'm thinking about bringing the laptop, on the off chance that my hotel has wi-fi or a usable cat5 connection, but just in case, posting might be pretty light until Thursday.

Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

The torture cells are shuttered.

Gang rape is an aberration, not an interrogation technique.

The mass graves are being emptied rather than filled.

No matter , says the NYTimes in a piece called "In Race to Give Power to Iraqis, Electricity Lags"; if the power's not working perfectly, it's as if the liberation never happened!

Media Discovers Blogs: Part MCCLXXII

Time Magazine writes about bloggers and blogging, and recognizes its top five "blogs to watch".

Those five are:

1. Fark - A cool site, although the articles description, "[a] venue for posting the odd pictures and news items he liked to gather and send to friends in endless, annoying e-mails" is all-too-accurate.
2. BoingBoing
3. Instapundit - well, duh.
4. Wonkette - a site that's gotten very tired.
5. Rebecca Blood - Huh? Standard-issue mild-left blogger, worst design I've seen on a website lately, and not even an especially big player; the article notes Blood gets "about 30,000 visitors a month". Yowza - "Shot in the Dark" got 33,000 in May, and is on track for 36,000 in June. Time: Have your people call my people!

An interesting article, nonetheless.

Still - what kind of list was that?

The five blogs I find myself reading most often these days (besides obvious ones like my six Northern Alliance colleagues and Instapundit):

1. Vox Popoli - Vox Day is an eclectic polymath (although, come to think of it, is there any other kind of polymath? Something about "monomaniacal polymath" just doesn't compute). Anyway - christian technogeek libertarian entrepreneur columnist. It's a fun blog.
2. Belmont Club - The best strategy/politics blog out there; like reading Den Beste, only it takes about a third as long.
3. Evangelical Outpost - Philosophy, pop culture, religion, social criticism, gratuitous erudition.
4. Sheila's Redheaded Ramblings - She makes "maddening eclecticism" enjoyable. Everything from her Victor Klemperer's notes to Rasputin's equipment. When I say it's a "Guilty pleasure", it's only because as a good Scandinavian protestant, everything makes me feel guilty.
5. Jay Reding - A news-cycle blogger with some great insights; think Captain Ed with better Libertarian cred.

So what's your hot list?

The Great Liberator

One of the great errors - or depending on the agent, slanders - against the memory of Ronald Reagan was that he wasn't responsible for the fall of the USSR.

But the fact is, while allowing that every administration from Truman through Johnson played a significant role, it's impossible to state witih a straight face that communism was receding in the seventies, that the policy of containment was working as of 1979.

I've debated this with countless liberals. Their arguments all, inevitably, without exception, fall into dogma (easily skewered dogma at that) when we get to the inconvenient facts of the era and, indeed, the beliefs of their own fellow travellers of the era.

Even the Russians of the era, the ones that held power - Gorbachev, Dobrynin - admit the role Reagan had.

You have to wonder - why would Reagan be so revered by so many Eastern Europeans?

Powerline refers us to an excellent Weekly standard piece, Tom Rose interviewing Natan Scharansky, a long-time zek in the Gulag. It's a wonderful read.

Asked why Reagan was such a major figure:

I have to laugh. People who take freedom for granted, Ronald Reagan for granted, always ask such questions. Of course! It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.

It's the clarity, stupid!

Of course, like all of us, Sharansky knows Reagan didn't do the job alone:

If I would be permitted to widen the credit a little more, I would say the collapse of the Soviet Union is attributable to three men. Andrei Sakharov, Scoop Jackson, and Ronald Reagan. These were the people who brought moral clarity to the conflict and started the chain of events which led to the end of Soviet communism. Sakharov to the Russian people, Senator Jackson to the American government, and Ronald Reagan on behalf of the American people to the world and thus back to the Soviet Union. They created the policy of linkage: That international relations and human rights must be linked. That how a government treats its own people cannot be separated from how that government could be expected to treat other countries. That how governments honor commitments they make at home will show the world how they will honor their commitments abroad.

Read the whole thing.

I Don't Know About You...

...but if I were John Kerry, I wouldn't be happy to have a pff piece start:

Like a caged hamster...

Is that wrong?

Fact-Checking

My Northern Alliance pal Saint Paul tripped across some dubious fact-checking in this excellent piece on the Strib's whizzing on Ronald Reagan's grave (Strib quote italicized):

"He was a good President who stood up for the people,"said hospice-care nurse Lisa Gibson, 38, while waiting at the bus stop at Glenwood and Morgan Avs.

Gibson said she voted for Reagan twice but understands why others are uncomfortable with the ongoing coverage. "The country's already in mourning over poverty, no jobs, and the new recession," Gibson said.

She claims to be 38 years old and to have voted for Reagan twice. Paul Levy wrote it and the editors printed it. It's in the newspaper, so it has to be true, right?

Wrong! (said John McLaughlin voice). According to my sources (the 26h Amendment to the US Constitution), you have to be 18 years old to vote in this country. And in 1980, during Reagan's first candidacy, Ms. Gibson would have been 14 years old! It would be impossible for her to have voted for Reagan twice.

But there it is, in black-and-white (again, you'll have to dig out your hard copies from Saturday to see it for yourself, as it's been stricken from the Web site).

How does this lazy reporting get into the paper?

Saint is right: Ms. Gibson is either lying about her age, or her voting record.

I'm 41. I missed the 1980 election by about a month; I turned 18 about three weeks after Reagan won his election. Just as well - chowderhead that I was, I was more likely to vote for John Anderson than anyone else.

Read the whole Fraters piece (assuming you're not one of the large group that comes from there to here in the first place...)

Flash! War is Messy!

Note to all NYTimes reporters:

• War is all about confusion. Clausewitz called it the "Fog of War". Times reporters: Read some Clausewitz. In fact, read any military history.
• Intelligence is not an exact science. In fact the Times article notes this, with a quote from an American officer: "A third senior military officer described the quantity of "no kidding, actionable intel" as having been limited, but added, "In a real fight, you go with what you've got." However, you have to sit through fifteen paragraphs - a third of the article - to get there.

I'm referring of course to yesterday's article, "Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders", by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt.

In the special little world that NYTimes reporters inhabit, war really is an efficient, push-button operation.

News flash: The CIA doesn't do intelligence well!

The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.

Hm. OK, the CIA doesn't do intelligence well.

But where did this information come from?

An explicit account of the zero for 50 record in strikes on high-value targets was provided by Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the joint staff's high-value targeting cell during the war. Mr. Garlasco is now a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, and he was a primary author of the December report, "Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq."

The broad failure rate was confirmed by several senior military officials, including some who served in Iraq or the region during the war, and by senior intelligence officials. So let's get this straight:

• The NYTimes supported the gutting of the CIA.
• They also all-but-explicitly back the party that moves to gut the military as a matter of routine.
• Now, when the CIA and the military they so passive-aggressively oppose can't do its job because the party it supports has so successfully hamstrung it with the active connivance and approval of the NYTimes - the Times whizzes and moans about it? It's the inevitable end-result of their best efforts!

Posted by Mitch at 07:27 AM | Comments (3)

The Dinosaur Revolt

Ron Brownstein, of the nation's most overtly liberal newspaper, the LA Times, leads this piece about a group of has-beens and representatives of discredited old policies.

The group - former diplomats and soldiers who reject Bush's Iraq policy - are best described by one of the quotes later in the piece, by a "GOP Strategist":

"For 60 years we believed in quote-unquote stability at the price of liberty, and what we got is neither liberty nor stability," the strategist said. "So we are taking a fundamentally different approach toward the Middle East. That is a huge doctrinal shift, and the people who have given their lives, careers to building the previous foreign policy consensus, see this as a direct intellectual assault on what they have devoted their lives to. And it is. We think what a lot of people came up with was a failure — or at least, in the present world in which we live, it is no longer sustainable."

Bingo.

These are people who devoted their careers to Kissinger-style realpolitik, which bent over backwards to accomodate and maybe, just maybe, subvert evil (a term that didn't exist in their vocabulary) rather than confront it directly. They are the same people who yakked up their skulls when Reagan used the "e" word to refer to the Soviet Union, and they are shocked, shocked, that the US isn't paying obeisance to the UN and to...well, them.

Good riddance to all of them.

The lefty-blogs are reacting with predictable ingenuousness; these people are "experts", ergo their word is all we need. And they say they're not linked with Kerry - well, good enough for them!

I don't care which, if any, candidate they support. In diplomatic terms they're the equivalent of flat-earthers.

Battle of the Flags

This is a film that I'd like to see. It's about a working-class black neighborhood's fight against gentrification - by gays and lesbians:

"Flag Wars"follows the stories of two blacks and a white lesbian Realtor. Linda Mitchell, a black woman with many emotional and medical problems, defiantly paints "not for sale" on her house.
She is dragged into the legal system when she cannot pay to repair her house, which is in violation of building codes. After following her travails through the system, encountering some poignant and some humorous moments, the film closes with the lesbian Realtor, Nina, showing Mitchell's house to prospective buyers after Mitchell's death.

It's an interesting article, which highlights an argument I was positing all over last weekend's MNGOP convention: why are afro-americans so solidly left-of-center, when the most successful african-american communities are the ones that best exemplify conservative ideals? (By which I'm talking about hard work and focus on the family, not friction with gays).

Much more to come.

Fact-Checking Nick

In my comment section last week, reader PJZ did some fact-checking on a Nick Coleman column I fisked.

I'll quote the comment, adding notes for who's saying what.

COLEMAN: “I have had a Dayton's/Marshall Field's credit card for 30 years. There were times I owed more than I made in a month. And times I was a month or two late with my payments. But "Dayton's" always waited patiently for me. Until last month.”

PJZ: When was this? I used to work in the Target Corporation’s (formerly the Dayton-Hudson Corporation when I was there) collection department and I remember calling people when they were less than 30 days past due. We didn’t assess late fees at that point (although they had to pay interest for carrying a balance) and we were generally polite about it (DHOC does soft collections until you’re really past due) but I never remember intentionally letting someone go by for a month or two without at least giving them a phone call.

Some people understandably may have been upset about this. However when you consider that (a) many people move and forget to update their address (not all mail gets returned to sender or forwarded on to the new address) and (b) the system automatically reports late payments beyond a certain time (IIRC it was 60 days) to the credit bureau, we probably saved quite a few people a lot more hassle by helping them keep their credit clean than having to (shudder) answer a phone call.

COLEMAN: “Last month, I was late with a $32 payment, in part because my wife was unsuccessful in returning a jacket I had purchased. It still had the tags attached, but she would have had to undergo DNA testing to be allowed to return it for me. She gave up.”

PJZ: Um no, so long as her name was on the card as a co-borrower and she had the receipt, she should had been able to return it at the guest services center. Of course even if she had returned the item, unless the only thing on the card was the jacket, s/he would still be required to make at least the minimum payment on the card for carrying a balance.

Wow. Sounds like a big cheese, he does.

Walesa's Eulogy

It should go without saying that Lech Walesa was a hero of mine - which long predated my becoming a conservative, and in the end he was a key factor in my conversion.

His memoria to Reagan in Opinion Journal last week resonates with the current debate as well.

The piece - which you need to read - ends with this observation:

I have often been asked in the United States to sign the poster that many Americans consider very significant. Prepared for the first almost-free parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989, the poster shows Gary Cooper as the lonely sheriff in the American Western, "High Noon." Under the headline "At High Noon" runs the red Solidarity banner and the date--June 4, 1989--of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the "Wild" West, especially the U.S.

But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together.

As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn't express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have.

So what does this say about Reagan, and for that matter our media?

Awash in their wonkish fascination with the minutiae of the present, they always get the big picture wrong. Mark Steyn commented on the phenomenon last week; in this case about the Reagan funeral:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans waited quietly in line in California and then in Washington to say goodbye to their president. Meanwhile, back on the air, the big networks struggled to find the tone. On the day itself, the assembled media grandees agreed that he was an amiable fellow with a big smile who told a good joke. If you'd tuned in 10 minutes late to ''Larry King Live,'' you'd have assumed he was doing one of his special tributes to some half-forgotten comic or TV host from the '50s that no one had very much to say about.

They got Poland - indeed, all of Eastern Europe - just as wrong.

I remember in 1992, barely a year after the Berlin Wall fell, when the fledgeling governments of Poland and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact (how many people remember that organization at all?) were not even a year old, after forty years of Nazi and Communist domination. Tom Brokaw went on the air with a story about the teething pains the Polish economy was suffering as it switched from a command economy to a market system. As Poland privatized its long-nationalized, sclerotic industries, masses of workers were laid off. Prices were in turmoil, things were very difficult.

Brokaw finished the piece: "It looks as if Poland's experiment with the free market is a failure".

13 years later, of course, we know Brokaw is wrong. Poland is thriving (and might be thriving more if they weren't so eager to tie themselves to the EU). Their democracy is fascinatingly lively - and fairly solid. They are America's staunchest ally in Europe today.

Question: Who predicted this? Brokaw? Schlesinger? Strobe Talbott? Or Reagan?

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

Posted by Mitch at 05:33 AM | Comments (0)

What's In A Funeral

Rocketman from Powerline brought the live-blogging skills he honed on the Miss Universe Contest to bear on the Reagan funeral - with very powerful results, in one of the best synopses of the event I've read yet.

I especially liked this part:

What would I make of it if I were a terrorist? Or, perhaps, a Frenchman? Don't screw with these people, I think is the lesson. We can bring more power and coordination to bear on a funeral than they can bring to a war. They think we are divided; they think we are weak. How many times will this happen? Why is it that America, like Ronald Reagan, like George W. Bush--and like George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower, and like countless millions of young men and women from small towns all across North America, who never meant to be soldiers but who stormed beaches, scaled cliffs, shot their opponents out of the air, captured cities, overthrew dictators, freed peoples--is so persistently underestimated? I don't know. But if I were an enemy and saw today's ceremonies, I would think twice.

Read it all, naturally.

Robert Quine, 1943-2004

Robert Quine - old-school guitarist extraordinaire is dead of a heroin overdose.

He played with - and as far as I'm concerned, outshone and defined - Richard Hell, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, John Zorn, Marianne Faithful, and an assortment of other pre-punk alternative rock icons.

Lou Reed - who was to Quine as Ian Hunter was to Mick Ronson (i.e. - just another singer without his defining, inspiring foil on the guitar) said:

"Robert Quine was a magnificent guitar player -- an original and innovative tyro of the vintage beast," Reed said in a statement released to Billboard.com. "He was an extraordinary mixture of taste, intelligence and rock'n'roll abilities coupled with major technique and a scholar's memory for every decent guitar lick ever played under the musical son. He made tapes for me for which I am eternally grateful -- tapes of the juiciest parts of solos from players long gone.

"Quine was smarter than them all. And the proof is in the recordings, some of which happily are mine. If you can find more interesting sounds and musical clusters than Quine on 'Waves of Fear' (from Reed's 1982 album "The Blue Mask"), well, it's probably something else by Robert."

Even Reed gets it right once in a while.

Logo Contest

We've entered the final round of the Northern Alliance Radio Network Logo Contest.

Now, it's your turn! Follow the link, vote for your favorite finalist, and tune in to the NARN broadcast next weekend to see who the winner is!

Conventioneering

I'll be at the GOP State Convention today, probably calling in to the NARN radio show later today.

Won't be live-blogging the event - I don't think they have wi-fi or even cat5 at the XCel center. But I'll have, no doubt, observations to share later.

The Party of Love and Tolerance

Good thing they're there and I'm here.

Although decency bids me to say I'd fight for these vermins' right to do this, let's just say I'd fight a little less hard than I might for some other peoples' rights...

Painting Party Update

The long-awaiting painting party is...going to be longer-awaited.

Tomorrow IS supposed to be a nice day. Yepper. Stuck between two days of monsoons. The wood'll be all wet, and any paint that is still tacky on Sunday will have, as they say, issues. Plus, for all the work people did to get me into the GOP state convention, I really should actually go.

So I'm putting the whole thing off two more weeks, to June 26th - partly because the weekend of the 19th is going to be a busy one, and partly because I'll have another payday before the painting day, which is always a good thing.

More details in about ten days!

Big Cheese

Nick Coleman tries his hands at business reporting, in re the sale of Daytons Marshall Fields:

Are we celebrating this news? Or are we waving goodbye, bidding farewell to an era when Minnesota was self-sufficient and blessed with homegrown companies and local owners?

We're still not over Dayton's.

Sorry, Nick. I'm just a "Big Cheese", a heartless Republican, but I've never shopped at Dayton's, Marshall Fields, or anyplace in their whole chain up-market from Target. "We" will get over it just fine.

I don't really need to fisk Nick on this one - Captain Ed did a great job of it, actually - but it's hard to resist.

Did you know Minnesotans are morons?

"It'll always be Dayton's to me," she said. "A lot of people feel that way. I wish they would change it back. It's confusing to shop here, now. They seem to be trying to offer way too many designer names here. It's not a Minnesota store anymore. It used to be simple, and classy.

"That's what Dayton's used to be."

Simple, and classy.

Without so many confusing "brands" and "things".

Minnesota doesn't often get praised so elegantly, but yes, that was Dayton's, and that was us, once upon a time.

Foreshadowing Alert! - Coleman is blaming Republicans for harshing his shopping mellow!

This part, however, is revelatory:

I have had a Dayton's/Marshall Field's credit card for 30 years. There were times I owed more than I made in a month. And times I was a month or two late with my payments. But "Dayton's" always waited patiently for me. Until last month.
Last month, I was late with a $32 payment, in part because my wife was unsuccessful in returning a jacket I had purchased. It still had the tags attached, but she would have had to undergo DNA testing to be allowed to return it for me. She gave up.

The next week, every night, I got a phone call during dinnertime demanding my $32.

The metaphorical genesis of a liberal:

• Can't control his credit cards.
• Pleads victimization when the consequences catch up with him. DNA testing? Aren't we being a tad dramatic, Nick? (And by the way - so what if Laura couldn't return the jacket? Nick couldn't mail the check anyway?)
• Whines about the oppressive "big cheeses" interrupting his dinner when they want their money.

Read the whole thing.

Or don't.

Music Trivia Time

This is a question I've trotted out at music trivia smackdowns for years.

See if you can do it without Googling.

Got Google turned off?

OK - let's start.

Bruce Springsteen has had a lot of top-40 hits of his own.

On top of that, seven songs written by Bruce Springsteen have made the Billboard Top 40, performed by other artists.

What were the songs, and who were the artists?

Again - no googling.

Signs the Economy is Picking Up Steam

How can we really tell how the economy is doing?

After all - while one side is saying this, the other side continues to believe this, and nothing will change their minds (save a Kerry victory in the fall).

But here's how I can tell things are picking up.

When the economy goes in the tank, highly-qualified people have to take any job they can find to make ends meet. You see software engineers stocking shelves at WalMart, young lawyers working for document coding companies...that kind of thing.

Know how I know the economy is picking up? Because the telemarketers are sounding less and less fluent in English, and the customer service people I'm reaching via phone - even the American ones - are sounding less professional, less literate, they type slower - the whole nine yards.

We're not quite to the boom years of hiring out call center jobs to prison inmates, but we're not that far away.

Meme Du Jour

From Silver Fox, via Red, one of those "fill in the blanks" surveys that I love so much.

This one? Music, natch.

1. Your favorite song with the name of a city in the title or text.

"Whippoorwill" by Robin and Linda Williams. Not just one of very few songs to mention North Dakota, but a stunningly beautiful one to boot.

2. A song you've listened to repeatedly when you were depressed at some point in your life.

"Hand of Kindness", Richard Thompson

3. Ever bought an entire album just for one song and wound up disliking everything but that song? Gimme that song.

Song: Talk to Me, by mid-eighties arena-rock flop "Fiona". Wonderful song. The album was dreadful to the point of ludicrous. Even more dreadful singer, as luck'd have it. But it's still a cool song.

4. A great song in a language other than English.

La Pistola y el Corazon, Los Lobos.

5. Your least favorite song on one of your favorite albums of all time.

Revolution Rock, from the Clash's "London Calling". The album is 1.8 disks of amazing, eclectic wonderment - and then this aimless mess of a song.

6. A song you like by someone you find physically unattractive or otherwise repellent.

Trouble, Pink. I dislike most everything about Ms. Pink, and on a bad day she looks a little like a pit bull that lost a fight with a lawnmower - but this is an amazingly cool song. That other "I'm Coming Out" song wasn't bad, either.

UPDATE: Also Oh Father, by Madonna. I detest most things about Madonna, but Oh Father is one of the most gorgeous, heart-wrenching songs I know.

Mock me at your own peril.

7. Your favorite song that has expletives in it that's not by Liz Phair.

I Am An Animal, Pete Townsend.

8. A song that sounds as if it's by someone British but isn't.

Take On Me, Ah-Hah.

9. A song you like (possibly from your past) that took you forever to finally locate a copy of.

Westbound Number Nine, The Flaming Ember. Thank goodness for Napster, back in the day.

10. A song that reminds you of spring but doesn't mention spring at all.

Centerfold, J. Geils.

11. A song that sounds to you like being happy feels.

Sherry Darling, Springsteen.

12. Your favorite song from a non-soundtrack compilation album.

Goodbye Steeltown, Iron City Houserockers, from their "Pumping Iron" compilation. Yaaaagh, what an amazing band.

13. A song that reminds you of high school.

While You See A Chance by Steve Winwood. I was about to ask a major crushgrrl out to prom; I put it off a few minutes - during which time one of my friends asked her. I still remember heachache I got from drowning my sorrows in "Asteroids".

14. A song that reminds you of college.

Jeez, anything they played on "Night Tracks". We didn't get MTV in Jamestown, ND until probably 1986 - long after I left town. One song? Probably Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2.

15. A song you actually like by an artist you otherwise dislike.

Shadows Of The Night by Pat Benetar. Amazing hook, and the most beautiful wall of guitar sound since "Born To Run".

16. A song by a band that features three or more female members.

Dover Beach, the Bangles. One of the most gorgeous pop songs ever written.

17. One of the earliest songs that you can remember listening to.

Rising Of The Moon, the Clancy Brothers. One of about ten albums my dad owned.

18. A song you've been mocked by friends for liking.

World Shut Your Mouth, Julian Cope.

19. A really good cover version you think no one else has heard.

Cruella DeVille, the Replacements.

20. A song that has helped cheer you up (or empowered you somehow) after a breakup or otherwise difficult situation.

Human Touch, Springsteen. I found it oddly comforting during the eight year stretch when my ten-year marriage was falling apart.

Yours?

R.I.P. Ray Charles

The R'nB legend passed away today at 73.

It's a pity that a whole generation remembers him more for doing Pepsi ads than for, say, this:

In 1984 Ray Charles was hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President to perform at the Republican National Convention. His televised rendition of "America The Beautiful", first recorded on the ABC records label in his "A Message from the People" LP, was both inspirational and electrifying. Charles' "America" is included in the 1987 two-disc CD release of Ray Charles hits on the Dunhill Classics label, "America" was also released as a CD single.

It's a bad week to be a Republican R'nB fan...

Well, La Dee Friggin' Da.

My Northern Alliance colleague from Fraters, JB Doubtless, says:

The Elder and I have been emailing a bit back and forth about all the usual suspects who have chimed in on Reagan's death and how so many of our (now) fellow-travelers think it cool to add that they used to hate Reagan when they were young, but at some point began to realize that they were wrong about him.

What is interesting is not only is it not considered shameful to admit you were an idiot, it is considered to be the mark of a political sophisticate: "You see my dear fellow, I USED to be on the other side, which shows you all how broad-minded I am. I'm not one of those people who has been a conservative all their life. Am I more acceptable to you now liberal friend? (please say yes please say yes)."

Plbbbff grnf blorf grrrnf...

(spit)

Sorry. JB jammed so many words into my mouth, I couldn't talk. Whew.

Yep. I was a liberal til I was twenty. Oh, it started eroding when I was 16, as my disgust with Jimmy Carter and knowledge of military history (it's impossible to have a clue about military history and remain a liberal - at least, not an orthodox liberal) ate away at the flimsy foundation from my upbringing.

But it has nothing to do with impressing anyone. It's just a fact - take it or leave it!

But when JB says:

Does that mean we are cooler or better than those who embraced (or at least didn't denounce) leftist ideology in their youth? I would say yes, as a matter of fact I think it does!

And it's there you're wrong, JB.

It's often said that (legal) immigrants make the best Americans; they had to leave their old country, often at great danger to themselves, and embrace this new land and culture; you don't do that without immense motivation. If you go through all that, you better love America! And they do.

So it is with politics; it's said that "the unexamined life is not worth living", and it is we, those who have fled the decrepit philosophies of our youth, who've done the examining. We've left our families and old lives and sailed on intellectually-rickety boats across morally-shark-infested waters, to come to our new political home. We want to save our old countrypeoplemen who remain in the foetid ideological cesspools and emotional gulags we dug our way out of.

It is an experience which may or may not make us, as JB says, "recent converts [who] won't shut the hell up" (as if that's a problem in politics or, ironically, talk radio); it does, in fact, make us better conservatives.

Like me. And Rush Limbaugh.

And, for that matter, former new-dealer Ronald Reagan.

Not that we're going to lord it over the rest of you. You can thank us later.

A Government Only A Green Could Love

The UN's meddling in Iraq could still screw things up, says this OpinionJournal piece this morning.

It's about the plan the UN has put forth for the upcoming Iraqi elections - a system that resembles the Green Party's pet plan for proportional elections:

In this system, voters choose not among individual candidates but among parties that are awarded a share of legislative seats based on their percentage of the vote. Proponents say the system better allows all significant voices to be heard. But even in the best of cases--Italy over much of the past 50 years--proportional systems tend to produce unstable governments easily paralyzed by the little parties they have to cobble into a majority coalition. Would-be candidates are beholden to party bosses who determine their place on the electoral list and thus their chances of success.

In Iraq especially, with its many ethnic divisions, the risks of such a system are huge. As much as possible we should be encouraging Iraqis to think of themselves as Iraqis rather than as Kurds or Arabs, Shiites or Sunnis. First-past-the-post elections in Iraqi neighborhoods, many of which are multi-ethnic, would help accomplish this. Where local elections have been held thus far in Iraq, voters have chosen pragmatic and secular figures rather than religious or ethnic extremists.

So why this unproven, quagmire-prone system?

A big part of the motivation appears to be the dogmatic desire of the U.N. and State Department to ensure that at least 25% of Iraqi legislators are women, which is a goal but not a requirement of Iraq's interim constitution. You can rig a party-list election to ensure such an outcome, and Ms. Perelli wants to mandate that every third candidate be a woman. She couldn't do that with constituencies.

We'll be following this, hoping that someone comes to their senses.

Read the whole thing, natch.

Layna Walczaca!

"Plain Layne" - the only readable diaryblog out there - has been through many incarnations: diary, bi travelogue, cathartic smackdown, and others I'm sure I've forgotten.

Now perhaps its most confounding change: into a Polish 404 page.

It's over my head, Layne - but I'm sure you'll do great with it.

Dzien dobry!

Parrying the Deft Rapier

On Tuesday, I lampooned Mark "Revolutionary Gonad" Gisleson's surreal take on becoming a "conservative". Gisleson is, of course, a conservative in the same sense that I am Etruscan, but I digress.

He left a comment the other day.

Hmm, thanks for catching the typo on "memoriam." I'll get that fixed right away.

I hope your open-minded readers (if you have any) take the time to click on the link and read the actual article. As usual, your selective quotes did tremendous damage to the underlying theme of the essay.

Re my readers: They're as open-minded as I tell them to be.

In regard to the underlying theme: Well, we'll be digging into that below. Bear with me.

My point, which I didn't work hard enough to get across, was not so much that I've grown more conservative with age, but that the Republican party is no longer conservative by any reasonable definition of that word.

No, Mark, that particular point came through loud and clear. I merely found it preposterous; hence, my guffaws at your conflating your entrenched statist ideals and selective history with "Conservatism".

Again, more later.

In my later youth I fought with my parents because I was an anti-war protester and liberal. In my middle years I'm still fighting with them, but now it's because they've turned into bomb-throwing radicals a la Gingrich and Bush the lesser.

Radical...what? Radical dissent from Mark Gisleson?

It must take quite a bit of denial to go from conservative to Bush apologist,

That's right. It couldn't have possibly been the rational decision of an adult with a lifetime of experience. Nosiree - it's "Denial". Gotcha.

... but obviously it was worth the effort if you've reached the point where you think that it was the liberals who redefined the term "liberal", and not the think tank propagandists. Or as Orwell also said, "Political language . . . is designed . . . to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Yep. Orwell was sure right.

Case in point - your piece. No, Mr. Gisleson, I caught the deft way you tried to tie the ickypoopy aspects of the Bush Adminstration to "liberalism", while trying to appropriate "conservative" to label your brand of nannystatism. Conflating "conservatism" with "balanced budgets" (from a liberal, that means "tax increases" - from a real conservative, spending cuts) or defense (coalition? Pfftt. Only when they've proven their worth and competence) or poverty (we abhor it - but know it goes a lot deeper than the presence of people who have money) or...whatever. It may have felt satisfying to write, but it would be better labelled "Cherry-picking administration policy to find places where you'd be more of a know-nothing and do-nothing than they, and calling it a better thing". It was like me saying "I am a liberal! A pro-life, pro-preemption, pro-Second Amendment, pro-tax cut, pro-merit, anti-whizzing-on-achievement Liberal, like all the real liberals", meaning like no liberals that either of us know.

Well - if you're interested in accuracy, anyway.

But thanks again for the link. I appreciate the opportunity to expose some of your readers to some relatively rational thinking.

Rational thinking? You have a link to Paul Demko?

No, that was cruel, Mark. You've written some supremely rational stuff. I liked this bit here:

In my heart, I still believe in revolution. In my heart, I still think I have the 'nads to put my life on the line for a cause. In my gut I think this is the only way we'll ever achieve our goals of economic and social justice. But in my head, I want to win the next election so we don't have to have a revolution

Whoah! Revolution! Checked those 'nads, lately, Mark? All stocked up on ammo and Molotov Cocktails? (Hint: They're not the kind you get at Chino).

More rational writing - and the rationality drips from this piece like sweat from revolutionary 'nads:

Wingers get to write Bret Ellis intensity stuff about corpse-fucking Bill Clinton, but throw hissy fits anytime someone suggests that we might have to resort to a roots style Declaration of Independence mandated action agenda to rid ourselves of this pustulently corrupt administration.

Don't take to criticism very well, do we?

And my favorite of all, one that cemented you at the head of my list of "rational writers":

As usual, maestro Karl's timing is impeccable: today's Des Moines Register story on Kerry is about taxes and energy policy. Tomorrow's Sunday headlines will be less kind. It's rank punditry on my part to say this kills Kerry, but I do fear that Rove has just dispatched one of his two most feared opponents [disingeuous paeon to Kerry's war record, written by someone who'd ordinarily spit on veterans, omitted] Can Karl Rove again steal what he cannot win honestly?

You were so rational, your editor, Steve Perry, had to correct you:

Perry: Yeah, Drudge has certainly been entertaining the last few days. Only one problem: Without any major exceptions that I'm aware of, this is not Rove and the Republicans doing the "opposition research," as it's called. It's the Democrats themselves, most especially the Clark camp. Didn't you look at that NYT piece about Chris Lehane I mentioned yesterday? (There's a link in yesterday's post.)

I'm still agog at the blazing irony of Steve Perry - an uberliberal if there ever was one, but, and here's the key bit, a very capable journalist - visibly, frantically backing away from your posting in print. He's just not rational enough, is he?

So yeah, I'm happy to allow my readers to bask in your reflected rational glory refer my readers to you. They can thank me later. (Bonus: if all the world's links to Atrios, Kos and Josh "ua Micah" Marshall go down, we'll have you site as a fallback).

And the Zellarmeister sends his love as well.

Excellent! I was a huge Gear Daddies fan back in the day!

In Praise of the Fair Weather Fan

Back in 1987, sometime during the American League Championship Series, Patrick Reusse and Joe Soucheray - on their old "Monday Night Sportstalk" show - lambasted the immense, loud, boisterous crowds that suddenly began turning out to see the Twins. Although the Twins had had a good season - after several straight bad ones, including a 1986 that saw them duelling the ChiSox for the AL West's cellar - the fans had been light and variable until the post-season got underway. Suddenly, the avalanche was on, and tickets for the Twins were hotter than Milli Vanilli and Debbie Gibson rolled into one..

"Aaaaaah", croaked Reusse, "buncha fair-weather fans".

Dang straight, I thought.

Except for the Bears and, most seasons, the Twins, I'm the king of the fair-weather fans.

I'm a busy guy - work, kids, time-intensive hobbies, yadda yadda. I go through a particularly rigorous cost-benefit analysis for everything on which I might spend time; does the cost (in time) benefit me in enjoyment more than the other things I might do?

That calculation leads me to toss things out pretty ruthlessly; among the detritus, losing teams (like the '90 Twins) and even entire sports (Hockey).

And let's be honest; sports need fans like me. It's only good capitalism.

In a normal free-market economy, sports teams need to deliver - good teams, good efforts, winning records - to provoke audiences to part with their hard-earned money. If the team is phoning it in, punching the clock, nobody but the absolute hard core will care - and the team will fold, and will deserve to. To draw people, they have to appeal to the fickle tastes of...me!

In the East-German-like sports economy of places like Wrigley Field, Fenway, and the vision the likes of Patrick Reusse, Joe Soucheray and the like have, everyone would troop dutifully, a horde of gray-faced sheep, to the Sports Allocation Centre, for their weekly ration of Sport. The team would slog through the motions, the herd audience would pay $5 for their hot dogs and dutifully clap at the appropriate times, and go home wearing their $399 sweatshirts.

So you see - fair-weather fans like me are not only absolutely vital for the health and survival of sports; we are good for free enterprise, even democracy itself.

Don't be ripping on fair-weather fans. Salute us - for we are the champions of freedom.

Oh, That Liberal Media

I'm watching CNN's coverage of the service for President Reagan at the Rotunda.

One of the commentators - the color man working with Wolf Blitzer, whose name escaped me - commented on Vice President Cheney's eulogic remark that Reagan won the Cold War: "This probably isn't the place to bring this up..."

...at which point he brought it up; "some historians argue that".

Sure they did. No rational commentator ignored the contributions of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson. Nixon, of course, invented detente for better or worse.

However, by the Carter Administration, we were headed the wrong way; the military was a disaster; our foreign policy was a shambles.

So while Reagan didn't win the Cold War singlehandedly, it remains a fact that Thatcher and the Pope could not have done the job themselves. Reagan needed to turn the ship of state around.

That, of course, would involve having some journalists with knowledge of history.

Rear-Guard Action

The war is going well, despite the most fervent wishes of the moonbat far left.

The economy is improving - perhaps even shaping up into a boom.

After a year of wondering whether to run on the economy or the war, the Democrats are faced with an answer: Neither.

So -as Hugh Hewitt notes today, they're reverting to the one approach they still have: sliming everyone.

Mr. Kerry, what's left on the talking points page now that the jobs are being created in record numbers and the U.N. has gotten on board the transformation of Iraq from despotic totalitarian killing machine to nascent democracy?-- the Senate Judiciary Committee convened and the Democrats on the committee put on display for the American voter what is so truly frightening about the prospect of a Democratic presidency and/or a return to Democratic majority in the United States Senate...The back-story is that the DOJ has provided advice to the executive branch on what can and cannot be done to interrogate prisoners. There are memos on the subject. Some have been leaked. Others have not. The Dems want all the memos in order to pick and chose among sentences in an attempt to link the prison abuse scandal to Bush and Ashcroft, as though the memos told the president that he should order the rogue troops in Baghdad to engage in their outlawed behaviors.

In short, Leahy, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and Dick Durbin --between them, not enough intellectual power to stay in the plus column on Jeopardy-- took turns trying to get Ashcroft to admit he had stopped beating his wife.

It seems that, at this point in the campaign, the Dems seem to be hanging their hopes on Abu Ghraib.

They - with the active connivance of the media - are going to try to gin up "Lindygate" into an administrative-rocking scandal.

Read the rest of Hewitt's piece...

First, He's Dishonest. Next, He Lies

Michael Moore's dishonest editing of MN Congressman Mark Kennedy's comments during an ambush interview are back in the news.

Last week, when the movie trailer first appeared on the Internet, it contained Moore's ambush interview of the Watertown Republican. In the preview, the liberal film maker asks Kennedy to help enlist the children of members of congress to fight in Iraq.

Kennedy's reply is not given in the trailer, which annoyed the congressman, because Kennedy said that he had talked about his nephews in the military and fighting overseas. He has two nephews who have served.

On Friday, Moore issued a statement saying none of the exchange between Moore and Kennedy is included in the film. "No statements by Rep. Kennedy are in the film," he statement said. "There was no editing of his remarks."

Someone should do a study on the extent to which careful manipulation of context is behind Michael Moore's success.

Joanne Doroshow, a spokeswoman for Moore's office, said Tuesday that Kennedy appears in the movie as he does in the trailer: for only a few seconds and he doesn't speak.

Kennedy's spokeswoman, Anne Mason, took issue with the "no editing" line.

"His remarks were still edited," she said Tuesday. "They were edited quite a bit - completely out."

In a related matter - Hugh Hewitt notes that the Academy will be simultaneously honoring the passing of Ronald Reagan and, it is likely, at least the nomination of Moore's flim film.

So in this environment, do you think that the Academy will:

• find giving Moore the best documentary politically irresistable, or
• find giving it to Moore politically (and more importantly, commercially) suicidal?

It's going to be an interesting year.

But we all knew that.

Between the Uprights

The media - in conjunction, witting or otherwise - with the Kerry campaign, keeps moving the goalposts in Iraq. They move them left, they move them right, they set them in the parking lot, they spin them around.

The President keeps hitting field goals. The media is in the press box watching footage from J-Lo's wedding.

The criteria for success in Iraq kept changing. There had to be no Stalingrad-like urban ground-combat quagmire - and the ground war was won in record time.

The war was unjustifiable without WMDs. Then we found WMDs.

The war was a war of domination. Then we set June 30 as the date for the handover of power.

The date for the handover was unrealistic because of the terrorists, especially the Sadrists and the gangs of Fallujah. Then we defeated the Sadrists, and negated the gangs of Fallujah.

The war was eclipsed by prison scandals - until it was revealed that it truly was a one-time aberration by moron thug reservists, and the whole incident reflected worse on our own civil prison system than on the occupation.

The war was all about oil. Then we handed control of all oil over to the Iraqis.

The war was illegitimate because the UN didn't approve. Then the UN bookended Resolution 1441, which justified the war originally, with yesterday's unanimous vote. The UN backed Bush's "unilateral" action.

Then the war was a farce because the Iraqis didn't really care. Except they do.

The Bush Administration keeps hitting field goals - over the stands, between two moving semis, through the lobby of the hotel, and into the storage closet where the Democrats and Media had stored the goalposts, hoping nobody would find them.

WWII Books, Movies You Haven't Seen

A few days ago I write about a David Gelernter piece on the cynicism behind so much baby-boomer genuflection to "The Greatest Generation"...

...but that's a subject we've already been over.

Here's a question: What are the best WWII books and movies you've read or watched, that nobody else has?

My lists - first, the books:

• The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer - true story of a French alsatian drafted into the Wehrmacht (he's ethnically German). Riveting first-person account of life on the Eastern Front.
• The GI War - Various. You can't find it. It was published in the fifties - a big compendium of articles, in gruesome and fortright detail - about the day to day life of the GI in WWII, from the draft to D-Day to Kiska Island to Kasserine. An amazing book.
• Flying Fortress - Edward Jablonski. It showed the day to day life of the crew of the B-17 bombers that pounded Germany so relentlessly.
• Duel of Eagles, Peter Townsend. No, the other one, the former British fighter pilot. This is a personal, broad and social look at the Battle of Britain, through the eyes of not only the men who fought it, but of a man who was shaped by it. Biography, history, auto-bio and sociology in one easy-to-digest book. Interesting detail; amid the stories of the leaders, strategies and battles, we learn that Townsend shot down the first German bomber to fall on British soil in WWII. Townsend traced the survivors of the plane's crew, thirty-odd years later, in a fascinating exchange.
• The Hurricane Story, Paul Gallico. A paeon to the Hawker Hurricane, mainstay of Fighter Command in WWII. Overshadowed by the more glamoous Spitfire, the "Hurri" actually scored nearly 2/3 of the air-to-air kills in the Battle. Gallico argues the plane saved Western civilization. I won't argue.

OK, now the movies:

• The Big Red One - Joseph Fuller's autobiographical account of his own service. Starred a "Between Star Wars and Empire-Strikes-Back" Mark Hamill and Lee Marvin. Great film.
• Casablanca - I don't need to explain it, do I?
• A Bridge Too Far - The most underrated movie ever. Perhaps a half-hour too long, but still a great historical classic.
• The Best Years Of Our Lives - Indescribably fantastic. Still relevant today.
• Escape from Sobibor - Really a TV movie, so it probably doesn't count - but really a great movie of an amazing tale; the true story of hundreds of Jews in an extermination camp, knowing their number is almost up, killing their captors and escaping into the woods. Starts a very Arkin-y Alan Arkin, a subdued, not-so-Hauer-y, pre-caricature Rutger Hauer, and Joanna Pacula back before she jumped the shark into Cinemax territory.

OK. Your turn.

Compare and Contrast

At Reagan's funeral, do you suspect we're going to see, say, Alexander Haig stand up, turn to the assembled Democrats and demand that they drop everything they believe to continue the Reagan legacy?

Do you think in two years we'll be seeing bumper stickers like:

Never Stop the Bombing

or

What Would Reagan Do

or

Reagan's Death - Natural Causes, or...?

Do you think we'll hear about people who are still depressed about the death of Reagan, the way we still hear about people whose live were gutted and filetted by Wellstone's death (tragic as it was)?

No. And that's a tribute to Reagan in and of itself.

Make no mistake - from the beginning, I've sought to separate my criticism of Wellstone the person, and my genuine sorrow for his tragic death, from my criticism of both his policies and the endless, mindless, cult-like caterwauling of his supporters. To his supporters, Wellstone embodied what they wanted to see in government - that is, government that served as a sort of surrogate mother, doling out care and love and (government) cheese sandwiches to her adoring children. Those children devote themselves to that vision with the kind of fervor Republicans devote to...I dunno. Running businesses? Earning money? Golfing?

Reagan's supporters will indeed mourn - as we indeed are. And when he's buried, we'll go on. We'll acknowledge Reagan's influence on us, as Joe and James and Michele and many more people have.

And then we'll move on. And I think that's the way Reagan would have wanted it.

For that matter, I can't help but think Wellstone might have preferred it, too.

Fair Comparison

Andrew Sullivan got me into blogging. He also got me to think a lot about my assumptions about gay marriage. I still oppose it - but for different, and thanks to Sullivan, better, reasons.

It's a shame watching him descend into irrelevance over his monomania over gay marriage.

J-Lo gets hitched again. It's her third exercise of her civil rights, and she's only 34. Her husband just got a divorce from his previous wife last Monday. The heterosexual lifestyle is destroying marriage, isn't it?

Andrew - shall we dig through the rolls to find the most supercilious, trite gay marriages?

More importantly; shall we compare the length and destination of all gay and straight relationships? Not only those of looneys like Lopez, but everyone else as well?

How long do you think the average gay "long term" relationship, especially among males, lasts compared to the average straight one?

Sorry, Andrew. You once nearly had me convinced. Seriously. You're swinging farther and farther from the mark every day.

Pro-Forma Attack On Rall (With Thoroughly Age-Appropriate Zinger), Part Number 2293-4492D

We all remember one kid in high school who throve on hatred - the kid who'd insult people on purpose, perhaps out of misplaced masochism, perhaps because he just got off on people's hatred of him.

It's perhaps too obvious to say Ted Rall was that kid. It's certainly not original.

And yet the 90% of this nation that wants to see Ted Rall eaten by mice are certainly not going to change their minds now:

How Sad...

...that Ronald Reagan didn't die in prison, where he belonged for starting an illegal, laughably unjustifiable war against Grenada under false pretenses (the "besieged" medical students later said they were nothing of the sort) [We were asked there by a multinational group of Grenada's neighbors. It was multilateral. And the invasion's effect on Soviet policy justified it a thousand times over - Ed) and funneling arms to hostages during Iran-Contra.(Less so - Ed.)

Oh, and 9/11? That was his. Osama bin Laden and his fellow Afghan "freedom fighters" got their funding, and nasty weapons, from Reagan.

Yep. Ted's right - or as close as he can be, taking the events of the early '80s completely out of context. Blaming support of the mujihadin for Bin Laden is like blaming Clemenceau and Lloyd George's opposition to post-WWII German Communism for Hitler.

A real piece of work, Reagan ruined the federal budget,(by creating the conditions that allowed the "Peace Dividend" that was the only reason Clinton could balance it - Ed.) trashed education, (It trashed itself) alienated our friends (Like in Eastern Europe?) and allies and made us a laughing stock around the world.(So unlike Jimmy Carter) .

Hmmmm...sounds familiar.(To someone who was that kid who throve on hatred? No doubt)

Anyway, I'm sure he's turning crispy brown right about now.

Nah.

And "crispy" would be an improvement for Ted Rall's work - which is more the mushy brown that comes from digestion.

Watch for This

The NYTimes notes the impact of Reagan on the various campaigns.

To summarize the Times' obviously unbiased view - Bush is wrong either way.

The article lays out both campaigns' bona fides:

In France, Mr. Bush heralded the late president as a "gallant leader in the cause of freedom," and lionized him in an interview with Tom Brokaw. In Washington, Mr. Bush's aides said that it was Ronald Reagan as much as another president named Bush who was the role model for this president, and they talked of a campaign in which Mr. Reagan would be at least an inspirational presence.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Bush's likely Democratic challenger, was no less warm in praising Mr. Reagan, with a speech and a tribute on his Web site.

So they both like Reagan. Got it.

"I've been dreading this every election year for three cycles," said Jim Jordan, Mr. Kerry's former campaign manager. "Bush has totally attached himself to Ronald Reagan. He's going to turn Reagan into his own verifier."

Still, Mr. Kerry's aides said they believed Mr. Reagan's death would be, as a political matter, far in the background by the summer. And Republicans said there were risks in too conspicuously invoking Mr. Reagan as part of Mr. Bush's campaign.

So Kerry's campaign thinks there are risks for Bush, but they don't matter anyway...?

Advisers to Mr. Bush said they had not determined how prominently Mr. Bush should identify his presidency with Mr. Reagan, whether Mr. Reagan's image should be incorporated in Mr. Bush's advertisements and whether Nancy Reagan might appear on Mr. Bush's behalf in the fall.

Some Republicans said the images of a forceful Mr. Reagan giving dramatic speeches on television provided a less-than-welcome contrast with Mr. Bush's own appearances these days, and that it was not in Mr. Bush's interest to encourage such comparisons.

On purely cosmetic grounds? Perhaps not.

On the grounds of actual accomplishment? There might be something to be gained, yes.

I have a better idea. Let's compare Reagan's speeches with those of John Kerry.

Over the next month or so, watch for the press, in ways subtle and not, to link Reagan with Kerry, while trying (as this article did) to detach Bush from it.

Painting Party

After weeks of weather-related delays, it looks as if I might have a Saturday free that has decent weather.

Next week - 6/12 - the extended forecast calls for sun. So the painting party - my attempt to at least get all the walls of my rather largish house painted in one glorious day - is on the ticket for this coming weekend.

More details tomorrow, after (hopefully) the long-range forecast firms up.

In Their Own Words

Rocketman at Powerline tips us off to a magnificent article by David GelernterToo Much, Too Late, a paeon to the cynicism of so much of the Baby Boomer generation's response to their parents.

You need to read the whole thing, of course.

But the most interesting part came near the end.

Gelernter notes the great wave of history and art written by veterans in the fifties and sixties - and how it's disappeared almost completely under the stewardship of the baby boomers:The veterans' neglected voice. World War II produced an extraordinary literature of first-person soldier narratives--most of them out of print or unknown. Books like George MacDonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe Out Here," Philip Ardery's "Bomber Pilot," James Fahey's "Pacific War Diary." If we were serious about commemorating the war, we would do something serious. The Library of America includes two volumes on "Reporting World War II," but where are the soldiers' memoirs versus the reporters'? If we were serious, we would have every grade school in the nation introduce itself to local veterans and invite them over. We'd use software to record these informal talks and weave them into a National Second World War Narrative in cyberspace. That would be a monument worth having.In the early nineties I ghostwrote and edited a such a book, "Shavetail" by Bill Devitt. It was in the tradition of many great first-person accounts of the war - from "The GI War", a compendium of stories told in unstinting, and sometimes horrifying, detail by the men who were there, to a book written by Charles Lindbergh - not the pilot, but a North Dakota farm boy who was the last surviving member of the patrol that raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached, Devitt couldn't find a publisher. Indeed, it was only a few years ago that he self-published the book (which I highly recommend, by the way, even though or perhaps because it's been rewritten since my last pass at it). It was certainly more deserving of print than much of what clogs the shelves today.

Read the whole thing - and I mean Gelernter and Devitt and Lindberg (his book may still be in libraries) and many more.

The Reagan Speeches

I've said it before - my dad taught speech. Great political oratory is a nearly-lost art, especially in the US. I appreciate it immensely when I hear it.

And so the loss of Reagan was a loss, not only of a link to a great moment in our history, but to the great tradition of true excellence in speech - speech in the Lincolnian manner to bring people together, in the FDR motif to console and encourage a shocked and grieving nation, like the speech after the explosion of the Challenger...

...and my favorite - the Churchillian call to action.

I love great political oratory - speeches that change the world, like Churchill's "Dunkirk" speech, or Kennedy's "to the Moon!", speeches that rouse men and women from despair to change history for the better.

Such was Reagan's 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall.

Here it is, in it's entirety:

Thank you very much. Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: Twenty four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the city hall. Well, since then two other president s have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city.

We come to Berlin, we American Presidents, because it's our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom. But I must confess, we're drawn here by other things as well: by the feeling of history in this city, more than 500 years older than our own nation; by the beauty of the Grunewald and the Tiergarten; most of all, by your courage and determination. Perhaps the composer, Paul Lincke, understood something about American Presidents. You see, like so many Presidents before me, I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: "Ich hab noch einen koffer in Berlin." [I still have a suitcase in Berlin.]

Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the East. To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, I extend my warmest greetings and the good will of the American people. To those listening in East Berlin, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, thi s unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin.]

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same–still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

President von Weizsacker has said: "The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed." Today I say: As long as this gate is-closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remain s open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. Yet I do not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph.

In this season of spring in 1945, the people of Berlin emerged from their air-raid shelters to find devastation Thousands of miles away, the people of the United States reached out to help. And in 1947 Secretary of State–as you've been told– George Marsh all announced the creation of what would become known as the Marshall plan. Speaking precisely 40 years ago this month, he said: "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos."

In the Reichstag a few moments ago, I saw a display commemorating this 40th anniversary of the Marshall plan. I was struck by the sign on a burnt-out, gutted structure that was being rebuilt. I understand that Berliners of my own generation can remember seeing signs like it dotted throughout the Western sectors of the city. The sign read simply: "The Marshall plan is helping here to strengthen the free world." A strong, free world in the West, that dream became real. Japan rose from ruin to become an economic giant. Italy, France, Belgium –virtually every nation in Western Europe saw political and economic rebirth; the European Community was founded.

In West Germany and here in Berlin, there took place an economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer, Erhard, Reuter, and other leaders understood the practical importance of liberty–that just as truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech, so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and businessman enjoy economic freedom. The German leaders reduced tariffs, expanded free trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in West Germany and Berlin doubled.

Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany–busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of park land. Where a city's culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there's abundance–food, clothing, automobiles– the wonderful goods of the Ku'damm. From devastation, fro m utter ruin, you Berliners have, in freedom, rebuilt a city that once again ranks as one of the greatest on Earth. The Soviets may have had other plans. But, my friends, there were a few things the Soviets didn't count on–Berliner herz, Berliner humor, j a, und Berliner schnauze. [Berliner heart, Berliner humor, yes, and a Berliner schnauze.] [Laughter]

In the 1950's, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind– too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control. Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

I understand the fear of war and the pain of division that afflict this continent–and I pledge to you my country's efforts to help overcome these burdens. To be sure, we in the West must resist Soviet expansion. So we must maintain defenses of unassailable strength. Yet we seek peace; so we must strive to reduce arms on both sides. Beginning 10 years ago, the Soviets challenged the Western alliance with a grave new threat, hundreds of new and more deadly SS-20 nuclear missiles, capable of striking every capital in Europe. The Western alliance responded by committing itself to a counter deployment unless the Soviets agreed to negotiate a better solution; namely, the elimination of such weapons on both sides. For many months, the Soviets refused to bargain in earnestness. As the alliance, in turn, prepared to go forward with its counter deployment, there were difficult days–days of protests like those during my 1982 visit to this city–and the Soviets later walked away from the table.

But through it all, the alliance held firm. And I invite those who protested then–I invite those who protest today–to mark this fact: Because we remained strong, the Soviets came back to the table. And because we remained strong, today we have within reach the possibility, not merely of limiting the growth of arms, but of eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. As I speak, NATO ministers are meeting in Iceland to review the progress of our proposals for eliminating these weapons. At the talks in Geneva, we have also proposed deep cuts in strategic offensive weapons. And the Western allies have likewise made far-reaching proposals to reduce the danger of conventional war and to place a total ban on chemical weapons.

While we pursue these arms reductions, I pledge to you that we will maintain the capacity to deter Soviet aggression at any level at which it might occur. And in cooperation with many of our allies, the United States is pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative–research to base deterrence not on the threat of offensive retaliation, but on defenses that truly defend; on systems, in short, that will not target populations, but shield them. By these means we seek to increase the safety of Europe and all the world. But we must remember a crucial fact: East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other- And Our differences are not about weapons but about liberty. When President Kennedy spoke at the City Hall those 24 years ago freedom was encircled, Berlin was under siege. And today, despite all the pressures upon this city, Berlin stands secure in its liberty. And freedom itself is transforming the globe.

In the Philippines, in South and Central America, democracy has been given a rebirth. Throughout the Pacific, free markets are working miracle after miracle of economic growth. In the industrialized nations a technological revolution is taking place–a revolution marked by rapid, dramatic advances in computers and telecommunications.

In Europe, only one nation and those it controls refuse to join the community of freedom. Yet in this age of redoubled economic growth, of information and innovation, the Soviet Union faces a choice: It must make fundamental changes, or it will become obsolete. Today thus represents a moment of hope. We in the West stand ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that separate people, to create a safer, freer world.

And surely there is no better place than Berlin, the meeting place of East and West, to make a start. Free people of Berlin: Today, as in the past, the United States stands for the strict observance and full implementation of all parts of the Four Power Agreement of 1971. Let us use this occasion, the 750th anniversary of this city, to usher in a new era, to seek a still fuller, richer life for the Berlin of the future. Together, let us maintain and develop the ties between the Federal Republic and the Western sectors of Berlin, which is permitted by the 1971 agreement. And I invite Mr. Gorbachev: Let us work to bring the Eastern and Western parts of the city closer together, so that all the inhabitants of all Berlin can enjoy the benefits that come wit h life in one of the great cities of the world. To open Berlin still further to all Europe, East and West, let us expand the vital air access to this city, finding ways of making commercial air service to Berlin more convenient, more comfortable, and more economical. We look to the day when West Berlin can become one of the chief aviation hubs in all central Europe.

With our French and British partners, the United States is prepared to help bring international meetings to Berlin. It would be only fitting for Berlin to serve as the site of United Nations meetings, or world conferences on human rights and arms control or other issues that call for international cooperation. There is no better way to establish hope for the future than to enlighten young minds, and we would be honored to sponsor summer youth exchanges, cultural events, and other programs for young Berliners from the East. Our French and British friends, I'm certain, will do the same. And it's my hope that an authority can be found in East Berlin to sponsor visits from young people of the Western sectors.

One final proposal, one close to my heart: Sport represents a source of enjoyment and ennoblement, and you many have noted that the Republic of Korea–South Korea– has offered to permit certain events of the 1988 Olympics to take place in the North. Inter national sports competitions of all kinds could take place in both parts of this city. And what better way to demonstrate to the world the openness of this city than to offer in some future year to hold the Olympic games here in Berlin, East and West?

In these four decades, as I have said, you Berliners have built a great city. You've done so in spite of threats–the Soviet attempts to impose the East-mark, the blockade. Today the city thrives in spite of the challenges implicit in the very presence of this wall. What keeps you here? Certainly there's a great deal to be said for your fortitude, for your defiant courage. But I believe there's something deeper, something that involves Berlin's whole look and feel and way of life–not mere sentiment. No on e could live long in Berlin without being completely disabused of illusions. Something instead, that has seen the difficulties of life in Berlin but chose to accept them, that continues to build this good and proud city in contrast to a surrounding totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or aspirations. Something that speaks with a powerful voice of affirmation, that says yes to this city, yes to the future, yes to freedom. In a word, I would submit that what keeps you in Berlin is love–love both profound and abiding.

Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower's one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the Sun strikes that sphere–that sphere that towers over all Berlin–the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.

As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I've been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they're doing again.

Thank you and God bless you all.

Hearing it then, you knew you were in the presence of an amazing communicator and a great leader.

Hearing it today is, if anything, more affecting. He was right; and in saying so, he towered head, shoulders and ankles above the dithering hamsters who criticized, even condemned him, then and now.

Then and now, the speech sends a surge of emotion up my backbone, just like listening to Churchill's "Dunkirk" or "Battle of Britain", or Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy"; it leveled the charge, in every sense of the term; to the USSR, in the form of an indictment; to my generation of Americans, as a mission; and to the west, in the sense of lowering the rhetorical lances and picking up metaphoric speed to a canter - presently, the enemy saw the inexorable advance, and broke ranks and ran.

Now I ask you: compare leaders:

• "I hear you. And the people who brought these buildings down will hear you soon."
• "I voted for the 78 billion dollars. Before I voted against it".

The question is not so much "who is fit to carry on Reagan's legacy". The real question is "Who is most likely to carry on the legacy of Carter and Mondale?"

Duckspeak, 2004.

In Orwell's 2004, one of the ruling party's end goals is to reduce the language of the proles to the very minumum needed to carry out party business - "Duckspeak", a circumscribed gibberish sufficient to carry out instructions and parrot simple dogma.

Orwell understood the importance of seizing and holding control of the language.

So does the left today. They started big; the word "Liberal" got hijacked; it no longer means "supporting democracy" - it stands for big government, endless entitlement, institutionalizaton of special interests...

Now, they're trying to change the word "Conservative.

Which in a way is good news; they've realized that their word has no traction, so they want to steal our word.

It's manifested in big ways - Kerry's absurd run to the right on defense, 20 years too late - and small.

No, infinitesimal.

James Lileks writes

What you don’t know when you’re 22 could fill a book. If you write that book when you’re 44, you haven’t learned a thing.

Longtime Northern Alliance comic relief Mark Gisleson, in a semantic travesty, holds up the first part of the bargain. Gisleson, a writer of unknown pedigree but obviously just out of college, is on the initial curve of the Lileks BellCurve, as we see in an oddly-constructed piece from his oddly-constructed little blog, in which he tries to rhetorically piddle on Reagan's grave (hint: Your equipment won't get the goods to the ground in that situation) while still trying to re-define "conservative" to his own uses.

Where to start?:

It took a lot of lies to get us to where we are today, but the biggest liar of them all just died. Don't ask me to mourn Reagan, he did enough damage to our country without lionizing him in memorium [sic]. Name anything you like after this fraud, but don't go whining about graffitti when I spray paint a choice obscenity or two over your newly named bridge or airport terminal.

Ah. An advanced intellect. Hey, I got a little rash when I was a 25 year old punk, too. And I didn't expect anyone to whine about my antics - although I would have expected the offended to have jammed a spraycan up my ass for doing something that puerile...

No matter; the good stuff awaits:

There's nothing wrong with being conservative, but what's that got to do with Reagan, Bush, or Bush? How many nations invaded? How many Americans lost to terrorism? How much debt? How many jobs lost?

Gisleson's questions are cliches, and so are the answers: no nations wrongly; debt was justifiable under the circumstances; Terrorism isn't a Rpeobjbldkslzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh, sorry. I nodded off. Onward:

In my old age I have become a conservative. I believe in balanced budgets and eliminating trade deficits.

But conservatives don't believe in "balancing budgets" by increasing taxes to cover increased spending on bigger government. That's the type of "conservatism" known as "The Great Society" or "The Minnesota DFL". Call it anything - just not conservative!

I believe in conserving natural resources, and not fouling the planet with our waste and effluvia.

As do I, as luck'd have it.

And if you believe, as the evidence bids you to, that the government is a lousy steward of our planet, then you might be able to back up your claim to conservatism!

Military action should only be taken when we are threatened, or if we are part of a coalition engaged in international police work to prevent genocide or other crimes more horrible than war.

Mark.

Mark, bubbie...

I'm sure that in the special little logically-detached world of the recent college grad, September 11 was not a "threat". Apparently in that world, we should ignore attacks on our people until those Rwandan and Kosovar things - y'know, the ones those "coalitions" have been performing such capable "international police work" on - have been solved.

But under what definition is that "conservative?"

Ideas and intellectual content yearn to breathe free, and the rights of corporations must never exceed those of the individual.

And they don't.

I believe that no one should be wealthy if anyone is hungry, and that the elimination of poverty is the greatest challenge we face.

But if you're conservative, you know that generalized wealth is the only way to combat poverty.

Wealth in the presence of hunger is simply an extension of feudalism. A billionaire is no different than a King or Queen, and should be anathema to any lover of democracy. This is not socialist cant, and not an objection to wealth. Obscene wealth, however, is a goal only for the societally deranged and morally corrupt.

So let's get this straight; John Ashcroft is a rat bastard for trying to define obscenity in arts, but Mark Gisleson, recent college grad, shall define obscenity in commerce?

An employer who pays wages that do not cover the cost of living for his employees and their families is nothing more than a thief who enslaves others for his profit...

All of these are conservative values.

Right. You're one of those Welfare State Conservatives - better known as Massachusetts Democrats.

Look, Mark. You're a young guy. Why don't you try to make your own movement viable, instead of trying to swipe the furniture from mine?

UPDATE: Uh oh. I noticed this on a second reading: "At the ripe old age of 51...".

I'm sorry - writing style and hyperinflamed emotion aside, Mark Gisleson does not appear to be a recent college graduate.

My bad.

D-Day

Blackfive presents a fairly comprehensive list of Milbloggers' tributes to D-Day.

Of particular interest - this piece about the Scottish involvement in D-Day - which BBC Scotland, perhaps even more blinkeredly liberal than its English corporate cousin, has not deemed fit to over.

There's another group to which I'd love to pay tribute; the men of the Norwegian Navy in Exile, especially that destroyer HMNoS Svenner, which was sunk at D-Day by a U-Boat while screening the beaches, killing much of a crew that had already had a long war; nearly all of the men had escaped from occupied Norway since 1940, served on various cast-off ships from the US and British navies, serving on convoy patrols and hunts for surface raiders.

I say I'd love to pay tribute to them - but very little information is available on the web. Maybe I'll have to work on that...

The Larger Tribute

Steven Green has an observation on the Reagan Legacy from back when it was still being formed:

One thing I did understand, and remember vividly today, was his visceral reaction to the name "Reagan." His eyes lit up at its mention, and he spoke in great animation of the portrait of a former American President that hung in a place of honor in his home. "People say, ‘he was just actor,'" he said, "but I know—WE know. Reagan..." his English failed for a moment, and finally he pounded a fist into his other hand in pantomime.

"Beat?" I offered.

"Beat! Yes, beat!" He cried. "Reagan BEAT Communism! We know! And we will never forget!"

In the mid-nineties - when the geniuses who make up the entertainment community were too busy laughing about Reagan's incipient Alzheimers to read any recent history - I worked with a Ukranian gentleman. We different in many ways - I the conservative American, he the new-agey socialist European in many ways. But on the topic of Reagan, he was clear and as effusive as his fragmented English allowed; "Reagan Sefft Ze Verelt vrum Kommunissem" punctuated his observations. He noted the number of families in Poland that kept photos of Reagan near that of Karol Woytyla.

For The Gipper

Ronald Reagan passed away today.

I grew up in a fairly left-of-center house; my dad was a teacher who would have described himself fairly accurately as a moderate Democrat; I'm convinced that if my mother hadn't been married with three kids by 1968, she'd have been a hippie.

There was a time, in my teens, before my conversion to conservatism about 20 years ago, when I'd have probably agreed with this rather infamous piece of hate-speech by Village Voice, ahem, theatre critic Michael Feingold:

o U.S. president, I expect, will ever appoint a Secretary of the Imagination. But if such a cabinet post ever were created, and Richard Foreman weren't immediately appointed to it, you'd know that the Republicans were in power. Republicans don't believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.

Reading this today, I realize what a wondrous rejoinder Reagan's classic "Well, there you go again" was to the impotent, bilious sputterings of his, and our, enemies.

As to the imagination? I refute Feingold thus: with the ordinary life and extraordinary legacy of Ronald Reagan.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, I was a senior in high school. The seeds of doubt in my left-of-center upbringing were already there; Jimmy Carter's "national malaise" speech had already affected me with a deep sense of "how dare you?" But I couldn't quite see becoming a Republican. I coudn't quite see myself supporting that man, that being so reviled by so much of my family's social circle, and so many of my own in college.

But over time, when juxtaposing the worlds and the Americas envisioned by Reagan with that of his opponents - a world of malaise versus a world of hope; a world of coexistence with the threat of nuclear oblivion versus victory over it; a world of self-abnegation before tyrants and murderers versus a world where they were negated - my resistance to the idea of being one of those people faded as I tripped upon one of the key ideas of my life:

Ronald Reagan's imagination was better than that of his opponents.

And it still is. I doubt that George Bush would say he were another Reagan - but he's carrying on that same struggle today. The struggle between those who think America whose horrors must be managed by the larger world, and those who see us as a shining city on the hill, embodying still for all our faults the best that humans can strive for in a self-government. The struggle between those who think life is best served as an unquestioning cog in a soulless machine versus spent uplifting the dignity of man the individual at home and abroad.

The struggle between perpetual snivelling versus proud acceptance of, and living up to, our nation's singular historical mission.

Quick - who were the congresspeople, authors and media figures who attacked Reagan? Answer: Who cares? Their contributions are of no more value to this world than month-old newspapers. We remember only Reagan's deft, self-effacing and yet devastating rejoinders...

...and of course, his legacy: No USSR; the greatest butchers in history, erased from the pages of history. No Berlin Wall. The threat of nuclear annihilation eliminated in less time than it took to develop the MX missile.

The twenty years since my college conversion to conservatism and today's sad milepost are littered with the intellectual corpses of many Alexander Cockburns and Michael Moores and Michael Feingolds - all left, sputtering and impotent in the wake of a movement that is, Feingold be damned, a movement of the imagination, through and through. A movement of people who dared to imagine, who dared to rip away the mental cobwebs and sweep away the dust of despair that covered the great, exceptionalist dream. And Ronald Reagan sparked that imagination.

Rest in peace, Ronald Reagan. You were the greatest president of my lifetime.

Things That Would Get Me Thrown Out Of A GOP Meeting

I've joked in the past that I have beliefs that'd get me drummed out of any party caucus.

And by any, I mean "Republican, too".

Let me explain.

With the DFL, it's obvious - I share virtually none of the Minnesota Democrat Farmer Labor Party's beliefs; the mainstream DFL, especially in the non-Eastside Saint Paul faction, is imperious, elitist, arrogant, authoritarian; it sacramentalizes infanticide, institutionalizes welfare, lionizes dependence, demonizes dissent, and disarms victims of the criminals on whom they go relentlessly soft. I'd get run out of a DFL caucus in my part of town on a rail.

The Greens? Ironically, I probably would last longer, there. They have a few planks about participatory democracy that make sense - largely because they'd fit nicely into a grassroots-level libertarian-slanted Republican caucus.

The Libertarians? Their dogma on defense is utterly nonsensical. As in, "Makes no sense whatsoever". It was the straw that broke my back as a big-L Libertarian, long before 9/11 - and in this post 9/11 world, it's by far the biggest straw there is.

But the GOP?

Yeah. There are a few. Even as the state party has slowly and laboriously swung to the right - and started actually acting like Republicans rather than neutered pseudo-Democrats like Arne Carlson, there are some things, locally and nationally, that just don't sit right in Republican dogma:

• Mass Transit - Yeah, goverment-controlled mass transit is usually a license to boondoggle. But there was a time when mass transit supported itself, and did an admirable job of containing sprawl. Whoah, there - before you jump to any conclusions, I have nothing against "sprawl", in and of itself. People should be able to live where they want. But the simple fact is, our society subsidizes the suburbs and exurbs with a panoply of hidden costs; roads, sewers, newer and bigger and more spread-out school districts, and more roads. Here's what I'm saying: if future suburban and exurban development had to pay its own way entirely, without subsidy from everyone else, it would probably resort to some sort of mass transit (road, rail or otherwise) out of pure market imperative - put quite simply, it costs less to build a mile of track than to build a mile of road (all things, including the purchase of right of way, being equal).
• Roads Uber Alles - The Dick Day transportation know-nothings have done us all a gaping disservice with their monomaniacal myopia for roads. Fact is, you can not build your way out of congestion; the more roads you build, the farther the congestion spreads, unless you build roads at a density and pace that we can neither afford nor live with. Eventually, local government will be essentially a road maintenance (and school funding) body.
• Casinos - Keep the casinos in the hands of the Native Americans; for all the left's nattering about affirmative action, it occurs to me that giving a class of people a monopoly on some thoroughly discretionary activity is the sort of thing that might actually help rather than hurt its recipients; maybe decriminalizing drugs and giving a monopoly to the descendants of slaves would end the need for government-run affirmative action and shut the proponents of "reparations" up for good. At any rate - keep our government out of the gambling business; in fact, abolish the lottery, which costs the state more money than it brings in. Privatize it, perhaps - and make it sink or swim on its own; but the government doesn't belong in the gambling business any more than it belongs in prostitution.
• All Burbs, All the Time - Hey! You! Yeah, Minnesota GOP, I'm talking to you! Yeah, the second and third-ring suburbs are the party's big growth area; does that mean you have to completely abandon the inner city to the DFL? Criminy, there are people up the wazoo in these cities that should be voting Republican, but don't know it yet:
  • Asians - with their predilection for small business, why do we cede them to the bad guys?
  • Hispanics - Latinos are heavily Catholic. Catholics, especially Latino Catholics, are very socially conservative. Why hand them over to the party that sacramentalizes infanticide without a fight? And the Latinos that are here legally, and have worked hard - sometimes for generations - to make it in the US? Why not drive a wedge between them and the party that espouses uncontrolled illegal immigration - thus devaluing their own franchise?
  • Afro-Americans - Yes, I mean it. The most Democrat segment out there, but they also among the most passionate advocates for change in the educational system. Why leave them to the party of the institutionalized status quo without a peep? (UPDATE: Unbeknownst to me as I wrote this, Joe Carter noted the same thing, and more)
• "Accountability" in Schools - It's more accurate to call it "teaching to the test", the way it's currently practiced. It turns education into an endless exercise in bureaucratic enablement, and strays even farther from the goal of creating good citizens than even the Profiles in Learning did. Big words? I mean it.

Still and all, I'm staying with the GOP. I'm just saying.

Five O'Clock World

Slow blogging day today - lots going on.

More later.

Powerquote

Re: Tenet, courtesy Powerline:

So the very people who neutered the CIA are now gleeful because George Tenet, who did his best to repair the consequences of their folly by rebuilding the intelligence-gathering and operational capabilities of the agency, was left holding the bag for September 11.

My lefty friends ask "Whaddya think about Tenet bailing?" (or, as Flash says, "What did the RNC tell you to say?").

I think it's about time. Tenet held the job a VERY long time, did a creditable job in some ways - hamstrung all the way by the very people who are trying to make hay against the Administration with the resignation.

Wait'll Nick Coleman Finds Out

James from California writes in regard to my post yesterday about my reservations about the design of the Ventura Trolley:

Sure, maybe the body count was high when it opened, but Mitch, it is for the greater good, isn't it? Except that body count will most likely consist of homeless drunks and drug addicts.

Whoa! The "big cheeses" are going after the down-and-out!

Nick! Will you stand for this?

Trolley Dead Pool

The Ventura Trolley - the light rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis with the Airport and the Mall - will be opening in the next couple of weeks.

I predict blood flowing through the gutters. Unlike Wes Skoglund, my prediction will be correct.

My hometown, Jamestown ND, was a railroad town from time immemorial. The Northern Pacific ran straight through the center of town. Forty-odd trains passed through Jamestown every day, and when they did, except for a single, antiquated two-lane underpass dating to the 1910s, there was literally no way to get from the north side of town to the south. This was no laughing matter; while sometimes the trains were mile-long fast freights that sailed through town in minutes, others were slower - or worse, spent half an hour backing in and out of spurs at the railroad yard on the southwest side of town. When that happened, the traffic jams at the little underpass on Fourth Avenue became downright sisyphean. It was said that if you lived your whole life in Jamestown, you'd spend two years waiting for trains.

But I digress; one of the big lessons I learned growing up there was "stay the hell away from tracks. All tracks. Period". I've seen what happens when people, and cars, meet trains; when I was a kid, my paper route ran along the tracks. One night, a drunk wandered in front of an oncoming freight in the middle of a cold night; an 800-foot-long slick of blood and goo was still visible the next day. Another time, in tenth grade, I saw a car swerve through the crossing gates, smack into an oncoming freight. The train was coming out of the switches, so it wasn't moving all that fast, and it still wadded up the car like a used kleenex.

So last March, when my office moved down to Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis, I walked out on the street - and jumped back in mute shock.

The tracks run along the street, at street level. There's not even a particularly pronounced curb separating the sidewalk from the tracks. I think anyone who's ever taken a group of toddlers for a walk, or watched a group of cotton-candy-for-brains junior high kids whirling down a busy sidewalk can see where the problem is, right?

And they kept a lane of westbound traffic on Fifth Street. Signs at the intersection politely warn people "don't turn onto the tracks", which I'm sure will make a big impression on, say, a driver from North Oaks who gets downtown once a year and is overwhelmed by rush-hour traffic, when it's hard enough to read signs at all...

So this is what I think - and believe me, I'm not playing this for laughs, not at all:

• I think we'll have our first serious train/pedestrian accident within three months.
• I think we'll see a serious train/car collision sooner than that.

And yes, in this case I hope I'm wrong.

Pick Your Marks Carefully

Laura Billings has discovered one of the key facts of life in...

...Saint Paul?

She notes:

It's not that they're stupid. In fact, St. Paul boasts of having more advanced-degrees and active voter-registration cards than almost anywhere in the country. These are the people who show up at caucus meetings, volunteer at schools and food shelves and subscribe to Internet news groups to debate arcane city ordinances .

But strangely, many seem almost willfully ignorant of the law you refer to in your letter, the one that grants right of way to pedestrians in marked or unmarked crosswalks.

Do people in Saint Paul ignore the crosswalk laws? Absolutely. Just as they do many other laws.

Think it's any different in Minneapolis? Has Laura Billings crossed any streets between her native Wayzata and her home in St. Paul? Drivers throughout the state are atrocious with crosswalk laws.

But you wanna know one HUGE difference between the cities?

Many of the backstreets of both cities, laid out in the days before automobiles, are very narrow. On many of the backstreets around my house if there's a car parked at the curb the street becomes two narrow for two cars that are approaching each other to pass.

In Minneapolis, both cars will gun it, trying to be the first to the gap.

In Saint Paul, one driver or another will yield and wave the other driver through - unless one of the drivers is from Minneapolis.

Self-Defense

Joel Rosenberg's LiveJournal site has the best coverage of the ongoing story - or non-story - of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, our celebrated concealed carry reform law. The law turned a year old in April.

I occasionally get an email asking - civilly or as a tart challenge - if I know of any defensive uses of handguns.

It's for sure you'll rarely hear about them in the Strib or the PiPress - but if you monitor Joel's site, the truth is out there.

Jim Ragsdale of the PiPress wrote a piece about the first-anniversary rallies that involved an interview with David Haagenson of Minnetonka, who foiled a carjacking earler in April:

Haagensen, attending one of two competing events Wednesday that commemorated the passage of the state's new gun law, said he foiled an attempted carjacking as he was on his way to work the late shift at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.

"I pointed it at his head, because he was trying to open my locked door, and he was pointing a gun at me,'' he said. "He ran away. I drove to work and called the cops.''

Minneapolis police confirmed that Haagensen reported the April 9 incident and that they are investigating.

Rosenberg adds:

What they didn't mention is that these particular cops treated him very unprofessionally, and that the MPD refuses to release the report to him. I think I feel an essay or two about cops coming on.)

And another one

Now, there's some conflict in the statements, but it comes down to this:

For whatever reason—Frank's take is that it was to get Bozo's attention, so he wouldn't end up running over Bozo—Frank honks his horn as he approaches, then goes on by. Frank stops at the red light. Bozo rides up, drops his bike in front of Frank's car, and walks up to the driver's side window, which Frank starts trying to roll up.

Bozo either "asked [Frank] what he was trying to do," or said, "What the fuck do you think you're doing, you fucking punk?" and grabs Frank.

No question that Bozo grabbed Frank: Bozo only admits to grabbing Frank; Frank says Bozo was trying to choke him.

Frank, who has a permit, tells Bozo that he's got a gun, and goes for it at the same time that he's trying to roll the window up.

Bozo backs up, and when the light turns green, Frank drives through the intersection, going over the bike as he does, getting far enough away so that he can keep an eye on Bozo, and sees him going into the PDQ store there, but not close enough to resume the confrontation.

Read the whole thing.

I'm seeing fewer and fewer "Repeal Conceal" bumper stickers, and some of the stores that used to be posted against legal carry permittees have quietly taken the signs down.

Don't Confuse Us With The Facts

Read today's Strib piece about the fraud investigation of Pat Forciea, longtime political consultant.

Pat Forciea, a well-connected Minnesota political consultant and sports marketing entrepreneur with deep hockey ties, is under criminal investigation by the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office for alleged financial manipulation and fraud worth millions of dollars, the Star Tribune has learned.

Part of the investigation concerns a $2.56 million loan Forciea obtained in late March from a Minneapolis bank to buy the River City Lancers professional minor league hockey team in Omaha. The bank has sued Forciea, alleging he forged signatures of two of his wealthy partners on documents promising that they would personally guarantee repayment of the loan. The partners, investor and financier Phil Ordway and Ford Nicholson, an Ordway-3M heir from White Bear Lake, have told the bank through their attorneys that they never signed such documents and that the signatures were forged.

OK, so there might be some shenanigans.

Now, read the article and see how far down you have to go before you see he's a Democrat consultant.

Paragraph eight.

How far do you think the Strib would have waited if he were in the GOP?

As Long As We're Focusing On The Important Stuff

Ladies night is toast in New Jersey:

The state's top civil rights official has ruled that taverns cannot offer discounts to women on "ladies nights," agreeing with a man who claimed such gender-based promotions discriminated against men.

It went on:

David R. Gillespie said it was not fair for women to get into the Coastline nightclub for free and receive discounted drinks while men paid a $5 cover charge and full price for drinks.

In his ruling Tuesday, J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo, director of the state Division on Civil Rights, rejected arguments by the nightclub that ladies nights were a legitimate promotion. Commercial interests do not override the "important social policy objective of eradicating discrimination," he ruled.

Gov. James E. McGreevey criticized the decision, calling it "bureaucratic nonsense."

"It is an overreaction that reflects a complete lack of common sense and good judgment," McGreevey said in a statement.

The governor does not have the authority directly rescind the ruling. But he met with state Attorney General Peter C. Harvey on Wednesday, telling him that the civil rights division had better things to do with its time, said Micah Rasmussen, a spokesman for McGreevey.

A spokesman for Harvey did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

As long as everyone has their priorities straight...

Here's a Shock

Isn't this what conservatives have been telling you all along?

At a time when schools and teachers' unions insist that hiring good new teachers is critical to education, schools must instead choose between the connection young teachers often have with students or the skills and experience of older teachers. Because state law requires districts to cut newer teachers first, there is really no choice. Young teachers lose.

The article continues:

"The strange thing about it is that the people at the top are just waiting for that two extra years so they can get their [full] retirement," Maxwell said. "The teachers who have been there for 30 years have got their foot, their arm, everything but their butt -- which is still in the chair -- out the door. They want to leave, we want to come. And nobody wins."
...and even with fewer students, payroll goes up

Schools lose, too, said Charlie Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

"The best of teaching staffs have a nice combination of mature, older teachers toward the end of their careers, a nice group of midcareer teachers who are skilled, and a group of young teachers, who are less skilled but are more connected to the kids," Kyte said. "Having younger teachers to mentor is also important for older teachers. It helps them be renewed by the freshness of youth. They get a chance to pass on their expertise."
Even as teaching jobs fold, payroll goes up...

And it always will. The teachers union has spent the last 30 years turning teaching into a blue-collar job; it's succeeding.

The inability to keep younger teachers not only hurts schools now, but it also will hurt later when the loss of new teachers turns into a shortage of experienced teachers, Kyte said.

Posted by Mitch at 04:24 AM | Comments (1)

Priorities

While Jay Reding was busy live-blogging the South Dakota election, Rocket Man took one for the team and live-blogged the Miss Universe Pageant.

The winner? Ms. Oz.

I thought Miss Bulgaria had it going on...

Hayes: The Iraq/Al Quaeda Connection

Tune in Saturday, as Northern Alliance Radio Network interviews Stephen Hayes, author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.

We're one of the first shows to talk with Hayes on this book, which is sure to be one of the most important of the year.

Tune in!

Omens

Stephanie Herseth beat Larry Diederich yesterday in the race for South Dakota's sole US House seat.

The left is digging to make this into a good omen for the Democrats; in this case, Mark Kleiman:

In any case, it's a second straight red-state House seat pickup for the Democrats. Not a bad omen for November.

Not so much.

The Dakotas are strange places; they are the six safest electoral votes in the GOP lineup, but they consistently send the likes of Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad, George McGovern and, of course Tom Daschle to Washington. The reason is simple; farmers are pragmatic. They want a strong nation, but they want their farm program handouts, too.

But Stephanie Herseth - who has to run for election again in five months - will have to vote to the right on most non-farm issues; allying with the left on the war will be political suicide in South Dakota.

Jay Reding and Captain Ed both analyze the results.

UPDATE: Rocket Man from Powerline - a native South Dakotan - notes that the omen may be, in fact, bad for the Dems, especially Daschle: Herseth won by a narrower margin than expected, had to fight a much tougher campaign, and is much less a lightning rod for the disaffection of South Dakota's Republicans:

Tom Daschle was invisible in Herseth's campaign. There has been speculation that he may have hoped that she would lose, on the theory that South Dakotans, most of whom are Republicans, may blanch at the idea of their entire Congressional delegation being Democrats, thereby hurting Daschle in his upcoming race against John Thune.

Don't count it out.

Finish What You Started

If there's a topic that's close to my heart - closer than firearms rights, closer than government's role in our lives, closer than anything - it's the topic of divorce and father's rights.

A few weeks ago, James Lileks wrote a piece - per usual, a great one - that included this line:

This isn’t a big cause of mine - it strays perilously close to that whole insistently pissy Men's Rights issue

There's a reason some of us guys are insistently pissy; the system is insistently, dehumanizingly, endlessly pissy to an awful lot of us.

This is the first in what will likely be a long series of pieces I've been chewing on for a long time.

Listening to feminist activists, you'd think California just made female circumcision mandatory.

The California Women's Law Center called the decision "a huge step backwards."

"A tragic day for children, a tragic day for the rule of law and a tragic day for scholarship," said Carol Bruch, a University of California, Davis, law professor.

What is Carol Bruch talking about?

A California Supremes ruling that makes it harder for divorced, custodial parents - almost always women - to destroy their children's relationships with their noncustodial parents - almost always men.

It's about damn time.

Full disclosure: I'm a divorced father of two. I have joint custody of my two kids - my ex-wife and I were able to settle on a custody arrangement, short-circuiting the legal system in the process. Due to a variety of circumstances that are not for public consumption, the kids have spent the vast majority of the time with me. I wouldn't change much - and, compared to the vast majority of divorced fathers, have very little to complain about.

Because life for a non-custodial parent - which, in 85-90% of contested divorces is the father - is a medieval state; the father is essentially a paycheck and glorified babysitter, while the custodial parent has immense control over the lives and situations of the children.

One of the most noxious provisions in most states' custody systems is the relative ease with which a custodial parent can move - even across the country - and disrupt, even destroy, the non-custodial parent's relationship with the children. It varies from state to state - many, even most states at least nominally require parents to make sure the non-custodial parent has the same access to the children as they would have had without a move. However, getting such rulings enforced is requires immense determination - and more money than most people have. And legal systems - especially the family court system - are fundamentally prejudiced against non-custodial parents (and I say this as someone who is not at all bitter about his own case). The upshot, in most cases? What the mother wants, the mother gets. Combine this with a child-support system with vast, unchecked power to punish non-compliance - even against non-custodial parents whose access to children has been illegally curtailed (even against non-parents, for that matter) - with loss of professional licenses and drivers licenses, and you have a system that is fundamentally unfair at its root.

The California Supreme Court's ruling today nipped about the edges of this grossly perverted system:

Justice Carlos Moreno, writing for the court's majority, set forth a list of factors that judges "ordinarily should consider when deciding whether to modify a custody order in light of the custodial parent's proposal to change the residence of the child."

Those include stability and continuity in the custody arrangement, the relationships of both parents with the children and with each other, the distance of and reasons for the proposed move, and the children's wishes.

The decision changes the focus in move-away cases "from a parent-centered to a child-centered analysis," said Garrett Dailey, who argued on behalf of LaMusga in the Supreme Court...To assure that they don't lose that right, he said, "the best thing they can do is to be a good parent and foster their children's relationship with the other parent." The evidence indicated Navarro had failed to do that.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Well, you can expect the defendant's lawyer to quibble:

On the other side of the case, Tony Tanke, who argued for Navarro, called the decision "fundamentally lawless." It gives local judges the power to forbid custodial parents from relocating "because they were not sufficiently friendly toward an ex-spouse," he said.

OK, that's his job.

But the National Organization of Women - which institutionally regards children as a mother's property and believes that mothers' and childrens' interests are one and the same - reacted predictably:

The National Organization for Women said the decision "binds the lives of many women and men, for that matter, who are trying to provide safety and economic opportunity for their families."

Too f*cking bad.

Hey, couple; if you have kids together, your first obligation is to them. Not your career. Not your next spouse. The kids. Don't like it? Don't get divorced. Or don't get married. Or grow up and put your kids' interests in front of your own until they're 18. Or - and this is the tough one - let the more responsible parent raise them.

If you have to choose between keeping your kids close enough to their other parent to have a meaningful relationship, and a cha-cha job across the country (or your new spouse or boy/grrltoy's wishes)? You stay put. Or agree to be the commuter parent. The status quo is what's best for the kids (*)

Of course, to the National Organization of Women, the children's interests are secondary to those of the mother; they've gone on record opposing joint custody as an onerous intrusion on the lives of women.

Unlike a lot of conservatives, I don't necessarily think divorce should be harder to get; I think it should be much harder to get married. As part of this, the fallout from divorce shouldn't be attenuated for anyone; for custodial parents (almost always mothers) they usually are. There's a reason that women are twice as accepting of divorce as an option; men are the ones that pay, financially and, usually, in terms of loss of access to their children. If the toll of divorce were equal - and putting the children truly first would tend to even things out - then perhaps people would work harder on their marriages - or avoid the bad ones.

Was this ruling a good one, all in all? It may serve to enrich the huge, rapacious divorce industry - lawyers and psychologists.

Still, men have a long way to go before they are equal in family court. Maybe today's ruling is a start.

(*) At this point someone will say "But what if the ex-spouse is an abusive jerk?" Well, that's an exeption, now, isn't it? In the vast majority of cases, it's a strawman; while every divorced person spends at least part of the time thinking their ex-spouse is the worst possible influence on the kids, if you haven't bothered proving it in court, then it really shouldn't count.

Or course, that brings up the problems in our Domestic Abuse industry - which is fodder for another screed, someday soon.

Flip This

The Center for American Progress bills itself as "a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America".

Translated into English, that means "another stealth Democrat propaganda front".

To wit: Yesterday's piece, "President Bush - Flip-Flopper in Chief". The piece starts:

On 10/11/00, then Governor Bush said: "I think credibility is important. It is going to be important for the president to be credible with Congress, important for the president to be credible with foreign nations." But President Bush's serial flip-flopping raises serious questions about whether Congress and foreign leaders can rely on what he says.

Let's start by raising some serious questions about this intensely stupid piece.

The goal, of course, is to try to make John Kerry look less like a supercilious empty suit by chanting "But the President does it too!

Let's go through the list; my comments are in bold:

1. OPEC

BUSH PROMISES TO FORCE OPEC TO LOWER PRICES..."What I think the president ought to do [when gas prices spike] is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots...And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price." [President Bush, 1/26/00]

...BUSH REFUSES TO LOBBY OPEC LEADERS With gas prices soaring in the United States at the beginning of 2004, the Miami Herald reported the president refused to "personally lobby oil cartel leaders to change their minds." [Miami Herald, 4/1/04]

No kidding. He's a president in wartime. He has a State Department and, remember this, an entire free-market industry that's supposed to do that. And, quite frankly, it's not something the president should be doing.

2. Iraq Funding

BUSH SPOKESMAN DENIES NEED FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR THE REST OF 2004..."We don't anticipate requesting anything additional for [Iraq for] the balance of this year." [White House Budget Director Joshua Bolten, 7/29/03]

…BUSH REQUESTS ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR IRAQ FOR 2004 “I am requesting that Congress establish a $25 billion contingency reserve fund for the coming fiscal year to meet all commitments to our troops.” [President Bush, Statement by President, 5/5/04]

Goodness, yes. The President, faced with a revanchist terrorist onslaught determined to derail the transfer of sovereignty, should have stuck with an arbitrary figure that the Democrats didn't support in the first place.

3. Condoleeza Rice Testimony

BUSH SPOKESMAN SAYS RICE WON'T TESTIFY AS 'A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE'...“Again, this is not her personal preference; this goes back to a matter of principle. There is a separation of powers issue involved here. Historically, White House staffers do not testify before legislative bodies. So it's a matter of principle, not a matter of preference.” [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 3/9/04]

…BUSH ORDERS RICE TO TESTIFY: “Today I have informed the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States that my National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, will provide public testimony.” [President Bush, 3/30/04]

The full story please? Some details about the press onslaught that the President was answering by violating decades of executive branch practice by sending the National Security Advisor to testify...

...to a kangaroo commission. It was, in fact, not a flip flip; it was just a mistake.

4. Science

BUSH PLEDGES TO ISSUE REGULATIONS BASED ON SCIENCE..."I think we ought to have high standards set by agencies that rely upon science, not by what may feel good or what sounds good." [then-Governor George W. Bush, 1/15/00]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION REGULATIONS IGNORE SCIENCE "60 leading scientists—including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents—issued a statement calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. According to the scientists, the Bush administration has, among other abuses, suppressed and distorted scientific analysis from federal agencies, and taken actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels." [Union of Concerned Scientists, 2/18/04]

This is a hopelessly broad complaint. Look at the cases involved: Some of the decisions were questionable; others involved politically-motivated, agenda-driven "science" that, if it were to drive policy, would constitute not only real-flip flops, but stupid science in and of itself.

5. Ahmed Chalabi

BUSH INVITES CHALABI TO STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS...President Bush also met with Chalabi during his brief trip to Iraq last Thanksgiving [White House Documents 1/20/04, 11/27/03]

...BUSH MILITARY ASSISTS IN RAID OF CHALABI'S HOUSE"U.S. soldiers raided the home of America's one-time ally Ahmad Chalabi on Thursday and seized documents and computers." [Washington Post, 5/20/04]

Three things not mentioned:

1. In November, Chalabi was a leading contender to lead post-war Iraq.
2. Now, there are allegations that Chalabi is compromised. It happens.
3. And if you believe Frank Gaffney, the decision may have been driven as much by the rivalry between State, CIA and the military as anything Chalabi himself did.

In any case, the term is "response", not "flip-flop". The right response? We don't know yet.

6. Department of Homeland Security

BUSH OPPOSES THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY..."So, creating a Cabinet office doesn't solve the problem. You still will have agencies within the federal government that have to be coordinated. So the answer is that creating a Cabinet post doesn't solve anything." [White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 3/19/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY "So tonight, I ask the Congress to join me in creating a single, permanent department with an overriding and urgent mission: securing the homeland of America and protecting the American people." [President Bush, Address to the Nation, 6/6/02]

Er, yeah. He was right the first time, and I wish he'd have stuck with it. But now, the whole story; he had to give on the DHS - another federal, unionized, Democrat-friendly bureaucracy - to pass other parts of his agenda on terror. Mistake? Perhaps. But less a "flip-flop" than just mere politics.

7. Weapons of Mass Destruction

BUSH SAYS WE FOUND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION..."We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories…for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." [President Bush, Interview in Poland, 5/29/03]

...BUSH SAYS WE HAVEN'T FOUND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION "David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out." [President Bush, Meet the Press, 2/7/04]

Hardly a flip-flop. More of a "wait and see".

We waited, and we saw.

Not a flip-flop.

8. Free Trade

BUSH SUPPORTS FREE TRADE... "I believe strongly that if we promote trade, and when we promote trade, it will help workers on both sides of this issue." [President Bush in Peru, 3/23/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS RESTRICTIONS ON TRADE "In a decision largely driven by his political advisers, President Bush set aside his free-trade principles last year and imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel to help out struggling mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states crucial for his reelection." [Washington Post, 9/19/03]

Wow. We're up to number eight, and we finally found a flip flop. Yep. The President was wrong.

Now, how disingenuous of the CFAP is it to complain about restriction of free trade - something they are kind of squishy on themselves, to say the least?

9. Osama Bin Laden

BUSH WANTS OSAMA DEAD OR ALIVE... "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'" [President Bush, on Osama Bin Laden, 09/17/01]

...BUSH DOESN'T CARE ABOUT OSAMA “I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him… I truly am not that concerned about him.” [President Bush, Press Conference, 3/13/02]

Really? Has Task Force 121 been disbanded? Have we called off the international manhunt? Knowing the dogs have been called off, is Bin Laden staying at the Radisson in Fargo, playing OTB and chasing blondes?

No. Bush justifiably deflated some of the left's misguided monomania about Bin Laden; the left substitutes "Search for Bin Laden" for "war on terror".

Not a flip-flop.

10. The Environment

BUSH SUPPORTS MANDATORY CAPS ON CARBON DIOXIDE... "[If elected], Governor Bush will work to…establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide." [Bush Environmental Plan, 9/29/00]

...BUSH OPPOSES MANDATORY CAPS ON CARBON DIOXIDE "I do not believe, however, that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." [President Bush, Letter to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), 3/13/03]

If it's a flip flop, it's an incremental one, and one in the right direction.

11. WMD Commission

BUSH RESISTS AN OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION ON WMD INTELLIGENCE FAILURE... "The White House immediately turned aside the calls from Kay and many Democrats for an immediate outside investigation, seeking to head off any new wide-ranging election-year inquiry that might go beyond reports already being assembled by congressional committees and the Central Intelligence Agency." [NY Times, 1/29/04]

...BUSH SUPPORTS AN OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION ON WMD INTELLIGENCE FAILURE "Today, by executive order, I am creating an independent commission, chaired by Governor and former Senator Chuck Robb, Judge Laurence Silberman, to look at American intelligence capabilities, especially our intelligence about weapons of mass destruction." [President Bush, 2/6/04]

Read carefully; he opposed the howling moonbat Democrat proposal, and established a responsible, adult investigation. No flip-flop.

12. Creation of the 9/11 Commission

BUSH OPPOSES CREATION OF INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION... "President Bush took a few minutes during his trip to Europe Thursday to voice his opposition to establishing a special commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before Sept. 11." [CBS News, 5/23/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS CREATION OF INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION "President Bush said today he now supports establishing an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." [ABC News, 09/20/02]

Not so much a flip-flop as a mistake. But OK, we're at a soft two for 12.

13. Time Extension for 9/11 Commission

BUSH OPPOSES TIME EXTENSION FOR 9/11 COMMISSION... "President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." [Washington Post, 1/19/04]

...BUSH SUPPORTS TIME EXTENSION FOR 9/11 COMMISSION "The White House announced Wednesday its support for a request from the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks for more time to complete its work." [CNN, 2/4/04]

So what? I mean, granting the Gorelick Kangaroo Court any time at all was a mistake, but what difference does this make? Call it a flop - we're at a soft 2.5 for 13.

14. One Hour Limit for 9/11 Commission Testimony

BUSH LIMITS TESTIMONY IN FRONT OF 9/11 COMMISSION TO ONE HOUR... "President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have placed strict limits on the private interviews they will grant to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that they will meet only with the panel's top two officials and that Mr. Bush will submit to only a single hour of questioning, commission members said Wednesday." [NY Times, 2/26/04]

...BUSH SETS NO TIMELIMIT FOR TESTIMONY "The president's going to answer all of the questions they want to raise. Nobody's watching the clock." [White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 3/10/04]

Another that's too irrelevant to care about. So what?

What's next? "President chose Cheerios, then switched to Special K - Flip Flop!"?

15. Gay Marriage

BUSH SAYS GAY MARRIAGE IS A STATE ISSUE... "The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's issue like you're trying to get me into." [Gov. George W. Bush on Gay Marriage, Larry King Live, 2/15/00]

...BUSH SUPPORTS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT BANNING GAY MARRIAGE "Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife." [President Bush, 2/24/04]

Not a flip-flop; a firming stance. The idiot mayor of San Francisco and the activist Supreme Court of Massachusetts demanded a confrontation. Bush gave it to them. Calling this a "flip-flop" is like saying the President "flip-flopped" on terrorism between 9/10 and 9/12.

16. Nation Building

BUSH OPPOSES NATION BUILDING... "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road." [Gov. George W. Bush, 10/3/00]

...BUSH SUPPORTS NATION BUILDING "We will be changing the regime of Iraq, for the good of the Iraqi people." [President Bush, 3/6/03]

OK, Center for American "Progress"; can you think of an event that took place between October, 2000 and March of 2003 that might have affected this? (I'm thinking they can't, but it's only sporting to ask)

17. Saddam/al Qaeda Link

BUSH SAYS IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEEN AL QAEDA AND SADDAM... "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." [President Bush, 9/25/02]

...BUSH SAYS SADDAM HAD NO ROLE IN AL QAEDA PLOT "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11." [President Bush, 9/17/03]

Right. He's waiting on hard evidence. It's not only out there - it's on the Northern Alliance this weekend.

18. U.N. Resolution

BUSH VOWS TO HAVE A UN VOTE NO MATTER WHAT... "No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam." [President Bush 3/6/03]

...BUSH WITHDRAWS REQUEST FOR VOTE "At a National Security Council meeting convened at the White House at 8:55 a.m., Bush finalized the decision to withdraw the resolution from consideration and prepared to deliver an address to the nation that had already been written." [Washington Post, 3/18/03]

Can anyone remember what happened in the intervening 12 days? Three certain formerly-relevant nations, many of whose top officials and media and political figures were on the Iraqi Oil-for-Food payroll stonewalled and blocked any chance of a meaningful vote? Anyone? Not a flip-flop, a realistic reassessment

19. Involvement in the Palestinian Conflict

BUSH OPPOSES SUMMITS... "Well, we've tried summits in the past, as you may remember. It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened, and as a result we had significant intifada in the area." [President Bush, 04/05/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS SUMMITS "If a meeting advances progress toward two states living side by side in peace, I will strongly consider such a meeting. I'm committed to working toward peace in the Middle East." [President Bush, 5/23/03]

Hm. Kerry attacks the president for a lack of "nuance". Yet when the position accounts for the "nuance" of the situation, chuzzlewits like the CFAP call it a "flip-flop"?

20. Campaign Finance

BUSH OPPOSES MCCAIN-FEINGOLD... "George W. Bush opposes McCain-Feingold...as an infringement on free expression." [Washington Post, 3/28/2000]

...BUSH SIGNS MCCAIN-FEINGOLD INTO LAW "[T]his bill improves the current system of financing for Federal campaigns, and therefore I have signed it into law." [President Bush, at the McCain-Feingold singing ceremony, 03/27/02]

Is McCain-Feingold a lousy law? Sure. Was Bush right to oppose it in 2000? Beyond any rational doubt. Was Congress a bunch of gabbling cretins when they passed it? Hell, yeah. Could a Presidential veto have worked? Doubtful. Did the President have a choice but to sign it? Probably not. If I say "my wallet is mine", and you hold a gun to my head and I give it to you, is it a flip-flop?

So of 20 "flip-flops", we have about 2.5 actual reversals, and that's being generous.

As always when reading any organization with "progress" in its title, assume you're reading comedic rather than substantive material.

Sprache Des Reichs

Sheila O'Malley has this habit of posting long, Long, LONG collections of posts from single authors - always fascinating.

Monday's is the best so far: the posts of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew and writer whose notes are a fascinating look into the decay of Germany from 1933 to the end of the war.

O'Malley explains:

The journals are written by a Jewish man, an intellectual, a professor, living in Dresden, who was married to a German woman. A Christian. They go from 1932 to 1945, I believe, and they are incredibly detailed and terrifying first-hand accounts of the rise of the Nazis. It's a perfect example of that old adage: If you put a frog in a pot of water, and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will not know when to jump out - but will indeed end up burning to death.

About fifty screens full of Klemperer quotes follow. They're all fascinating - start Here's one post on language,
and another,
...and another...
...and another....
...and another.

Worth a read.

Bad Sign for Kerry?

This can't be good for Kerry:

How many Democrats do you think know what that means?

The Last Man Standing

I've been reading about Marek Edelman since I was a kid. He's always been among my heroes.

He is the last surviving leader (perhaps last surviving participant) in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1942 - where a slum full of doomed Jews fought, and mostly died, to throw off Hitler's plans for their peaceful extermination (John Ales played him in the surprisingly superb TV miniseries based on the battle), . He also fought in 1944's Warsaw Uprising, and was deeply involved with the early-eighties Solidarnosc movement that, in hindsight, served as the first crack in the Iron Curtain. He also advocated strongly in favor of the (eventual, tardy, sluggish) European interventions against the atrocities in Yugoslavia and Kosovo.

So when he talks about fighting for freedom, I listen.

This, via Chrenkoff, comes from a Polish TV interview:

Interviewer: Many people do understand that, but they don't understand why the Americans have to go to the other side of the world and fight over Iraq now.

Edelman: And why did they go to Europe then? Who defeated Hitler and saved Europe from fascism? The French? No, the Americans did. We thanked them then because they saved us. Today we criticise them because they're saving somebody else.

Interviewer: Returning to the question about having Polish soldier on the ground in Iraq. Many Poles don't want them there.

Edelman: If they don't want them there, let's just keep waiting and then let's see from which direction the rockets and the bombs will come from - will we in the end be lorded over by Saddam's viceroys or Bin Laden's, just as we were once lorded over by Hitler's viceroys.

Interviewer: Do you really believe in such a scenario?

Edelman: It's possible. If we will keep closing our eyes to evil, then that evil will defeat us tomorrow. Unfortunately there's more hatred in men than love. Those who murder understand only force and nothing else. And the only force that is able to stand against them is the American democracy.

About the French?

Edelman: France used to be a great power, culturally and intellectually. And what happened to them? They didn't want to fight for their own democracy, they thought it wasn't really their war [in 1939]. And they lost everything, because when you bend over and take it - even once - then you're finished. And what's that whole talk about the difference between American politics and European politics? There is no other politics but international democratic politics. If we withdraw from Iraq now, what do we have left? Cosying up to Iran and Saudi Arabia? ...

There's more. You owe it to yourself to read it.

But Does Powerline Cover This?

Audrey Hepburn was declared the most beautiful woman of all time.

Hepburn, the star of Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's, topped the poll of beauty editors, make-up artists, fashion editors, model agencies and fashion photographers who were asked to choose their top 10 beauties from the list of 100 compiled by the drinks firm Evian.

The women were chosen for their "embodiment of natural beauty, healthy living, beautiful on the inside and out, with great skin and a natural glow to their personality, as well as their complexion", Evian said.

Hepburn was joined in the top five by current US film star Liv Tyler, Blanchett, Tomb Raider star Angelina Jolie and the '50sicon turned princess Grace Kelly.

"Audrey Hepburn is the personification of natural beauty," said Elle beauty director Rosie Green.

While I don't disagree, any poll where Ingrid Bergman doesn't come up in the top two is suspect on its face.

Kim DuToit's New Pinup

Or - who knows - maybe mine.

From ashkan sahihi's Women of the IDF photo exhibit, which The Professor calls "Bin Laden's Worst Nightmare".

It's Just a Close-To-Perfect Day

Memorial Day, we went to Clifford French park, rented a canoe, and spent a couple of hours paddling around Medicine Lake and the network of little bayous the connect it with the rest of the park.

It was chilly and piddling rain - which kept a lot of the morons off the lake. It was beautiful, in that way that's very peculiar to the Twin Cities; not ten miles from downtown Minneapolis, whose skyline lined the eastern horizon, and we're on a lake that feels like it could be up north - except for the distant howl of the trucks on the highway.

Made hamburgers, went out to play video games. Son said "I really had fun today" on his way to bed.

All in all, they don't get much better.

The Madness of King Gizzizzle

Normally, I don't like sending traffic to sites I regard as jokes. But sometimes it's unavoidable.

Mark Gisleson - former City Pages writer (albeit briefly) and "Rush Limbaughtomy"-calibre conspiracy theorist - has the election all figured out.

No, really.

We're talking about the same Mark Gisleson that Steve Perry - no right-wing tool, he - had to step out of his usual liberal firebrand role to drag him back into the realm of reality, as he did in this bit. Gisleson had accused Karl Rove of personally orchestrating the trashing of Mad How in Iowa; Perry wrote in a following posting:

Yeah, Drudge has certainly been entertaining the last few days. Only one problem: Without any major exceptions that I'm aware of, this is not Rove and the Republicans doing the "opposition research," as it's called. It's the Democrats themselves, most especially the Clark camp.

Mark didn't last long after that - he went back to his resume-writing business.

But while you can unceremoniously excise a moonbat extremist pundit from the City Pages, you can't excise the moonbat from the pundit. Gisleson's blog is a fascinating read, in the same sense that sitting next to a schizophrenic on a bus can be mildly engrossing.

This piece is a case in point:

It's talk radio that keeps propping up Bush, and states that were late to trend red will be slow to reverse course. But bluster and Limbaughisms won't prop up Bush forever, and I expect the worst of the bubba vote to dwindle into apathy by November due to an alt-source of anti-Bush sludge.

And that source - aside from the daily drumbeat of the media, of course - is...what?

Bush is hurting where it really counts: the online porn threads. For years the ultra-hard core fans (or perhaps paid professionals?) littered the porn threads with vicious anti-Hillary Clinton fake porn.

Got that?

That's what made all the difference! Not the well-run come-from-behind campaign against the stiff, lunatic Algore that the GOP remembers. Not even the cascading conspiracies of Democrat Underground lore. Nossir - Photoshops of Hillary!

That stuff hasn't disappeared entirely, but what little there is has been overwhelmed by a sea of fake George W. Bush fake gay porn. More to the point, the Bush stuff is pretty amateurish, a sure sign that this is a sincere outbreak of teen wrath at the man who fucked up Iraq.

Right. Because in a world where Karl Rove carried John Kerry's water, I suppose it's logical to think that 49% of the people were influenced by porn in 2000, and that Iraq is worse-off than it was two years ago.

Silly of me to miss it, in fact.

This fake porn gets printed out and circumspectly distributed in workplaces and classrooms. In male-only domains like autobody shops these pix get posted in the men's room. Macho Americans can only endure so many pictures of Bush on the bottom and Osama on top before the whole thing becomes a national joke.

Ah, that'd explain the "Gender Gap", Bush's pre-eminence among males, then. Nothing influences the red-state male like gay Photoshop porn.

Bush has lost the Howard Stern voters, and that will cripple him. Or, more accurately, he'll increasingly be seen as a pathetic sick joke.

He has a point.

Karl Rove told me to say that.

Historical Illiteracy

The bad news: American students are nearly illiterate about history.

The good news? British students aren't much better:

It is 1899 and Denzel Washington, the American president, orders Anne Frank and her troops to storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied New Zealand.

This may not be how you remember D-Day but for a worrying number of Britain's children this is the confused scenario they associate with the events of June 6, 1944.

The article relates the same depressing litany familiar to anyone horrified by American kids' historical illiteracy.

I liked this part:

There were some exceptions to the general ignorance. One teacher at Great Addington Church of England Primary school in Northamptonshire was amazed to find that one of his pupils had scored 100 per cent in the test.

He said: "I asked him how he knew material which we had not covered in school. He told me he had picked it up from a D-Day game he played on his computer."

Read the whole thing.

Ragged Glory

Saint Paul has a terriffic post on a gig we both would love to have seen - and a scene we'd have loved to have parodied.

Saint says:

At this stage in my life I have no interest in going to a crowded bar and enduring a screeching drummer from a horrible (yet critically legendary) local band from the 90's [Ed: - that would be Lori Barbero, former drummer for "Babes In Toyland, a thrash band that was unaccountably huge in the eighties and nineties and who used to date the drummer from my old band] taking her falling star turn as a back up singer on a Bowie song, just so everyone in the crowd can laugh and cheer and congratulate themselves for being hip to Babes in Toyland back in the day.

But, even so, this show might have been worth it. I think Westerberg is one of the best song writers of the rock era and his albums are responsible for more smiles, poignancy, moments of clarity, and inspiration in my life than the rest of my CD collection combined. HIs shows at the Guthrie last year were ragged and amazing and beautiful and even with him playing covers at the 400 Bar, there's a good chance it was a joy to behold.

Westerberg and the 'mats are also on my top ten list - they are the basement band in the masthead of this blog, for the very reason that that band, and that photo, not only sum up most of what's good about popular mucic, but in fact are a wonderful metaphor for the Northern Alliance Radio Network. But I digress.

There are a few singers and musicians out there that, no matter what they do and where they do it, are riveting performers. I'm not talking about extreme cases - yes, Springsteen would turn in an enthralling performance if he were sitting on a heater in the Saint Paul skyway.

But artists like Paul Westerberg, or Chris Osgood (of the seminal Minneapolis punk band Suicide Commandos) or, if my hunch is correct, Cyndi Lawson, former doyenne of The Clams, a group that did everything The Donnas do today, twenty years ago (And just whatever happened to Karen Kusak, anyway?) - they'd be worth listening to, playing anything, just about anywhere.

So - who else?

Winging It

Chicago Boyz recap a great point:

One of the great strengths America has in this war is that we have totally open discussion, including off the wall thinking. Off the wall situations require off the wall thinking. This situation we face – Suicidal maniacs from a failed civilization want to murder us all, and most people don’t believe it is really happening – sounds like something out of a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. But it is real.

True.

And in response?

We Americans are pragmatists. One of our greatest enemies, Rommel, said the Americans knew less but learned faster than any enemy he ever faced. He also said the Americans had an admirable lack of respect for anything other than what worked. God willing we’ll always be like that.

Pray for clear thinking, and bravely facing the truth, and hard-nosed leadership.

Which is, of course, the exactly opposite of the Democrats' approach.