Shot In The Dark

Deafening Silence

Pat Sajak (with whom I'm very distantly acquainted from another internet forum) is a smart, sharp, blazingly funny guy - certainly more than Vanna's foil.

He asks in Human Events Online - where is Hollywood's outrage over the Van Gogh murder?

The hypocrisy is certainly there:

Somewhere in the world, a filmmaker creates a short documentary that chronicles what he perceives as the excesses of anti-abortion activists. An anti-abortion zealot reacts to the film by killing the filmmaker in broad daylight and stabbing anti-abortion tracts onto his body. How does the Hollywood community react to this atrocity? Would there be angry protests? Candlelight vigils? Outraged letters and columns and articles? Awards named in honor of their fallen comrade? Demands for justice? Calls for protection of artistic freedom? It’s a pretty safe bet that there would be all of the above and much more. And all of the anger would be absolutely justified.

And yet the brutal murder of the Dutch filmmaker has drawn nary a peep from activist-choked Hollywood. Why?

It could be fear, Sajak notes. But...:

There’s another possibility; one that seems crazy on the surface, but does provide an explanation for the silence, and is also in keeping with the political climate in Hollywood. Is it just possible that there are those who are reluctant to criticize an act of terror because that might somehow align them with President Bush, who stubbornly clings to the notion that these are evil people who need to be defeated? Could the level of hatred for this President be so great that some people are against anything he is for, and for anything he is against?

As nutty as it sounds, how else can you explain such a muted reaction to an act that so directly impacts creative people everywhere? Can you conceive of a filmmaker being assassinated because of any other subject matter without seeing a resulting explosion of reaction from his fellow artists in America and around the world?

As I said, it’s a nutty-sounding explanation, but we live in nutty times.

Read the whole thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

I get a lot of questions here at Shot In The Dark. I figured I should answer the most common ones.

Q: How many watertight hatches are there on a Sturgeon-class nuclear attack submarine? A: 154, counting the washing machine.

Q: Peanut butter: Crunchy or smooth?
A: Crunchy.

Q: When does Rosh Hoshana fall next?
A: Beats me. "Berg" is, in my case, not Jewish; it's a very common name in goyische Northwestern Europe. It means "Mountain" in Norwegian, Swedish, German, Danish, and probably Polish for all I know. In other words, my forefathers was from the hill country.

Q: Mitch, settle a bet for us: What's the best historical simulation board game?
A: Strategic: Third Reich. Tactical: Squad Leader. Naval: Second Fleet. Air: Air Superiority. Operational: Central Front.

Q: What is a Quantum Dot?
A: A quantum dot is a semiconductor confined to a very small volume of space. Think of a sphere with a diameter equal to (roughly) its' Exciton Bohr Radius. The radius is small enough that its' energy bands are discontinuous, which results in the confinement. Don't make me explain it again.

Q: What's the best prank you've ever thrown?
A: Tie: "College Sold to Kuwaiti Oil Sheik" (Jamestown Collegian, front page, 4/1/83), and the immortal Saran Wrap on the Toilet Seat (Kroeze Hall, December, 1984)

Q: How do you get into the Northern Alliance?
A: Practice. No, seriously. Blog. A lot. Write constantly. Develop a following. Impress the bejeebers out of people. Have fun with it. Repeat daily for a long time.

Q: While some of the Northern Alliance - Powerline and Captain Ed - have graduated into the leagues of the megablogs with over 50,000 visitors a day, you're still hanging around 2,000 visitors a day. What's the matter?
A: Nothing. Just staying true to, er, my art. And I get quality readers.

Q: Where is the World's Largest Holstein?
A: New Salem, North Dakota. You know - west of Bismark. That New Salem.

Q: Does pure evil exist?
A: Yes. That's why Cartoon Network broadcasts Ed, Edd and Eddie.

Q: So why hasn't some nice conservative girl snapped you up?
A: Pfft. The longer I'm single, the more I like being single; I'm a pretty lousy prospect these days. And most of the nice conservative girls got married when they were 25, and still are.

Q: Help! I'm in Salisbury, England, and I don't know what beer to order! What should I get?
A: "Bishop's Tipple".

Q: Why do you pick on Nick Coleman so much?
A: Because in a just world, Captain Ed and John Hinderaker would get paid for writing, and Nick Coleman would be working in a car wash.

Q: Are all these questions real?
A: I'll vouch for them personally.

More later.

Stories Straight?

Minnesota DFLers are trying to ding the Governor over his "no new taxes" pledge.

Seems that local property taxes might rise.

DFLers contend that Pawlenty's "no new taxes" policy while erasing budget shortfalls is a sham because it applies only to income and sales taxes collected by state government. Pawlenty's preference for budget cuts to erase deficits in recent years has reduced local government aid and other property tax relief measures, leading to a recent spike in property taxes, especially for homeowners, DFLers contend.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing by itself; it makes it clear to property owners exactly how much their local government costs.

Still, I have to wonder - did the DFL really think about this?

Pawlenty's office responded to the event by issuing a statement from press secretary Brian McClung, who said the governor was "surprised and pleased to hear that the DFL is concerned about holding the line on taxes." McClung challenged DFLers to support Pawlenty's proposal to impose new limits on increases on property taxes, which he described as "entirely a local tax." McClung also urged citizens to put pressure on local governments to reduce spending and claimed that the projected increases "are not outside the historic range."

Of course, we need to exert pressure not just to reduce spending, but to reduce spending on government. Remember - the bureaucrats' standard response to spending cuts is to cut spending on whatever faces the public - libraries, school programs, etc - while leaving the bureaucracy and its perks untouched.

Somewhere In The Swamps of Jersey

My political hero, Bret Schundler, is running again for Governor of New Jersey.

Says the WaPo:

Republican Bret Schundler, who lost the 2001 New Jersey governor's race to the recently resigned Democrat James E. McGreevey, announced Monday he will seek the job again in 2005.

Schundler told cheering supporters that he would cut taxes by keeping state spending below the rate of economic growth. He cut taxes while mayor of Jersey City from 1992 to 2001.

For those of you who've been hiding under rocks (at least as re Jersey news), Schundler is the former mayor of Jersey City. Schundler, a conservative Republican, won the office in a city that is over 80% registered Democrat - a place that makes even the Twin Cities look pretty balanced. And he rocked, helping revitalize the city. He's a object lesson in Republicans running in the inner city.

Developing.

Feeling Strangely Better

Marah has an new album.

Life just got incrementally better.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Steve Gardner, John Kerry's former boatmate and a lynchpin of the Swift Boat Veterans Against the War, is on the wrong end of a world of Democrat payback and dirty tricks.

The Chicago Sun-Times has the story, via Powerline .

"They said I had a political agenda. I had no and have no political agenda whatsoever. I saw John Kerry on television saying he was running for the Democratic nomination for president, and I knew I couldn't ever see him as commander in chief -- not after what I saw in Vietnam, not after the lies I heard him tell about what he says he did and what he says others did."

Gardner explains he was sitting at home in Clover, S.C., when he first saw Kerry on television. It was before the primary races. For 35 years, Gardner says, he hadn't talked about his tour of duty in Vietnam. But when he saw Kerry talking about running, he says he got up, called the newspaper in town, called radio stations and "talked to anyone I could about why this man should never be president." Eventually he got a call from Adm. Roy Huffman, who had been in charge of the coastal division in Vietnam, reunited with other swift boat veterans, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Gardner's story is the stuff of smoke-filled Chicago backrooms:

Gardner told this story and others to radio stations and he wrote a piece for the local paper. Then, he says, he received a phone call from John Hurley, the veterans organizer for Kerry's campaign. Hurley, Gardner says, asked him to come out for Kerry. He told Hurley to leave him alone and that he'd never be for Kerry. It was then Gardner says, he was threatened with, "You better watch your step. We can look into your finances."

Next, Gardner said he received a call from Douglas Brinkley, the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. Brinkley told Gardner he was calling only to "fact check" the book -- which was already in print. "I told him that the guy in the book is not the same guy I served with. I told him Kerry was a coward. He would patrol the middle of the river. The canals were dangerous. He wouldn't go there unless he had another boat pushing him."

Days later, Brinkley called again, warning Gardner to expect some calls. It seems Brinkley had used the "fact checking" conversation to write an inflammatory article about Gardner for Time.com. The article, implying that Gardner was politically motivated, appeared under the headline "The 10th Brother."

Twenty-four hours later, Gardner got an e-mail from his company, Millennium Information Services, informing him that his services would no longer be necessary. He was laid off in an e-mail -- by the same man who only days before had congratulated him for his exemplary work in a territory which covered North and South Carolina.

Gardner's story? That of a guy who's looked down the barrel of an AK47:

Gardner is broke and jobless for speaking out, the husband and father of three says he'd do it all over again. He says it wasn't for politics. It was for America.

Furious yet? Gardner spent years of his life fighting for this nation and against John Kerry's slanders - and now he's doing it again.

Powerline has Gardner's email; if you're in the Carolinas and need a guy with Gardner's background, drop him a line.

I, along with the other NARN blogs, will keep you posted.

Spirit Of America - Week 2

The Northern Alliance team is in a solid second place behind Little Green Footballs in the Spirit of America Blogger Challenge, and we've been catching up all weekend.

For most of the past week, the NAoB team trailed LGF by between $2,300 and $3,000 - but over the weekend we pulled to just a little over $1,200 behind, and gaining on the 900 pound gorilla. Er, lizard.

Anyway, the competition is secondary to the goal of raising money to send to help rebuild Iraq via Spirit of America. Please, please pony up - a little bit of private help goes a long way.

Priorities

Red has some feedback for CNN:

I wanted to let you know that I sincerely appreciate the "Breaking News" email I received about Julia Roberts' safe and healthy delivery of twins. Thank you so much.

It was nice to NOT get a Breaking News email about outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma okaying a new election in order to stave off the crisis in the Ukraine...I am very very glad to see that you have your priorities in place.

The Ukrainian presidential crisis? Bah, humbug, whatEVer.

But I have been barely able to sleep or wash myself since Julia Roberts was confined to bed rest.

Say amen, everybody.

And Then There Was One...

For a brief, shining moment, the Northern Alliance Radio Network was at the front of a trend - blogger radio shows.

WBIX, a business-format talk station in Boston, has been running a weekly, one-hour show, Pundit Review. The NARN's Scott Johnson was one of the program's interview subjects. While I'm not sure if the hosts were particularly prominent bloggers before they started the show, it was certainly an encouraging development.

However, WBIX seems to be circling the drain, a victim of fraudulent management.

The bad news? The NARN is back to being a Trend of One.

The good news? I don't see anyone involved in the NARN or AM1280 The Patriot being perpwalked out of the studio any time soon.

Lack of Intelligence

The Strib is concerned about the "failure" to pass the intelligence "reform" bill:

Before it adjourned last weekend, the U.S. House failed to pass an urgently needed intelligence reform bill, the one developed out of recommendations by the 9/11 commission. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney supported the bill. House Speaker Dennis Hastert supported the bill. The 9/11 commission supported the bill. Families of 9/11 victims supported the bill. But it failed in the House? What's wrong with this equation?

What's wrong is that while the bill is something that, on its surface, is something that we all want, its actual implementation is completely wrong.

We don't need a national intelligence czar; indeed, centralizing intelligence under one common bureaucracy is not going to solve anything.

Competition among a variety of agencies (which we currently have), combined with communication among the agencies (which we don't, and which the "reforms" make only token, bureaucratized efforts to change) will improve intelligence, as the Israelis learned when they abolished their analogue to the Intelligence czar.

So - the most terror-stricken nation on earth rebukes the precise reform that the nattering nebbishes at the Strib are demanding; what does this tell us?

As the Strib would say - "What's wrong with this equation?"The Strib tries to analyze the situation:

Well, the bill would create a new national intelligence director and give the person appointed to that office control of most of the U.S. intelligence budget. The Pentagon, which now controls 80 percent of that budget, doesn't like that and has worked hard to defeat it. Pentagon officials have found willing accomplices in their hard-line supporters in the House. Especially upset was Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a strong friend of the Pentagon. Hunter's committee would lose oversight of much of the intelligence budget, and thus much of its power over intelligence, under the proposed reform.

It's all about a budget battle, in the Strib's special little world.

But behind the numbers - which seem to be the only way the left can analyze matters of intelligence and the military - are a few simple historical facts; the Central Intelligence Agency has had a forty year record of incompetence and failure, from the Bay of Pigs through Iraq. The Defense-controlled intelligence agencies - the DIA, NRO and NSA, plus the individual service intelligence branches - have a record of doing the jobs within their purviews - strategic intelligence, photo analysis, ELINT and cryptography, and tactical and operational intelligence, respectively - very, very well. Why fix the part that's not broken?

The editorial concludes:

The Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House. They also have run out the string on blaming President Bill Clinton for their problems. If Washington fails to enact strong, comprehensive intelligence reform soon, put a big, black check on the Republican side of the demerits ledger.

Only if it's a bad idea.

So why is it a bad idea?

So far, most of the "reforms" seem to be of the "bigger, better bureaucracy" variety. Duncan Hunter and James Sensenbrenner aren't impressed - why should I be?

On Message

Flash at Centrisity makes a key mistake; he quotes Ezra from Pandagan.

Flash says:

Ezra over at Pandagon nailed it yesterday:

Democrats, we all know, have the message clarity of a coed at her first kegger. But they're only partly to blame for it.

Ain't that the truth. It seems we are so intimidated by the Right Wing media machine, that we play catch-up most of the time. We need a more aggressive style. We need to be able to take command of any issue and claim our equal time.

Liberals up and down the scale, from atrocities like Ollie Willis to relatively rational guys like Flash - keep repeating this as if it's a generally-accepted fact; that there's a "right wing media machine". Let's look at the numbers:

Broadcast Networks with News Divisions:
Liberal: 3
Conservative: 0

Cable News operations:
Liberal: 3
Conservative: 1

Political Identification of Newspaper Reporters:
Liberal: 61 Percent
Conservative: 15 Percent

Presidential voting patterns of reporters and producers, on average, since 1984 (LA Times):
Democrat: 85% (give or take a few)
Republican: 9% (ditto)

So about that "conservative media machine" - you're saying that one cable network, the talk radio industry, and one in seven reporters dominate the entire rest of the media?

Flash continues:

Pandagon's method:

Democrats need to pick an outrage of the week and pound on it until they win. No diverting attention, no denunciations of new and upsetting bills, no distractions. We must pick and choose among the Republican's unjust, unfair, unpopular actions and settle on one to obsessively publicize and publicly reject.

Like you (collective) did with the Texas Air Guard stuff? With Florida in 2000? Like Halliburton and "Yummy Yummy Yellowcakes" and the successive injustices of every American military action in the past forty years and...

Go for it, Dems. It's served you so well so far.

Flash:

The left has been playing nice too long. It is time we put away the White gloves and chiffon dress, and slip on the boxing gloves and sweat suit. We need to confront the opposition with our own brand of delivery. And if we wait till the next election cycle, we'll lose again.

Question, for all of you: What was MoveOn? What has George Soros (and his little clacque of bought-and-paid-for bloggers) been?

And the notion of Oliver Willis in a chiffon dress - gaaaaah. Guess I don't need to fix lunch, anyway...

His Master's Voice

Patterico notes a shocking example of the NYTimes' reportage being driven by the Democratic Party (in the "I'm shocked - SHOCKED..." sense of the term):

Not only are New York Times editors regurgitating Democratic talking points in their editorials, they aren't even bothering to check them out first.

Someone needs to tell all those people that think the media is conservative...

Spirit of America

Remember - please give to Spirit Of America. The Northern Alliance and a bunch of our friends are in a competition with a bunch of other blogs to try to raise the most money, and the NAOB team is second only to the gigantic Little Green Footballs, raising over $6,000 as of today.

We have a little over two weeks to go in the competition. Please help; Spirit of America does an immense amount of good in Iraq, no matter what your stance of the war itself.

Click and give. That's all we ask.

Good Thing They Ban Guns, Huh?

A school massacre in China claims eight lives.

The killer used a knife.

A man armed with a knife killed eight people Friday at a high school in central China (search) and wounded four others, a government news agency reported.

Police were searching for the attacker following the killings in Ruzhou, a city in Henan province, the Xinhua News Agency said. It didn't give any other details.

That's not even the scary part.

It's part of a trend in Red China:

China has suffered a series of knife attacks in schools and day-care centers in recent months, prompting orders by the central government for schools to hire guards and tighten security.

The earlier assaults left one child dead and injured a total of 42 people.

A man who slashed 25 children with a kitchen knife at a grade school in eastern China was executed Wednesday. Though no one was killed in that attack, a court ruled that the penalty was justified because the violence was "especially cruel."

In August, an employee with a history of schizophrenia killed one student and slashed 14 children and three teachers at a Beijing kindergarten.

Scarier still? I'm trying to think what would make US schools, with their moronic "Zero Tolerance" laws for even mentioning weapons in the school building, any safer. American schools, like Chinese ones, are statutorily disarmed; nutbars and criminals know that they have at least a few minutes to wreak havoc before anyone can bring any lethal force against them.

Up Front

For all the criticism of the Embedded Reporter program that's happened in the two weeks since the shooting of a wounded insurgent by a US Marine (most of it misguided), the program continues to be a source of some great journalism, in the best tradition of Ernie Pyle.

Greg Palkot of Fox News' "Reporters Notebook" covers the Fallujah assault, and covers it memorably, tying the big picture to the view from within a single platoon in the Fifth Marine Regiment.

We'd seen our share of "Shock and Awe" (the air, artillery and tank barrage as the Marines entered Fallujah (search) was nothing short of a modern-day Dante's "Inferno"). We'd gone along and watched as Marines blasted in doors, scaled walls and turned up weapons and weapon-toters — the blood-thirsty terrorists that this mission was all about.

But again, it took until that Thursday for the difficulty of this campaign to sink in. That's when we watched as Lance Cpl. Clayton South was carried out on a stretcher from a house in the northwestern section of the city.

Calls for the abolition of the Embedded Reporter program are very premature. We are in the middle of creating a generation of reporters and producers that view our servicepeople as actual humans, something that's been missing from our "elite" media since World War II. That's important.

The Regulars

Max Boot is one of our best current military historians. Yesterday's column (via Powerline) is his thanks for one of our most underappreciated institutions; the volunteer military.

The whole article is worth a read, but this section is important:

In their post-Vietnam agony, all the services had trouble attracting recruits, and those who signed up tended to come from the bottom of the barrel — half were not even high school graduates. Low morale, racial tensions and drug and alcohol abuse were rife in the 1970s.

By the 1991 Persian Gulf War, those problems had evaporated. Entry standards for volunteers were higher, the quality of recruits improved, and the first-rate military we know today was created — a military force that is better educated than the civilian population, whose enlisted ranks are composed of high school graduates and whose officers are college graduates (many with graduate degrees). A force in which drug use has fallen into insignificance and morale and discipline are sky-high. A dedicated, courageous, professional force capable of knocking the stuffing out of just about any foe, anywhere in the world, at a moment's notice.

Some antiwar protesters want to spread the idea that the military is composed of victims who have no alternative but to become cannon fodder. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in front-line combat units in which everyone is a volunteer twice over.

Read the whole thing.

"We Don't Need No Copyright Lawyers..."

I always wondered - who were the kids who sang on the chorus of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall", the megahit single from 1979's The Wall (which remains the only Pink Floyd album that should not be used as mulch).

Today, we find out not only who they were, but that they're finally going to get paid.

They were a bunch of London-area fourth graders...:

The pupils from the 1979 fourthform music class at Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals after their teacher was approached by the band's management.

Now the 23 ex-pupils are suing for overdue session musician royalties, taking advantage of the Copyright Act 1997 to claim a percentage of the money from broadcasts.

...with a cool teacher...

Music teacher Alun Renshaw took the 13- to 14-year-old pupils out of lessons by to the nearby Britannia Recording Studios in Islington to record - without the head's permission.

...and a principal straight out of central casting...

Headteacher Margaret Maden banned the children from appearing on Top Of The Pops or in newspapers and refused to let the band make a video of them singing it...Ms Maden, 62, now a professor at Keele, said: "Alun Renshaw was a seriously good if somewhat anarchic music teacher. I was only told about it after the event, which didn't please me. But on balance it was part of a very rich musical education."

I smell a quirky British low-budget indie film starring John Postlethwaite!

Conservatives and Culture

Vox Day makes a great point in re the thread between Joe Carter, the Elder and I from Wednesday.

It's about culture; Carter decried the lack of it on talk radio; I agreed.

Vox adds:

That being said, the one thing that NPR has over talk radio (and that liberals have over conservatives) is in the area of culture and entertainment. Conservatives are simply terrible about giving any credence to this area; the very same people who will lament that there are no Christian or conservative alternatives to the atheist secular hit of the moment will assiduously ignore such alternatives even when they are brought directly to their attention. (And yes, I'm speaking from personal experience here.)

This touches on something I've been gnawing on for a long time.

I like the Laura Ingraham show - partly because she's an interesting (if far from flawless) host, partly because her show is a Pee-Wee's Playhouse of on-the-fly production earcandy that tickles the fancy of this radio geek from a purely technical perspective; her producers and engineers are amazing.

But Ingraham has lent the conservative movement a meme that doesn't serve us well in the long run - the whole "Shut Up And Sing" bit.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no less reticent about telling an artist or a singer where he or she is wrong, wrong, wrong than I am any politician or blogger or academic. And it's a fact - most art, movies, literature, music in this country is written and produced by people who are not conservatives, many of whom have contempt for conservatives. As to the contempt? It's their loss, and let's not worry about that for now.

The problem with too many conservatives is that they take that disagreement as a reason to reject not just the political beliefs of the artists, but art (and the culture it not only represents, but illuminates) itself.

There are three problems with this: Art (broadly defined) is not just a good thing; it is essential to being a human. Art with which you disagree can not only make you a better person, and a better conservative. And Art, being an essential human activity, is too important to leave to the other guys without a fight.

Leo Tolstoii wrote a wonderful essay, "What Is Art". It's long, but it's an essential read - and for my purposes, here's the crux:

#12. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

#13. As, thanks to man's capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.

#14. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar Houser.

#15. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

#16. And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

"Art is as important as speech" is a notion that's a hard sell for conservatives; we tend to be 9-to-5 guys and gals, with jobs or businesses and kids and mortgages and taxes to pay. We - all of us - tend to get enmeshed in the here and now. And yet exploring is an essential human need, like food or air or love; without any of them, parts of the human die, literally or mentally. We all can't climb into the Space Shuttle or start clambering up K-2 - but we can explore other people, other times and places and ideas, through art; Bach's rapturous communion with all things holy; Turner's visual time capsule of the Edinburgh Renaissance, and the excitement of one of the great eras of human history practically jumping off the canvas at you; Tolstoii's wonder at the mystical, juxtaposed with his horror at the brutality hidden in man's rejection of it; Eminem's vulgar but dazzling vocal gymnastics; the window into the Slavic soul in Russian monastic chants...and on, and on. Art - high and low - is a ticket to places and thoughts and emotions that don't exist in your world, or to a deeper understanding of the places and thoughts you do have.

"What? Eminem? Mitch, you're nucking futs!" Oh, relax. Bear with me here. If I catch my son talking like Eminem, he gets his mouth washed out with soap and he's grounded. But I'm amazed by his technique in the same way I'm amazed by Turner's use of the color yellow (long story) - and over the years, Eminem has had a song (yes, rap is music) or two that did what all of my absolute favorite art, music, literature, whatever does; reached down into the pit of my gut and found something that made me stand up and think "Damn. He pegged it. That's something I can relate to, that I feel. Maybe not always, but right now, I do. . The Brandenburg Concertos do that; excerpts from War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Tom Wolf's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bruce Springsteen's "The Price You Pay" and "Tunnel of Love" and Alison Krause's "And the Angels Cried" and the Clash's "The Card Cheat" and the old Soviet National Anthem (wierd, huh) and Joe Grushecky's "This Time The Night Won't Save Us" and, yeah, Eminem's "Lose Yourself" all do it. They all hit different places deep down in the pit of my liver, but they all do it.

Art of all kinds can speak to the truths buried deep inside all of us - which is why I'm unabashed in my admiration for the art of so many people who so actively denigrate, well, people like me. I think Garrison Keillor is a condescending, arrogant man and a political idiot - but not only is "A Prairie Home Companion" a wonderland of off-the-main-track art, but Keillor's humor itself has provided many wondrous, fascinating insights into my own rural scandinavian heritage; in and among the facile caricatures, Keillor does indeed have some amazing insights.

Art, as Tolstoii says, is a human essential. Beyond that, it's up to you. Sheila O'Malley, one of my favorite bloggers, said it well: "Two quotes:

"Agreement" is not what I look for, when I respond to art. I don't look to art to ... reflect the world as I wish it was. I don't look to art to do anything political at all. I look for it to entertain me, to move me, to transport me, whatever.

Exactly.

But since we're talking politics...

"But artists are all liberals!". Yes, for the most part they are. O'Malley, an actress and self-described "South Park Republican", wrote an interesting piece about a year ago, The Problem With Conservatives. This was an interesting quote:

Mark Rydell, film director of "On Golden Pond", came to my school and gave a seminar, and he talked about what it was like when he directed John Wayne, a man whose political beliefs were completely opposite from his own. "I thought of him as right-wing, completely against everything that I am for." Rydell described the surprise of Wayne's gentle and gentlemanly personality. And then he said something which I thought was so awesome. Rydell said, looking right out at us, "You know ... a lot of people who agree with me on certain issues ... are total jerks."

The echo chamber is not only self-referential and ultimately deadening. It's worse than that. If you're a tennis player, and only play against players who aren't as good as you, you'll never improve. You should always try to play against people who can beat you - that's how you improve.

And being engaged - as in "doing intellectual battle" - with the sentiments that drive art that both moves you and yet sparks your disagreement is a key facet in ones' personal, intellectual growth - the kind of growth conservatism needs. It's easy to be a dittohead (or, commensurately, one of Kos or Atrios' or Air America's blogs' innumerable comment zombies). About this time two years ago, I got into a kerfuffle with the Fraters' J.B. Doubtless over the response to the death of the Clash's front man, Joe Strummer. I was way into the Clash in high school, and remained a fan as I traversed the continuum from the 16-year-old liberal-with-doubts until I could finally admit I was a full-blown conservative five years later. And being able to explain why I rejected the superheated radicalism of some of the Clash's efforts (especially the hamfisted politicizing of Sandinista and Combat Rock) was a key factor in not only saying I was a conservative, but in being able to explain why I was.

Ditto Springsteen, an artist who's taken a lot of heat from conservatives this past year. His music has always whacked me upside the head; Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River and Born to Run were essential albums for the teenager who was struggling with wanting to strike off into the world on the one hand, deeply torn about hurting his father's feelings with the implied rejection of his path, his town, his choices (to this day, I think he wants me to be a high school teacher) on the other, and becoming aware of the consequences of taking the path of least resistance - there has never been an artist that's reached me like Springsteen has on those parts of my life. Tunnel of Love is (along with Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out The Lights) the best "watching in mute horror as your relationship/marriage crumbles) record of all time. Would my life have been a better place had I rejected the music because of the politics? No - indeed, I can't imagine having survived either of those parts of my life without that art available.

And yeah, he's an overt liberal. But on the other hand, albums like Nebraska and songs like Seeds and Spare Parts are about real people (or people we can recognize, which is even more important) and real ideas - and dealing with those things from the perspective of a conservative is difficult, revelatory and, in the end, very rewarding.

Art, like commerce, shapes our culture. Unlike commerce, art belongs to everyone, without merit or rational means of distribution; we all own it. Trying to engage in the culture war by saying "Shut up and sing" and otherwise ignoring, or rejecting, art is like trying to fight World War II by invading Mexico instead of France. Conservatives - and conservative media - need to realize this, if we want to truly affect our society.

How? By engaging art, not just as a consumer (although being a more critical consumer would go a long way), but as a critic, and ultimately as a creator.

More on this later.

Crawl To The Right

Meet the New Boss.

Incrementally different than the Old Boss.

The Economist has an excellent piece on the evolution this election brought to the media.

It's about blogs, true - but mostly, it's about options.

Money section:

Given America's fractious politics, it is easy to look at Mr Rather's retirement merely in terms of a left v right scorecard. But, more fundamentally, it is about choice.

Mr Rather's announcement of his (partial) retirement comes just a few days before Tom Brokaw resigns from his job anchoring NBC's evening news. That leaves ABC's Peter Jennings as the only survivor of the long-established triumvirate. But nobody imagines that the arrival of new blood at CBS and NBC will revive the fortunes of the network news. Most Americans now get their news from an ever-proliferating range of sources: not just Fox or CNN, but also foreign newspapers and even the innumerable original documents that are now available at the touch of a button. And fewer people regard any single news source—be it CBS News or the New York Times—as the embodiment of truth.

The erosion of the old media establishment probably does entail some shift to the right, if only because so many of the newer voices are more reliably pro-Republican than Mr Rather. But the new media are simply too anarchic and subversive for any single political faction to take control of them. There are plenty of leftish bloggers too: such people helped Howard Dean's presidential campaign. And the most successful conservative bloggers are far from being party loyalists: look at the way in 2002 that they kept the heat on the Republicans' then Senate leader, Trent Lott, for racist remarks that the New York Times originally buried. It is a safe bet that, if the current Bush administration goes the way of previous second-term administrations and becomes consumed by scandals, conservative bloggers will be in the forefront of the scandal-mongering.

Better idea for the GOP: knowing that we're out here and we, unlike the big lefty blogs, are not bought and paid for, simply don't do the scandal thing. It'll be much easier for everyone.

But I digress. The article is a must-read. Get on it.

Mr Rather's passing does not mean that the liberal orthodoxy is about to give way to a new conservative one. It means that all orthodoxies are being chewed up by a voraciously unpredictable news media, which is surely all to the good.

The Graceless Ones

Atrios contributor "Hecate" says about the Bush twins' birthday today:

Seems to Me

That by the time you're 23, you're old enough to start teaching preschool in Harlem and saving AIDS babies in Africa.. Just sayin'. Oh, and happy g****mn birthday.

But then, by the time you're (I'm guessing) on the far side of thirty, you'd think one would aquire a little thing called grace; you'd have learned not to let life's little petit morts turn you into a snarling, bitter little troll.

Well, that's what I'd think. But I've been wrong before.

New Years Day, 2004

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called New Years Day, about Thanksgiving. I said:

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

Last year, at the tail end of one of the most miserable years of my life, I added:

If anything, I have more to be thankful about this year: that I got through four months of unemployment and five more of drastic underemployment, in one piece; a new job; opportunities; relative stability.

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

And for that, I'm deeply thankful.

It's another year - as I wrote two years ago, and as it's been for the last 19 years, Thanksgiving is the beginning of the new year for me.

And what a year it was. Thanksgiving last year was vivid with memories of the year I'd just survived; this year's leitmotif is happier, with horizons expanding and life in general feeling a lot better.

I'm thankful for all the new people in Iraq and Afghanistan who've joined the world's democratic voter rolls. I'm deeply thankful for the troops that made it possible, as I am for NARN guys and the band of local bloggers whose roll Jo called the other day. And its been great; it's the closest thing to a social life I've had in a long time, and it's a fun group.

Of course, I'm thankful for my family - "Bun" and Sam, who are the maddening little lights of my life. I'm luckier than I can imagine.

Anyway, it's back to getting dinner ready. Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone. More posting tomorrow.

Michelle Malkin has her usual, wonderful run-down of Thanksgiving links.

Ad Campaigns While You Wait

Joe Does Radio

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has a cogent, comprehensive critique of radio in general, and especially conservative talk radio, in a post earlier today.

And, as Joe notes, my Northern Alliance Radio colleague Elder has a superb rejoinder over at Fraters that, honestly, covers most of my answers to Joe.

Which doesn't mean there's not a lot to talk about still.

As re music radio, Joe has the best critique I've read lately:

Pop and country stations used to play the “top 40” but now they repeat the same singles over and over throughout the day. No matter when I tune in I know I'll hear about Usher’s confessions or how Toby Keith loves his bar. The music from both genres has become so monotonous that I’m starting to get them mixed up in my head. Just the other day I imagined that Nelly and Tim McGraw were singing a duet. [Painfully true - Ed.]

We also have an “urban” channel that plays hardcore rap in case you need a soundtrack for a drive-by shooting and a “smooth jazz” station that will make you want to reach for your gat and bust a cap in somebody. [Its like he lives in the Twin Cities - Ed.] There is one exceptional “classic soul” channel that is worthy of praise. [OK, forget that "lives in the Twin Cities" bit - the excellent, syndicated "Solid Gold Soul" is long gone - Ed.]And of course you have the requisite “Christian” station playing sugary music so vapid and mawkish that the playlist must be programmed by Satan himself. [Joe has no idea how happy I am to hear this from an evangelical stalwart like him; I've long held that most contemporary Christian music is a tool for atheism at least, evil at worst - Ed.]

Fortunately, I still have another option available. There’s a place on my radio dial that I can turn to hear news, current events, intelligent conversation, and the latest on politics and culture; an oasis amidst the desert of the airwaves. And no, it’s not talk radio. It’s better. It’s NPR.

Joe goes on to give six reasons that NPR is "better" than talk radio. Elder's response is excellent, and covers just about everything I'd have said if I'd written first; read it, as well as Joe's response.

Not that I don't have something to add...

Joe's first reason: "It’s not part of the conservative monoculture" - Carter notes that all conservative talk hosts are white males, except Laura Ingraham, who "merely imitates being one". It's true. It's also the primary audience. Who better to speak to them? Does hearing from people just. like. you all. the. time get old? I'll agree with Joe; unless there's something else there, it certainly does. I can't listen to the likes of Hannity or O'Reilly or Mike Gallagher or, locally, Joe Soucheray or Kris Krok for that exact reason. For the hosts with something different - well, it's a different story. Doesn't matter to me if a host is white, female, hispanic, young or gay - as long as they have something interesting to say. That is, unfortunately, as rare a thing as Carter notes.

Joe's second point:There are no callers. Joe notes "On her recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Jeanne Garofalo refused to talk to callers. She claimed that when people call in to radio shows it does nothing but bore the audience. For once, Jeanne and I agree. The people who call radio shows rarely have anything interesting to say. Mostly they simply want to express that they either love the show’s host or tell them that they disagree with him". Joe is half right (and Garofalo is all wrong, on principle alone). This is an argument we had on the NARN a long time ago - why even take callers? One simple reason; even if the callers are boring, sycophantic time-sucks, they serve the same purpose that comments serve in blogs - letting the audience know they are included, that they are an integral part of the proceedings rather than just expected to sit and listen like docile units of audience product.

That being said, the sorry state of talk radio callers is something we can blame on Rush Limbaugh. Don Vogel taught me how to screen callers; "Mitch", he said, "There are four kinds of callers; great ones, mediocre ones, boring ones and crazy ones. We want to put the great ones and the crazy ones on first, because they help the show. We put the mediocre ones on when we want, because it makes the show less intimidating. And we keep the boring ones off." National talk shows have become largely abysmal at screening callers - most national shows seem to just take names, cities, and basic topics, and then take the callers in the order received. It's silly - a country station would never play a rap record just because someone sent it to the station - why would a station that tries to produce interesting, intelligent talk radio put on a dull, butt-kissing caller just because he or she dialed the number? The death of good screening as an essential element of show production has been a major detriment to good talk radio.

Joe's third point: No commercials - Not much we can do about this, although program directors and consultants that have their shows stop down more than four times an hour should be beaten with sticks.

Joe's fourth point: No Dittoheads - And it's here we see that Joe doesn't actually listen to NPR; the stations are their own dittoheads. How many times do we hear, especially during pledge week, how much better NPR is than the alternative - and NPR's listeners than the hoi-polloi rabble tuned in to Limbaugh? Who needs dittoheads when you wallow in self-adulation the way Garrison Keillor does?

Joe's fifth: It's not Rush - I rarely get to listen to Limbaugh. When I do, it's not to necessarily hear new ground broken; but as a born-again radio guy, dissecting Limbaugh's style is fascinating technical exercise.

Joe's sixth point: There's no Dr. Laura. True, but Ira Glass is at the very least an offsetting offense.

Not to be unbalanced, Joe has NPR's flaws dialed in as well:

In comparison, the flaws of talk radio allow NPR to stand out more than is warranted. Listening to NPR is like dating a charming and beautiful woman that has a semi-serious personality disorder; you're enchanted by her yet know you can’t commit to someone so troubled. But most criticism of the station is too simplistic, too concerned with its liberal bias. The problem with the station, though, runs much deeper than a mere penchant for left-leaning politics. NPR can be heard in almost every town in the country yet its worldview is a secular cosmopolitanism that is foreign to many Americans, particularly those in non-urban areas or in the “Red States.” The hosts of All Things Considered, for example, would have no trouble relating to an obscure avant garde musician, while a popular gospel singer would be considered an anthropological curiosity.

I can't add a single thought to this. It may be the best summation of NPR's flaws I've read.

And now, the fascinating part:

Still, NPR takes ideas, culture, art, and international affairs seriously. Conservative talk radio may touch on the same issues but generally they are either treated defensively (“In our next segment, the NEA's plan to ruin our children…”) or as purely political concerns (“Will the genocide in Darfur hurt Kofi Annan?”). Talk radio is merely topical while NPR attempts to be timely.

Mostly when I listen to NPR I wonder why conservatives can’t produce something similar. Why can’t we have discussions about art for art’s sake on the radio? Why can’t we have debates about the role of religion without it being subordinated to politics? Why have we ceded all culture to the “liberals?”...why can’t we have grant-funded/listener supported conservative radio? We conservatives have a weird bias toward ad-driven free enterprise. Paying for a station we loved would be compatible with free-market principles and would allow us to expand the range of conservative views. I’m not saying we should collectively turn off commercial radio – the Dittoheads need somewhere to go – but we could use more variety.

This is a brilliant question. I'm not overstating one iota.

Why, indeed?

As we watch the era of narrowcasting dawn all around us, why indeed has no entrepreneur hatched the notion of a highbrow conservative boutique narrowcasting service? Something that is for conservative listeners what "National Review" and "Weekly Standard" are for conservative readers? Something with either limited advertising (fewer spots, but charging premium rates for a premium audience) or supported by subscription (think XM or Sirius), with the programming and production wherewithal to tackle a much broader swathe of topics; we'll fight the culture war from within culture, rather than outside of it; we'll fight the intellectual war with brain, rather than just heart and sweat and, yeah, occasionally too much bile.

(Note to entrepreneurs: The Northern Alliance would be happy to anchor the morning show. Let's talk).

PS - I'm gratified that Joe is so complimentary of the Northern Alliance Radio Network. Thanks!

Perestroika on the Peninsula

As rumors swirl that Kim Jong-Il has been shot, the Pyongyang regime is apparently seeking a return to the six-partite talks that Kim poo-poohed:

North Korea wants urgently to restart six-party talks on its nuclear programmes, but is still demanding certain conditions be met, a top U.N. official has told South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

North Korea agreed with the format of the talks, Yonhap quoted Jean Ping, president of the U.N. General Assembly, as saying on Thursday. Officials told him during a visit that Pyongyang was committed to denuclearising the Korean peninsula, it said.

Let's think back to the eighties for a moment.

It was 1986; the United States had gone, in ten short years, from full-out appeasement and military decay to outright confrontation with Soviet expansionism; we were supporting anti-Communist movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia; in 1983, we'd looked a Communist regime in the eye and kicked it in the groin. We were not only deploying Pershing II and Cruise missiles to Europe - the doomsday weapons of last resort - we were adding conventional troops as well, troops with the equipment and doctrine and, increasingly, technology to meet the Warsaw Pact army in head to head combat and, maybe, repel it. The western Navies, led by the US, had built up to the point that the expansion of the Soviet fleet as a sea-denial force was effectively neutralized.

This, combined with the economic decay of the Soviet system, rendered forty years of hard-line confrontation with the West obsolete. To a Western nation, that would have been at worst a neutral thing - but the Soviet ruling elite was faced with a conundrum. Unable to defeat the West in out-and-out conflict, it had to be able to beat the West in the battle for the hearts, minds, wallets and lifestyles of the people; the Politburo knew it had no chance as it was.

So Mikhail Gorbachev was ushered to the front of the stage, talking of Glasnost (transparency) and Perestroika (restructuring). In retrospect, American leftists, desperate to redeem their movement's largely shameful performance at foreign policy since the death of JFK, claim that Gorbachev took office as an agent of the voluntary resignation of the USSR from the world stage - but that's absurd. Gorbachev's initial mandate was to save the Communist system, to paste on a human face that would allow the system a fall-back position that would preserve the power and position of the ruling caste. Americans, with our tradition of peaceful transition of power, have little knowledge of how dictatorships transfer control; it usually involves the losing party getting shot in the back of the head.

Gorbachev failed in his primary mission, preserving Communism, of course - but to Gorbachev's credit, he was able to bring the system to a relatively soft landing, without the bloodshed that attended the fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania, and of many other dictators through history. The key point to remember is that Gorbachev's initial mission was to save Communism, not to bury it.

As much as Kim Jong Il is identified as the face of the Pyongyang regime, he's far from the only shareholder in the enterprise. The world's most massive police state was administered by many chiefs - who must regard the consecutive passing of international Stalinism, Communism, the "Third World" "system" that shielded them from so much international opprobium, and finally the unmolested network of terror-sponsoring states as harbingers of what awaits them if the masses they've starved, beaten, murdered and made disappear manage to grab the truncheon away from them.

In 1983, the invasion of Grenada sent a message to the Russians; we were not playing the game anymore.

Today?

North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China have met for three inconclusive rounds of talks but a fourth set for September did not materialise. Analysts said Pyongyang wanted to assess the outcome of the U.S. election.

North Korea has demanded the withdrawal of what it calls a hostile U.S. policy before it will return to dialogue.

And on November 2, the people of the US said "no"; our policy would remain hostile to the thugs who have starved, beaten and tortured the people trapped north of the 38th Parallel this past 59 years.

If indeed Kim has caught terminal Makarov Flu, look for some of those other stakeholders to put forth someone to present a new front to the West; that new face might be a Korean Gorbachev, or someone with a different version of the Kim-like hard line, but that person like Gorbachev will have a mission; keep the status quo in effect as long as possible, to allow the current stakeholders to retain their power - or at least, their lives.

If Kim is indeed dead, President Bush needs to go to Seoul, and give the 21st-century equivalent of the "Tear Down the Wall" speech - to send the same message to the tortured, beaten, starved people north of the world's last Iron Curtain that Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech sent to the zeks in the Gulag 20 years ago - "We remember you. We know you're there. You're not forgotten. In so doing, Bush will send the message to their overlords; "In history's long term, you are not the sharks. You are the chum. And you have millions of sharks penned up in camps, beaten, intimidated; when you stop beating them and shooting them and holding them hostage, they will smell you in the water, and then you are done".

Today, I'm thankful that we're at a juncture where this might just be possible.

Year of the Blog

World Magazine's Gene Edward Veith and Lynn Vincent take what may be the best look at blogs' achievements in the past year.

Highlight, featuring the Commish:

What bloggers did with the Swift Boat Veterans and the exposure of the Rathergate forgeries arguably played a role in the reelection of President Bush. Liberal blogs helped launch the candidacy of the anti-war candidate Howard Dean—and raise money for him—which pulled John Kerry to the left, which, in turn, may have also helped reelect President Bush. On election night, blogs leaked the result of early exit polls that heralded a Kerry victory, leading to Democrats' euphoria and Republicans' depression until the actual vote count came in. Mr. Hewitt believes that left-wing bloggers were part of a deliberate disinformation campaign, what he calls "black blog ops," which signals the potential of blogs to be misused. But it was also conservative bloggers on election night who warned their readers not to take those early reports seriously.

Read the whole thing for an excellent summation of an amazing year.

Nick Coleman - Bigot of Low Expectations

Forget the criminals. It's you - the lowly Twin Citian, especially in the inner city and the first ring 'burbs who doesn't "know stuff", who is merely trying to raise good kids in a culture where half of their influences glorify violence, and the other half poo-pooh the common-sense measures that would protect us against violence - who is the problem. Did you know that?

Nick Coleman does.

Today's column? discusses the double-shooting last week in Minneapolis. You may recall the shooting (and then again in Minneapolis, you may not); two young men were shot under fishy circumstances. Both were dropped off at supermarkets. One of the men, 20-year-old Tremaine Finley, died of his wounds.

Coleman says:

Tremaine was 20 when he died, shot during some kind of botched carjacking, it turns out. At first, news reports said it was a drug deal gone bad, which is a coded way people have of dismissing the deaths of young men of color in this country: "Don't worry about it; it's no skin off our nose."

"When one of these guys gets killed, I don't consider it a drug deal gone bad," one reader graciously took the time to write me the other day. "I consider it a drug deal gone good."

Bigots love bloodshed that confirms their prejudice.

And bigger bigots manipulate facts, and people's beliefs, to fit theirs. Bigots like Nick Coleman.

Coleman is no stranger to jiggering facts and manipulating emotions - as two weeks ago when he mis-reported the facts and context behind Alabama's rejection of a constitutional amendment that would have removed segregationist language from its state constitution (unreported by Coleman; the rejection was because of an unrelated rider to the bill that would have increased taxes), the better to depict a Republican state as a nest of Jim Crow-era bigots sprung to life in the present.

This column is worse.

If you live in one of the inner-city neighborhoods that have been under siege by the drug gangs - for the past twenty years in some cases - hearing gunfire and screaming at night, sirens blasting past in the wee hours, carefully scanning cars that are parked too long in front of your house, patching the occasional bullet hole or fixing the odd shot-out window (my house: Two bullet holes, one window in 11 years - and I live in a good neighborhood), one might be forgiven for occasionally, in a fit of pique or fatigue, even depression at the realization you've invested much money and years of your life building a life and a family where you're at and being unable to move, and thinking it'd be nice if the vermin - skin color irrelevant - would do the moving, the worrying, the dying for a while.

And when the whole story comes out - as it did in the Finley shooting - most of us catch a breath. One of the good guys died. Again. The f*cking vermin won another one, damn them to hell:

Despite a learning disability that made writing a challenge, he made the B honor roll at Roosevelt High School. And though he stood only 5 feet 6, he became the school's most valuable football player and went on to the University of Minnesota for 18 months.

Yet despite those successes and his efforts as part of community groups seeking to steer young people away from violence, Finley, of Minneapolis, died last week at the hands of a carjacker who tried to steal his mother's car in the Longfellow neighborhood.

I used to live in Longfellow; it was a neighborhood, as they say, "in transition"; a neighborhood of little bungalows built by blue-collar Germans and Scandinavians in the twenties and thirties, with old people and young families and immigrants who've moved up and out of Phillips tend their lawns and pick up toys off the lawn, and occasionally watch those suspicious neighbors with all the traffic.

And as South Minneapolis - the good people, anyway - mourn the death of one of the good kids they raise and send into the world with their hopes and prayers, and go home after the services and see the worthless vermin patrolling their streets, they pick up their Star Tribune and read Nick Coleman attacking...who? The worthless piece of humanesque filth who shot two men for a car?

No. He's attacking the mourners. And you, and I, the ones who live with and around this crap, the ones who fight it daily.

And we see the way the game is played among the elite, in their cozy homes in Crocus Hill; we who want our tax dollars spent to stamp out the vermin rather than subsidize them are heartless; we who want the ability to defend ourselves against the vermin are Neanderthals; we who have been worn down by the destruction of our neighborhoods by these vermin are racists.

Nick Coleman - who hasn't the balls to live in the neighborhoods he writes about, nor the integrity to face his critics - is lecturing you, the mother and father in South Minneapolis and Frogtown; you, in his special little world, are the problem; if you merely weren't so ignorant, so racist, things would improve.

Come on out, Nick Coleman! Sell your home in Crocus or Mac-Groveland or whatever upper-middle-class enclave you're holed up in, and buy a place - invest your future - in Powderhorn or Camden or Swede Hollow or in the Midway south of Thomas! Learn whereof you speak!

And while you're at it, come to Saturday's Northern Alliance show and talk with your critics. You might learn some "stuff".

You know where to reach me.

The Challenge

The Northern Alliance is proud to join in a benefit for Spirit of America, an organization that helps supply our troops in Iraq with the supplies they need to help rebuild Iraq, one heart and one mind at a time.

Leading bloggers are competing to raise funds to benefit the people of Iraq. 100% of all donations go to needs selected by these bloggers. Many of our projects support requests made by Americans serving in Iraq (Marines, Army, SeaBees) for goods that help the Iraqi people. Other projects directly support Iraqis who are on the front lines of building a better future for Iraq.

So please, give 'til it hurts - it's among the worthiest causes out there.

Naturally, we're in competition with Jeff Jarvis and team of big media allstars. This is a David and Goliath matchup. And while we want to vanquish them in this battle, Jarvis does make an excellent point:

It's always important to emphasize that Spirit of America isn't about left or right, anti- or pro-war. It's about people. It's about Americans helping Iraqis realize the dreams of any people for freedom and democracy and free speech.

This is a new breed of charity that identifies need on the ground and that lets you decide where to put your donations.

So let's all step up!

UPDATE: Wow - the NARN contributions have leapt into the lead! Thanks - and if you haven't contributed, please do!

BUMP AND UPDATE II: Wow - we're smoking them so far. If you're on the fence, let's seal the deal with some prizes!

Second Prize: You get to watch Captain Ed do his Irish Dancing.

First Prize: You don't.

UPDATE 2: Wow - over four grand. Thanks! The threat worked! Now we need to beat Little Green Footballs. More productive threats later today!

All I Want For Christmas, Part II

One of these years...

Retrospective: Too Much Work

Looking through my archives today, I saw this poem I wrote in this blog in December of 2002, explaining a drought in my blogging:

Twere the days after Christmas, and all through the joint,
Mitch was stuck in meetings; staring at PowerPoint.
The quarterly specs nearly ready do dump,
on all the unfortunate programmer chumps.

When what, to my wandering eyes, should occur
but a manager who, up his butt, had a burr.
There were I's to be dotted! T's to be crossed!
Nostrils were flared! Tempers were lost!
Requirements changing! Changing Required!
And so, the designs I'd so lovingly squired
all through the quarter were brutally altered.
Artistry bowdlerized, function befaltered.

When, six hours later, from the meeting he bolted
(five minutes before the crew might have revolted),
he turned at the door, and said with a grin,
"Happy Christmas to y'all - 'til we do it again!"

Of course, a week later my real drought - my nearly-a-year out of work - began with a bang, so I should be careful...

Rather Not

Dan Rather retires:

Rather, 73, has come under fire for his 60 Minutes report on President Bush's service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. The report relied on documents that cast Mr. Bush's service in a negative light. Critics charged that the documents were forgeries, and CBS News was unable to vouch for their authenticity. An independent panel is now investigating the matter.

Of course, it had nothing to do with Memogate. Nothing. NOTHing.He portrayed his decision to leave the anchor chair as a "mutual decision" made last summer.

The veteran newsman also said the decision was not influenced by the National Guard story. He said the purpose of announcing his decision now -- prior to the release of a report on the story by an outside panel -- was to separate the two events.He has critics!

Rather has long been a target of critics who accused him of a liberal bias, and there's even a Web site devoted to that notion. [One? Ed] The National Guard story sent those critics into overdrive. Rather's announcement Tuesday led one Republican congressman from Pennsylvania to issue a statement saying, in effect, good riddance.

"Dan Rather has been a legend in media for more than a quarter-century to many people around the world, but not to me," Rep. Bill Shuster said. "For the entirety of his career, Rather has allowed his liberal bias to shape the news rather than report it."

Bill Shuster gets his first drink free when we meet.

We Oughtta Be In Pictures

First things first; support your local artistic community. Chuck from Blogumentary has released his blogumentary, entitled Blogumentary. Go see it.

I'd like to go see it, actually, although time never permits.

A long time ago, Chuck asked the various members of the Northern Alliance Radio Network about filming one of our broadcasts. Except for the Powerguys, we all declined for a variety of reasons; the logistics of the studio down in The Bunker, doubt that Chuck would film our "good" sides...

...and, of course, the knowledge that whatever we said or did, it would inevitably be cut into a caricature designed for people who already had their minds made up about conservatives, and conservative bloggers, by an auteur who had our role in his film plotted out long before filming began.

As this review of Blogumentary shows, we probably weren't wrong.

The guy - his blog is called "Cheek", and it's on blogspot so I can't see it from work and get his actual name - writes:

And so the Blogumentary began...My favorite moment was when the whole crowd laughed uproariously as one of the PowerLine dudes [That'd be John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker - Ed.] sorta sneers and cocks his head briefly after an extravagant put-down of the New York Times...Fair and unbalanced, Chuck gives equal time to the right-wing dudes who bum-rushed their way up to Dan Rather's office...Despite my prole misgivings, I was impressed that Chuck portrayed the lefty blogosphere as activists and sturdy campaigners, while the right-wing pajama-boyz mostly fire quills at the New York Times and force Dan Rather to apologize to the world. In other words, the liberals are creators, and the conservatives of destroyers.

Where to start with this?

I haven't seen the movie yet; unaccountably, the Northern Alliance guys didn't get invited to the media screening. [Chuck - you gotta cover the little things in this business - Ed.] I'm not sure if Chuck Olsen portrayed last October's events as a "bum rush", or if Mr. Cheek just saw what he wanted to see, but it was more a matter of Powerline (and Little Green Footballs) catching Sixty Minutes in a bald-faced lie. Again, it's the little facts that count, here.

As to conservative bloggers "destroying" - wow. On the one hand, I suppose that all us guys in our pajamas and living rooms have to be careful so that we don't accidentally go and "destroy" any multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates. Kudos to Mr. Cheek and, if applicable, Chuck Olsen for preventing that.

On the other hand, if we can be accused, singularly (Powerline, Captain Ed) or collectively (conservative blogs as an institution) of playing a part in destroying the credibility of a corrupt institution, and mangling its ability to lie to the people with impunity, then I for my little part am happy to be a destroyer.

But in fact there is much more. Because it's in the "destruction" that we are indeed creating something much bigger; a huge, decentralized, omnimathic network of citizen journalists that is vastly greater than the sum of its parts. The parts - tens of thousands of engaged, intelligent people, each of them a jack of a few trades, a master perhaps of a few things - aren't journalists; we have day jobs. But together, piecing our disparate bits of knowledge together, we have the resources of a hundred newsrooms, the background of a dozen networks; we "know" more "stuff" than 25 million Nick Colemans...Colemen? Anyway, we are creating in the same way the schmuck minuteman at Concord created - by taking aim at a little piece of the status quo, and destroying it. We are bringing journalism - and the check and balance it provides to government - back to the citizens themselves, which is a key goal if democracy is to survive and thrive.

Finally, for all the palaver about Dean's internet campaign, the blogs of the right dominated the internet political game. They - we! - out-organized the Democrats online. We told a better story. And when the turning point of the campaign - the Swift Vets - came along, we were the ones who turned the flank of the mainstream media and the largely bought-and-paid-for heavyweight leftyblogs, and got the truth out to the people.

More importantly? We presented a front - a huge, discordant, unruly front, but a front nonetheless - that could appeal to people in and out of the Party, of all ages and places and walks of life; I would never dream of sending my (very Democrat) parents to cesspools like Daily Kos or Democratic Underground. For that matter, I'd be hard-pressed to find a lefty blog that would appeal to my various African-American, Hispanic and Asian friends, or older voters, or voters who weren't white, college-educated and middle-class, many of whom were on the fence politically; finding conservative blogs speaking to each of those niches was simple. Finding a blog for my liberal friends? Among the bigger leftyblogs, you can have any type of author you want, as long as he or she is middle-class, 22-35 years old, college-educated, and whose approach to political writing extends from the snark to the dismissive snark; I can't imagine the likes of Atrios, Oliver Willis, or Pandagon appealing to anyone outside that demographic or level of reading comprehension. The election seems to have unhinged even the next level of leftyblogs, the Matt Yglesiases and Josh "ua Micah" Marshalls; as a group, they all seem to be substituting chanting "Reality Based!" for actually basing their writing in reality. In short, they are aggressively exclusive in a way that conservative blogs as a group are not.

Both conservative and liberal blogs have their "attack" impulses; Cheek guy notes:

I relayed this epiphany to Chris Dykstra during the post-film crowd-spill, but then I realized that Chuck did include a bit about how Josh Marshall took down Trent Lott. So my theory is still a bit ragged, but probably right.

"Ragged" in the sense that as re stereotypes about conservatives and liberals in the blogosphere, it's completely wrong, but it's fair to say that both sides have their constructive and "destructive" motives.

The difference? Leftyblogs seem to try to find a way to fit into existing lefty hierarchies; notice the way the leftyblogs rushed to defend CBS? Of course, so many lefty bloggers are part of existing hierarchies; Atrios and Willis work for George Soros (it's a lot easier to blog when you know where your next paycheck is coming from); Drum and Yglesias and others depend for their livelihood on liberal publications.

Conservative blogs seem a lot more invididualistic (although I'll admit my impression comes from reading dozens of lefty blogs that each try harder than the last to try to ape Atrios' snarky, too-cool-for-school disdain for...everything).

As to documentaries? Go to see Blogumentary, Chuck's tale of "Pepys, laughs, contemplated suicides, bittersweet memories, gory injuries, Chuck's gigantic face, Sharyn's Little Man's even more gigantic face, fraudulent identities, thrusts, parrys, bald dudes, cats", of political inside baseball with Joe Trippi and whatever. And then think about this; there's another great story to be told here. Powerline and Captain Ed and Charles Johnson's David Versus Goliath struggles against the big media, and the growth of a genuinely organic media that is slowly slipping the bonds of traditional blogging (the NARN is only the beginning) and infuriatingly impervious to the bloviation of the bigs...

...you know. The story that Blogumentary apparently doesn't tell at all (or so it seems). The story you don't see in the major media, or anywhere else but in thousands of conservative blogs, and one blogger-driven radio show.

Firepower Healing

Yesterday, I commented on a piece in Slateinvolving a liberal writer going to a rifle range.

Yesterday's bit was mainly on the purpose the gun issue serves - as a bellwether on many other social issues, as they were and continue to be in Minnesota as re the concealed carry issue.

But the piece itself, by Emily Yoffe, rates some comment.

It's actually fairly interesting, and a lot more even-handed than one would expect from Slate:

In Human Guinea Pig I engage in unusual activities and hobbies. This time I wanted to see if a novice—a nervous novice—could in a few lessons learn how to be a decent shot. I do understand that there is nothing unusual about owning firearms. Surveys show almost half of American households have them.

And she touches on the comedy of errors that is urban gun control:

But I live in the District of Columbia, which has one of the nation's toughest gun laws. Residents are not allowed to own handguns, and if one of us feels a need to discharge a weapon, we are supposed to file a request with the chief of police asking for permission. (He must spend all his time answering yes, as D.C. has one of the country's highest murder rates.)

Cultural divide? Natch:

So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.

Yoffe's education? Fascinating? Check:

Ricardo had me watch a short film as part of my gun-safety training, and in it the narrator explained that guns are simply machines. Machines can't hurt you, he said; the danger lies in the person operating the machine. OK, I thought, but if I am inept in the handling of my blow-dryer, I am unlikely to vaporize anyone's kidney. As he went through his safety lectures, Ricardo emphasized which firearms would be best for my "personal protection," even though as a District resident this was virtually out of the question, and even though I assured him that no one was after me. Undeterred, his top recommendation was a pump-action shotgun. "Nothing else makes that sound," he said, and even I could conjure up that ka-chung. "Hearing that sound alone can negate the need to fire. It makes such a sweet song."

Now, an aside.

I've been involved in guns and the victim rearmament movement since I bought my first rifle, when I was 22 (I wasn't raised around guns in my house, more's the pity). To my knowledge, I was the first radio talk show host in the Twin Cities to actively stump for a rollback of Minnesota's parochial and racist concealed carry laws (in 1987, about the time Florida started the national move toward liberalized carry laws for the law-abiding).

Understand that the pro-victim-disarmament movement has never had much in the way of evidence supporting their stance - and that even what they put up as evidence never actually stands up to detailed scrutiny. That's gotta be frustrating. It's perhaps understandable that so many victim-disarmament advocates have acted out on that frustration; I've been called a lot of names over the years, had ehough hardballs lobbed at my character and anscestry and morality enough to make a pretty good make a pretty good triple-A rhetorical shortstop.

And when the frustration reaches its peak, they all - all of them, every one, from the most moronic Saint Paul DFL petty hack up to Cacklin' Catherine Lanpher (in her pre-MPR stint at KSTP-AM) - falls back on what they consider the nuclear option:

I think guns are a substitute for some sexual shortcoming on the gun owner's part [chuckle chuckle]

You can thank ABC News for empirically disproving that particular slander, at least as far as Republicans and gun owners intersect (proving something I'd believed for a very long time) - but there is something about guns...

...no. Not about guns. Guns are like power tools - finely-crafted metal objects that bring out the toy geek in lots of boys and, by the end of Yoffe's article, quite a few girls too.

But shooting, itself - the act of going to the range, setting out your targets, loading up, blasting off a magazine, and repeating the process - it's...

...nothing like sex. Sex is pheremones and emotion and casting irrationality to the wind. Shooting is adrenaline, logic and technique. Different hormones, different frame of mind, different everything. The only thing they have in common? A day at the range busting caps in paper targets is the second-best stress relief there is.

And yet, Yoffe notices something else:

Before I slinked back to my now-embarrassing Volvo, I stopped to watch two men shooting. They were fast and fluid and the targets shattered one after another. I am happily married, but I found myself thinking these two—whose faces I couldn't even make out—were awfully attractive. It brought to mind a newspaper article from a few years back. After the death of Hugh Culverhouse Sr., the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his various entanglements caused his widow to sue his estate. During the court proceedings, it was revealed that Culverhouse had an affair with the wife of a now-deceased television anchor. Culverhouse's son testified that the caretaker of his father's ranch told him that the caretaker would escort the anchor's wife and Culverhouse "into the woods and they would shoot guns and basically have sex." I thought the article was hilarious at the time. Now I understood.

All these years, and I never had a clue. It was all transference. It's the other guys, the victim-disarmament fops, with the hang-ups. They are the ones that need a little, dare I say it, Firepower Healing.

They can then know, as many of us on the right do, that there are few things in the world hotter than a woman with a shotgun...

...aimed at a target, of course.

Anyway - read the whole thing.

Comparison

Mitch's vacations: Load the kids and a lot of crap into the car, drive to North Dakota or maybe Chicago once in a while.

Red's vacations? Just read.

[Audible sigh]

The Zone

My fingers flew without effort over the keyboard. Websites, then programs, even the operating system itself could barely keep up with me. I had been at the laptop for hours without a break, and in my mind's eye, watching myself from the distance that happens when your frontal lobe gets a mild sunburn from sitting at the monitor, I had entered an altered, higher state of human-computer consciousness. My mind was absorbing stimuli at low and high levels, processing them, and returning them through my fingers so quickly and so without discernable effort that I felt like I had gotten inside the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop not only of the various sites and programs I was working with, but of MS Windows (T) itself. It wasn't as if I were a human working the computer, or even a peripheral that was tuned to the same wavelength as the computer; I was ahead of the computer at a system level. I had gotten inside the Matrix.

That, or all the crap my son has been downloading has slowed the computer down again. I haven't decided which it is yet.

Strike One Meme

The meme: "Lookit those hypocritical Republicans! They're changing the rules because their guy DeLay is going to get indicted!"

The truth?:

[Delay] is unlikely to be indicted by a state grand jury probing alleged campaign finance violations in Texas, according to an official involved in the investigation.

"No, no, I really don’t think DeLay will be indicted," the official told CBSNews.com. "And to be quite honest, [DeLay’s] lawyers know that."

Anticipating a possible indictment by a state grand jury in Travis County (Austin) Texas, House Republicans last week took steps to protect DeLay's position by changing a party rule that would have forced him to step aside as majority leader if indicted on a felony charge. The change will leave it up to a committee of GOP House members to decide whether an indicted leader should step down.

The truthier truth?

DeLay and other Republicans have asserted that the Travis County probe was politically motivated. The Travis County district attorney, Ronnie Earle, is a Democrat.

What? A Democrat partisan staging a partisan indictment on less-than-wobbly grounds? Wow. That's so Texas.

Good thing that never happens in Minnesota, right?

Here We Go Again

The tragedy came from nowhere:

At least five people were killed and three wounded in a multiple shooting in northwestern Wisconsin Sunday afternoon. After a confrontation over the use of a deer stand, a 36-year-old St. Paul man apparently chased some of the victims through a heavily wooded area, authorities said.

The perp? As usual, nobody would have guessed:

Chai Soua Vang, 36, was arrested early Sunday evening in Sawyer County, Wis., said Sawyer County Sheriff's Deputy Jake Hodgkinson. Vang lives on St. Paul's East Side, police spokesman Paul Schnell said...Vang, lives in an aging, two-story house on St. Paul's lower East Side.

He and his family apparently moved into the neighborhood earlier this year, said John Black, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood who lives across the street.

Black and his wife, Cheryl, said Sunday night that the family pretty much kept to themselves, rarely interacting with neighbors. They said they never spoke with the man, but described him as "real clean-cut" and "nicely dressed."

The media's response?

Predictable as Old Faithful

They were killed with an SKS assault-style rifle, he added.

Even more predictable? There'll be a Nick Coleman column on the subject.

Back in - I think - 1988, after the Stockton Massacre, Nick Coleman wrote a (typically snide, ill-informed) column about a day he spent haulting a civilianized "assault" rifle - an AK-series, if memory serves - around in the woods, musing on how inappropriate he felt it was as a hunting rifle. Expect a reprise, and a further spate of uninformed reaction.

Attitude Check

Slate has a regular "column" (the word feels a bit dated in the online world) called the Human Guinea Pig; the correspondent does things that the readers don't, won't or can't try themselves.

This week's episode: The Pig shoots a gun.

That's worth a (upcoming) piece on its own.

But 'til then, Shannon Love's response is a great one:

So what was the wild, dangerous thing that some reader sent the "Human Guinea Pig" out to do?

She went to fire a gun at a shooting range.

Nothing so reveals the red/blue divide so starkly as the blue-zoners' prissy and often hysterical attitude towards guns. Reading this article is like watching the old movie where a city slicker tries to mount a horse at a dude ranch and ends up facing the wrong way. I find it uproariously funny that going to shoot a gun is the subject of breathless journalism. What's up for next week, power drills?

Love both pegs the attitude perfectly and, I think, sells the actual article in Slate (of which more later).

But where the piece intersects with policy, it shows part of the red/blue culture war that's fascinating:

Red-zoners just can't take blue-zoners seriously when they talk about guns because they come off as hysterical, pitchfork-waving lunatics. Their perception of the dangerousness of firearms is so over-the-top as to reduce their arguments to absurdity. They sound as credible as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson describing the nightlife in San Francisco. Yet blue-zoners expect red-zoners to defer to them in political debates about guns and get angry and confused when they don't. They can't relate to the perspective of the red-zoners at all.

Guns have been a leading indicator of the red-blue culture war for longer than we knew there was one. Easy example; Minnesota's drift from DFL gulag to incipient red state has been presaged by the fortunes of, among other things, the Minnesota Personal Protection Act's voyage from wild hair to dark horse to law of the state (and, fittingly and frustratingly enough, its current limbo-by-judicial fiat).

And it'll continue to - because guns, especially handguns and the faith in self and implied rejection of government supremacy they represent, are the exposed, throbbing nerve of the battle between red and blue.

Interesting

What impact did blogs have in this past campaign?

Blogpulse has the numbers.

Lots and lots of them.

(Via Ruffini)

Signs I'm Just A Tad Spoiled

Reading Patterico noting the drop in his traffic since the election, it reminded me of my never-ending mood swing when it comes to traffic to this site.

When I started this blog, I got 8-15 hits a day for the first eight months; the 2002 election and my Keillor pieces put me on the map, but after the instalanches were done, I was at maybe 200 visitors a day - and very happy about it.

Last year, when I was under-or-unemployed most of the year and could spend a couple of hours a day on the blog, traffic climbed laboriously to about 400 visitors a day - where it stayed until this past March.

And then it was off to the races, peaking at over 3,200 visitors a day for most of October.

We all knew it would tail off after the election. All I'm saying is that if you'd have told me a year ago that I'd be bummed about getting "only" 2,000 visitors a day, I'd have said you were nuts.

And I should just shut up and say "Thanks!"

Thanks!

Sign of the Season

You can tell the change of the seasons in my little neighborhood here in the Midway of Saint Paul.

You know summer is ending when the Hamline University kids start moving in - and that fall has truly fallen when you find yourself stepping over little puddles of vomit along Hewitt Avenue.

You know it's almost furnace season when another of my neighbors throws her annual end-of-season party with all of her outrageously alcoholic offspring; the smell of burning furniture reminds you that it's time to check the batteries in your CO detector.

And you know it's nearly time for the first snowfall when the lady five houses down - who, with her husband is deeply bipolar - spends her annual two weeks in extended treatment; it was only a few nights ago that she rang the doorbell complaining that her husband, her landlady and the clerk at Superamerica were plotting to kill her.

Tis the season!

Doing His Job

Diane West in the WashTimes on The Marine:

"Enlightened" people everywhere are clucking — but not over the heinous execution of CARE's Margaret Hassan, the mutilated bodies found on Fallujah's streets, the beheading chamber discovered by U.S. soldiers, the Taliban-like decrees threatening death for Fallujah women who don't "cover," or the bomb-making workshops seized before creating more craters of carnage. They emote over the death of a terrorist dedicated to all of the above.

Liberals - many of them, including a few who should know better - treat this incident like a police shooting gone wrong.

It's not.

...I have heard nothing, nada, zilch that indicates this Marine was doing anything besides trying to preserve life and limb in his unit while fighting to wrest control of Fallujah for liberated Iraq.
"In a combat infantry soldier's training, he is always taught that his enemy is at his most dangerous when he is severely wounded," commented Charles Heyman, a senior analyst with Jane's Consultancy Group in Britain. And the jihadist enemy we find in Iraq — comrade in both faith and arms with the terrorists of Beslan, Bali, Jerusalem, Madrid, and Manhattan — are even more dangerous wounded than others.
Some are rigged with suicide-belts to detonate in extremis. Boobytrapped corpses — a Judeo-Christian taboo Muslim jihadists overcome, I suspect, in their perverse belief that killing infidels on earth earns them virgins in paradise — are a common hazard in hotspots. Even one of our beheaded hostages in June, poor devil, was packed with explosives designed to detonate at an American soldier's touch. Who, among the global millions who have watched NBC's videotaped-shooting, realize that a comrade of the Marine in question was killed by a booby-trapped corpse the day before? That same corpse-bomb wounded five others in the unit.

I've had it.

If the Marine does get brought up on charges, I will start a fund to take contributions for his legal defense. This whole fracas is a travesty.

The good news? According to Powerline, it's only a travesty here. From one of their Iraq correspondents:

I just got of the phone with my father in Baghdad. I asked him what is the reaction of the Marine killing the injured Iraqi in the Mosque in Felujah. His first words were "Good riddance."

People are not giving it a second thought. Any terrorist who attacks soldiers from Mosques has no sanctuary. Any terrorists who fake death to kill in a mosque deserve no mercy. He says Iraqis (including Sunnis) are fed up with the terrorists and want them eliminated.

There was much uproar about the brutal kidnapping killing of Mrs. Margaret Hassan. Iraqis are upset outraged and disgusted with her brutal abduction & killing. She helped us, helped the poor & needy and this what the terrorist do to her and her family.

He says we must stay strong, united and relentless in the pursuit of the terrorist. Baghdad had relative calm over the last few days. People are even going out in the street till 9:30pm now.

Nothing a little Sharia couldn't fix, huh?

Cancer Benefit

Read this post, by Flash at Centrisity. It's a benefit for an acquaintance (Ron Rice) who's suffering from esophogeal cancer.

It's well worth a read. Please do what you can.

UPDATE: I bumped it forward to make sure everyone's read it. The benefit - a spaghetti dinner, silent auction, and bake sale - is tonight, Friday, at the American Legion in Chanhassen, from 4 - 9 pm. Be there if you can, or follow the link and contribute any other way you can.

You're No Good

First things first: Linda Ronstadt abruptly ceased being listenable when she stopped covering Warren Zevon songs. Heart Like A Wheel is a simply amazing album - and it's been downhill since then.

I mention this by way of saying that in a just universe, nobody would care what Linda Ronstadt is saying; when she was in her prime, I was still in elementary school.

And yet she's oddly symptomatic of what ails the "elite" of the Democrat party these days.

Here's the money (earned in Branson) quote:

Don't get her started on the recent presidential election. "People don't realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves," she says. Of Iraq (news - web sites) in particular, she adds, "I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqis, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers."

So - in one short graf, we have the Democrats Post-Moore Manifesto:

• "People are stupid and ignorant - that's why we lost"
• "Forget what you see - a Republican adminstration is baaaad for you"
• "Your motivations are base and scary..."
• "...and comparable to Hitler."

The more I think about it, the more I believe we're at a fork in the road.

The Democrats can grow up and start basing their politics and worldview in reality, and start acting like a party of adults. That might be good for the nation, probably would save their party, and probably lead to a long-term stabilization of the GOP's electoral fortunes.

Or the Democrats can continue down their current path - hatred, paranoia, self-contratulatory narcissism based on a delusional, self-adulatory dream of their own intellectual superiority. It'll lead to decades of GOP hegemony over American politics, which I like to think would be a good thing...

...but in fact would be a problem in the long term. Our country is designed, from the Constitution on down, to be a two-party system. Not a multi-party system, not a one-party state.

Given the way the Democrats nationally have been acting lately, I wonder if the Greens woudn't make a better second party for this nation than the Democrats currently are?

Feeling Queasy Already

This just looks...icky.

I'm not above the occasional burger, but - ugh. I'd be nauseous and off my game for a week after one of these.

And yet, I'm drawn to defend it.

Why?

Its enemies, naturally:

"They would argue they are just giving people what they want. I would say this is beyond the pale," said Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Probably no nutritionist ever imagined that a product like this would be marketed."

Jacobson pointed out that one Monster Thickburger contains twice the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat, and nearly a full day's worth of sodium. Even before the new Monster Thickburger, the chain offered five sandwiches with 1,000 calories or more, and eight overall that have more calories than what was once the big-burger standard — McDonald’s 600-calorie Big Mac.

"If Hardee's persists in marketing this junk, it should at least list calories right up on the menu board," Jacobson said.

So while your nauseating megaburger makes me feel mildly awful just looking at the picture, I'll defend to the death your right to market it - if it tweezes of the professionally indignant.

Bon Appetit!

Therapy

For depressed Dems, via Rambling Rhodes.

Protest Too Much?

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about how some ofthe dimmer, less discerning, more hate-choked bulbs of the fever-swamp left are trying to call upon the history of the Democrat party - things like "The party that won World War II", the party that "gave you the forty-hour week", etc, etc. It drew a least one hilarious response, and a few - I'll kind here - fevered, overwrought comments.

Leave aside the patent illogic of claiming the victory in World War II as a Democrat victory (Americans, not Democrats, fought in the war), or the near-complete historical illiteracy needed to cite several of the examples; read the various (juvenile, trite) graphics.

Try to find something listed that is less than forty years in the past.

Question to Democrats: What does your party have to be proud of that's less than forty years old?

Note: Don't say "the Nineties". The Nineties were prosperous for many reasons, chief among them the Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War, and the Republican victory in 1994 forcing Clinton to the center. To the extent that it was a good decade, it was at most a shared "triumph" (scare quotes due to the Clinton Bubble, which was made possible by many Clinton-era tax and corporate law changes, among other things.

So I'll throw open the comments, Democrats. What is it about your party that you're proud of?

Ashcroft In Review

Jeff Jacoby on John Ashcroft:

IRRATIONAL hysteria is never pretty, and the demonizing of John Ashcroft during the past four years has been just about the ugliest spectacle in US politics. As the attorney general prepares to return to private life, he deserves thanks not only for doing an admirable job in a time of uncertainty and danger but also for the uncomplaining dignity with which he has borne the gross abuse heaped on him by his enemies.

And the abuse, lest we forget, was insane.

The lynching began as soon as he was nominated by President-elect Bush four years ago. People for the American Way compared him to the "virulent segregationists" of the Jim Crow South. Handgun Control Inc. likened his views to those of "convicted mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh." The Los Angeles Times depicted him in a cartoon as a Klansman, complete with white robe and hood. It was a contemptible pack of smears. And it was just the beginning.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, it fell to Ashcroft to lead the administration's legal fight against terrorism. He made aggressive use of the powers given to him by law -- including the enhanced authority provided by the new Patriot Act -- to root out terror cells, arrest suspected Al Qaeda conspirators, and freeze the assets of groups suspected of terrorist ties. Since 9/11 the Justice Department has secured 194 terror-related convictions, including those of Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh, and radical Islamist cadres in Seattle, northern Virginia, and Lackawanna, N.Y.

All that's great.

But what about civil liberties?

But for taking the threat of terrorism seriously, Ashcroft was turned into Public Enemy No. 1. The ACLU accused him of having led "a massive assault on our most basic rights" and displaying "an open hostility to protecting civil liberties." CBS News titled him the "Minister of Fear." A song parody, "The Twelve Days of Fascism," was widely posted on the Internet, including at Democrats.com (Excerpt: "On the third day of fascism, John Ashcroft gave to me/ Three wiretappings/ Two detained Muslims/ And a Department of Homeland Security.") And on the presidential campaign trail, the candidates libeled him with gusto:

"John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joseph McCarthy." (Howard Dean)

"We cannot allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties." (John Edwards)

"I look out at this audience, and there are people from every background, every creed, every color, every belief, every religion. This is indeed John Ashcroft's worst nightmare." (John Kerry)

One of the most grotesque calumnies came from the prominent columnist Anthony Lewis. "Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right," he told The New York Times in an interview, "like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft." In the fever swamps of the left, there is no important difference between the man who masterminded 9/11 and the man trying to ensure that the horrors of 9/11 are never repeated.

Ashcroft's backing for the Patriot Act was a particular target of scorn. The American Library Association revved up a hysterical campaign against Section 215 of the law, claiming that it posed a dire threat to the privacy of library records. When it turned out that Section 215 (which doesn't mention libraries) had never even been invoked, the ALA was not the least bit chastened.

Let's get one thing very, very straight; I'm a stronger defender of civil liberties than you. Broad statement? Perhaps - but if you're a Democrat, it's true. I am. And while some of the hype about Ashcroft and the Patriot Act made the libertarian in me nervous, his actions were less bothersome than, say, Janet Reno's.

Such loathing of Ashcroft might be understandable if he had done something truly loathsome -- ordered an attack on a religious minority in Waco, Texas, say, and caused the deaths of 70 people. But there is nothing like that in Ashcroft's record. His tenure as attorney general hasn't been marred by scandal or coverup. He has presided over a sharp drop in violent crime and an even sharper increase in federal gun crime prosecutions. The civil rights laws have been vigorously enforced, and more than 500 corporate fraud defendants have been convicted. Above all, there has been no repeat of 9/11 on his watch.

Americans have been well served by their 79th attorney general. Under daunting circumstances he performed with decency and fortitude. The nation is safer and stronger because he served, and all of us are in his debt.

To borrow a phrase; indeed.

Stifle a Joyful Noise

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Salvation Army.

The winter of 1992-1993 was a horrible one for the Berg family. I'd spent most of the year working at awful, not-quite-subsistence-level jobs; $7 an hour grading essays (the worst job in the world to require a college degree), legal document coding for $6/hour, working for a moving company. My then-wife worked too, for about the same money, although that was coming to an end; she was pregnant, due in February. The situation was never much fun; it was my then-wife, my stepson and my daughter (then about 18 months old). We were living in a mouse-infested abortion of a house that was draftier than Anna Nicole Smith's cerebrum. We were behind on all of our bills, had bill collectors like Jessica Simpson has paparazzi - things were ugly.

Finally, just before Thanksgiving, I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel; a company gave me a short-term contract job writing technical manuals.

The light was an oncoming train. I worked nearly a month, got paid for maybe a week, ended up getting stiffed for $2,000. Bill arrangements got scuttled, landlords were angered.

The day my son was born, we got simultaneous eviction and power shutoff notices.

Dire straits. It was a cold winter; we'd broken our arrangement with NSP, so the "winter no-shutoff rule" didn't apply to us, so we were a few hours away from being out in the cold, literally, with a new baby and not much else.

The Salvation Army bailed us out. They covered our heat bill, and helped work out a deal with our landlord that kept us in the place - a small blessing, but it beat the alternative. And a month later, I got my first good technical writing job, had my first year with over $20,000 in income, and onward and upward. If the Salvation Army hadn't helped out, I doubt any of the rest of my life would have come together any time soon.

I support the Salvation Army any way I can; I make a point of dropping something in the kettle every time I walk by, and usually manage a check of some sort once a year.

And yeah, I'm upset at Target.

Lileks says:

...There’s always something to tick you off; the tentacles of business and the non-profits are intimately intertwined. Pick any big shop and you'll find they fund something you like, and something you don't. That said: if I find that Target kicked out the Salvation Army for religious reasons, I’ll be peeved. Doesn’t mean I won’t buy my soap there. But it would chip away at that ephemeral thing called good will, the stuff companies often spend too fast without heed...End result? I wrote out a check to the Salvation Army tonight. Figured out what I put in the kettles, and doubled it. They’re happy; Target’s happy; I don’t have to drive 20 miles to find a frickin’ Wal-Mart.

I don't really get into boycotts; they tend to backfire. And while I live equidistant from the Target and the Wallyworld in my neighborhood (both are about half a mile away), I usually only go to WalMart when I am feeling depressed about how my life is going, and I want to feel better in comparison.

As Captain Ed notes, Best Buy (like Target, based in the Twin Cities) also bans the bell - but I never shop there. It's like shopping in a dumpster during a hailstorm - I always leave there with a headache. Anything I need from Best Buy, I can get online or at Circuit City (which I vastly prefer) or at Nanosystems.

Target's another story. Good prices, good service, good location - hard to turn up my nose at it.

But Target has squandered a lot more of my goodwill than they'd care to measure.

NOTE: Doh. I originally put the story in 2002-2003. I actually meant it as corrected above - 1992-1993. Sorry about any confusion.

Misery Index

In the world of Nick Coleman, the Twin Cities are a morass of misery; huddled masses of the poor, chivvied into shivering, hungry action by a smug, self-satisfied clacque of "Big Cheeses".

And yet, the media is talking about full employment:

The unemployment rate for Minnesota for the last 25 years is 4.8 percent and for the last decade, 3.7 percent. In the last decade, the rate has been less than 2.6 percent in only one month out of 10. If we are not at "full employment" by historic standards, we are getting close to it.

Good news for most of us, anyway.

Moore's Minutemen

Michael Moore compared them with the Minutemen.

Less egregiously, a commenter on a previous post repeated a meme that the leftymedia have been pimping for the past week or so:

An occupying soldier who shoots an unarmed wounded man in the head is responding naturally. So what would be the "natural" response to having your entire block leveled by bombs and seeing your friends and family reduced to collateral damage? Something a little more extreme and protracted, perhaps?

In other words, the people of Fallujah were rising up against the violence of the US assault on Fallujah. Right?

Not so fast.

Times Online - World

Mutilated bodies dumped on Fallujah's bombed out streets today painted a harrowing picture of eight months of rebel rule.

Minutemen. Wow.

Two female bodies found yesterday suggest such threats were far from idle. An Arab woman, in a violet nightdress, lay in a post-mortem embrace with a male corpse in the middle of the street. Both bodies had died from bullets to the head.

Just six metres away on the same street lay the decomposing corpse of a blonde-haired white woman, too disfigured for swift identification but presumed to be the body of one of the many foreign hostages kidnapped by the rebels.

Of course, Fallujans hate Americans.

Right?

Such is the fear that the heavily armed militants held over Fallujah that many of the residents who emerged from the ruins welcomed the US marines, despite the massive destruction their firepower had inflicted on their city.

A man in his sixties, half-naked and his underwear stained with blood from shrapnel wounds from a US munition, cursed the insurgents as he greeted the advancing marines on Saturday night.

"I wish the Americans had come here the very first day and not waited eight months," he said, trembling. Nearby, a mosque courtyard had been used as a weapons store by the militants.

Perhaps they should have.

And perhaps having an example to show the world - what a depraved, vile group these thugs are - will be something for the Arab world to learn from.

Howzat?

Let's get one thing straight; I don't turn to Oliver Willis for cogent commentary. There was a time I did - the rationale eludes me, lo these two years later, but...

...but...

...oh, the hell with it. I can't kid myself anymore. I read Willis these days purely to try to plumb the depths of the fever swamp.

Check out this bit here, especially the top entry.

I know. The fever swamp will moderate well before 2008. But a guy can dream...

Secession Diaries, Part VII - Atlas Fled

As the great summit dawned on that fateful morning at Federal Courthouse in Fargo, North Dakota, nerves were raw and on edge on both sides. The US delegation, under President Buck Lincoln, knew that tensions were running hot, and the USoC was in many ways like a cornered bear. He came prepared to tread gently.

The USoC delegation, on the other hand, knew how precarious their nation's economy truly was - the market was in freefall, public perceptions of the food problem were still dire, and unemployment was flirting with double digits; the Ministry of Employment's "Industrial Resuscitation Tax" had not revived manufacturing, and had indeed exacerbated the problem.

And Prime Minister 1092 knew another secret.

Rude Welcome

At precisely 9AM, the summit convened. Two rows of tables, each seating the respective nation's delegations, faced each other, surrounded by flunkies and the media.

Prime Minister 1092 opened the proceedings.

"President Lincoln, speaking as a representative of the non-former-slave states, I'd like to thank you for your hospitality, and present you with a little token of our nation's esteem for the United States of Jesusland...er, America".

A group of hotel employees, straining and sweating, pushed a pair of dumpster-sized containers on caster wheels. Both were coverded with sheets, like sculptures awaiting unveiling. One was the size of a small contstruction dumpster, the other roughly the size of a huge cake.

"Mr. President,", 1092 continued as the containers were wheeled into place, "In honor of our USoC native tradition, I present our gift to your nation"

Staffers pulled off the sheets, to reveal...

...a large cake, and a 12-foot-square metal plate piled high with vegetables.

"Ah", said President Lincoln, covering his brief confusion. "A cake, and a huge plate of Vegan Tabouli. Why, thank you!" He looked around, mildly nonplussed. "Excellent. It looks like we don't need to order lunch!"

The crowd laughed - all but Prime Minister 1092.

"No, you certainly don't!", the woman finally said with a sneering menace. "Unleash the plan!"

The plate of tabouli shuddered, then disintegrated as a dozen North Korean commandos in bulgur-and-tomato colored camouflage climbed out from the clumpy mass of vegan fare, weapons at the ready.

"Nobody move!" yelled 1092, "and nobody gets hurt. Yet!", she added with a chilling cackle.

The commandoes trained their weapons on the US table.

"What on earth are you doing?" asked President Lincoln, momentarily stunned.

"Don't ask me", replied Prime Minister 1092. "Ask him!"

From the top of the cake erupted a large, grubby figure covered in white frosting.

"It's Michael Moore!" gasped the crowd.

"Yeah, it is", Moore replied as a quartet of commandos lifted him over the side of the cake.

"Have you been working out?" asked Vice President Mgembe.

"Er, no."

An awkward silence ensued, as the commandos aimed at the US members heads.

"OK", Moore continued. "Anyway, you stole two straight elections, and we're here to steal 'em back. And Halliburton can't help you now!"

"So what do you think you're going to do?" asked Lincoln.

"Simple," Moore answered. "We're going to re-unite the United States."

"Pffft", replied the President. "Why on earth would we do that? We're doing great without all of you hoity-toity, tax-guzzling, merit-piddling, neo-socialist wonkomaniacs", the President replied.

"Silence!" yelled 1092. "You have a choice, and you have only a minute to make it!" She pulled a document from an organic hemp folder. "This is a document declaring unconditional surrender to the USoC, allowing the enlightened and progressive people of the USoC to take their rightful place at the head of a progressive North America".

"Hah. And why would I sign such a thing?"

"Because", Moore picked up the narrative, "at this moment airplanes full of jihadis with Iranian nuclear weapons are heading toward Denver, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Miami. The blood of millions of people will be on your hands if you don't!"

A group of USoC Foreign Ministry employees burst into spontaneous applause.

"Damn you!" yelled Lincoln. "You can't blackmail the hopes and dreams of 150 million Americans!"

"And you, Mr. Lincoln, can't stand in the way of the ineluctible forces of history!" yelled 1092. "Sign, or watch your biggest cities vaporize!"

President Lincoln sat for a moment; a dozen Korean rifles pointed at his head, and Prime Minister 1092 held a pen and the surrender form.

"Very well". He took the pen.

"No!" shouted Secretary of State Nguyen.

"I have no choice", Lincoln said, with audible anguish. He turned, and put pen t paper.

He hesitated.

"Er, Ms. 1092?"

"What?" she replied, audibly irritated.

"Your shoe is untied".

"Huh-what?" she replied, looking down. It was all the opening Buck Lincoln needed.

He flicked the fountain pen with a practiced flip of the wrist. The instrument buried itself in Prime Minister 1092's forehead, and she sank to her knees, shrieking in agony.

Lincoln flipped the table up on its side, sending a cascade of documents and donuts into the air. The North Korean guards, stunned, fired blindly at the cloud of papers and food.

Lincoln dropped and rolled, coming to his feet next to a commando. With a practiced knee kick, he felled the Korean, seizing his rifle. The next four shots dropped four more of the elite, tabouli-clad troops. The other eight spun on their heels, firing wildly as Lincoln rolled along the floor, bullets ripping the hardwood scant inches behind him as he rolled and fired. Another commando dropped, then another, and the remaining half-dozen fled the room, into the gunsights of the waiting Secret Service, where they promptly surrendered.

President Buck Lincoln rose to his feet, and blew the smoke from the muzzle of the Korean rifle. The room was silent, except for Prime Minister 1092's whimpering and the chatter of the two-way radio strapped to Michael Moore's belt.

"But Buck! What about the nuclear weapons!"

President Lincoln walked to Moore, and as the older and much larger man trembled in terror, seized the radio from his belt. He looked it it, thought for a moment, and keyed the microphone.

"All units!" Lincoln said.

A variety of Persian-accented voices responded "Rrroger".

"Vast Republican Conspiracy. I say again, Vast Republican Conspiracy".

There was silence on the air. "Oh, lord, we're gonna lose Denver", said a terrified Department of State employee.

And then nothing but static, for a few seconds that seemed to drag on for hours.

"Rrrroger. Breaking off attack, rrreturning to base", said a voice with a thick Iranian accent.

The Americans in the room erupted in cheers.

"How on earth did you know their abort code?" asked Vice President Mgembe.

"It's the Democrat's answer to everything", the President replied.

"It matters not one bit!" yelled Prime Minister 1092 with an edge of pain to her voice, the pen still sticking out of her forehead. "Our armies are massed along the border, and all they have to do is see me give the order...", she motioned toward the cameras from CNN and NARN News, still cranking away, relaying the scene to millions of TVs around the world, "and they'll march! March, I tell you!"

"You can't!" yelled Lincoln.

"I will!" yelled 1092.

The people in the room looked at each other.

"STOP!" . It was the impassioned voice of a woman.

"It's pop star and TV personality Ashlee Simpson!", yelled one of the surviving North Koreans.

"Yes! And I ask you, in the name of the whole world, please, please stop this madness! This nation - the WHOLE nation, the United States - is built on an idea - that all people are created equally before the law! It's a place where people seek freedom - rich people, poor people, people of all colors and faiths and orientations! It's a place where a mechanic in Biloxi has the same vote as a bond trader in Manhattan! And we need them both - we need the dynamism and the chaotic agglomeration of the big cities, sure - and just as much, we need the stable, moral compass that the rural heartland of this nation provides. We need it all!"

Simpson stepped to the middle of the room. "This nation - this one nation, this shining, exceptionalistic city on the hill - has always been this world's one great hope for liberty, both political and economic. We've always been the bellwether of international right and wrong. And when the rest of the world went crazy, it was us who brought it back around. It was the sons of farmers and of stock brokers that died on the USS Arizona, that stormed the beaches at Normandy, that mourned JFK, that teared up as the Berlin Wall fell, and yes, even went to see Throbbing for Halliburton", she said, nodding to Moore and referring to his 2010 documentary. "Christians, atheists, drunkards, everyone. We can all learn something - the New York Metrosexual Master of the Universe can learn self-centering and humility from the Wal-Mart greeter! The small-town insurance agent can learn self-questioning and the yearning to improve himself! We are all stronger with each other than without!."

The room sat, silent, nothing but the sound of rolling cartridge cases and Michael Moore's skin stretching.

Finally, a single voice broke the quiet. "What the hell is Ashlee Simpson doing here?"

"I dunno", replied another disembodied voice, "but she makes some sense".

Lincoln nodded. "So whaddya say?

1092 nodded. "Sure. Let's".

"Nooooo!" bellowed Moore. "I'm meellllllll-tingggggg!", he screamed as he was escorted to a waiting truck by the Secret Service.

Lincoln and 1092 shook hands, sealing the deal as flashbulbs popped and video cameras whirred.

Lincoln turned to Ashlee Simpson. "That really was a perfect speech", he said, shaking the young pop star's hand.

"Why thank you!", she responded with a flick of her hairdo.

"Yes. Tooo perfect", he added, as a thought crossed his mind. "Extremely perfect, for someone who sounds so...hoarse?" He walked to a curtain by the window, and yanked it aside.

The crowd gasped.

"Hugh Hewitt?" someone yelled, recognizing the famous talk show host and Rhythm and Blues singer. "Lip-Synching again!", yelled Mgembe, pointing at Simpson accusingly.

"Morning Glory!" said Hewitt.

"Evening Grace", answered half the crowd.

"Damn!" yelled 1092.

Terms of Rebirth

And so the United States was united once more. The new-again nation learned from its mistakes; from the Red states, it learned to trust the inherent drive and ambition and common sense of the American people, and to get government out of the people's way. And from the Blue states, it reinforced the lessons about that "trusting the American people" bit even more, except when they are being led around by the nose by a bunch of raving moonbats. The Constitution was not only restored, but was reinforced. The tax system was rationalized, corporate welfare abolished, and on Christmas morning of 2013, President Lincoln opened a box containing a trussed-up, infuriated Osama Bin Laden, courtesy of the Special Forces of the thriving Federation of Iraq, who had captured him buying a Slurpee at a 7/11 in Bandar Abbas.

And Lincoln addressed the nation later that morning, joined by his late adversary, Ms. 1092, who had been named Professor of Victimology Studies at UC Berkeley.

"...and in closing, may God bless us, every one!"

"Ahem", 1092 interejected. "Goddess".

"Christ. Whatever.

So What Are You Doing Sunday?

Join the Northern Alliance this Sunday at the Minneapolis Hilton for an Evening with Bill Bennett, the latest in the series of Patriot Forums.

A good chunk of the NARN will be there - along with Bennett, of course...

Craziest Day Possible

Lots going on. Will post more later.

I've got a post rattling around my head about the whole Marine shooting thing that I'm going to try to tackle sooner than later...

Secession Diaries, Part VI: Postcards From The Ledge

The leaders of the Two United States couldn't have been more different.

Buck Lincoln, who won re-election in a hard-fought battle in 2012 against New Democrat candidate Angela DiLligio, was a native of rural Montana and a former Marine who'd become a multimillionaire in the construction business. Along with his wife LeAnne, he'd raised his three children plus two adopted special needs kids; his experience at raising them led him into a third career, as the founder of a charter/semiprivate school in the inner city of Denver; he was drafted by the local GOP to run for state Senate, and although he had to practically be dragged into politics, he served well. After The Split, he was in the right place at the right time, and was swept to the Presidency.

Prime Minister 1092 was the same age as Buck Lincoln, but they could hardly have been different. Raised on a commune, she was picketing non-vegan lunch lines in the cafeteria while Lincoln's Force Recon unit was pinned down under enemy fire on Grenada - an action that earned Lincoln the Silver Star as he shot his way through a cordon of Cuban contruction workers carrying a wounded comrade on his back. She'd worked in non-profits and the public sector ever since.

But they had one thing in common. They both hated, hated, hated the book "Atlas Shrugged". 1092 hated the Ayn Rand because of its unabashed libertarian themes, which she called "unabashedly libertarian" - a vile imprecation in her personal argot.

Lincoln hated it not so much on its own merits, but because he associated it with the strain of "pie in the sky, feet in the clouds, holier-than-thou" libertarianism that he felt negated the cause of libertarianism.

It wasn't much to go on.

The Gathering Storm

The USoC campaign to break the farm strike was a disaster; troops from various USoC federal ministries were accused of much pointless brutality, and in one tragicomic incident even chased a group of fleeing farmers across the border from Illinois into Iowa, capturing and looting an Iowa farm town; the unit commander, a native New Yorker and graduate of Columbia University, when informed that his unit was in Iowa, asked "What state is that in?"

Minnesota and Wisconsin, who'd been on the brink of voting "red" before The Split, were on the verge of open insurrection; repeated, perhaps even majoritarian calls for a re-vote on joining the USoC were rebuffed only because seceding from secession wasn't covered in the USoC Constitution.

The USoC stock market crashed. Unemployment, which had been endemic and growing for years, skyrocketed. Crime spiked in the inner cities, and spread. The Black Market devoured massive swathes of the economy.

Prime Minister 1092 looked at the numbers - and saw the "Red" USA booming - and knew that not only was her political future in jeopardy - but so was the future of the great dream, Progressive America.

If only there were a solution...

And she remembered; in 2009, the USoC administration had sold nuclear fuel, as promised, to the Iranians. She placed a furtive phone call.

A week later, a freighter slipped its moorings from a heavily-guarded dock in Bandar Abbas.

Diplomacy

USoC Foreign Minister Darby Von Minion scheduled a summit meeting between the leaders of the US and USoC, to be held at the border cities of Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota, for January of 2014. Preparations went ahead; hungry and disheveled farmers were removed from the area around Moorhead, while Fargoans tried to tone down at least the appearance of rampant prosperity, to avoid appearing ostetatious.

As the final preparations went ahead, and Lincoln and 1092 left their respective executive residences to go to the meeting, the freighter pulled into a shrouded dock in Bayonne, New Jersey. A convoy of black vans met the ship at the dock, as elite Ministry of Love troops scoured the area. The convoy left quickly and quietly.

The next morning, the summit opened.

The RINO King and the Mulligan Man

Nick Coleman longs for the bad old days.

As Dinesh D'Souza wrote in his biography of Reagan, there was a time when the GOP was just a rump of the Democrat party; slightly less statist, slightly less pro-tax, marginally less one-world oriented.

Barry Goldwater changed that, of course, and Reagan took the idea national.

Well - almost national. The Minnesota GOP didn't follow until the mid-nineties. For an extra twenty years, the Minnesota Republican Party remained stuck in the era of Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller.

It had one "advantage": It was a time when Demcrats (so goes the legend peddled by the likes of Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman) felt very comfortable around Republicans - as well they should. They were virtually indistinguishable from Democrats.

The 2002 elections changed that. As former governor Elmer Anderson's death shows, Nick Coleman just can't let go.

In today's column, Coleman :

In 2002, Pawlenty, the endorsed Republican candidate for governor, visited Elmer at his home in Arden Hills to ask for Elmer's endorsement. As always, Elmer was a gracious host, offering his guest coffee and cookies and listening politely as Pawlenty made his case. Then Elmer looked Pawlenty in the eye and said, No, Tim, I won't endorse you. More coffee?

Elmer said no because Pawlenty had bowed before the antitax lobby and pledged never to raise taxes, no matter how dire a financial crunch Minnesota found itself in, no matter what services might have to be cut. To Elmer L. Andersen, such a pledge was counter to the spirit of public service.

Catch that?

Elmer Anderson believed the public was better "served" by making sure the gravy kept going out; fiscal responsbility (as in responsibility to the taxpayer) be damned. "Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves".

"He asked me for endorsement, and I didn't give it," Elmer told me after Pawlenty took office. "Pawlenty acts like he has a mandate from the election to cut taxes, but I beg to disagree. The election was an aberration caused by a tragic accident."

Elmer was referring to the death of Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone in a plane crash 10 days before the 2002 election. While many Republicans viewed the victories of Pawlenty and Sen. Norm Coleman as proof of their genius, Elmer Andersen saw it only as proof that the Republicans were lucky: An airplane had crashed, and they were lucky enough not to be on it.

Let's step back for a moment, to last week's churlish, angry rant about the stupidity of the American voter. The Republicans won the presidency. But Coleman took time out from defaming the citizens of Alabama and all Republicans to say:

Yes, George Bush won another term with 51 percent of the vote, which he believes gives him a mandate to stop being Mr. Nice Guy and start getting tough on Social Security.

But not in Minnesota, Red.

Minnesota stayed blue, as it has for 12 straight presidential elections, except the one CREEP stole for Tricky Dick in 1972.

Again, so what? Bush won, and he won decisively. A real man would admit it, and get on with his life.

And now, this: Pawlenty and Coleman, in Nick Coleman's special little world, don't really count because of the plane crash.

Question to Nick Coleman; do you think Elmer Anderson would have spent this much time and churlish energy trying to debase and peck away at the legitimate, verified winners of an election?

Is that part of that precious "Minnesota way" whose passing you and all other DFL pundits mourn every time you meet a Republican who didn't leave his conservative cojones on Mike Erlandson's desk? Try - in your own pathetic, shrill way, granted - to delegitimize the election by grabbing at such irrelevant straws?

Unfortunately, we don't seem to elect leaders like him anymore, either.

Buck up, little camper. What would you bitch about if it weren't for us?

If You Think It's Scrappleface, But It's Not

I read this story.

Then I read it again.

And a third time.

And I figured "It just has to be a parody, a clever hoax planted by a wry Republican hoaxter.

But for the life of me, I can't prove it.

It starts off like a Scrappleface post:

Mental health officials in South Florida blasted Rush Limbaugh on Monday, saying the conservative talk show host’s offer of “free therapy” for traumatized John Kerry voters has made a mockery of a valid psychological problem.
“Rush Limbaugh has a way of back-handedly slamming people,” said Sheila Cooperman, a licensed clinician with the American Health Association (AHA) who listened Friday as Limbaugh offered to personally treat her patients. “He’s trying to ridicule the emotional state this presidential election produced in many of us here in Palm Beach County. Who is he to offer therapy?”

Mocking the bloated self-importance of a soft-scientist? Totally Scrappleface.

And it gets better:

The Boca Raton News reported last week that more than 30 distraught Kerry supporters in South Florida contacted the non-profit AHA following their candidate’s Nov. 3 concession to President Bush. AHA officials have diagnosed the disorder as Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST) and have scheduled the first of several free group therapy sessions for just after Thanksgiving.

PEST?

PEST?

No. No way this is legit.

Is there?

I googled it. Oof - if it's a hoax, it's a pretty elaborate one:

Florida trauma specialist Douglas Schooler alone has already treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic candidate conceded on November 3.

"I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life," Schooler said. "I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated," he told the daily.

More or less the same way my 11-year old is "emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated" when I tell him he can't have a TV in his room, I suspect.

Limbaugh, of coursed, offered to counsel PEST victims - an offer the South Florida soft-science community apparently takes deadly seriously:

“Rush Limbaugh has no clinical qualifications to counsel anyone,” Cooperman said. “He’s not only minimizing PEST, but he’s bastardizing the entire psychological field and our clinical expertise.”

Any snarky comment would be superfluous at this point.

...a lot people who felt the same way. You have to understand that to many of us, this was the key election about the future of our country, and with a Bush win that future is pretty much destroyed. Naturally, there’s going to be some significant grief.”
“The people here in Palm Beach County now in therapy or support groups are the canaries in the mine shaft,” Gordon said. “There could be thousands of others, even Republicans, who need to be in therapy over this election.”
Gordon said the AHA on Monday also received its first out-of-state call – from a fixed-income woman in Texas who is “absolutely terrified of what Bush will do” – and scheduled a free telephone therapy session with her for today.

Wow. All that Soros-funded Democrat hate-speech did its job, I guess.

ouglas Schooler, the Boca Raton trauma specialist who treated 20 people with hypnotherapy following Kerry’s loss, said he believes many people suffering from election-related symptoms are still afraid to step forward.“The Republicans want Kerry voters to shut up and pretend they’re not feeling anything,” Schooler said.

"The Republicans"?

Actually, I don't want them to shut up. I just want the psychological "profession" to quit classifying "petulant, spoiled whining" as a disease.

AHA officials, listening to the taped broadcasts, described Limbaugh’s tone of voice as sarcastic.

Which will lead to increasing diagnoses of Smug Liberal Understanding Gap (SLUG), Post-Limbaugh Un-Intellectual Derangement (PLUNDER) and Sudden Implosion of Mindless Entitlement Reaction (SIMPER).

So Sorry

Via Cold Fury, a link to Jim Treacher, who who continues to light up those "We're Sorry" dimbulbs.

Exit Safire

One less reason to read the Times, coming this January;Safire is retiring.

Safire's always been an inspiration to me. He's had more careers than I have, although I have 34 years to catch him.

I love this bit:

Safire said he often enjoyed the column more when those he disagreed with were in power. "You can inveigh with glee when you are denouncing the political opposition," he told E&P. "It is tougher when your guys are there because most of the time you agree with them."

So true.

What must it be like, being a libertarian/conservative in a place like the Times?

Looking back on his 31 years at the paper, Safire had mostly positive memories. He praised the Times leadership for giving him a chance and always backing him up. "I was looked at [by some Times staffers] as a Nixon flack when I came to the paper," he recalled. "When [Nixon] resigned [in 1974], the newsroom exploded in an outpouring of glee. Abe [Rosenthal, former Times executive editor] came over, put his arm around me and said, 'It must be a tough time for you.' That was a rare side of Abe Rosenthal."

Safire recalled that the Times' Washington staff eventually warmed up to him after he saved the daughter of colleague James Naughton (later the head of the Poynter Institute) from drowning in a pool at a staff picnic. "My wife pushed me in to get her," Safire said. "At that point, they kind of accepted me. I guess they thought I couldn't be all bad."

I can hardly wait for the autobiography.

Silver lining: "On Language" isn't going anywhere.

Good News, Bad News

The good news - Zero Intelligence is blogging more often these days. The blog - which covers the lunacy of school "Zero Tolerance" policies and other such educational atrocities - is an essential read.

The bad news? They have so much material:

Eight year-old Isaac Sutton got into a fight with a ten-year-old neighbor. The other boy's mother called the cops and they arrested Isaac and took him to Juvie in handcuffs. Police held him until midnight before releasing him to his mother.

The story goes on.

Zero Tolerance policies, as they are enforced by too many of the type of people who seem to be drawn to public school administration (my apologies to any school admins out there, but I've run into a staggering number of lousy principals in my day) are a recipe for tragicomic stupidity.

"What else can districts do?", someone almost inevitably asks? I dunno - think?

Cue Wolves, Idiots

War is a lousy thing.

In Fallujah, a Marine apparently shot and killed a wounded Iraqi prisoner.

The NBC report set the scene:

The Marine battalion stormed an unidentified mosque Saturday in southern Fallujah after taking casualties from heavy sniper fire and attacks with rocket-propelled grenades. Ten insurgents were killed and five others were wounded in the mosque and an adjacent building.

The Marines displayed a cache of rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles that they said the men were holding. They said the arms were conclusive evidence that insurgents had been using mosques as fighting positions in Fallujah, which they said made the use of force appropriate.

When the Marines left to advance farther south, the five wounded Iraqis, none of whose injuries appeared to be life-threatening, were left behind in the mosque for other Marines to evacuate for treatment.

The other Marines arrived:

Sites saw the five wounded men left behind on Friday still in the mosque. Four of them had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier. One appeared to be dead, and the three others were severely wounded. The fifth man was lying under a blanket, apparently not having been shot a second time.

One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

The Marine could be heard insisting: “He’s f---ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f---ing dead.” Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

“Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.

When told that the man he shot was a wounded prisoner, the Marine, who himself had been shot in the face the day before but had already returned to duty, told Sites: “I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.”

Combat does things to people. Pressure, stress, the high emotion of watching your friends get killed and wounded, of being shot at yourself - they're all a recipe for occasional problems. During World War II, there were many stories of GIs killing prisoners. It happens. The military frowns on it, and I'm sure the Marine involved is in a world of trouble; as Jason Van Steenwyck points out, the Marine is probably looking at a murder rap.

But what it boils down to is that it's something that is a symptom of the stress of combat, something individuals and small groups do in the heat and pain and pressure of battle.

Not as a matter of national policy.

I would ordinarily feel silly pointing that last out. It's not rocket science. But a number of leftyblogs, not being themselves rocket scientists, are trying to create an Abu Ghraib-like scandal out of this - and pin it on the Administration:

Kevin Sites, while showing captures of the photos of the murder: "Let's watch Bush win Iraqi hearts and minds!"

Matthew Gross entitled his piece "Culture of Life", and said "Someday, not too far away, we'll tell the kiddies how the U.S. was once looked up to around the world, as a beacon of moral virtue. And you know what? They won't friggin' believe us."

Get a grip, people. It's not an administration policy, and it's not a sign that America is in decline. It's an alleged murder, with (it is likely) extenuating circumstances, none of which will help the Marine much if he's found guilty. It's a symptom of what a rotten thing war is.

Which leads us to the conundrum; we're fighting people who saw hostages heads off, and are lionized for it throughout the radical Moslem world. They're people who'd think nothing of killing prisoners - in fact, that's what started the whole situation in Fallujah.

Our laws, and "international law", forbit the killing of prisoners. That's a good thing. Our enemies will look at the prosecution of the wounded Marine who did the shooting, and laugh at our weakness.

Secession Diaries, Part V - Snack At Midnight

The biggest nightmares have the smallest triggers.

It was early June of 2012. Life in both of the new nations had settled into a rough, jittery stasis.

The economic growth in "Red" America had slowed from its double-digit pace of the late '00s into a steady 5-6%, dampened slightly by the massive influx of blue-staters. Even that was good news, though - most of the immigrants from the USoC were, if not the nation's elite (they had, indeed, no reason to leave for the most part), at least a fair percentage of the nation's entrepreneurial class; middle-class people who were used to a lot of mobility, and who had options. The immigration scare - where the USoC Parliament nearly banned emigration - created a temporary spike in the numbers, and these numbers were of direct benefit to the economy. With unemployment in the 4.5% range, "Red America" as many still called it was prosperous and generally happy.

Many more BlueStaters (as they were frequently called) emigrated to cash in on the demographic changes; Red-staters old and new, their consumer confidence surging, had a flood of discretionary dollars that financed changes in the demographics of other industries; as Broadway languished, regional theatre scenes in Dallas, Miami, Phoenix, Boise, New Orleans, Tampa, Atlanta, Denver and Fargo began drawing well-to-do crowds - which drew a steady efflux of writers, producers and actors from New York, LA, Chicago and Minneapolis to the Red States. They in turn spearheaded a renaissance in the cultural lives of these cities; while many had had thriving cultural lives before the Split, several became positively superheated. Miami and Austin, Texas spawned musical scenes which easily rivalled Memphis in the fifties and sixties, or Minneapolis in the early eighties; the New Orleans' jazz and blues circuit became newly revitalized; a film production market erupted in Denver; there was even a thriving, throbbing, intellectually daring literary circuit in Fargo, where a clacque of writers, a mix of home-grown and expat-Bluestate authors, spawned a genre named, in the plainspoken argot of the Plains, "Fargo Books" that jiggered brains and sold books. Following the artists came the people who throve around artists; literary magazine editors, coffee shop entrepreneurs, clove cigarette merchants, purveyors of black clothing and blonde furniture. The new artists brought their art, their followers - but, for the most part, left their politics in New York and LA.

The USoC government - under Minister for Arts Courtney Love - reacted swiftly but ineffectually to the "arts drain" with an ad campaign aimed at artists and related crafts: "Don't Be a Slave Stater". After the program was widely ridiculed, the USoC Ministry of Arts tripled its budget in hopes of reaching more people.

Less troubling to the USoC's policy-making class - at least initially - was the flight of many farmers from the Blue states; booming property and commodity taxes drove the "Cheese Rebellion", which started in the USoC's agricultural breadbasket. The USoC painted itself into a bizarre corner; massive subsidies made it very easy to be a mediocre farmer, but they weren't enough to counter the taxes and penalties involved in being a successful farmer. A food glut in the late '00s was answered with a huge setaside program that took millions of acres out of production, essentially paying farmers not to farm. Dairy farming was still bound by pricing compacts set up in the seventies, which paid Massachusetts dairy farmers much more than Wisconsin dairies; combined with the new taxes, it made farming in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota a dicey proposition.

Emigration provided one answer for farmers; there was plenty of land available in the West, as the market and lack of subsidies had driven many older farmers from the land; the same lack of subsidies led to a drastic rollback in corporate farming in the West. Eastern and West Coast farmers with their knowledge of specialty crops moved to, and throve in, various Red regions.

The other answer was the New Grangers. Modelled after the Grangers of the 1800s, they were self-styled prairie populists. And in the spring of 2012, outraged at the disparity in farm subsidies and demanding cuts in property, commodity and transportation costs, the New Grangers called a farm strike.

But the Farm Strike had no immediate effect on food stockpiles, which were in fact quite ample, even given the massive set-aside programs.

But as is so often the case in history, what happened next had nothing to do with physical reality.

Whitebread Riot

Ana Marie Cox - under her nom de plume, Wonkette, had for nearly a decade been one of the leading bloggers in the USoC.

On the evening of June 13, 2012, after coming home from a DC-area nightclub with a case of the munchies, wrote:

Damn. I'm starving.

At that moment, National Public Radio producer Aaron Micah Lubeck-Enkelberger, a producer for NPR's long running program "Fresh Air", was working on a radio documentary on the phenomenon of bloggers and blogging, and their effect on the media. Lubeck-Enkelberger took a printout of the Wonkette piece to host Terry Gross, who read it on the documentary.

Irony-proof and humorless as both Lubeck-Enkelberger and Gross had been conditioned to be after a combined total of 70 years in Public Radio, the story was stripped entirely of its tongue-in-cheek context on the evening broadcast. "Fresh Air" listeners responded with an instant run on grocery stores throughout the USoC.

The next morning, NPR News reported on both the original Wonkette piece and the run on food. USoC Blogger Laureate Duncan "Atrios" Black wrote a post, here reproduced in its entirety:

Food shortage? Oh, that'd be horrible.

Atrios' millions of fans responded by flooding to the food markets, wielding baseball bats, cans of mace and tasers hoarded after the '04 election.

As the grocery stores in the college neighborhoods and tidy upscale ultraliberal enclaves came under siege, the always-dicey inner city neighborhoods began to unravel. "The Legacy of Slavery is Alive and Well, and Whitey's created a Starvation Hell", bellowed New York professional demigogue Al Sharpton on a television interview, sending thousands of rioters into the street, stripping the shelves of all groceries. Looting then spread to all other stores.

By nightfall, the inner cities of Los Angeles, Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, DC and Chicago were in flames. Dan Rather reported on the Evening News that a full-scale famine was in effect, and that Americans were "...hungrier than a coyote at a Hindu wedding". The confusion caused by the remark led to a lull in the rioting, but only a brief one. Prime Minister 1092 called out troops from the Ministries of Safety, Peace, , Housing, Welfare, Agriculture, Labor, Sensitivity and Justice; overnight, the armies moved into the USoC's inner cities. Deploying water cannon, tear gas and truncheons, they gradually restored order - except in Baltimore, which had been in the throes of a Water Department strike for two weeks. Deprived of water cannon, the Ministry of Education troops used what they believed were fire extinguishers, which unfortunately turned out to be Army-surplus flamethrowers, causing immense casualties and property damage.

The next day, the Ministry of Welfare ordered the distribution of government-held food stocks to needy people in the inner cities, while the Ministry of Safety embargoed all food shipments due to fear of food convoys being looted in the countryside; this led to a firefight in Harrisburg, PA between MOW and MOS troops, killing four soldiers and 23 innocent bystanders. News spread rapidly; blogger Oliver Willis wrote:

Troops shooting each other. That's brilliant.

Ministry of Housing troops moved to confiscate warehouses and hoarded food supplies, and Ministry of Peace troops were put to work harvesting crops in the countryside (which were, unfortunately, months from being ripe enough to harvest), while the Ministry of Education declared that the Teacher's Union was a national security asset with priority for food distributions, and the Ministry of Agriculture hurriedly printed and distributed Ration Books to millions of Americans, without actually instituting a system of rationing. At one point, a Ministry of Arts bureaucrat in rural Illinois ordered the torching of six warehouses full of corn, barley and arugula, as "a symbolic statement about the malleability, indeed the flammability, of material objects in a time of fear and hate, and the temporality of our phallocentric lifestyle." (he was acquitted at trial, after declaring the action "performance art", and went on to become a co-producer of "This American Life").

Panicked over the rioting and the appearance of ration books mere days after the first bout of news of famine - which followed reports of a grain glut in the Midwest - confused USoC citizens hoarded their food supplies, and enthusiastically participated in a huge, rapacious black market rumored to be run by the Mafia and the Ministry of Labor.

By the end of that fateful week, headlines shrieked FAMINE, and mobs of panicky citizens roamed the streets, giving indignant, frightened interviews with the world media that were punctuated by flurries of gunfire as gangs went after suspected food hoards, or as troops fought the looters.

On June 19, Prime Minister 1092 addressed the nation. She announced:

• A new rationing system (causing the Agriculture Ministry to print another batch of ration coupons, which sparked more riots as holders of old books desperately struck out)
• Martial Law and a suspension of the Constitution
• A comprehensive set of retail price controls (which exacerbated the shortages and gave the Black Market a gross product larger than France and Russia combined)
• that the Farm Strike was to blame for the Famine, and that farmers would be required to return to work forthwith
• That troops led by the Ministry of Agriculture's Tactical Extension Service (and supported by troops from Labor, Peace, Safety and Housing) would be moving into the rural areas to enforce the Agricultural Emergency Act
• That all looters would be shot on sight, nationwide.
• Finally, that the conservative media - talk radio, bloggers, and the Fox and NARN news networks - in the "Red" USA were partly responsible for the famine, by creating a "climate of hunger".

The next morning, MoAg troops in armored vehicles deployed into the countryside, as mobs in New York and DC stormed and looted US embassies and consulates.

The troops had a simple mandate; crank up food production "by any means necessary".

The US offered aid (which was rebuffed by the Ministry of Safety - it would "send the wrong message" for the USoC to accept food and disaster aid from the US), but watched events warily. For the first time since The Split, Congress considered re-arming.

Events overtook everyone far too fast for civil debate.

Iron Curtain

I've been waging a month-long battle against spam, basically going through the blog and closing old threads, and deleting thousands of spam comments. I'm doing the job in dime lots - I figure if I delete a few hundred spams and close a few dozen comments a day, I'll have the job done soon enough.

Unfortunately, I've ended up banning a lot of IP addresses in my battle against spam. If you find you're unable to leave a comment, and would like to, send me an email at "comments" at the same address (shotinthedark.info) as this site, along with your IP address (if you know it), and I'll see what I can do.

But It's The Republicans Who are Ignorant, Right?

This letter in today's Strib, in response to a recent letter from a petulant Stillwater DFLer who threatened to take his toys and move to Canada, brightened my day - especially the emphasized part (emphasis added):

The letter from the gentleman in Stillwater (Nov. 10) about his new address in "Banff, British Columbia, Canada" illustrates a problem in all this loose talk about moving to Canada.

Canada is a sovereign nation; one doesn't simply move there like one moves to Nebraska. Canada has its own history, traditions, system of government, laws and problems.

If this American is thinking about moving there, he should at least honor his anticipated new homeland by learning that his new home is in the province of Alberta, not British Columbia.

Submitted without superfluous comment.

I Feel Sorry...

...for all the poor saps who are spending their time puttering away playing HALO II (or worse, standing in line waiting to buy it) when they could be playing Combat Mission - Afrika Korps and Combat Mission - Barbarossa to Berlin.

CMAK and CMBB are games for those of us who remember the glory days of Avalon Hill's classic "Squad Leader" and Advanced Squad Leader boardgames. They combine decent graphics with comprehensive, very-well-modelled equipment, a glorious scenario generator, a really excellent tactical AI, excellent play-by-IP or play-by-email, and an international and obsessive fan base that has created an immense library of scenarios and even game modifications.

And word has it we're close to a huge update.

So keep blasting away at your fictional apocalyptic fantasies, kiddies. I'll be busy saving democracy.

(Yeah, I know. Don't knock it until I've bla bla bla. Games that feel like arcade games have never felt the least bit compelling to me).

What's In A Label?

It's a question I've asked in this space many times; when is a Republican a Republican?

The Arlen Spector flap has brought the divide between "moderate" and "conservative" Republicans into stark relief (although it's not that simple - there are many divisions within both wings of the party as well), in ways that have parallels here in Minnesota.

Captain Ed writes:

picking a fight with Arlen Specter is a poor choice of battles. Specter is not the only center-left Republican in the Senate; Olympia Snowe and Lincoln Chaffee ally naturally with Specter, and John McCain has expressed support for the Pennsylvanian as well. Denying Specter the natural ascension to the chair that he expects will alienate at least these three votes from the whip, making filibusters all but inevitable.

Even that isn't really the issue. Republicans have to learn how to be a majority party. We've talked for years about being a big-tent party, but without allowing members to dissent on issues, talk is all it is. Specter, Snowe, and Chaffee know that their views won't carry the day but they do expect to be able to express them without being threatened with oblivion. In return, they support the majority of the party's initiatives and provide needed support to the President in getting his legislative agenda as a whole through Congress.

There's something to that.

If we start demanding ideological purity, we will drive off a significant level of support not only for Bush in the Senate but from the electorate as a whole. There's something to that.

I agree with Hugh Hewitt about Spector - he's gone a long way toward repaying the party for his Bork debacle. And he may well support the party 75% of the time.

My question: Isn't there a minimum standard that someone should meet to be a "Republican?" Jim Jeffords clearly didn't meet that standard - and thankfully left the party.

Still, to be "big tent" Party in any intellectually-honest way, you have to allow dissent, even radical dissent, on a lot of issues. But there have to be a few that everyone agrees on. What are they?

Taxes? Foreign policy? Corporate Welfare? Abortion? Death penalty? Second Amendment? Federal Judges?

On which issues is there any wiggle room?

Why did the Democrats lose their majority status in the first place? We've spent the entire presidential election lamenting the loss of the Scoop Jackson Democrats, opposition members that supported a strong national defense and foreign policy. The International ANSWER wing of the Democratic Party drove them off over the last years of their majority status when they demanded a politically-correct party line and brooked no dissent.

As an example, can you imagine a pro-life Democrat being given any kind of leadership position now? He or she would be driven from office by a combination of Emily's List, NOW, and a half-dozen other advocacy groups in the next primary.

If we want to maintain our ascendancy, we need to develop the maturity to allow those who agree with us on 75% of the issues to feel as though they belong in the GOP. Specter has already been put on notice, and as long as he has something to lose (the chair), he will be pressured to support the President's legislative agenda and judicial nominations. If he has nothing left to lose, we face not only six years of obstructionism by Specter but likely a coalition of centrist GOP Senators that will coalesce to hold the GOP majority hostage in the next two.

On the one hand, I agree.

On the other hand, taken to its extreme, it's what gives us "Republicans" that meet the Nick Coleman test; Republicans that favor abortion, gun control, tax hikes, intrusive government and the teacher's union, endorse Democrat candidates...

Where do Republicans draw the line?

The Gap

MyDD is - how to say this - a big leftyblog that seems to suck less than most of the big leftyblogs, on initial read.

Readin this piece, on a Brad Carson story in TNR, you can sense the complete confusion this blue stater feels on encountering a (caricatured, cartoonish) view of Red State America. Worth a read, more or less.

The reason I bring it up is because of the referral to the piece, from Oliver Willis (who, two years ago, was a "leftyblog that didn't suck", and who since has degenerated into a cartoon himself):

Simply not reality based. Rejiggering a party on the basis of appealing to these folks is a loser proposition, because it ain't gonna happen.

I respect the religious beliefs of my fellow Americans, but I don't believe there's any way to realistically speak to someone who swears that the rapture is happening next Tuesday and lives like it every day.

Next Tuesday? Well, one never knows.

But is there "really no way" to speak with "them"? Now, Ollie, that's a lousy attitude.

Because if the Democrats - not the Clinton Democrats, mind you, but the party that tried to follow Howard Dean over a cliff eight months ago - want to be relevant to the majority of this nation again, they're going to have to learn a way to communicate with those who believe in some sort of higher moral code. Whether they believe the Rapture is "next Tuesday" or an allegory representing salvation in a world gone horribly wrong or anything in between, we're the majority in this country.

Curses! Foiled Again!

I drive most days past the corner of Randolph and Fairview, in Highland Park in Saint Paul.

The problem is, I always drive through at a time of the day when coffee is the last thing on my mind. But even I noticed the, er, brewing competition between local stalward Brewberry's - a former video store that's been supplying the neighborhood's poetry, craft and sandwich needs, plus coffee, for nearly a decade.

Across the street is one of those lots where businesses go to die - it was most recently a Blimpy sub shop (is it just me, or is that chain dying the big death? I just had the worst sub of my life at the one on University two weeks ago), before that it was...er, something else.

Then, a few weeks ago, I noticed a Caribou Coffee moved into the other lot. Ironic, I thought. I should write about this.

Lilekst did.

I understand the desire for local independent merchants – I prefer to patronize my local hardware store rather than go to Home Depot, for example, but each has its advantages. I just hate to feel like a traitor to the rich tapestry of human history because I want to have a cup of coffee near a fireplace with those lemon scones the chain carries. The crumbly ones. Yum.

This story says a lot about Saint Paul.

Part of the story involves the doughty small businessperson:

[Owner Jan] Nelson promptly looked at her shop [when the news of the impending Caribou broke] and listened to her customers, including sympathetic architects and designers.

"They'd say: 'Jan, your building's exterior doesn't match the warm interior,' " she said. "It was very boring and if you weren't brought here by someone, you'd whiz right by. I wanted it to be a little jewel box."

She repainted the building light green, extended her hours and put up a snazzy new sign, telling anyone driving past that hers is a neighborhood coffee shop. And the neighbors, irked by yet another chain threatening their area's quaint residential feel, stood strong.

On the other hand, we have the representative of the city government that does so much to stifle business in this city:

"Sometimes the competitive side of business goes too far," said City Council Member Pat Harris, whose ward includes the shops. "But the great thing is to see people rallying around a local St. Paul business."

"Sometimes the competitive side of business goes too far". That's what business is up against in Saint Paul.

Saint Paul's city government, of course, doesn't think it's going too far when it's serving as a competitor itself. A few years ago, a businessman who lived not too far from the coffee shops sank his life savings into building a gun shop in my neighborhood, the less-tony Midway, three miles north of the competing coffee shops. The local Neighborhood Council - an unofficial level of government - engaged in a years-long campaign to drive the store out of business; sometimes competition "going too far" isn't the only problem business faces in this city.

And as to the "neighbors" Harris refers to?

Picket signs, egg tossing and "corporate scum" graffiti welcomed Caribou Coffee when it opened one of its 100 Minnesota branches right across the street from Brewberry's.

I'll be at Dunn Brothers...oh, wait. It's becoming a chain, and a fairly successful one. What's a guy to do?

Secession Diaries, Part IV: World of Hurt

Tad and Sheila Devaney remembered the straw that broke the camel's back..

"We were living in Framingham Massachusetts. I was working as an accountant for a software company, which went under because of the tariffs. So I got a job as an accountant with the county, which I figured, "Cool, it's a union gig", but that only lasted about six months, because all the lowest guys on the totem pole got laid off first. Then I got a job as a bookkeeper with a gas station, but then when the fuel tariffs went into effect and the State of Massachusetts took over fuel distribution..." The narrative tailed off for a moment. "Which woulda been fine, I've seen hard times before, but not only was I out of work with two kids and another on the way, but then I got a notice in the mail that on top of the income tax, sales tax, and property tax hikes, they're adding a Value Added Tax to pay for agriculture price supports. I emailed my cousin in Cleveland, and he told me his company needed an accountant ASAP. I drove to Cleveland, interviewed, got the job the next day, and filed for my work visa from an internet cafe on the way home. It was waiting for me when I got there".

The young family sold their home at a big loss into the rapidly-depressing Massachusetts economy in the fall of 2009, and became the initial trickle of what became, by 2010, a torrent of people emigrating from the United States of Canada. Tad Devaney says it was the best move he ever made.

Interviewed at his office at Hexotech, a Cleveland company that makes holographic memory storage crystals, Devaney looks like a happy man. Sitting in his office in a renovated steel plant overlooking the Cuyahoga River, his office has a few mementoes: his MBA from Boston College; a picture of him shaking hands with former President George W. Bush ("That's how you knew I'd changed", Devaney notes, "I actually voted for Kerry. And Gore. And Clinton, twice. And Dukakis. And Mondale. Yep, I was a d**k", he chuckles), and a framed letter from the USoC Ministry of the Interior.

He asks me out to lunch. We spin down Ian Hunter Drive, to a small clutch of restaurants that are gradually taking over an old steel-era office park. "Most of these places weren't here six months ago. Most of them moved here from New York and Boston." He motions toward a Thai restaurant going in at the corner. "That place is run by a couple of French guys who used to run a haute cuisine joint on Park Avenue. I used to read about 'em in New Yorker. Life is good for Tad Devaney today; he is the Chief Operating Officer of Hexatech, is in line to manage its expansion to Europe and Africa, and teaches one night a week at the Cheney School of Business at George W. Bush University, a new "Red League" university that sprouted almost overnight in Cleveland.

We take a seat at a popular Italian bistro, "Two Guys from Hoboken", run by - yep, two guys from Hoboken, who've prospered in their three years in Cleveland.

"So", I ask, "Tell me about when you heard the news".

Devaney pauses. "Yeah. Well..." and he becomes lost in a memory only barely dimmed by the passing half decade.

"Sheila and I were going to a play - this was about when the Red State theatre scene really took off, back in late '09, back when all the New York directors started spending more time in the Reds to make ends meet. Anyway, during intermission, we heard about the hurricane. We thought "how could a hurricane catch ANYONE by surprise these days? But sure enough, they turned on a TV in the lobby, and we watched the breaking coverage on Real Clear News. Sheila and I were horrified - it looked like Bangladesh, not Boston."

Immediate Action

The No-Name Storm killed several hundred people on the Eastern Seaboard, inundating low-lying areas and blowing buildings apart. No warning was ever issued, even though satellites and aircraft had tracked the storm for nearly five days. The National Storm Center, mired in a turf squabble with the Ministry of Sensitivity over the naming of the storm, never received bureaucratic clearance to release the warning until a day after it struck shore. Boats sank, ferries foundered, cars drove into washouts, shoreline homes were swamped, fleeing people were hammered by flying debris - the final death toll topped 1,000. The most expensive storm in history, it caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, from north of Boston to Baltimore.

Worse? The relief effort - the attempt to bring food, fuel, clothing, even fresh water to the storm's victims, especially the hundreds of thousands left homeless or without power - was bogged down by a civil and bureaucratic turf war that beggared the imagination.

Dennis Kucinich, Minister of Peace, ordered units of the Peace Force to the affected area. But at the edge of the damaged areas in Boston, Providence, New York, Hartford, Philly/Camden and Trenton, the convoys of troops were met by teams of armed agents and lawyers from the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness, the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Housing. Under court order, the MODP agents ordered the MOP troops to hand over their weapons; most complied. These weapons - rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers - were handed over to Housing and Labor agents, and hundreds of AFL-CIO, Teamsters and AFSCME members who'd been deputized as "provisional agents", who proceeded to go door to door serving pre-printed injunctions against homeowners carrying out repairs without union labor on the job. Homeowners who failed to comply were arrested, and their insurance payments attached by the unions as damages by drumhead civil courts issuing summary judgements under the Emergency Law Act of 2008.

Outrage ensued; outrage at the Ministry of Peace's inability to control the situation; outrage that the Ministries of Housing and Labor along with the unions had turned into officially-sanctioned looters and profiteers.

And outrage at the Red USA.

Devaney remembers. "I got a call from my brother, Sean, who still lived in Charleston Mass. Their house had folded up like a UN peacekeeping mission. "You know how bad it was? My brother, Sean, a good guy but a total agnostic, got religion. He became a priest. Oh, and he moved to Montana."

Devaney organized an effort among Hexatech's 2,000 employees to gather up canned goods, blankets, tents, aspirin, money, the works. They loaded up three donated semi-trailers. Devaney climbed into the lead semi, and in what he calls the most thrilling moment of his life, yelled "OK, Red Staters - we gotta boogie!" The small convoy drove through the border checkpoint, and made it to Boston in good time.

"I was standing there in my 'Cleveland Heart Boston' T-Shirt, handing out stuff, and we had these goons watching us, making sure we didn't give out tools, medicine, weather information or religious content. I was wondering about that, when this gaunt-looking grad-school-looking chick from Swarthmore yells "you DO realize you red-staters wouldn't have anything to give if it weren't for us, right?' She draws a round of applause from the goons! I finished giving the stuff out - but instead of staying over, we all just piled in and drove back to Ohio, all night long. I swear, I kissed the ground when I got home".

USoC insurance companies, strained to the limit by the losses, applied to the government for aid. The Legislature, reeling from paying for hurricane damage, as well as unemployment benefits for an increasing number of unemployed workers in the USoC, and subsidy programs in agriculture, healthcare and manufacturing that were growing geometrically, had to propose another tax increase, which the Blue Parliament rubber-stamped over increasingly loud grumbling from the smaller, more removed provinces of the USoC - Minnesota and Western Canada.

But the big scandal was the disastrous performance of the Peace Force. The all-volunteer force, modeled after the German Army, was intended to serve as a peacekeeping tripwire under UN command, and at first blush would have seemed perfect for the disaster assistance role. But it was clear that it needed to be bigger, better-disciplined, and better trained. And recruitment was way off, especially in the class of recruits they really wanted - people who spoke English, with high school diplomas or more. Peace Force Chief Executive Adrian Bollock said that he needed one of two things - either a 50% increase in funding, or a draft. (In a later interview, he told a Instanet reporter than he only threw in the draft to make the other option look better). And, in fact, since the USoC had effectively demilitarized itself, and had banned the draft in the Constitution, the traditional draft was impossible.

But the draft caught on - because of an unlikely proposal from a mid-level bureaucrat.

The Armies of Love

Assistant Peace Minister for Force Maintenance Ross Tavish was an up-and-coming organizer for the confectioner's union in Portland Oregon when he started working for the Kucinich campaign in 2003. He quickly worked his way up the hierarchy, proving on the way that his capacity for endless work on assignments made up for his lack of curiosity and creativity. He was placed in the "Force Maintenance" position as a reward - since the USoC was the first major nation to effectively demilitarize itself in all of history, the theory was that there'd be really nothing for him to do; the US Peace Force was under operational control of the United Nations.

But Tavish had a keen eye for the obvious. He put together the factors; rising unemployment, especially among young blue collar workers and college graduates, a large underclass of undereducated males, an imperative to create something from nothing - and that "no draft" injunction in the Constitution...

...Tavish drafted a memo advising the Prime Minister that while the original plan - drafting high school graduates - was both illegal and impractical, there might be some benefit in trying something differerent; actively recruiting undereducated males and unemployed/unemployable college graduates, and declaring eminent domain on the ones they needed to fill out the numbers.

The Prime Minister 1092 approved, presented the plan to Parliament, and within the month announced a plan to increase the Peace Force, and other military forces controlled by the Minister of Peace, to 150,000 men and women. Their weaponry was to be augented with stocks of former US Army weapons - tanks, artillery, etc - taken from depots around the USoC.

However, the powerful labor bloc in the Ministry of Labor worried about the concentration of so much power in the hands of the Ministry of Peace. They rammed through a measure allowing Labor to recruit and, if needed, draft 80,000 armed Labor Enforcement Police.

Suspicious of Labor and Peace, the Transport Ministry snuck in a measure allowing it to recruit or draft 75,000 National Highway Patrol, including a squadron of F-16 Tactical Traffic Control fighters.

Not wanting to be left out, the Ministry of Justice created a force of 45,000 Field Marshals. To prevent violence and terrorism in schools, the Ministry of Education was authorized to recruit/draft and train 50,000 Tactical School Patrols. The Customs Department followed suit with 35,000 Customs Patrol Inspectors, the National Endowment for the Humanities with 20,000 Special Museum Guards, the Ministry of Safety added 40,000 armed Emergency Workers, the Ministry of Housing with 20,000 Tactical Housing Inspectors, and even the Ministry of Sensitivity, which brought on 10,000 plainclothes Sensitivity Detectives.

Thus, over the course of six months from November of 2009, the world'd first officially pacifist country recruited and drafted half a million armed paramilitary soldiers.

Other agencies jumped onto the bandwagon, too; the Ministry of Welfare took on 100,000 Associate Social Workers, the Ministry of Agriculture 50,000 Extension Associates, and the Department of Commerce 10,000 Commerce inspectors.

The Cheese Rebellion

While the USoC struggled with building a byzantine tangle of pseudo-militaries, a story broke on page B-22 of the New York Times:

Farm Voters Upset
MADISON, WI (SNN) - Farmers upset by the strengthening of pre-split price subsidy compacts demonstrated on the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol today.

"Farmers are getting screwed" said New Granger leader Joe Pyylopenhaapo of rural Black River Falls. "We get lower subsidies than the farmers in California or the Coast, and we have to pay higher transportation fees because of the MIinistry of Transportation's support fees - and then all the taxes! It's impossible!"

Minister of Agriculture Hermione Throckmorton responded "these farmers should just make it happen. They're sounding like a bunch of red-staters. Did I mention they used to be slave states?" A system of luxury and excise taxes was proposed. but no action was taken.

Over the course of the next year, the New Granger movement spread throughout the USoC's farm districts in western Canada, Minnsota and Wisconsin, Illinois and Pennsylvania. In the summer of 2010, they organized the first Farm Strike.

The government responded with a Ministry of Information ad campaign; "Eat Less".

Exit Polls

In the summer of 2010, the number of people emigrating from the USoC approached an epidemic. It was a problem in both countries - while the US unemployment rate was still at near-negative levels, in many sectors the available jobs were finally close to the number of applicants. And in the USoC, despite the unemployment rate (flirting with 8% by August 2010), it was getting to be hard to find people to fill some positions; doctors, engineers, project managers, architects, all were in critically short supply.

The Parliament voted down bill to ban emigration - by a 40 vote margin in the 890 seat Lower House.

2011 loomed. In every sense of the term [1]

Part IV - World of Hurt
Part III - Death and Taxes
Part II - Irrational Exuberance
Part I - Push Comes to Shove

[1] including the sense of using a loom to weave cloth, although that's purely tangential to the story.

Or is it?

Failure Is An Orphan

Jonathan Last on the liberal myth (since 11/3) that Kerry was a lousy candidate.

On the notion that Kerry damaged the Democrats:

At a time when all of the cultural tension was pulling Democrats towards the lefty fringe, Kerry, for the most part, resisted. A Howard Dean-style campaign--based on isolationism and pacifism--would have been truly disastrous for Democrats and might have realigned American politics for a generation.

Granted, Kerry didn't help the party as much as he could have by jettisoning the Michael Moore wing. Had he done so, he would have done for Democrats what George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole did for Republicans in the '90s by throwing Pat Buchanan overboard.

But that shouldn't overshadow Kerry's very real accomplishment: He stood his ground as anti-Americanism and knee-jerk pacifism roiled the base of the Democratic party. He prevented the main body of his party from giving in to the Moores, Deans, and MoveOns of the world. And in doing so, he has given them the chance to fight again another day.

There are a host of reasons why John Kerry lost, and he bears his share of responsibility for the defeat. But the liberals heaping scorn on him today and insisting that because of him, their enterprise was doomed from the start, are looking for an easy alibi. They're doing a good man disservice. And they're not doing the Democratic party any favors going forward.

The whole thing is worth a read.

The Middle Is Red

You know I have to love a piece that ends with...:

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

...and begins with...:

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

This year's trope, of course, is the "Fundamentalist, gay-bashing, bible-banging Red-stater", and Brooks demolishes it.

If you're a conservative, it's a fun read. If you're a liberal who doesn't want your party to be a third party by 2016, it's an essential one.

Give it a read.

Friday

In for Hugh Hewitt.

Tune in!.

RIP Iris Chang

Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, is dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In 1997, Chang published the international bestseller ``The Rape of Nanking,'' which described the rape, torture and killing of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in the former Chinese capital during the late 1930s. ``The Chinese in America,'' published last year, is a history of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the United States.

The late historian Stephen Ambrose described Chang as ``maybe the best young historian we've got, because she understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way.''

Chang suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized during a recent trip researching her fourth book about U.S. soldiers who fought the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II, according to her former editor and agent Susan Rabiner.

Chang continued to suffer from depression after she was released from the hospital. In a note to her family, she asked to be remembered as the person she was before she became ill -- ``engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her family,'' Rabiner said.

I've always considered myself pretty cynical about man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man; I read the B'nai B'rith "Black Book" of Nazi atrocities against the Jews when I was in eighth grade, and haven't spared myself the inside story of any of the century's genocides since then.

But Rape of Nanking was worse - as immediate as a stroll through the Holocaust Museum, but worse in its way; you don't expect a book to punch the horrors of its subject through the printed page as immediately and vididly as Chang does in Rape of Nanking.

I read the book years ago - and it disturbed me deeply (all the more so to realize that Japan has still not reckoned with its involvement in the Rape). I remember wondering how Iris Chang could live with the images that, for her as the writer, must have been even more immediate and vivid than the ones she brought to the reader.

Apparently she could not. Please keep your thoughts and prayers with her husband, daughter and family.

Secession Diaries, Part III: Death and Taxes

The Prime Minister of the United States of Canada, Howard Dean, declared January 1 "Freedom Day" throughout the USoC. The eyes of the world focused on Times Square in New York City, where the official celebration of Freedom Day took place.

Freedom Day Celebrated in Times Square NEW YORK (NARN) - The first annual Freedom Day celebration in Times Square went off with few hitches last night, as nearly 200,000 people gathered in Times Square to watch fireworks and a performance by Barbra Streisand, Cher and the Frankenettes.

But it was the unofficial entertainment that got most of the attention from the hordes of revelers. Revelers dressed as caricatures of the Red State people they were now rid of.

"I see this as sort of a community celebration of the relief we feel over having cast off the autocratic, sexist, homophobic, racist, homophobic, anti-choice, sexist rule of the hicks in flyoverland", said Tamatha Bryce-Flobbert, 26, a documentary filmmaker and barrista. "Did you know the Red states used to own slaves?" Bryce-Flobbert was dressed in a "big hair" wig, rhinestoned jeans and cowboy boots, and a babydoll t-shirt that read "I'm With My Cousin". Her partner, Joshua Micah Geoffrey-Stephen Pillsbury, an interactive fiction designer and parking lot attendant, was dressed in a ten-gallon hat and a "wife-beater" T-shirt with the same saying, holding a longneck bottle of Lone Star Beer (a novelty import enjoying great success at the party, even at $12 per bottle) and Bryce-Flobbert were watching a troupe of performance artists' street theatre, dramatizing seven gay and lesbian partners marrying as a caricatured fundamentalist family was pelted with cream pies and water-filled condoms. The performance, in front of a newly-shuttered Broadway theater, drew a crowd of dozens.

"It's a sort of atheist Mardi Gras - a sort of Bacchanalium for smart people", said Pillsbury as Bryce-Flobbert filmed him pantomiming a lewd act with a reveler dressed as Jerry Falwell".

"It's a symbol, really, of our emancipation from narrowmindedness, bigotry, hate, Rush Limbaugh, idiocy...oh, I hate those people so much!" Bryce-Flobbert exclaimed.

The performance ended when a brawl between audience members from New Jersey and Manhattan erupted. "Oh, isn't that typical?" asked Bryce-Flobbert. "New Brunswick is the new Oklahoma."

Also in the papers that morning:

ER OoopsIt had been a rough day for bond trader Joshua Micah Blotnik, 35, of Manhattan.

A downturn in municipal bonds had wrecked his day - and now, paying $22 for an imported Jack Daniels, he was short of cash.

Walking to the cash machine, he felt cripplingly short of breath. He paid his tab and hailed a cab to the hospital.

The evening only got worse.

He walked to the charge nurse and asked if his doctor, Eli Goldschuh, was available.

"F**k you, D******ag", replied the charge nurse. "Can't you see we're f*****g up to our a***s with m***********g p********d d****s? Wait your f*****g turn" the charge nurse replied as she struggled to juggle too many patients among too few tables.

"No, I mean Doctor Goldschuh", Blotnik persisted.

"He only works here one f*****g week a month", the charge nurse replied as she fixed a mis-connected IV tube. "He started a clinic in f*****g Miami three months ago, and now he only practices here one m***********g piece of s**t week per f*****g month, to take in some shows and keep his National Health registry up to f*****g date. Now sit down before I have you arrested, beaten and your eyes gouged out".

After a six hour wait, Blotnik was briefly examined, wheeled into an operating room for a double amputation, and sent home at lunchtime with a bronchial inhaler.

Once the confetti from the Freedom Day celebration was picked up, though, things became dicey for the new USoC.

Minister of National Wellness Pinkerton announced that the National Healthcare System was in debt to the tune of several hundred billion Francs. Prime Minister Dean was forced to enact a tax increase - deficits had been rendered illegal in the new USoC Constitution.

Death and Taxes

This story appeared in the February 26, 2009 New York Times:

New Government Ad Campaign Raises Eyebrows in 'Burbs
PITTSBURGH (SOROS NEWS SERVICE) - A new ad campaign is sparking conversation in suburban Pittsburgh.

Overnight, thousands of lawn signs, like those used in political campaigns, appeared on suburban lawns around the Pittsburgh metro area. The 1x2 meter plastic lawn signs, done in a dreamy, pastel style, read "Happy To Pay For A Better, Safer Pennsylvania". Similar signs were reported in suburbs in Connecticut, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

"I dunno, I never gave permission to plant the sign" said Letta Fleebert of suburban Pittsburgh. "I know the taxes have been rising in the 'burbs, and I guess someone wants us to feel good about it. I just dunno".

The head of the controversial ad campaign, Minister of Public Opinion Anneke Blinston-Poppenberg-Llewellyn-Poff, said "we're just trying to raise peoples' awareness of how happy they are to be contributing to the greater good".

The lower house of the USoC Parliament passed the tax hike by a 3-2 margin, but not without intense acrimony. The lower house was popularly elected by each electoral district (the USoC had abolished the Electoral College - in fact, Al Gore had presided over a ceremonial burning of the Electoral College in effigy in January of 2008), throwing it over for a mass popular vote using a weighted-preference ballot intended to foster small parties that, nevertheless, empaneled a Parliament that was solidly controlled by the new Social Democratic Party. The Prime Minister, elected by the Lower House, appointed members to the Upper House for ten year terms - a system borrowed from Canada. The appointments were subject to Lower House confirmation. Dean's first upper house, which was 100% SDP, had been the subject of a fierce floor fight decided on straight party lines. Dean solved the problem by forming an SDP coalition of inner-city and rural districts; united by the slow industrial and agricultural economies, they made natural allies.

Members of Parliament (MPs) from wealthier, white collar suburban districts in central New Jersey, suburban Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois and Minnesota protested bitterly, feeling that the tax burden was being shifted from the urban and rural districts to them. "Why should our hard work be used against us?" asked Leo Prigg, MP from Westchester, PA, before being shouted down by the front-benchers. The increase passed.

That bill was followed by two more in quick succession: a bill creating "Enterprise Zones" in the inner cities, and another creating a vast "Rural Initiative" cutting taxes on corporate farms. Despite bitter debate from the suburban MPs, both measures passed, not without intense ire on both sides. "We in Nyack are the city's cash machine!" complained MP Jerod Pflinzer of upstate New York. "The suburbs are the new Mississippi!" responded Boston MP Star Rabbit Preger during a nude appearance on "The Late Show".

"Well, at least we're not in the Red States, being ruled by a bunch of fundamentalist...no, make that dumbdementalist gun toting wackoes" said Mekhi Tostengard of Bennington, Vermont. "Did you know they used to be the slave states? I heard they burned a witch in Minnesota", he added, before being told that Minnesota actually was a Blue state and member of the USoC.

The Consitutional Crisis That Wasn't

In the "Red" US, the economic news remained good. The US Government "LINUX Gambit", despite the predictions of the pundits, was successful beyond its proponents' wildest expectations. "We'd figured people wouldn't be comfortable enough or familiar enough to most people - but this nation's Information Architects and Software Human Factors professionals have provided yeoman service", said Raj Prathvandandigar, technology correspondent for NARN News. "Their work was the fulcrum between success and failure, and they delivered magnificently. They are the heroes of this economy!".

But a social storm cloud arose that threatened some of the nation's progress. As Feff Jecke of the Atrios Foundation asked in the run-up to the separation, "What happens in the South when Secretary of Religion James Dobson issues his order requiring mandatory Christian prayer in school, "For the good of all the unenlightened?"

To a large extent, it was a moot point - the mass privatization of the nation's schools made it largely a moot point for 85% of the student body. But a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the 15% of students that remained in purely public (as opposed to private, charter, parochial or hybrid) schools by the US Civil Liberties Union. The Blue State press had a field day. "Oh, right. Prayer. That'll solve a lot of problems" said Oliver Willis, commentator for Soros News Network.

The problem was solved when President Lincoln and James Dobson appeared jointly on the Instanetwork. "Public school kids can pray if they want, and God help the teacher who stops them on my watch", said Lincoln, as Dobson nodded and smiled. "They can pray to any God they want, any time they want. The schools just shouldn't be requiring it. Now - don't make me stop this car, America!", he said to a mass, ecumenical standing ovation. It was never an issue again.

As the headlines told of an economy growing at a 9% annual rate, a new problem arose; immigration from the USoC.

It started small; "guest workers" travelling from recession-addled California to Las Vegas and Phoenix to work at the jobs that were more plentiful than skilled workers. A steady stream of medical professionals from major urban areas in the USoC began dividing their time, or even emigrating, forsaking the bureaucracy of the USoC's National Health Service for the cash-and-carry fluidity of the Red State system. "I actually love being a doctor again" said Dr. Bernie Brickman, former Chicago internist who moved to Saint Louis. "Before, I spent 50% of the time arguing with lawyers and case managers from the NHS. Now? I actually had a patient thank me last week! I used to get spit on in Chicago!".

Many doctors from Chicago, LA, DC and Minnesota moved to bordering states, and ran thriving cash-and-carry clinics for Blue-staters who, tired of waiting days for appointments, furtively snuck across the border for care. The changes weren't good for all physicians, of course - Hollywood plastic surgeons found that their job prospects in the Red US were extremely limited, and saw their incomes in California drop by nearly 70%. In a celebrated episode of "60 Minutes", a once-prominent plastic surgeon was filmed moonlighting at a coffee shop to pay his property taxes, prompting legislation to retrain "transitional physicians" in fields more in demand.

As the stream of doctors widened into a torrent, legislation was proposed making it a gross federal misdemeanor to seek medical care outside the National Health System. "Get Healthcare in the USoC or Die", said an ad campaign featuring rapper and Undersecretary of Culture P. Diddy, and people joked that that wasn't far off.

The next wave of emigration was more prosaic; middle-class professionals from small towns and suburbs in the Blue States who, lured by the prosperity they heard about in the Red States, decided to move on to greener pastures. "I used to vote Democratic all the time. I wouldn't now, that that it'd matter" said Beth Brecker, 33, a single mother and unemployed waitress from Willmar, MN, interviewed while packing her minivan to move to North Dakota for a spot in a Management Training program . "The taxes are killing me, and they killed the restaurant I worked at. I'm happy to pay for gas to get me the hell out of here, she said, pointing at one of the ubiquitous "Happy to Pay..." signs that had been planted in her lawn.

"I'm tired of feelin' like I'm the beeyotch of every special interest that needs a few thousand more bucks from the trough" said Tyrone Jenkins, 44, a construction welder from Pomona, CA. "My cousin in Dallas says that I can get work there, or anywhere in the Midwest, for the asking. We're outta here". Jenkins planned to move to Dallas, and send for his family later.

The efflux continued, a group of SDP MPs proposed legislation calling for a 95% wealth and property tax on all immigrants - but the bill was withdrawn from the '09 Parliament because the two sponsors resigned to take jobs with immigration law firms in Denver.

Emigration helped strain the slowly-worsening relations between the US and the USoC.

Shih-Tzus of War

In August of '09, a mob of Islamic radical and students stormed the USoC embassy in Karachi, Pakistan, taking 75 USoC diplomats hostage. The group declared itself disgusted with the "American moral imperialism" (taking specific umbrage with the popular Michael Moore documentary "Fundamentalists Look Silly and Smell Bad", which took swats at Moslem fundamentalists as well as Christians.

The government was paralyzed. The Dean wing of the SDP wanted to negotiate, while the Kucinich wing and the Greens thought that negotiating as equals was an authoritarian, Western concept, preferring instead to pay reparations to the militants and their societies.

Prime Minister Dean was brought up on a vote of No Confidence after nine days of debate, and lost 446-440. The announcement of the results was halted by news reports that the radicals were going to execute hostages; debate became deadlocked between those who wanted to accelerate the payment of tribute and a faction who thought death was appropriate given America's legacy in the area. A compromise candidate, Eleanor 1092, a Greener Party candidate from Minneapolis, swept to the Prime Ministership on a fluky vote, promising to get the UN even MORE involved. As the results were counted, word came in that the hostages, about to be executed, had been rescued by 13 US Marines (from the vestigial Marine Corps kept in being to guard embassies) who opted to take the issue in their own hands, broken into the Embassy, killed hundreds of the radicals, rescued the hostages without loss, and escaped to safety with a howling mob of radcials and French foreign service workers at their heels.

The issue sparked heated debate in both legislatures - in the US Congress, Republicans got into a fierce floor fight over who admired the Marines more, while in the USoC Lower House, debate on the complete failure of the Ministries of Intelligence and Peace to predict or react to the disaster raged for months. Prime Minister 1092 convened a Blue Chip Summit of Summits to investigate.

Feel Like a Number - and Loving It!

Born in a commune in Idaho in 1966 as Eleanor Strunk, the new Prime Minister was a colorful character. After spending the eighties as a member of an anarchist group in Seattle, Strunk moved to Minneapolis, became active a full-time organizer for a variety of protest groups, advocacy groups, non-profits and, in 2005, the leader of the Greener Party and it's first elected official, when she swept to a seat on the Minneapolis City Council. It was that year she changed her name from Strunk to 1092; "1 stands for the unity of being, zero stands for my place in the universe, 9 is three sets of three, which is the union of perfection, and 2 is myself and my partner, Marcella". It had taken four years to to from fringe city councilperson - 1092 preferred "Citycouncilbeing" - to Prime Minister of the USoC.

Prime Minister 1092 and the First Partner were the first chief executives in former-US history to abjure living in the White House - 1092 called it a "symbol of white male rectangularity". The 1092s lived in a yurt Lafayette Park, and turned the White House over to a non-profit that promoted self-actualization through Andean drumming.

Blown Away

In September, as the Summit of Summits convened, a hurricane blew ashore in New England. Coastal residents recieved no warning; the National Storm Warning Center had been embroiled with the Ministry of Sensitivity over the naming of the storm (factions advocating naming the storm after a Gay American and a Mentally Handicapped American were deadlocked) until it was far too late to issue a warning. Thousands died, tens of billions of dollars of property damage ensued, from New York through Maryland.

As people cleaned up, the questions started: Why no warning? Why did the Ministry of Labor's attorneys file injunctions against the Ministry of Peace sending troops to help? Why did the Ministry of Information not get the word out?

The questions about both the Karachi Hostage Crisis and the No-Name Hurricane dominated the debate through the winter. People thought it couldn't get any worse.

They were wrong.

Part IV - World of Hurt
Part II - Irrational Exuberance
Part I - Push Comes to Shove

Idealistic Story for a Cynical Age

A heart-rendingly poignant Veteran's Day Story from Hugh Hewitt.

Anniversary To Remember

Folsom Jim Phillips at Infinite Monkeys notes the passing on Tuesday of an important, but oft-ignored anniversary - November 9 anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, along with a reprint of Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech - as essential a speech as there has been in this country.

Remember - only 84 shopping days until Reaganmas.

Teach Your Children Well

Young Kerry supporter allegedly attacks Bush-supporting friend with a baseball bat:

Three high school students, one allegedly armed with a bat, were charged with attacking a pro-President Bush (news - web sites) classmate after he reportedly said only gays would support Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites).

Curiously, the Strib piece on the subject doesn't mention the allegiance of the alleged attacker, although the PiPress puts it in the headline.

Remember when James Byrd and Matthew Shepard were murdered? Leftypundits and the liberal media carped endlessly about the "climate of hate" that conservative talk radio had allegedly created.

Just asking.

UPDATE: Ed comments on the same story.

Casinos

Tim Pawlenty wants to tax Indian casinos.

The scenario could have been like this...

At the same moment, two men — both wearing heavy trench coats and fedoras angled across their foreheads — approached the table. The smaller of the two slid into the chair across from McCarthy, removed his fedora and set it next to an empty plate. McCarthy recognized the man they call "the Governor."

"Nice to see a man minding the store," he said casually referring to McCarthy's position as executive director of the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association.

"Those fries look good." Without waiting for acknowledgement, the Governor reached across the table and grabbed a handful of McCarthy's meal. Meanwhile the larger man — larger as in "leviathan" — moved behind McCarthy. McCarthy thought better than to ask if the man had a concealed carry permit for that bulge under his coat.

"What do you want?" said McCarthy with the timidity of a Minnesotan seeking tax relief.

"What makes you think I want anything?" replied the Governor, helping himself to another handful of McCarthy's fries. "I just sort of felt lucky — like I was gonna come into some cash today. Know what I mean?" The Governor glanced around while munching on a fry. "Nice little gaming business you got going here. Shame if something were to happen to it."

McCarthy didn't respond, so the Governor went on.

"Yea, pretty busy here. Like the Mall of America. Nice place that mall. Got just about everything out there."

The Governor paused for effect. "Except a casino."

McCarthy started to push away from the table, but the long arm of the leviathan standing behind him restrained him. Resistance was futile. McCarthy eased his chair forward. "We have a deal," he muttered.

"Deals, smeals," said the Governor shrugging his shoulders. "You never read your history? There's always," he made finger quotes in the air, 'options.' "

...but no matter. Getting the state into the gambling business is a lousy idea.

But not as bad as horning in on the Indian gaming monopoly. Vice monopolies are the best form of, for lack of a better term, "reparations"; they're voluntary, yet lucrative enough to make a difference.

Unapologetic

A response to last week's cretinous "Sorry Everybody" campaign, the We're Not Sorry campaign is just in time.

Some are straight...

And some are photoshopped...

...and they're all fun.

UPDATE: David's Medienkritik joins in from Germany.

Thanks, Veterans

It's Veteran's Day today.

Thank a veteran - as, indeed, I thank any vets reading this today.

Plenty of Vaccine, No Patients

Apparently, there's plenty of flu vaccine...

The nurses who give flu shots in Minnesota are facing a shortage of another kind -- patients.

Last Friday at a clinic at Bloomington City Hall, public health workers came armed with 800 vaccine doses but gave out only 259. On Tuesday, nurses at a clinic at the Shepherd of Lakes Lutheran Church in Prior Lake arrived with 1,000 doses and left with 750 of them.

So what's going on? An excess of "Minnesota nice," say frustrated state health officials. Too many Minnesotans who are at high risk of complications from the flu think there is someone out there who needs the vaccine more than they do.

"I've heard many people say, 'I am 65, but my 92-year-old mom needs it,' " said Mary Ann Blade, president of the Minnesota Visiting Nurses Agency, which runs flu clinics around the state.

Kris Ehresmann, head of the vaccine program at the Health Department, said there are about 1.6 million high-risk people in Minnesota who should be vaccinated, but many have not gotten shots. The state still has about 925,000 doses available.

"We can't make them get vaccinated," she said. "But we want to make sure that we've gotten the word out."

Odd, isn't it?

Maybe someone told the people that getting a shot was just a tad less gruelling than the Bataan Death March.

Someone who knows stuff.

Secession Diaries, Part II: Irrational Exuberance

"It's time for us to throw off the bad baggage of the old system. You remember the Red States used to be the slave states, right? That kills me"

Mental Health Minister Garofalo, 2007

The United States of Canada's Constitutional Convention of 2006 dragged on into 2007, and eventually into 2008.

This is Part II of the History of North America after the Great Secession of 2007.

When the final document was released, the 200 page Constitution (that was actually the average length of the versions released - California refused to ratify the Immigrants Rights sections of the charter) guaranteed the Rights of speech, press, assembly, housing, security, food, family leave, reproductive choice, family configuration, self-esteem, a balanced budget, healthcare, mental healthcare, education, voting/education/medical care rights for immigrants regardless of documentation status, a living wage, as well as freedom from religion, hate, and harassment.

The first 100 days were tumultuous for both of the new nations. Since the two nations couldn't agree on foreign commitments, all US troops were withdrawn from overseas, and the US Army, Navy and Air Force were in effect disbanded. Shortly thereafter, Peace Minister Kucinich inaugurated the new "Peace Force", a small paramilitary "peacekeeping" force that was completely integrated into the UN command.

The "Red" US, realizing that neither its tax base nor its organic commitments required a large military, retained a small Coast Guard using former USCG cutters, an enhanced Border Patrol, and a National Guard. "If there's one thing we don't need to worry about, it's those Blue Staters invading us", said Red Secretary of Defense Jeff Nguyen.

As tumultuous as foreign policy was, domestic relations were even moreso. The Prime Minister's Press Secretary, John Stewart, was quoted on "Meet the Press Branch" early in '07: "We have all the industry, all the media, all the people, all the brains, restaurants, all the love..."

The Red states had most of the food, of course - as well as a lot of thriving commercial and industrial areas. While they'd always been overshadowed by Silicon Valley, a number of small, decentralized commercial, development, scientific and industrial centers had been developing in places like Idaho, North Carolina, Utah, Florida, Texas and Colorado.

Many economists, including the New York Times' Spleetor Fandingding (nee Paul Krugman, who had changed his name under peculiar circumstances in late 2004), predicted that things would basically stay the same; "It's in eveyone's self-interest to keep things in a sort of stasis".

But things started changing; the changes were small, but they came on fairly quickly.

The Red Boom

The non-agribusiness sector in the US took off much more quickly than expected. There were many reasons - there was so much work to do to basically build a national infrastructure where none had existed, plenty of work awaited. A massive selloff of federal lands owned by an extranational federal government brought in billions of dollars of non-agribusiness currency. And the US didn't lack for any industrial infrastructure - the new nation had access to the many, many maquiladoras in Mexico that had been briefly idled by the USoC's "closed border" policies (of which more below). Las Vegas, Miami, and Orlando raked in extra billions, both for the gambling, tourism and entertainment markets and in foreign exchange fees. And the trips to Aspen and Vail that had entertained the Blue State elite during the old days were now overseas trips, complete with international fees and exchange taxes.

The New US abandoned the Income Tax for a radical, but reasonable, National Property Tax. Individuals and corporations - domestic and foreign - paid a small, flat annual tax on real and fiscal property holdings. The revenues were more than sufficient to pay the budget of the drastically-shrunken Federal Government. Further revenues came from taxes on "foreign" property and investment holdings in the US, notably the large tracts of former federal land that were bought by USoC nationals and European and Asian buyers.

"Corporate Welfare" was abolished; companies were no longer subsidized.

The healthcare system introduced a system of health savings accounts. Low-income catastrophic care was augmented by a small national subsidy in the form of a nationally-underwritten catastrophic care risk pool for low-income workers.

The tax revenue went to paying down the US's minimal combined state deficits, and ameliorating the readjustment in the agriculture business. Absent Washington's subsidies, the price of American agricultural products plunged. But again, without the subsidies, most of the major agribusiness conglomerates confined their business to the USoC, where subsidies and higher-margin crops made their operations more profitable. As a result, farming in the "Red States" underwent a bit of a shake-out - but not nearly as severe as had been predicted.

Freed of Washington's politics, the new USA negotiated lucrative agricultural trade agreements with much of the third world.

But the real revolution was electronic. As a money-saving and reliability-boosting measure, the US Government adopted the LINUX operating system as its software backbone. This created a massive, internal market for development work to support the sudden, vast divestment from imported Microsoft and IBM software. Massive development efforts occupied most of the US software development market, as companies worked overtime to supply the needs of government, business and an immense private sector. "Times have never been so good", said Tad Rawaljindipur of Boise's "Vishnuware", which provided the software that powered the new banking industry that arose to replace the largely "blue-state" banks who were frozen out of the US market. "Before the split, we had been developing a RecipeMinder for PalmOS. Today, our OpenBanc application tracks billions of dollars of EFT payments per day".

The New US defied predictions, and came right out of the gate with a booming economy.

The Blue Bust

The left-leaning USoC started out with big economic and social plans, immediately ratifying a French-Canadian/UN-sponsored "Bill of Universal Economic Liberties". The Bill included:

• A comprehensive single-payer healthcare, essentially transposing the Canadian system to the new nation. The system included comprehensive addiction and psychological care.
• A national "Living Wage", set at 84 francs per hour ($12/2004 US)
• A family leave bill that allowed new and adoptive parents six months of mandated leave
• Complete, mandatory domestic partner benefits
• An acceleration of the old agriculture and dairy price supports.
• Punitive energy consumption taxes on larger private vehicles.
• As a gesture of solidarity to the oppressed workers of Central America and Asia, as well as a sop to the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, high tariffs on manufactured goods went into effect immediately.

These tariffs cut the legs out of under much Central American industry. US companies rushed in to fill the gap with the newly-cheap capacity - which caused a UN/USoC resolution condemning the exploitive industrial practices practiced in the new US. "Just like a bunch of former Slave States!", crowed Fairness in Labor Minister Arianna Piffle-Schwartzwald-Van Beek.

The tariffs brought retributive tariffs on USoC agricultural products from Central America and Eastern Europe - opening a large market for US agricultural goods to all of those markets.

Piffle-Schwartzwald-Van Beek instituted a punitive tariff against US agricultural goods. In response, the US enacted its first tariff - a 5% surcharge on all goods "imported" to the US from the USoC.

The effects were subtle, but started immediately.

• "Exports" of cars from Detroit to its major export market - the US - dried up immediately, as Japanese and German companies, leveraging their market position with their Red-State factories in the South and West gobbled up market share. The Volkswagen Maverick replaced the Ford F150 as the top-selling pickup in the US, while Toyota, Honda and Mazda's US operations - operating as domestic companies - picked up near-exclusive market share.
• The tariff on food cause the price of pasta - a staple in New York and Boston - to skyrocket. A government effort to encourage New York and Boston Italian-USoCians to eat rice backfired, culminating in the Semolina Riot of 2008, where a rumor of a pasta shortage caused by massive hording of precious "pre-tax" pasta led to nine deaths and $40 million in property damage in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Newark.

The obvious lesson of the riots, in hindsight, was that the tariffs were a disaster. The less obvious lesson was that troops from the federal Ministry of Peace were unable to quell the riots, and the government's efforts to rebuild the damage were late, and hideously expensive.

Still, at the end of 2008, the situation was fairly impressive; the "Red" US was growing ("From what?" scoffed Minister of Intellectual Development Maureen Dowd), while the USoC's economy was stable.

Not all the news was good:

• Christmastime layoffs at Ford and GM plants in Michigan and New Jersey made for a brown holiday season
• tariff-induced inflation in food and fuel prices sparked a slight uptick in the USoC's inflation index
• Violent crime rates experienced a sharp spike in the major metropolitan areas in the USoC, despite the five-year phased confiscation of all non-hunting firearms that had begun 12 months earlier. Minister of Safety Niles Throckmorton announced a plan to accelerate the confiscation, and proposed banning hunting weapons as well. "We need to disarm all the potential criminals", said Entertainment Minister John Tesh in kicking off the Safety Ministry's "Disarm for Peace" ad campaign in late November.
• The Ministry of Entertainment noted that it had been the worst Broadway season on record in New York. "No Frickin' Tourists", said Associate Minister of Culture Vito Scungili. "Frikkin' Red-State Rubes ain't comin' here and spendin' their frickin' money! Whadya think they're doing in f****ng Flyoverland - making Twine balls, going to tractor pulls and grooming each other's frickin' mullets? Jeeezus H Christ, tell those hicks that Broadway is still frickin' here! Jeez, we're dying here!"

Still, as people in the US sat down for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa dinner (and families in the USoC celebrated Solstice) and 2009 loomed, everything was looking pretty good in both the Red and Blue states.

But nobody had seen a year like 2009 in recent human memory.

Part IV - World of Hurt
Part III - Death and Taxes

Part I - Push Comes to Shove

Blue State Scrooges

While rabid pro-Blue-state pundits complain (mistakenly) that the Red states are a net drag on taxes, as Powerline shows, the story on charitable giving is much different.

Hint; no Blue state ranks in the top half in the US.

Minnesota "Nice?" #45.

Kinda puts those moronic "Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota" signs in perspective.

Happy Birthday, USMC

The Gun Club is 229 today.

In honor of the Corps' birthday, all current and former Leathernecks (and serving, reserve and former members of all services) need to observe the Twelfth General Order and get down to Keegans' Irish Pub. Publican [1] and former Marine Terry Keegan is hosting "Salute to Veterans" night at his exceptional pub in Northeast Minneapolis, today through Sunday.

Bring your ID, DD214 (or equivalent) or other proof that you're an active duty, reserve, or veteran member of the military (reciting the other 11 General Orders may suffice - I'll have to check with Terry) - you'll get your first drink free.

And don't forget to join the Northern Alliance on Saturday evening as we join with Keegans' in saluting our military and vets.

[1] Note to MoveOn members: "Publican" means "Bar Owner".

America's First War on Terror

Via Dean Esmay, the story of our first war on terror:

The first time the American flag flew over foreign soil taken in battle came in a war against international terrorists. Unlike today’s brigands, they were not driven by ideology or religion, but by a baser and perhaps more honest lust: gold. But terrorists they were, and our war against them was fought long and hard, in somewhat unconventional but still very real ways. And it was long before all of us were born...

They were known as the Barbary pirates.

Their name came not from the native Berber people of North Africa but from Khair ad Din, known in the West as Barbarossa--or, in English, Redbeard. Coming from the ancient Mediterranean piratical tradition, Barbarossa seized Algiers in 1510, effectively making himself the first sovereign of a modern pirate state. His territorial grab should have been a direct threat to the sultan in Constantinople, but when he pledged his fealty to the throne in exchange for a large cut of the action, he was given regency of Maghrib. His descendants—both biological and methodical—maintained control over the shores of Northern Africa for the next two hundred years.

Forget all the swashbuckling Technicolor imagery of buried treasure and naval battles featuring galleons firing cannons at equally matched opponents conjured up by Hollywood and cheap rum ads. Those are great movies, and fun myths. But the Barbary pirates were murderers, rapists and slave traders. Ransoming hostages, and demanding tribute from merchant princes who wanted to avoid anything “unfortunate� happening to their cargos, were among their favorite tactics. They essentially ran protection rackets, and controlled every form of vice from Alexandria to Gibraltar. Just like modern mobsters, their services were often called upon by a prince-ling here and there who wanted to harass his enemies without showing his own flag.

Read the whole thing.

Preening Arrogance

Here's the (RealMedia) video of the C-SPAN forum where ABC's Carole Simpson calls the election a return to the Confederacy.

Submitted without comment about the preening arrogance and historical ignorance of the utterly vapid, blowdried Simpson, a walking symptom of all that's wrong with the mainstream media today, because comment is not needed.

Attention, Moonbats: Christmas Cancelled

According to that right-wing tool Salon, rumors that the election was stolen are greatly exaggerated:

There's little question that the American election is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But even if this particular election wasn't perfect, it was still most likely good enough for us to have faith in the results. Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny.

Read it all.

Better luck next time.

Posted by Mitch at 06:55 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Secession Diaries, Part I: Push Comes to Shove

January 1, 2017 - This post is part one of a several-part history of what was once called the United States, since the Great Secession of 2006. While historians will one day no doubt come up with a more comlplete story, the overall tale - hubris and hatred that bred comedy that led to epic tragedy - is a constant in human affairs. Even now, looking back on the bout of insanity that gripped the nation over the past decade, it's hard to believe that this nation could have been led down such a dismal path by people alleged to have been so smart.

Here's the story.

January 1, 2007
After the 2004 election, the calls for secession among the so-called "Blue States" started.

At first, it was seen a joke, even by people in the "blue states", a bitter, petulant ranting by members of what was up until then called "the chattering classes", but starting in 2007 were known as "the Blue State Ruling Elite". Laurence O'Donnell - who had developed a reputation as an intellectual thug during the runup to the 2004 elections, was the first person since Reconstruction to seriously broach the notion of secession from the Union.

It stayed at the "late night TV" joke level for months, until the fall of 2005, when over the course of two weeks, four things happened:

A book, "The Stupid Jesusland Rednecks Used to Own Slaves, and Now They Cost More Money Than They Take In, You Lying Liars", by failed Minnesota Senatorial candidate and ex-talk-show host Al Franken topped the best-seller lists. Franken's first intentionally non-comedy book, it traced the amount of federal tax dollars that went to support the children of incestuous relationships in Red States under the active connivance of fundamentalist churches - an amount that Franken stated was greater than the cost of healthcare for the entire Eastern Seaboard.
• Franken, in a segment on Sixty Minutes later that week, noted Halliburton killed more gay couples than had died in all of the Hussein regime. Sixty Minutes host Michael Moore showed disturbing footage of NRA members standing in front of a Starbucks in Lusk, Wyoming, drinking beer and shooting at fleeing gay couples - a segment that generated outrage from coast to coast.
• Barbra Streisand, later that day, launched her comeback "The Redneck Rubes Want Your Money, Your Uterus and Your Life" tour, featuring Liz Phair, P. Diddy and REM. The tour was intended to "Raise Awareness of the drag the Red States are on all the enlightened people"

Over the course of the next year, what had started as a joke became a key item in the national discourse.

Finally, in the spring of 2006, the Supreme Court scheduled a national plebiscite on secession; each state would be allowed to decide its own alignment.

Voting was surprising yet ultimately predictable. The West Coast, New England, the Middle Atlantic states north of Virginia, DC, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin and Hawaii - 18 states - voted for secession by various margins. In addition, Minnesota's secession measure passed by ten votes, amid allegations that a balding, droning, fiftysomething man identifying himself as "a really, really Big Cheese" had personally vouched for hundreds of people at dozens of polling places.

On January 1, 2007, the 19 "Blue States" seceded from the Union, and joined with Canada to form the United States of Canada. The new nation opted for a parliamentary form of government, and elected its first Prime Minister, Howard Dean. The cabinet included John Kerry as Minister of State, Dianne Feinstein as Attorney General, Nancy Pelosi as Minister of Human Activities, Jesse Ventura as Secretary of Recreation, and Dennis Kucinich as Minister of Peace.

The other 31 states formed a new nation. The new nation carved out a new federal district outside Omaha (at the old SAC base), and, defiantly mocking the stereotype they'd been given by the major media, called themselves "Jesusland" for one day, before reverting to "The United States of America". A new Congress was empaneled, and an emergency election was held. The new nation elected a pair of virtual unknowns to the New White House.

The United States elected Buck Lincoln, a former Marine sergeant-turned-construction-entrepreneur, turned urban vocational training pioneer, who'd served two terms in the Colorado State Senate. He was joined by his running mate, Miriam Mgambe, an expatriate New York native who had built a network of inner-city private schools that, defying expectations, were such wild successes that a teacher's union local had been rumored to have put out a contract on her life.

The United States adopted the original United States Constitution. The USoC embarked on a constitutional convention that, as of "Secession Day", January 1, 2007, was not yet close to finished (see next chapter).

At the swearing-in of the USoC Cabinet at the UN building in New York, Prime Minister Dean said "We, the states that never owned slaves, the states that pioneered really good coffee, the states with all the theatre and really amazing restaurants, the states that generate the tax dollars that our former leech-like appendages in the South and West have been siphoning off for decades, would like to ask the rest of the world for its' forgiveness for the arrogance of our forefathers", which led to a standing ovation from the entire assembled, combined Parliament and General Assembly. Then, as the audience held crystals and chanted, a wiccan priestess adjourned the assembly.

At the same time, in the new Federal District near Omaha, President Lincoln addressed the nation via the Internet and Fox News: "My fellow Americans; we have to play the hand we're dealt. Let's play it well. God Bless America".

On January 2, 2007, the history of the US became two histories.

Tomorrow: Daily life in the two new nations.

Part IV - World of Hurt
Part III - Death and Taxes
Part II - Irrational Exuberance

Follow The Money

One of the left's more moronic tropes is that the Blue states are net exporters of tax money, while the Red states get more tax money in than they send out.

This, of course, is yet another case where the Democrats need the American people to be too stupid to think for themselves.

It's true - in the sense that "if you line up facts properly, they add up that way, but it's still incredibly misleading".

For starters, per capita incomes in Red states tend to be lower; there's much less income to tax. And as Rocket Man notes on Powerline:

The condition decried by a "top Democrat"--"The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government"--has existed for a long time, courtesy of the progressive income tax, under which a small minority of upper-income taxpayers carry most of the cost of the federal government. Funny, the Dems never minded this before!

Of course, in the lower-income Red states, prices are commensurately lower - so there are fewer expenditures, and less economic activity, to tax. This, of course, is why so many Blue staters are moving to Red states - why Colorado has turned into California East, and formerly-conservative Vermont and New Hampshire have turned into Massachusetts Liberal exile camps.

Beyond that? Western red states tend to be very sparsely populated - still less money to tax - and on top of that, they tend to be full of things like Federal land, military bases and national parks, Native American tribes, hydroelectric projects, water reservoirs and pipelines to feed the major cities - all of which receive tax money, and lots of it, but then I don't hear Los Angeles or New Yorkers bitching too hard about the immense, red-state tax expenditures that keep their faucets gushing.

It's another mark of a party whose desperation is slowly eating away all logic.

Arafat Kacks?

The Christian in me refuses to rejoice at anyones death.

The human in me wants to do a tapdance at the late-breaking word that Yasser Arafat has assumed room temperature. The auteur of the policy of years of suicide attacks and bloody riots - the intifada - should not be missed by anyone with a human soul.

Arafat leaves a colorful legacy to the world:

In fact, I can find hundreds of reasons to dance on Arafat's grave.

And hundreds more.

If Islam is truly a religion of peace, then Arafat is not going to need that outer layer of clothing. The only shame is that he got to live such a long and prominent life.

The Christian in me prays I'll be forgiven my gleeful indiscretion.

All-Purpose - but Pointed

Lileks repeats something I heard on Hewitt; Paul Harvey has spoken:

Paul Harvey, of all people, noted that the hard phase of the battle would involve house-to-house combat, “just like Vietnam.” Sigh. It’s now the all-purpose metaphor.

All-purpose, perhaps - but not all that inappropriate.

Hewitt ridiculed Harvey's statement on his show yesterday - "what did they have in Vietnam? Jungle?"

Nobody remembers the Battle of Hue. You should.

The city of Hue, South Vietnam, was the site of one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam War. Three understrength U.S. Marine battalions, consisting of fewer than 2,500 men, attacked and soundly defeated more than 10,000 entrenched enemy troops, liberating Hue for South Vietnam.

Situated in central Vietnam, Hue was the country’s cultural capital, a unique blend of French and Vietnamese influence. The Imperial City, it gracefully retained the glory of Vietnam’s past while its universities educated Vietnam’s brightest minds for the future. Hue was a symbol of everything the Vietnamese people admired and respected. For this reason, it was spared the terrible effects of war—until Tet 1968.

During the lunar New Year holiday of Tet—a very important week-long holiday celebrated all over Vietnam—the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army launched a massive assault on South Vietnam. They seized the American embassy in Saigon. They also seized the city of Hue and its population of about 140,000 citizens. This Tet Offensive began on January 31, 1968. The Battle of Hue lasted four weeks and cost some 142 American lives. Marines of the First and Fifth Regiments, fighting alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s 1st Division, were supported by U.S. Army 7th and 12th Cavalry Regiments, among other units, in the battle for Hue.

North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were driven out of Hue little by little as U.S. Marines retook the city one block at a time. The Marines retook the Treasury building, the university, the hospital, the Provincial Headquarters and, finally, the citadel. On February 26, 1968, the city of Hue was declared secure. U.S. forces remained another week to ensure the city’s safety.

U.S. Marine Seargent Alfredo Gonzalez was awarded the Medal of Honor for his fearless gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. Today, USS Gonzalez (DDG-66) honors the memory of this hero. Additionally, countless Silver Stars and Purple Hearts were awarded for other acts of heroism.

The parallels don't need explaining. The differences do.

The Battle of Hue, according to Bing West and Ray Smith in "The March Up", was a watershed in the US Marines' approach to urban warfare. The Marines, led by officers who had survived the bloody point-a-to-point-b slogs in the Pacific in World War II, Tarawa and Peleliu and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as well as the "Stand or Die" meatgrinders of the Korean War, took Hue in a bloody, block-by-block battle that would have looked familiar to anyone that fought at Stalingrad or Aachen.

The battle spawned a movement among some of the younger officers, the company commanders whose men had gotten brutalized at Hue, to develop new tactics. They are the men who revolutionized the Marine Corps theory for fighting "low-intensity" war - battles like we face in Iraq today - in the eighties and nineties.

Belmont Club obliquely notes the differences in the Marines' approach to Fallujah, as opposed to Hue:

In Najaf as in Fallujah too, apparently, US forces did not advance on a single broad front but snaked in to seize key areas, breaking up enemy defenses into pockets which can no longer support each other. The pockets may be further isolated by bulldozing fire lanes. The low number of casualties so far indicates that US forces have successfully sidestepped enemy forces the way a broken field runner dodges tackles.

Harvey's reference isn't entirely wrong - but events have passed it by.

They Don't Get It

Right after the election, liberal uberblogger Atrios ran this piece, "Really Bad Ideas That the Media Loves and Democrats Must Resist". It's worth looking at, just to see what the other side is thinking.

It starts:

1) "privatizing" Social Security. I don't worry so much about benefits being cut. The upshot of a growing population of old people is that it's a growing populating of old people who vote. But, this will just be the Treasury Looting Act of 2005. Firms will get their fees, funds will be looted, then they'll be bailed out, rinse, repeat...

I dug back through Atrios' archives, to 1924, with his grandfather's comments about the pending Immigration Reform Act: "The upshot of a growing population of Italian people is that it's a growing population of immigrant people who vote. But this will just be the Treasury Looting Act of 1925. Lawyers will get their fees, organized crime will rise and control our cities, rinse, repeat...". Any human activity will draw the dishonest. The possibility of dishonesty is no reason to swear off progress; you just have to guard against the dishonesty.

2) "Medical Savings Accounts." Insurance is about reducing risk and uncertainty. Forcing people to cover their medical costs by hording [sic] a big pile of cash they can't spend until they get sick is a just a weird idea. And, it might have the added advantage of destroying the private health insurance market entirely.

Where do you even start with this - words fail - completely incoherent statement? Medical Savings Accounts change nothing about the philosophy of insurance; they merely introduce some consumer-side market discipline into the use of the flood of office visits and smaller procedures that make up the bulk of insurance claims. The only thing that "forces" the hoarding of cash are the IRS regulations for using pre-tax income deductions. Atrios' last sentence is presumably a snark - the destruction of private insurance would pave the way for a Canadian-style single-payer healthcare quagmire - but in fact MSAs would likely make private insurance viable again; HMOs have come to have most of the disadvantages of single-payer systems (rationing, gross inefficiency, a detached, overworked and paperwork-bound medical staff) with none of the advantages of the free market (downward pressure on the price of individual transactions, pushing of resposibility for transactional negotiation to the individual level). MSAs, which combine a high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic care policy with a cash account funded with pre-tax dollars to cover the deductible for things like office visits and cheaper procedures; doctors frequently charge lower rates for cash-and-carry visits and simple procedures, since there's no insurance company paperwork to do.

3) Tort reform. The "Moron-American Act of 2005." You get what you wish for, I guess.

While I have a few problems with the way the administration envisions tort reform, Atrios provides no reasons to discuss the issue, approaching the issue with his usual "snark and run" approach.

4) Bankruptcy reform. Oh Lord help us.

5) Enviornment. Well, everything.

As above, without the concomitant problems with the administration's approach.

6) Tax cuts. Oh, just let them have their g***amn tax cuts. The bond market'll snap like a twig at some point.

Just like it did under the Reagan Administration.

All I Want For Christmas

Mad How is a candidate to run the DNC:

=Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.

"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid.

Dean, who was in Albany, N.Y., Monday night to give a speech, said he hasn't decided about the top party job, noting he'd received thousands of e-mails urging him to try for it. He said he's still uncertain about his future.

"It's a lot easier to run for president when you don't know what you're getting into," he said. "I will stay involved, believe me."

Note to Democrats; when you're in a hole...

...well, no, go ahead. Keep digging. I'll lend you my shovel.

New Patriot Business Strategy: Sell At A Loss, Make It Up With Volume!

I figured it was only a matter of time before some leftyblog or another tripped over this story, about Twin Cities retail giant Best Buy. The story's been around for a year, although this incarnation in the WSJ is a new one.

Lo and behold, local leftyblog powerhouse New Patriot is on the beat!

But NP writer Mark Desrosiers, usually among the more capable of the New Patriot's stable of writers, completely punks this one.

Full disclosure: I used to work at Best Buy. I know a number of the people involved in Best Buy's research effort. I work in user and customer research.

Desrosiers writes:

In case you were wondering whether our new rich-get-richer culture will have an effect on morals and values, check this out: Analyzing Customers, Best Buy Decides Not All Are Welcome.

Who are the unwelcome customers? Coupon-clippers, bargain-hunters, rebate-scroungers. Some of them are misers; some of them look for loss-leaders because they have a (now entirely justified) vendetta against Best Buy; but I bet most of these "devil" customers just can't afford all that pricey merchandise, yet they want to keep up with the Joneses. In other words, Best Buy now officially wants to shun poor people, while targeting the new legions of moneybags:

Let's stop right here.

Read the article. Find any reference to "poor people". There is none. Indeed, poverty has nothing - jack - to do with this strategy. Indeed, cut right to the chase, this section right here; the customers they're trying to cold-shoulder are those who...:

...buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on "loss leaders," severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. "They can wreak enormous economic havoc," says Mr. Anderson.

Best Buy estimates that as many as 100 million of its 500 million customer visits each year are undesirable. And the 54-year-old chief executive wants to be rid of these customers.

Mr. Anderson's new approach upends what has long been standard practice for mass merchants. Most chains use their marketing budgets chiefly to maximize customer traffic, in the belief that more visitors will lift revenue and profit. Shunning customers -- unprofitable or not -- is rare and risky.

Mr. Anderson says the new tack is based on a business-school theory that advocates rating customers according to profitability, then dumping the up to 20% that are unprofitable.

I can tell you from personal experience; Best Buy (like all megaretailers) operates at razor-thin margins. The only selling point Best Buy has is price. If you want to buy from a stereo from a place with amazing service, you go to a higher-end retailer. If you want to buy a CD but don't know what, and need someone to guide you to exactly the right one, you go to a Let It Be or an Electric Fetus. I for one never buy computer stuff from any of the big box retailers: I haven't shopped anywhere but General Nanosystems, a little hole-in-the-wall on University Avenue with better prices than any of the big boxes and better service than anyone in the business [hint: I highly recommend them for everything hardware-related], in five years. But I'm a geek.

Best Buy (and Comp USA, and Circuit City) has two selling points: price and choice. The profit on a low-end computer system is infinitesimal (although computer accessories are highly marked up; Best Buy may literally make more money on the printer cable than on the computer it's plugged into).

So there's a certain imperative to try to draw the customers who won't be a drag on whatever margin the company has, and - this is important - that has only little to do with the customer's income.

Desrosiers continues:

Meanwhile, "To deter the undesirables, it is cutting back on promotions and sales tactics that tend to draw them, and culling them from marketing lists." In other words, banning them.

No.

New Patriot doesnt go out of its way to draw Young Republican readers; it's not the same as banning them.

Not going out of one's way to draw specific customers - customers who are actively trying to short your margin, as opposed to people who don't want to spend a lot - is not "banning" them.

It's a cutthroat world, but not since the Jim Crow days have I heard of a company actually attempting to shun customers as a business strategy. Really, what's going on here?

The article does, in fact, explain the business strategy.

I remember my last trip to Best Buy, coupla years ago, to buy a new CD player. I am not a "Barry" [one of the consumer personae described in the audience], so needless to say I bought the cheapest one of the lot, and was thereupon practically thrown to the ground and kicked about by the well-trained employee because I didn't want to join in their warranty scam.

While Desrosiers has noticed that the extended warranties are indeed, let's be euphemistic, a profit center, I suspect the beating was done purely on principle.

Need I add that this newly upscale operation is still called "Best Buy", and their logo is still a yellow bargain price-tag?

It's called branding. Best Buy has invested tens of millions into getting people to associate them with that yellow tag, the same way New Patriot is putting its effort into associating itself with the picture of Melissa Maerz at the top of its webpage.

Long story short - Desrosiers is being (must not use the P word) unduly alarmist about the implications of this business strategy.

Another Instant List

Now that the election's over, I can start having some fun with blogging again. Not that covering the elections and saving democracy and beating the barbarians back from the gates (kid=love) wasn't a gas, but it's time to relax just a tad before the anti-Mark Dayton revolution kicks off.

And nothing's better for good relaxing blog fun than one of Red's surveys.

Forthwith and anon:

Ten movies you'd watch over and over: Casablanca, The Big Red One, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Eternal Sunshine, A Bridge Too Far, Best Years Of Our Lives, Magnificent Seven, Das Boot, Return of the King and The Great Escape.

Nine people you enjoy the company of: Nuke, the NARN guys, my little bro Jim, Odin.

Eight things you're wearing: The usual guy at work ensemble - polo, khakis, underwear, footwear - makes seven if you count shoes and socks as four.

Seven things on your mind: Need to get new windows, need to refinance again, want to find some way to take the show national, the toilet is running and I need to replace the flapper valve, my kids' study habits, I need a vacation, it's mortgage time again.

Six objects you touch every day: Keys, steering wheel, keyboard(s), stove, toilet handle, guitar, alarm clock.

Five things you do every day: Blog. Wake the kids. Work. Cook dinner. Play some musical instrument.

Four bands (etc) that you couldn't live without: E Street Band. Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. Richard Thompson. Franky Perez and the Highway Saints.

Three of your favorite songs at this moment: I've been singing "My City of Ruins" to myself constantly for the past week. There's this stupid Kelly Clarkson song (I think it's called "Low", but I'll be damned if I go look it up) which my daughter plays all the time that's pretty irresistably poperrific. And for some reason, I played a cassette of one of my old songs, "Great Northern Avenue", and I've been humming it over and over for a few weeks now. It's from my old band's demo tape from 1987, and not to butter myself up excessively, but dang, it's good. Yes, I may just try to post it pretty quick here.

Two people who have influenced your life the most: Beyond my parents? Bob Richardson (my first boss, at KEYJ in Jamestown, ND) and Dr. James Blake (my English major advisor in college).

One person who you love more than anyone in the world: The kids. Which is two people. So sue me.

Intolerance

Michele Catalano says what I tried to, and does it faster:

Just curious, but how do you think those lefty bloggers would feel if I spoke the same way about Muslims? Isn't the whole Jesusland concept just what they get on Charles at Little Green Footballs for when he takes on radical Muslims? Suddenly, the left side of the blogosphere is awash in mass hysteria about how those religious white folks with their bibles and their homophobia are going to destroy your lives. What makes this any different than when a right bloggers says that Islam is the "Religion of Peace" in a sarcastic manner? If I wrote half what these guys are writing about Christians about Muslims, I would be inundated with accusations of bigotry and blind hate. And guess what? Those hurling the accusations at me would claim I was following the lead of the great crowd of ignorant conservatives, that I'm a sheep, a mindless drone who has fallen for propaganda.

But look at yourselves. Your guy lost the election so now it's ok to behave in a manner you once found ugly? Now it's ok to be the party of exclusion, to think you are morally and intellectually superior to one specific religious group or culture and to show that contempt in blatant form?

The distinction is lost on a lot of people.

Coleman: Red-faced Ranter Sings The Blues

Nick Coleman on the "Reds" who wrote him after the election.

You sent me a ton of angry mail, Red: letters giving me "a one-fingered salute," telling me the '60s are over, that I should shut my cake-hole, and sending me a map of the country that seems overwhelmingly red.

Oh, my. Don't be doing that, people. That's rude.

And it makes Coleman think he has material:

And that's not pretty, ever:

Until you study it closely while thinking about where you'd like to go on vacation someday. Do that and you discover that all the places you want to visit are blue.

Wow. I knew that Nick "Knows Stuff", but knowing where I want to go on vacation...that's amazing.

Although among the "stuff" Nick knows, he apparently missed the fact that the Grand Canyon, the Tetons, Glacier Park, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Roosevelt Park, the Barrier Islands and most of the Rockies being very, very red.

But no matter. Nick's onto something here:

But here's what I found troubling about your letters, Red: Many of you don't seem to realize you live in Minnesota. You think you are in Alabama.

Speaking now to Blue Minnesota: In case you missed it, Alabama didn't just vote red by 63 percent. It also defeated an initiative to remove segregationist language from its state statutes.

Yes, indeed, the 1960s are over. What worries me is the people who want to go back to the 1860s.

Among the "stuff" Nick Coleman apparently doesn't know is how to tell the entire story. Yes, indeed - a measure to remove segregationist language appears to have failed by a razor-thin margin (provisional and absentee ballots are still in play, as is a recount), but not because Alabamians yearn for the antebellum south:

That 1956 amendment was at the center of the opposition to Amendment 2. Critics argued that repealing the old amendment would lead to higher school taxes.

The Alabama vote wasn't about segregation - it was about taxes. Alabamians, like Minnesotans, are tired of slick government attempts to slip tax increases in when we're not paying attention.

But never mind; far be it for Nick Coleman to allow something like telling the truth get in the way of a dig at Republicans.

Back to you, Red:

Yes, George Bush won another term with 51 percent of the vote, which he believes gives him a mandate to stop being Mr. Nice Guy and start getting tough on Social Security.

But not in Minnesota, Red.

Minnesota stayed blue, as it has for 12 straight presidential elections, except the one CREEP stole for Tricky Dick in 1972.

But Nick: we vote as a nation. It doesn't matter one iota if Minnesota voted "blue" - Bush still won.

In fact, we are bluer now than we were four years ago, despite the pipe dreams of Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty and the fact that Bush visited Minnesota more often than a mukluk salesman.

More "Stuff" that Coleman doesn't "know" - Math.

We're not "bluer than we were four years ago"; Kerry won by the same margin that Gore took, and that was after 80% of the Nader voters came back to the DFL fold, and including the population increase of the last four years. Bush gained hundreds of thousands of votes, and kept his margin even.

Coleman doesnt' do percentages? Hell - he doesn't do arithmetic, either. Kerry and Edwards visited Minnesota more than Bush and Cheney. They had to - they figured they were being challenged. Kerry had to work relentlessly in Minnesota, to shore up a Blue state, using time and money he could have spent maybe capturing a Red state.

Well, Red, let's look at some of the true blue things that are hard for you to swallow, and which might make it easier for you if you moved to Alabama or some other red-state Shangri-La.

While you are claiming that 51 percent nationally gives Bush a mandate, you also complain that too much is being made of the Democrats' 51 percent in Minnesota.

You can't have it both ways, Red: A mandate for the goose is a mandate for the gander. With a 3.5 percentage-point Democratic margin, Minnesota is a major redoubt in 19-state Blue America.

More "stuff" Coleman doesn't know: Kerry's 3.5 point margin, along with an almost-equally wispy margin in Wisconsin that was only held by redeploying all of Kerry's resources from every single red state hardly counts as a "major redoubt". How about "hemorraging wound"? And that Big Blue Bang explains why a baker's dozen of Republicans lost seats in the Minnesota House -- that and Pawlenty's Bully Boy effort to whip up votes by appealing to greed and racial resentment of Indian casinos. My favorite losers: Lynda Boudreau, the ex-bandit who helped pass the gun permit law, and Arlon Lindner, our equal opportunity bigot.Ooof. More "stuff" that Nick doesn't know - how to dig beneath the numbers and do serious analysis:

Examining the data, a clear pattern emerges: candidates who ran as fiscal conservatives tended to win competitive races; candidates who tended to run with a more muddled fiscal message tended to lose. Having rescinded the taxpayers pledge was clearly NOT in your interest as a candidate.

"Stuff", Nick. Don't forget the "Stuff".

If you don't learn from this election and keep demanding that your neighbors shut up and knuckle under to the national vote while deriding the verdict at home, then you will be left sputtering to yourselves.

Until you are red in the face.

The "Verdict at home" is this: We're right where we were in 2000, with a slight majority in the House and a slight deficit in the Senate, and a competent governor to boot. We have the White House. We're winning over outstate Minnesota, and losing a few precincts in doddering, first-tier Edina isn't a remote concern; in two years, we'll have both houses.

And you'll be singing the blues.

UPDATE: On a third reading, I noticed this bit here:

Boudreau, the ex-bandit...

Wow. I thought liberals were supposed to be the ones for giving the sucker an even break. Rep. Boudreau paid whatever debt she owed society for her long-ago screwup. Which is more than Nick Coleman can say for his crimes against journalism.

Guess that's what you get for sponsoring a law that actually empowers the common schlubs that Nick Coleman writes about all the time, but seems to fear so very, very deeply.

Projection

A friend of mine noticed something in a friend of his (whom I also know), that I'd been noticing in a number of people that I mercilessly mock. Friend-of-friend is a died-in-the-wool Minnesota liberal.

This friend-of-a-friend had had a dream - her husband was being hauled off to a re-education camp out west somewhere.

Pal remarked "People dream about what is in their own subconscious. No Republican has ever talked about sending liberals to camps". Well, maybe J.B. Doubltless once in a while, but that'd be an aberration.

"I think she's projecting her own beliefs on us".

That rang a bell.

Bear with me here.

I was listening to Fast Eddie Schultz today, as I was driving around doing some business.

For those who don't know, Eddie Schultz is a know-nothing former conservative blowhard who switched horses a year or two ago and became a blowhard, know-nothing liberal talk show host.

Eddie is a dim bulb; he was a terrible sportscaster, a fourth-rate conservative host, and if I were a liberal (koff koff) he'd embarass me.

Today (the show was a rerun from last week), he croaked "That's what it's all about to them, ..." (conservatives are always "them" in Fast Eddie Schultz' world) "...God, Guns and Gays".

So. To 51% of the American people, it all comes down to Bible-thumpin', Shootin' and Gay Bashin'. To them. (Oy. Now I'm doing it).

Last week, Slate released a series of articles, "Why Americans Hate Democrats". It included a irredeemably smug and blinkered piece by a frequently-adequate novelist, Jane Smiley. The piece was a treasure trove of Smug-Blinkered-Liberal-Watching joy. The basic thesis: "Conservatives are too dumb for the rest of us.

This particular bit was the big daddy:

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell.

Er, yeah, some Christians will do that.

But I've heard no Christian - certainly no Christian that anyone would take seriously if they weren't digging for ammunition to use against All Red-State Christians - say any such thing about the election.

But I have heard plenty of the secular, obverse equivalent; commentators from the left with jeremiads about how spurning their "gospel" was a sign of how far we'd fallen, of the horrors - indeed, the hell - we'd endure for rejecting The Word.

Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

And yet there's a reason that people become more conservative as they grow up, get out of their teens and twenties, have kids, buy houses, and start paying taxes. Liberalism is simple; Dennis Kucinich's message is easily digestible by any six-year-old; "Everybody should have what they need; people who have more should share. Fighting is bad, and you should stop right away. Guns are icky. People should do what makes them feel good, and nobody should be sad" It's when you grow up that you learn nuance. That's what creates Poli Sci majors from Macalester. Then you grow up a little more, and learn to wrap nuance around reality. It requires conscious thought at a level that'd baffle a six-year-old.

And still seems to baffle many adults: "I believe in God. You're free to believe anything you want, but I vote my conscience, and that's something God drives.

I believe in the citizen's right to defend him or herself. War is always horrible, and should always be the last resort - but it's not the worst thing imaginable. The worst thing is what people in Iraq went through, and the people of North Korea and Darfur are going through now - having a war fought against you and being unable to defend yourself.

I have no problem with gays, truly - but I need some convincing before I vote to change the institution of marriage, and if you'd rather find a friendly judge than convince me to vote with you, then you won't like my vote when I finally get my chance".

Simple? Sure. But it takes some thought to reach the simple solution. More than, say, "If you don't agree with me, you're a bible-thumping, gun-toting yay-hoo!".

Smiley continues:

Next, they tell you that you are the best of a bad lot (humans, that is) and that as bad as you are, if you stick with them, you are among the chosen. This is flattering and reassuring, and also encourages you to imagine the terrible fates of those you envy and resent. American politicians ALWAYS operate by a similar sort of flattery, and so Americans are never induced to question themselves. That's what happened to Jimmy Carter—he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted. The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do—they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.

Viewing oneself as a chosen, above reason and criticism...

...like this?

The "best of a bad lot" join the good people. The sinners - and to the left, being called "ignorant" is the only sin - are cast into the pit (which, to a liberal, is called "Mississippi" or "Alabama", or, now, "Jesusland". Flattering? Sure.

Sign that one may be unteachable? After 2000, I predicted that the left would have to run back toward the center. The moonbat left had not served the Democrats well - racing to the far left has never won the Democrats an untainted election (voters in 1976 were voting as much against Watergate as for Carter's dimbulb agenda). I was wrong.

But it's conservatives that are unteachable. Go figger.

Steyn notes:

In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the [sneering Guardian reporter] Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate.

In other words, people applying "complex thought" to an issue, as opposed to saying "If you're not with us, you're a moron".

As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with [another arrogant Guardian reporter] Oliver James's mum.

Ironic?

As ironic as the fact that the party of "Free Speech" is the party that pushed the hardest for the "Campaign Finance Reforms" that took ordinariy citizens out of the free speech business, but delivered it gift-wrapped to George Soros.

As ironic as the "Party of the People"'s contempt and distrust of the people, and exclusive reliance on judges to get their agenda passed.

As ironic as the party of the First Amendment pushing to re-instate the Fairness Doctrine, which would shut down conservative talk radio - the only broadcast balance to the mainstream media's corrosive, pervasive leftward bias.

As ironic as the party of people who proclaim a partisanship for peace sending gangs of thugs to harass GOP offices.

As ironic as a party full of people awash in hatred for Republicans in turn accusing Republicans of being awash in hate.

God, Guns and Gays? It should be "Faith, Trust and Respect", which I'll take over Pusillanimity, Pandering and Projection any day.

Moore's Wrists - A Preponderance of Evidence

After the election, Michael Moore posted 17 reasons for Democrats not to "slit their wrists" over the outcome of the election.

Not to speak for Kerry supporters, but in the interest of equal time, I thought I'd present some countervailing reasons why Mr. Moore might like to check out. I'll leave the means up to him.

1. While it's against the law for Bush to run again (good thing for you guys - next election, he'd win 55-44), we have Mitt Romney, Condi Rice, Tim Pawlenty, Jeb Bush, and many more. Who do the Dems have? A woman with higher negatives than Lucretia Borgia. Start the tub, Michael.
2. Was the margin the "NARROWEST for a sitting president..." ever? So what? Nobody cares. Bush increased his margin over 2000, and built the basis for yet another off-year increase. I suggest the hunting knife
3. In your list, you played "The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults" like it was good news. It's not. The young 'n dumb vote has always broken left. And yet once they get married, have kids, and start paying taxes, they are not only moving right, but doing it younger and faster and more intensely than ever before. Maybe the .38 would hurt less?
4. You say that "In spite of Bush's win, the majority of Americans still think the country is headed in the wrong direction (56%)". Right. And yet only 48% of the people think your guy (and you, Michael Moore) have the answers. Why is that? Maybe a whole bottle of prozac.
5. The Republican majority isn't filibuster-proof. Whoop-di-doo. How would you like to be the Democrat candidate going before the voters in '06 with nothing but a bunch of mindless filibustering to show for the past two years? Maybe jumping off the top of the GM headquarters would be just the right statement.
6. The red states are growing. The blue states are shrinking.
7. Did I say blue states? Look at the national maps of results by county; there are really no "blue states", except for maybe Vermont. There are about 47 "red states", with a number of blue cities mixed in. The Democrat party is like the South Vietamese Government - they control the cities, and little else. Does your assistant have any rope?
8. Ohio beat Michigan. And it may have been because of you. Personally. Rope, schmope - your belt'll do.
9. You said "88% of Bush's support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn't such a long time! If you're ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age." Racism is a dying trait, Moore. Whoops - your belt is too long. You could try to hang yourself off the second floor and still hit ground. Back to the drawing board.
10. All your whining about gay marriage will likely set the cause back a decade. Turn on the oven and open the door...
11. If you think the return of Cynthia McKinney is good news, you are clearly beyond human hope. Damn, the oven is electric - another protest against Halliburton gone horribly wrong.
12. The CEO of Coors was defeated by a guy who may have been to Coors' right on a lot of issues. Maybe running the car into a bridge...?
13. And you lost four seats in the Senate. Damn, you live in a swanky Manhattan apartment, so you don't drive. Damn damn damn...
14. The Bush Twins will clobber your ass at the polls in 20 years. Maybe self-defenestration?
15. Your gains in state houses were largely aberrations...
16. ...and didn't help your presidential candidate one iota. You'd land on your stomach and bounce to your feet.
17. Reagan was a lame-duck president fighting a hostile Congress when he achieved his greatest victory, the Cold War. Maybe dynamite?
18. Given the record of his first term, Bush is equally as likely to create a legacy that will sweep his opponent into office as his is to screw up.
19. Given his majority in Congress, the odds get shorter.
20. The "Dumb guy" beat you. Again.
21. Finally, while as you say "over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed "The #1 Liberal in the Senate." That's more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore.", nearly 60 million of us voted for the compassionate conservative, nearly 50% more than voted for Clinton in 1992, and again, more than voted for Reagan, Dad, Clinton or Gore. And nearly 5 million more than voted for Kerry. OK - maybe chronic suicide by arteriesclerosis is the answer. You're well on your way.

That's 21, bigfella. Your mission is clear.

DISCLAIMER: No, I don't want Michael Moore to off himself. If people would just see what a complete intellectual non-factor he is, it'd suffice.

Fallujah

The battle is joined in Fallujah.

According to Wretchard, the US Army, Marine and Iraqi troops are moving in from the west of the city, while a battalion of Brits (the famous Black Watch, a storied and fairly ancient Scottish unit) will be blocking the terrorists' retreat or evasion routes to the east.

This promises to be some of the nastiest urban combat the US has engaged in since Hue. Says Wretchard:

But the urban combat facing the troops [embedded reporters] will accompany will probably consist of small units in constantly moving through a very dangerous kind of environment, full of IEDs, snipers and close-range engagements. In this situation, getting lost may well mean dying from enemy fire or blue on blue. Sticking close to Marine infantry advancing under fire is only slightly more palatable. Everyone knows the saying that 'war is hell, you cannot refine it'; but Sherman might have added, 'you cannot describe it'. The Marines and many reporters will come to know what can never be described and what no sane person should ever hope to experience at first hand.

I can see why the Administration opted to hold off the offensive until after the election; no matter how well it may go, the media will be completely unable to report on this battle with any expertise; successes will look like bloody setbacks, and no reporter can possibly no the difference.

Cooler, non-politically-motivated heads need to prevail here.

Please devote your thoughts and prayers for our troops in harm's way tonight.

Having A Party - Again!

Saturday, November 13, join the Northern Alliance at Keegans Irish Pub for Keegans' "Salute to Veterans" weekend. All active duty, guard and reserve, and veterans get the first drink free. They'll have SOS on the menu (I'll leave plenty for the rest of you; growing up in the Presbyterian church, the novelty of SOS is long since worn off).

As Elder reminds us, we'll be raising money for Soldiers' Angels, a terrific charity dedicated to supporting our troops overseas and their families back home,

Speaking of parties - we'll also be hosting another Minnesota Organization of Bloggers party soon. Stay tuned.

The Best Revenge?

Patriette has the story.

Unseemly but Appropriate

Elder's post-election word to the disloyal opposition - you know who they are - is not safe for work.

But in nearly every particular, I second him.

Long Weekend Continues

More light posting today - new furnace, plus a Hewitt show later today (5-8 Central, AM1280).

And that whole "long weekend" thing. It occurs to me that I take very little time off from much of anything; I haven't had a "vacation" longer than a long weekend since 1995. Part of it is that I've spent the last three years working as a contractor - and vacation pay comes out of my own pocket. But even before that, when I had paid vacation time, I spent most of my "vacation" time on kids' sick days. Maybe next time I do a fulltime gig, I'll have to try one of those newfangled "weeks off".

Oy. It's my break from blogging, and I'll bet I put in 1,000 words on not blogging. I"ll stop now.

Well...for a while.

Axis Of Weasel Alert

Chirac spurns Bush's overtures. Like that's a surprise.

Know what I like most about this election? The US has officially told the world's francophiles that, for the next four years, they can go pound brie.

Bush extended the olive branch - and...:

French President Jacques Chirac - dubbed Le Worm - was doing his best to scupper bridge-building.

He will snub a meeting with Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi in Brussels today. It is a sleight aimed at Mr Bush and Tony Blair, who back Mr Allawi.

Chirac — who tried to stop the war to topple Saddam Hussein — will leave Brussels before the new Iraqi leader arrives.

However Chirac DID find time to visit Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in hospital yesterday.

Of course, adult nations know better:

Meanwhile, Mr Blair was working to heal rifts over Iraq, and flew to Brussels to rally EU leaders.

Last night he called on Europe's leaders to end their “state of denial� over Mr Bush’s election win.

He told The Times countries against the war must now work with the US.

The PM said: “The election has happened. America has spoken. The rest of the world should listen.

"It is important that America listens to the rest of the world too."

"The fact is that President Bush is there for four years. Some people are in a sort of state of denial."

Zero Patience

If you're already depressed about the state of public education, the Zero Intelligence blog is noplace to feel better about things.

And yet it's becoming an essential read. School district "Zero Tolerance" policies are only turd icing on a rotten cake - but the icing bears examination; "Zero Tolerance" policies enacted after Columbine can have no possible effect on school violence, but will have the probably-unintended side-effect of teaching children that authority is really stupid.

Like this episode:

Two Spring-Ford Area Senior High School students did something very foolish. They climbed through a ceiling tile in a classroom and explored the space above it. Their plan to come back into the empty classroom was foiled when a maintenance man caught the fifteen year-olds.

Danny Suraci was suspended for 3 days, which changed to 5 days and finally grew to 10 days. Andrew Davis wasn't so lucky. He had a pocketknife and a lighter in his pocket, both violations of the school's zero tolerance policy. He was expelled by a unanimous vote of the school board.

Good students expellec due to irrational juvenile exuberance. I'm betting that the thugs and the pinheads still roam the halls.

Much more on edumication when I return from my (imperfectly-enforced) long weekend.

The Ties That Bind

The day after the election, I linked to a piece by Charles Johnson declaring the big leftyblogs among the losers on election night.

Chuck Olsen left a comment:

Yeah... not only can you not blame lefty blogs, you can't blame blogs - period. Information is instantaneous and ubiquitous, and we demand that. The internet is the fastest conduit, blogs are part of the internet, etc.

I'm not sure that either I or Charles were "blaming" anyone, merely observing.

But Chuck's comment introduces another question; blogs are indeed a conduit - but a conduit for what?

Where do blogs come from?

Johnson's observation - I think it's a fair one - is that Atrios, Willis, Kos, Josh "ua Micah" Marshall, the giggly fratboys at Pandagon, and Wonkette more or less parrot whatever the current lefty talking points are. It might be argued that the big right-wing blogs do the same - but I think there's a difference.

When you read a source, ask yourself two questions: What's the person's motivation? And if you follow the money, where do you end up?

Let's start with ideology.

So where do the big leftybloggers come from? Many of them are parsimonious about biographical details; we only learned Atrios' identity at the Democrat convention. But the MO seems to be pretty consistent: most of the big leftybloggers are young, male, big-league university educated, and life-long lefties; Duncan "Atrios" Black and Matt Yglesias are both Ivy-Leaguers

It's worth noting that many of the biggest conservative blogs are run by 9/11 liberals (Reynolds, Catalano, Johnson), former radicals (Powerline), or long-converted apostate liberals (Lileks and, among many bigger names, myself). The biggest right-wing blogs are written by people with incredibly broad perspectives on politics - they're looked at the fever swamp from both sides now. There are a few lifelong conservatives among the bunch - Captain Ed is a good example - but there's a lot more variety among the backgrounds of the big conservative bloggers.

Now, let's follow the money.

The biggest of the leftyblogs depend for their livelihood on the upper reaches of the American left. Atrios and Oliver Willis both work for Media Matters, George Soros' house organ. Yglesias and Drum both work for lefty publications. Kos' income comes from consulting for Democrats. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it's worth knowing when gauging a source's credibility.

As to the major conservative bloggers, I'm trying to think of a single one that works in politics. Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh are law professors. Hugh Hewitt is a talk show host, but commenting on politics isn't the same as being in politics. The Powerline guys are attorneys, and fairly busy ones at that. Charles Johnson is a software guy. Michele Catalano seems to be a mom - in years of reading her, I can't recall noticing if she has a job outside the home [UPDATE: Readers inform me I'm wrong about this - Catalano works in law], but I feel safe in saying she doesn't work in politics, and if she ever did, it wasn't for a Republican organization. Captain Ed is a manager in the service sector. Lileks, of course, is not just a columnist, but works for the most embarassingly liberal newspaper between New York and LA; it's safe to say he doesn't get paid for his politics (although it's a stretch to call him a political blogger...). The point being that while the big leftyblogs are pretty much house publicity organs for the left (Atrios, Kos and Willis literally so) or owe their livelihoods directly to lefty institutions (Yglesias, Wonkette, Drum), the biggest conservative blogs are independents with day jobs that have nothign to do with politics.

Do the various bloggers' motivations affect what they put out? I'll let you be the judge. Perhaps that's why I prefer most of the local lefty blogs to the national ones; some of them seem to have lives outside politics. Many are better writers (although it's hard to see how anyone could be a more cursory writer than the likes of Willis or Atrios).

Not to say I agree with any of them. I'm just saying.

Do you assess a blogger's motivations when assigning credibility to their output? Do they matter to you?

(Full disclosure: I design software. For a credit card company. I've never earned a dollar from politics. And I was a Democrat, although only until I learned better...)

The Pajama Meme

Peggy Noonan, in her post-election wrapup, keeps the meme alive (emphasis added):

Who was the biggest loser of the 2004 election? It is easy to say Mr. Kerry: he was a poor candidate with a poor campaign. But I do think the biggest loser was the mainstream media, the famous MSM, the initials that became popular in this election cycle. Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief--CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election--the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the next blogger party should be a jammies-only affair (hat tip to Jo).

Light Day

I've been posting at a pretty fair clip this last few months. I'm going to be doing something different from today through the weekend; posting less.

This last few days has been a wringer; I was up all night election night (barring a couple hours' sleep), and couldn't sleep the night before. Deadlines looming at work (natch). And I have a lot going on in the next few days; a new furnace and a Hewitt show tomorrow, another show Saturday, housework up the ying yang.

That might mean "none", or it might mean "sporadic", or it might mean the usual "Mitch is nuts, no real change", but I'm having an urge to take a long weekend without worrying about to terribly much.

Which is what I'm doing. Starting now. See you Monday. Unless I post earlier. Which I won't. Unless I do.

When One Door Opens...

The world didn't end this morning. It wouldn't have ended for me had Bush lost.

But listening to the foul-tempered tantrum-throwing of some Democrat bloggers, I was almost tempted to say "If you're so miserable, disgusted or scared, just move to Canada".

But apparently that's not an answer.

Casualties of Ire

Charles Johnson notes the big losers last night: the big leftyblogs...:

...who were tricked by someone into releasing deceptively skewed exit polls early yesterday—a report that was picked up by wire services and actually affected the stock market briefly. I’m speaking specifically about Wonkette and Daily Kos and Atrios, who acted exactly like the mainstream media in the Rathergate affair, by running with a bogus, unverified story because they wanted it to be true.

They were played for fools.

And afterwards, as the house came tumbling down? Their reactions ranged from churlish and bitter to dissociative and a bit scary.

The search for the decent national leftyblog continues.

Now the Bad News

With all the excitement over the presidential victory, Margarent Martin has sobering news about the MN House:

The defeated Republicans:

Lynda Boudreau
Bill Kuisle
Bill Haas
Jim Rhodes
Carla Nelson
Peter Adolphson
Doug Fuller
Doug Lindgren
Stephanie Olsen
Lynne Osterman
Howard Swenson

Although the Star Tribune and the DFL are trying to spin it as a victory against Conservatives. But it's hard to discern a real pattern here except anti incumbancy. Boudreau was known as a strong social conservative, pro-gun and anti-abortion. Jim Rhodes was clearly a moderate. You have some of each in this group.

The house is currently 68-66 GOP, and many of those GOP votes are moderates - not much use.

Losing Bourdreau hurts. She was a solid social conservative and the majordomo of the concealed carry movement. CCRN has some homework to do.

In Praise of Gloating

John Derbyshire is doing a bit of gloating.

Oh, relax. Not at John Kerry, or John Edwards' expense. Not even at the media, or Hollywood.

But that leaves plenty of targets:

That still leaves us plenty of gloat-worthy targets, though. I am going to have no compunction about gloating at Michael Moore, who has done more to boost anti-Americanism world-wide than Farrah Fawcett did for big hair. I was talking to some young English people the other day. They didn't know much about U.S. politics, and half of what they knew came from watching Fahrenheit 911. They knew there was something fishy about that movie, and giggled in a slightly embarrassed way as they played back the opinions they had picked up from it; but those were in fact their opinions faute de mieux, and some of them will stick. In cultures yet further removed from our own — in China, in Latin America, in India, in the Muslim Middle East — Moore's poisonous brew is swallowed without a hiccup, and has become the stuff that "everybody knows..."

Nor do I have any reservations about gloating at George Soros, who has squandered stupendous sums of money in a lost cause.

Then there's the foreigners: the Guardian and Independent newspapers and the BBC in England, the French and the Greeks, Kofi Annan and Mohammed El Baradei...and of course that Friendly Giant to the North. How incredible it must seem to them, to these self-styled sophisticates, that a crude, swaggering boor like George W. Bush should retain the affections of his countrymen after all his crimes and blunders! Well, deal. You're stuck with an honest to God (literally) American conservative — and a conservative America — for another four years. Get used to it.

The big gloat, though, must be directed at our enemies. How they wanted Kerry to win! How they must be sunk in gloom in their caves and hideouts and seedy rented rooms! They knew that, for all his podium salutes and tough talk, Kerry would be another Jimmy Carter, another groveller, another guilt-addled cringing apologizer for America's sins, past and present. Now, instead of a boneless wonder, they are faced with a resolute and determined opponent, a commander-in-chief who actually inspires his troops, and who knows that, as Winston Churchill usefully noted, you can't win wars without fighting.

Derb's a better man than I. I'm tempted to lay a little smug smack down this morning...

...but I won't. This victory's just too sweet to sully with such churlishness.

(The hell it is. Ha ha, Atrios and Ollie Willis and Pandagon and Kos! Pffffft!)

Now, when we beat Dayton...

Tag It and Bag It

Kerry concedes:

After a long, tense night of vote counting, the Democrat called Bush to concede Ohio and the presidency, The Associated Press learned.

Thanks, Senator.

Best of All Worlds?

The good guys lost by 3.5% in Minnesota.

No - this is a good thing.

We have a Republican governor, a Republican state house, a Democrat state senate that is largely an embarassment, an upcoming race with a US Senator that makes "embarassing" seem pretty good in comparison, and a president we can live with.

And, if we take Bin Laden at his word, we're safe from attack.

(Downside: A slim majority of Minnesotans seem to take Bin Laden, Michael Moore and Al Franken at their words...)

Suicide Watch

Matt Yglesias is hard at work:

I would caution anyone against deluding themselves into believing that a second Bush term won't be so bad. With a majority of the popular vote and expanded margins in the House and Senate, we're going to see Bush Unleashed -- something that will probably be much crazier than what we've seen over the past four years.

But since conventional Democrat wisdom is that the GOP is in for a big battle for its' soul...

...OK, which is it?

Media In Tank for Kerry - Vol MMMCMLXXIII

Drove home from the station, knowing that Bush had won the popular vote by 3% and was within a concession or two of getting over 290 electoral votes.

What did NPR News say?

"American election too close to call!"

Yeeeeeaaaaaah!

Three points - just like I said.

Republican net pickup of four in the Senate - better than I'd predicted.

EV still in flux - but on track nicely.

Digest of moonbat thought coming up soon.

Your Attention Please

Apparently Zogby is calling the election for Kerry.

Even though he hasn't done any exit polling in Florida or Ohio.

Even though he's been a outlier in Kerry's favor throughout the election.

Here's what Shot in the Dark central recommends you, the good Republican, do with Zogby's poll:

1. Roll it up
2. Use it for kindling
3. Never, ever pay any attention to Zogby again.Zogby, whose brother leads an Arab-American group that is in the bag for Kerry, may as well be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC at this point.

   In short: Ignore Zogby. And get out and vote.

   Posted by Mitch at 05:17 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Getcher War Face On

If you're a Bush supporter, you can expect a lot of this from the mainstream media tonight; as Rocket Man notes, the mainstream media isn't even bothering to cover up the fact that they're overtly backing Kerry.

So you can expect the media, working in conjunction with the Kerry Kampaign, to try to discourage and depress Republican voter turnout.

A few hours ago, Drudge and Wonkette moved some numbers that were very discouraging to a lot of GOPBloggers.

As Hugh, Rocket and NRO point out, of course, the numbers were very skewed; the sample was 3-2 female, which means the large male gender gap didn't come into play (and even the lead that Kerry supposedly had was pretty feeble, meaning the traditional female gender gap might just be eroded as badly as it's rumored to have become).

The point being, of course, don't worry. If you're a GOPer and you haven't gotten out to vote yet...get on it. The lines are long, so be ready for a haul. If you're in Minnesota, MoveOn is trying to intimidate you, either actively or passively - look 'em in the eye and smile.

But get in there and vote.

And ignore the "bad news" - in 2000, the Democrats were howling with joy up until 8-9PM Central, as I recall. Then reality sank in.

And if you're in the Twins, remember; however reality sets in, join the NARN and Hugh for live coverage all night long, once the polls close.

My Day at the Polls

Just before I left for the polls this morning, my neighbor - if anything, a stauncher Republican than I - phoned. "Have you see those MoveOn people by [our polling station]? They're right across the street!" He was wondering how close they, a partisan 527 group, were allowed to be to the polls. I said I'd check it out.

I went to the polling station. A group of people - including a neighbor I recognized - were running a coffee and donut stand surrounded by MoveOn signs, on the corner directly across from the polling station. I stood at the entrance, and started pacing off the distance to the stand; 63 feet. The law says 100 feet.

I got in line - it took about 40 minutes to get to the front and vote. Then I told the poll watcher what was going on, and stood by as she called in to, presumably, her supervisor. She thanked me, and I left.

As I walked away, I thought "was I being too anal-retentive about this?"

Apparently, I was neither too anal. Nor was I alone; according to a co-worker, he heard on MPR and KSTP-TV that MoveOn stands had been caught too close to polling stations in other parts of the metro (although I've found no confirmation on the web yet...).

I'm willing to chalk it up to being an innocent mistake. So far.

UPDATES: Apparently MoveOn was doing the same thing all over the metro.

And the MoveOn donut stand by my polling place moved. About twenty feet east along the street. I suspect they were 100 feet and three inches from the building.

Some Good News

Day By Day returns on December 1.

I'll be there.

Buzz Live

I've set up a special AOL Chat ID just for tonight (and only tonight). If you have any election news, you can buzz us directly in the NARN studio at:

NARNElection

See you tonight...

The Blog meets the Godfather

The Northern Alliance will be covering the election live on the air tonight - AM1280 The Patriot, if you're in the Twin Cities. We'll be doing cut-ins on Hugh Hewitts live broadcast from Dallas, starting at 8PM and going until 3AM or a concession, whichever comes first.

Ed, King and I will also be liveblogging the evening. Please send any comments or other info about your own local elections; I'll be posting an open election thread this evening.

John Hinderaker of Powerline will be live in New York with NBC Nightly News.

The Times has an article featuring bloggers' opinions, from the trite (Tom Burka, Wonkette) to the excellent (The Powerguys, Ann Althouse).

Election Coverage

I'll be standing in line at my poll in the Midway of Saint Paul when it opens in about 90 minutes. My district is pretty reliably Democrat, unfortunately, but I doubt we'll see any monkey business. Like most precincts in this country, I suspect, the problems are happening at someone else's precinct.

No surprise who I'm voting for, I guess, at least for President, US House, MN House. In fact, it will probably surprise a few of you to hear that for only the second time in my life I'll be voting a straight Republican ticket.

I'll be following the Fraters' recommendation and writing in Scott "the Big Trunk" Johnson for MN Supreme Court. And I always write in my kids and my pets for four of the long list of unopposed judicial races - that way if there's ANY doubt about votes being lost, I can check to see if those four names pop up on the election results.

Posting will probably be light; I have a full day of work after voting, and then...

...well, that's another post.

In Which They Serve

If the vote were limited to those serving in the military (as it was in Switzerland until not so long ago), it'd be a Bush landslide:

The respondents were broken down into two groups: Active Duty (AD) troops and Reserve / National Guard (RN) troops. (Apologies for the formatting, I don't have time to set up an html table for this right now.)

If the presidential elections were held today, for whom would you vote?

Bush: AD- 72%, RN-73%
Kerry: AD- 17%, RN-18%
Nader: AD- 1%, RN-1%
Other: AD- 1%, RN-1%
Declined to answer: AD- 2%, RN-1%

Among Active Duty who were deployed 2 or more months since 9/11, the percentage for Bush goes up to 74%. Among the Reserve / National Guard deployed for 2 or more months since 9/11 (whether in a combat zone or elsewhere), Bush gets 76% of the vote.

When asked "What are the most important issues of you in deciding for whom you will vote for president?", the answers were:

The war in Iraq: AD-66%, RN-72%
The character of the candidate: AD-64%, RN-66%
The economy: AD-53%, RN-58%
Social issues: AD-34%, RN-36%
None of the above: AD-4%, RN-3%

Do you approve of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?

Approve: AD-60%, RN-63%
Disapprove: AD-23%, RN-25%
No opinion: AD-8%, RN-5%
Declined to answer: AD-8%, RN-6%

A few things stand out about these numbers. First, I don't think anyone can claim that the military are puppets who salute and vote for whomever is in the White House. Furthermore, the Army Times notes that many military have chafed under Rumsfeld's criticisms and policies, which may be one reason support for Bush's handling of Iraq is a bit softer than for re-electing him.

On the question of Vietnam in this election, neither Kerry's service nor Bush's is a big issue for the respondents in this poll. But Kerry's anti-war activities when he got home clearly is.

In making your decision about voting for president, how important is the military service record of the candidates?
Very important: AD-12%, RN-16%
Somewhat important: AD - 47%, RN-54%
No opinion: AD-19%, RN-8%
Somewhat unimportant: AD-19%, RN-14%
Very unimportant: AD- 10%, RN-7%

Do George W. Bush's actions while in the National Guard make you more or less likely to vote for him - or will they not have much effect on your vote?
More likely: AD-6%, RN-10%
Less likely: AD-12%, RN-16%
Not much effect: AD-73%, RN-68%
No opinion: AD-8%, RN-5%

Does John Kerry's combat experience in the Vienam War make you more or less likely to vote for him - or will they not have much effect on your vote?
More likely: AD-12%, RN-15%
Less likely: AD-21%, RN-26%
Not much effect: AD-58%, RN-53%
No opinion: AD-7%, RN-5%

Do John Kerry's anti-war activities after he returned from serving in the Vienam War make you more or less likely to vote for him - or will they not have much effect on your vote?

More likely: AD-7%, RN-9%
Less likely: AD-65%, RN-67%
Not much effect: AD-24%, RN-20%
No opinion: AD-3%, RN-2%

Here's hoping the rest of this country is listening.

Trunk for SCOM

Fraters Libertas has chosen the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour to launch a quixotic, but excellent, Minnesota Supreme Court bid.

In Minnesota, the Supreme Court is elected. Three of the slots are up for election this term, although only one is contested.

For the other two positions on this generally liberal court, the Elder has the right idea:

But what of the other two uncontested races? Often times voters like to have some fun with these contests and write-in the names of their favorite cartoon character or pet. But this year we want to offer a better write-in solution.

He's a blogger. He's a lawyer. And he's just the man to brutalize our criminals. Ladies and gentleman, your only choice for judicial write-in candidate for 2004 is...

...Scott Johnson from Power Line. He's got the name. He's got the know how. And in your hearts you know that he's got the 'nads for the job. Fraters Libertas encourages all right minded Minnesota voters to write-in Scott "The Big Trunk" Johnson in all unopposed judicial races.

I'm in.

Write in Johnson for the SCOM tomorrow. Minnesota will thank you.

300-238

Here's my prediction, in glorious surreal color. Bear in mind, I put no weight on my own predictions whatsoever - but it's an entertaining diversion.

The wierd thing is, except for Hawaii, I don't think I'm being especially overoptimistic in making this prediction.

I figure Bush will capture two from the troika of MN, WI and IA; WI seems the least likely to me right now.

As to Ohio, I'm taking Hugh's word for it - with good reason, I think.

Senate: GOP picks up two seats.

House: GOP picks up six.

Court cases embroil at least two states.

Violence will break out in at least a few places, with one fatality as a group of Democrats beats a Republican to death.

That is all.

100 Reasons I'm Voting For Bush, Not Kerry

I'm not going to do any grandiloquent endorsement; nobody asked me, and nobody cares. I'm not going to tell you how to vote. You're mostly adults, and for better or worse, you all have the same right to vote that everyone else has.

I'm just going to list 100 reasons to vote for Bush, and/or against Kerry.

And I'll see you at the polls tomorrow.

1. Because he doesn't have a law degree. Lawyers, bless 'em, have a way of dealing with reality that is so...lawyerly. It's a nice switch to have a businessman in charge of things - it's a worldview I can relate to.
   
2. Because he's an alcoholic who has been recovering successfully for longer that most of us can quit drinking coffee. That takes character.
   
3. George Bush has never told me to "wake up".
   
4. Because the various tyrants of the middle east want Kerry.
   
5. Because so does Jacques Chirac
   
6. I'm not going to say "Bin Laden Endorses Kerry" - but when Bin Laden goes to sleep at night, who do you think he dreams will have his head stuffed and mounted above the fireplace in the East Wing?.
   
7. Because I'm realizing that abortion is a more important issue to me than I thought. And Kerry is a hypocrite on the issue.
   
8. Because partial-birth abortion is inexcusable, yet Kerry excuses it.
   
9. Because Bush gives us at least a remote chance of reforming Social Security.
   
10. Ditto the Income Tax system. Bush has expressed interest in either the flat tax or the national sales tax, either of which would be an improvement over what we have now.
    
11. Because the words "Massachusetts Liberal" mean something.
    
12. Because that something is worse than "Minnesota Liberal", which itself is a horror to behold.
    
13. Because I work hard for my money.
    
14. Because Michael Stipe supports Kerry.
    
15. And Ricky Skaggs supports Bush.
    
16. Because Kerry met with the North Vietnamese.
    
17. And they still appreciate it.
    
18. Although the POWs and MIA's don't. Or shouldn't.
    
19. Because tax cuts are always good. Always. Especially if they force you to cut spending.
    
20. Because I think we can force Bush to cut spending.
    
21. Because hundreds of union goons can't be right.
    
22. Because the field among Democrat hate sites is getting a bit crowded, what with MoveOn, ACT, Democratic Underground and Democrats.com; the field could use some winnowing, and a GOP win would impose a little market discipline on things.
    
23. Because the more I think about it, the less I support gay marriage. Civil unions, yes. Marriage? Not so much. The constitutional amendment is a dumb idea (and I think the administration knows it, and it's just a campaign year prop anyway); the notion behind it, I'm coming more and more to believe, is not.
    
24. Because I believe the Swifties. I can't imagine 300 men of that age, from that era, from such diverse backgrounds and with such diverse politics, agreeing on anything - and yet they agree that John Kerry's Vietnam record is a fraud. And they've spent the last eight months charging into the teeth of the Democrat spin machine to tell us the truth, the same mediatainment/political spin machine that destroyed Juanita Broaderrick and Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones and everyone else that dared cross the Democrats. That's not a smear job. That's courage. And my vote is my thanks to them.
    
25. Because of the "Winter Soldier" testimony. US troops did commit atrocities in Vietnam - this was well-known by 1971. For Kerry to exaggerate and generalize them to jumpstart his political career was beneath contempt.
    
26. Because I'd love to see George Soros' face when he realizes how much money he's poured down the big craphole in the past few years.
    
27. Not to mention the looks of the faces of his bought-off, trite, hate-choked minions who keep the craphole humming.
    
28. Because Laura Bush has more class in her little finger than Tereza has in her whole pedigree.
    
29. Because George Bush rescued "the Clinton Military" from its decline from the "Clinton Years", and just in the nick of time.
    
30. Because I'm dying to see Katie Couric's face the morning after.
    
31. Because John Kerry will reduce the deficit - by raising taxes.
    
32. Raising taxes kills jobs. Including mine.
    
33. Because he stumbles on stage, often seems inarticulate and unpolished. I've spent a good chunk of my life earning a living trying to sound just the opposite, and know "polish" for what it is; an artifice that has nothing to do with what's inside. Hitler and Churchill were both wonderfully polished speakers; Abraham Lincoln and Joseph Stalin were not. Which two do you think would "win" the debates? Which two would you want as your leader? It was what was inside, not how they expressed themselves, that counted - and counts.
    
34. Because for all the lying palaver about "Bush will institute a draft", it's worth noting that every draft since the Civil War was instituted by Democrats (including Selective Service registration, instituted by Jimmy Carter), and repealed by Republicans.
    
35. And the Democrats, given their simple-mindedness on foreign policy ("Let's let the UN do our thinking for us!") and puerility on defense, are much more likely to get us into a situation where we'll need a draft. Or at least they'll think so.
    
36. Because it'll make Michael Moore's head explode.
    
37. ...not to mention Garrison Keillor, Barbra Steisand, Ira Glass, Atrios, and the whole staff of the City Pages.
    
38. Because Edwards primps for cameras
    
39. ...while Bush flips them off.
    
40. Jenna and, especially, Barbara - oy.
    
41. Because while I've been a conservative for over 20 years, I grew up a Democrat, around enough Democrats to care what happens to the party. John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman would puke if they saw what Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and Michaal Moore had done with their party. If you're a responsible Democrat, so should you. Help your party re-discover its real legacy by sending John Kerry back to palookaville.
    
42. Because Jimmy Carter endorsed Kerry.
    
43. Because under pressure, the record shows that Kerry is a vacuous hamster.
    
44. Because Bush's daughters were little hellions. It makes me feel better to know that my president has had to deal with some of the same day to day problems I do.
    
45. I get the impression the Kerry daughters were raised by servants. John Kerry's life as a parent, if it exists, is almost completely absent from his persona.
    
46. Because I love my country more than I love the UN.
    
47. Because George Bush represents the positive side of the legacy of the Cold War; America as a nation confident in its beliefs and in what is right.
    
48. Because John Kerry represents the worst of what I remember of the Cold War; the return to the balance of fear, waiting for "imminent threats" before taking (impotent and misguided) action.
    
49. Because Kerry consistently mistakes "plans" and "summits" and "negotiation" for productive action.
    
50. Because Bush takes chances, even risks his presidency, to do the right thing. Can you see Bill Clinton doing that? John Kerry? Not a chance.
    
51. Kerry's idea of "the right thing" changes depending on the audience he's talking with.
    
52. Because of Bush's September 20, 2001 speech to Congress after 9/11.
    
53. Because while Bush read a book to grade school kids for seven minutes on 9/11 while he and his staff tried to gain awareness of the situation, John Kerry spent forty minutes sitting around like a cow that had been stunned by a whack on the head.
    
54. Because after the alleged seven minutes were over, George W. Bush accomplished more in the following two months than John Kerry did in his entire political career.
    
55. Because I want to see the look on Steve Perry and Mark Gisleson's faces in January, 2009 when they haven't been hauled off to re-education camps after all.
    
56. Because the Teachers Union...
    
57. ...and the AFL-CIO...
    
58. ...and AFSCME can't all be right. They never really are when it comes to these things.
    
59. Because George Bush has done nothing for which he needs to apologize.
    
60. Because Kerry has.
    
61. Because while John Kerry natters on about the minimum wage, George Bush is talking about increasing community and technical education, which is the real route out of poverty for most people that are actually interested in getting out of it...
    
62. Because of the frenetic hatred Bush inspires in moonbats. I don't think much of the character or intellect of many of Bush's most raving opponents, and I didn't long before I'd ever heard of George W. Bush; I figure that anyone they detest so badly must be all right.
    
63. Because hundreds of thousands of European protesters can't be right.
    
64. Because nations that genuinely value freedom - Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czechs, the South Koreans, even the Japanese - supported us in Iraq...
    
65. ...and John Kerry, "Diplomat", repudiated them. As have too many of his peabrained supporters.
    
66. And I'll take the Poles, ROKs and Brits over the French any day - diplomatically, economically, morally or militarily. If Kerry's yapping about "allies"...well, we have the ones that matter already.
    
67. Kerry voted against the '91 Gulf War, when we had every single "ally" we could have gotten, including the French.
    
68. Because I have a deep-seated desire never to see John Kerry throwing a basebell ever again.
    
69. Because then Air America can go off the air, freeing up precious frequencies nationwide for productive programming. Like more oldies stations.
    
70. Because while a Kerry victory would guarantee the conservative blogosphere and the Northern Alliance years of material, a Bush victory would be good for the economy, freedom and the world. In balance, the Bush thing gets the nod.
    
71. Because maybe, just maybe, Hollywood will get the hint; nobody cares what they think.
    
72. Ditto rock musicians.
    
73. And authors.
    
74. Because it'll be another nail in the coffin of the stultifying, Frenchifying, authoritarian statism (I refuse to call it "liberalism") that has sclerosed the arteries of academia, the media, the bureaucracy and the other big institutions of American life for the past forty years.
    
75. Because it'll be one more step in taking the word "liberal" back from the statists that have been abusing the word for so long.
    
76. Because Kerry and (especially) his surrogates and minions have run a cowardly, deceitful, cravenly ugly campaign...
    
77. ...and I think that's a foreshadowing of how they'd run the country, heaven forfend.
    
78. Because the mullahs can get their nuclear fuel the old-fashioned way - buying it from Kim Jong-Il.
    
79. Because John Kerry has probably read Von Clausewitz, and still doesn't realize that one does not win wars on the defensive. Putting oneself on the defensive allows your opponent to choose the place, time, intensity and pacing of the attacks; it puts you in reactive mode, and if he can act faster than you can react, you're done. Dead. Over.
    
80. I don't know if Bush has read Clausewitz - but he understands him.
    
81. Because this country is a better place with Republicans in charge. Lower taxes, lower spending, smaller government...oops. Yeah, we conservatives have to take our party back. Guess what? It's easier to do when you're in office.
    
82. Qadaffhi. He gets it.
    
83. Because Yassir Arafat doesn't belong in the White House (assuming he's able to attend a Kerry inauguration)
    
84. Because the Media deserves a huge, stinging rebuke for having been in the tank for the left for the past 30 years. Will this hurt, Mainstream Media? Good.
    
85. Because I wasn't originally a Bush supporter. I supported Forbes. I voted for Bush, but wasn't enthusiastic about him - until 9/11. And especially the week after - the sermon on the rubble, the address to Congess, and the decisive action that followed. Bush earned my trust as has no leader since Reagan.
    
86. Five words - Madeline Albright, Secretary of State Emeritus.
    
87. Because George Bush doesn't act like an east-coast patrician.
    
88. Because John Kerry won't let you forget that he's an arrogant east coast brahmin.
    
89. Because George Bush doesn't beat "Baby Boomer" into your head, even though he is one.
    
90. Because John Kerry oozes "baby boomer", even though technically he isn't.
    
91. Because John Kerry thinks that "World Terrorism" equals "Osama Bin Laden" - like Hussein never supported terror.
    
92. Because Bush understands how ludicrous that idea is.
    
93. Because John Kerry is the candidate of the '70s - the intellectual and moral descendant of Jimmy Carter.
    
94. Because George Bush is the candidate of 9/12/01 - the moral descendant of Reagan.
    
95. Because I remember how 9/11 looked, sounded, felt.
    
96. Because I remember how afraid my kids looked when I picked them up from school.
    
97. And I remember how afraid even I felt that day.
    
98. And I remember how the President led this nation in the hours, days and weeks that followed. I remember how he took the point, stood on the rubble, and led from the well in Congress days later, before the shock had even begun to wear off. He ran ahead of the nattering classes, and by God, he and his administration enacted a strategery that has put 75% of Al Quaeda's leadership into shallow holes or ratty jails or rendered them into bug-food deep inside caves, while his opponents would still be chattering about the proper procedure for filing the subpoenas needed to get witnesses. This we can never forget.
    
99. Bush hasn't forgotten. Kerry remembers what's convenient.
    
100. Because we're at war. And John Kerry is not a serious leader for a nation at war. And don't want to learn how to co-exist with this war - I want it over.

See you at the polls.

UPDATE and BUMP UP: Gerard Van Der Leun has fifty reasons, and with the pictures, it adds up to about 100,000 words. Read it. It's essential.

All Of You Who Think...

...that Bin Laden's message was "aimed at Arabs", rather than at the US elections...

...please account for this:

MEMRI said radical Islamist commentators monitored over the Internet this past weekend also interpreted the key passage of bin Laden's diatribe to mean that any U.S. state that votes to elect Bush on Tuesday will be considered an "enemy" and any state that votes for Kerry has "chosen to make peace with us."

The statement in question is when bin Laden said on the tape: "Your security is up to you, and any state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

That sentence followed a lengthy passage in the video in which bin Laden launches personal attacks on the president.

Yigal Carmon, president of MEMRI, said bin Laden used the Arabic term "ay-wilaya" to refer to a "state" in that sentence.

That term "specifically refers to an American state, like Tennessee," Carmon said, adding that if bin Laden were referring to a "country" he would have used the Arabic word "dawla."

Tell me again how saying "Bin Laden Wants Kerry To Win" is wrong?

Harbinger?

Polipundit draws our attention to some stuff buried in the latest New York Times/CBS Poll

John Kerry has a 41% favorable, 47% unfavorable rating. This is his worst rating ever.

President Bush has a 48% favorable, 41% unfavorable rating. That is his best rating since last December.

Undecided voters lean to President Bush 50%-47%, validating the Pew finding and calling the Gallup number into question.

66% of Bush voters strongly favor their candidate.

50% of Kerry voters strongly favor their candidate.

By a 49%-34% margin, voters expect President Bush to win.

President Bush has a 49%-44% job approval rating.

The right track today is 43%. In 1996, it was only 39%.

48% of voters will vote on national security issues; only 33% on domestic issues.

By a 54%-29%, voters believe the Bush Administration has made them safer.

53% of voters do not think that Kerry agrees with their priorities, his worst number ever. 42% believe he has the same.

48% of voters do not think that Bush agrees with their priorities. 49% believe he does share their priorities.

52% of voters think Kerry has leadership qualities, his lowest number ever.

62% of voters think President Bush has leadership qualities.

57% of voters are uneasy with Kerry’s ability to handle a crisis.

60% believe Kerry says what people want to hear. Only 36% say that about President Bush.

53% of Americans say we did the right think in Iraq. Only 42% disagree.

31% say their families are better off than they were four years ago. 40% say about the same.

Most importantly, the percentage of voters call themselves a liberal has declined to 17%, the lowest number since 1997. 35% call themselves conservative.

My Scandinavian heritage makes unfettered optimism impossible. I am always looking for the whammy around every corner.

But that news in particular is good.

Which informs my final prediction, coming out later today.

Kerry's Painful Discharge

Did John Kerry get an honorable discharge from the Navy?

THe NYSun's Thomas Lipscomb makes the case that he didn't.

A former officer in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve has built a case that Senator Kerry was other than honorably discharged from the Navy by 1975, The New York Sun has learned.

Will the media demand the same transparency about Kerry's military record that has obsessed them about Bush's for the past five years?

Read the article. Pass it on to any voter you know who is still impressed by John Kerry's war record.

Cheney and Perceptions

Dick Cheney went to Hawaii last night.

And the reporting is an interesting look at the media's two-minute game to try to bring this election in for Kerry.

The AP writes:

"We are standing just a few miles from Pearl Harbor, the site of a sudden attack ... Three years ago, America faced another sudden attack," Cheney told a crowd estimated by his aides at 9,000, the vice president's biggest crowd at a campaign event.

Cheney said that "the clearest, most important difference in this campaign is simple to state: President Bush (news - web sites) understands the war on terror and has a strategy for winning it. John Kerry does not."

Fair enough so far.

But then the story goes on:

Though it seems a huge task for Bush to actually win a state that has been a Democratic stronghold, Cheney's overnight trip is aimed at fueling the perception the president's re-election is assured.

Nationally, however, the latest national polls show the race to be extremely tight.

That's been a talking point the last few days: "The President is playing the perception game, like he did by campaigning in California in 2000 - to create the perception that he can win where he really can't"

Never mind that the polls show extremely tight races in most of these places.

Kerry's campaigning in nothing but blue states; I wonder why that is?

Perceptions?

Someone tell me with a straight face that the media's not in the tank.

Canard Watch

Someone left me this comment:

Bush had three years to get Bin Laden,
and he didn't.

Although he made big words around it right after 9/11.

His approval rate was above 90% back then.

Since then he started a different war.
And Bin Laden is still at large. He even said he would not be that concerned about him.

Churchill had six years to get Hitler. Did the fact that Germany wasn't conquered in 1942 make the victory irrelevant? And did the end of Nazi Germany end WWII?

When did Bush, or any sane person, put a deadline on capturing Bin Baden? And when Bush said he "wasn't that concerned" - he was right. If he were brought in on a slab tomorrow, the war would still go on.

And Iraq wasn't a different war; Iraq supported terror, supported Islamofascism. It's the same war, just a different front.

Lileks says it well: "I hate to say more about it lest something happen in the next few days, but for Binny to jack-in-the-box now, rather than appearing after his next Brilliant Mastermind Strike, seems to suggest he has nothing in the tank and less in the trunk."

Bin Laden is the symptom, not the disease.

And I wish more of you Democrats could figure that out.

Predictions

Varifrank has quite a number of predictions, some of which make Hewitt sound pessimistic.

Vodkapundit is nervous about Tradesports' map....

More predictions later today.

Statistically Speaking - Wow...

To say October was this blog's biggest month ever would be to beggar the word "biggest".

I had 70% more visitors than my previous record, and they made 60% more total visits than ever before.

I'm assuming this is a pre-election spike - most of us bloggers are assuming, I think, that things are going to tail off after Tuesday pretty sharply. But this blog averaged nearly 2300 visitors a day all month, which is easily triple what the site drew in April.

I thank each of you for stopping by; About this time two years ago, I was averaging 25 visitors a day, and a year ago I was maybe around 500 daily visit. I appreciate each of you, and thank you for your support (or criticism, as the case may be...)