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 C