Shot In The Dark

"Hasbara": Hebrew for "S**t or Get Off the Pot"

Israel claims to have a smoking gun in last Friday's bombings in Tel Aviv, and it has Syrian fingerprints:

As the March 1 London conference devoted to the re-building of the Palestinian Authority approaches, Israel has launched an informational "hasbara" campaign to shed light on Syria's involvement in terror orchestration.

Delegations from the Israeli defense establishment embarked Monday to Washington, Paris and London, in order to present intelligence information which Israel has collected against Syria revealing its role in the deadly bombing in Tel Aviv Friday night, which killed five people.

Israel said Sunday that it would use intelligence information to prove Syria was behind Friday night's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the cabinet Sunday.

For the sake of bringing some long-awaited honesty to the issue, I hope the Israelis are right.

Remember the KAL007 hearings in the UN? Jeanne Kirkpatrick took the tapes of the MiG pilot and the ground controller in to the UN, and playing the damning evidence to the whole world. The Security Council had no choice but to act, or void all pretense of legitimacy.

I'm going to cross my fingers and hope this is the same kind of moment.

What the two called irrefutable evidence to this effect has been sent to the US and select European allies. The evidence, based on intelligence information, will be presented by IDF Intelligence chief Aharon Ze'evi Farkash in a briefing on Monday at the Foreign Ministry for ambassadors from European Union countries and the UN Security Council.

Sharon's associates said the goal of releasing the information is to pressure the Syrians ahead of Tuesday's summit on building the Palestinian Authority in London. Foreign Ministry officials said they hope the Security Council will condemn the attack and perhaps even censure Syria on Monday.

"We have intelligence information that the orders came from the Islamic Jihad in Syria," a senior source close to Sharon said. "We know where the orders for the attack were issued, we know where they were sent, and we know Syrian intelligence was involved and provided logistical support."

Mofaz told the cabinet that an Islamic Jihad cell in Jenin recruited the bomber from Tulkarm under orders from Damascus. Mofaz said that Israel had arrested Islamic Jihad operatives in Tulkarm, but both Mofaz and Sharon emphasized that the PA had taken no action yet against the group, even though Israel had given the PA names of wanted Islamic Jihad operatives.

Riots to the West of them, smoking guns to the south - Assad has some 'splaining to do.

I See Pink

So over the weekend my laptop's monitor wigged out.

Basically, every pixel displays normally, except every one that is supposed to be plain white. These all display in a hue of hot pink that I haven't seen since the early eighties.

Yes, it makes it hard to do a lot of typing. I've reset my system colors in Windows, but white is, unfortunately, a fairly unavoidable color in our society. Hence, steaming hot pink is unavoidable on my computer.

I re-installed the drivers, natch - no dice.

I'm thinking it's the video card (or whatever they are o a laptop).

So - any ideas, here? What's the best place to get a laptop fixed? (Yes, it's out of warranty - 14 months old).

I bought it from Circuit City, in case it's an issue...

Stability

My little college in the middle of North Dakota was like a little Middle-East for a while in the 1980's.

Most of the Iranians left during the hostage crisis, of course - there had been dozens, a major source of income for a tiny, struggling college in the middle of nowhere. But other Southwest Asians attended, too.

In the dorm across the way, two Palestinians shared a room. In the other dorm, on the far corner of campus, lived two Jordanians. Although the PLO and the Jordanians had exactly no love lost for one another, the four of them got along just fine, although didnt make a point of hanging out together. There was also a Kuwaiti kid, who dazzled the locals; the Kuwaiti government, after paying the tuition and room and board of their exchange students, gave them a $3,000/month stipend, putting him in the top 25%of incomes in Jamestown. The snow got to him pretty quickly, and he transferred to a school in Arizona after his freshman year.

Anyway.

In my dorm - Watson Hall, the campus' "Animal Dorm" - lived seven Lebanese guys. They were mostly, maybe all, Lebanese christians. Some of them told stories of what they'd do over the summer; fly back to Cyprus, take a boat to Beirut, spend the summer fighting the Lebanese Civil War, take the boat back to Cyprus, then fly back to North Dakota via Paris, Chicago and Fargo. I never knew whether the war stories were fish stories, and nobody cared to pry, that I recall; they were mostly great guys. The only friction was when women (to the extent that college girls were "women" back then) came into the picture; most of us guys at Jamestown College were fresh off the turnip truck; the Lebanese guys were urbane, had seen a good chunk of the world, spoke French and English and, of course, Arabic, and had (this didn't hurt) plenty of money. This, among a bunch of guys who wore sweatpants to class, belched the alphabet and would drink beer with straws to get more potent buzz from less beer (Red, White and Blue, $4 a case).

Most of them went to grad school in Arizona, at an international biz grad school that attracted a lot of foreign expats. I think most of them were fairly intent on staying in the US, or at least out of Lebanon; the Civil War wasn't getting any less ugly.

I think about them - Fahdi Melki, Jalal Babik, Jihad Beaino, Fuad Shanti, Milad Basil, and the rest - when I see the news from Beirut these days.

The best thing about the Bush Doctrine - for someone who, at the tail end of my liberal years was horrified by the things that the US was willing to tolerate in the interest of "Stability" - is that the great dream of many of us small-"l" liberals from the end of Kissinger's era of realpolitik, who preferred promoting the rocky path of liberty to the dictator-lined road to stability, seems to finally be happening. The US' actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are having a ripple effect.

A few more nations like this - nations who reject dictatorship, terror, autarchy - and maybe even the american left will have to pay attention. And if Egypt - one of the most populous Arab nations and one of the biggest Moslem ones - follows through on Mubarak's promise, it'll have the glorious result of leaving Qaddafhi stuck between two (fledgeling, imperfect) democracies, Algeria and Egypt.

Note: I will stipulate in advance that Bin Laden is not likely in Lebanon. I suggest it is neither relevant nor an especial sign of Bush Administration failure.

Anyway - guys, I hope you get your country back soon.

Hatchet Jobbed

If you're a conservative and a Christian, do you suppose you can get a fair hearing in the City Pages?

The headline for the CP's article on MIchele Bachmann and the rest of the GOP field looking for the nomination in the 6th CD race reads:

Michele Bachmann heads an all-star cast of GOP Christian flat-earthers in the Sixth District
Somebody Say Oh Lord!

Balance? The "Related Links" in the online version are to a Dump Bachmann blog (by a local gay activist who's obsessed over Bachmann for years) and a site showing "photo funnies" including a photoshop of Bachmann standing next to Hitler.

And the article itself isn't much better.

City Pages - Somebody Say Oh Lord!

Sometimes I wonder if the City Pages has computer file with boilerplate text that must begin every reference to conservatives and conservatism?

Read this clip and you tell me:

In fact, she's a rising star in the growing archconservative wing of the state's Republican Party. Her conservative Christian values underscore an agenda that is "pro-family," antiabortion, skeptical of public education, and decidedly jingoistic. A decade ago, Bachmann would have been marginalized within her own party. (Former Republican Gov. Arne Carlson, for instance, has publicly chastised Bachmann in the past.) Now her affiliations with prominent conservatives like Alan Quist and David Strom, not to mention her ties to religious organizations, have put her in lockstep with a powerful faction of the state GOP.

Bachmann's track record in the legislature reads like a parody of right-wing talk radio. She has introduced or signed onto bills that would make English the official state language, halt grants to clinics that perform abortions, make proof of citizenship a requirement at voting booths, and allow stillbirths to be officially designated as births by the state. Bachmann is also the legislator behind the Reagan fetish at the Capitol this time around, proposing that Interstates 494 and 694 be renamed Ronald Reagan Beltway, and declaring February 6, the dead president's birthday, officially recognized.

The old guard within her own party is not impressed. "I wish she would get on with something meaningful," says one GOP insider. "She is definitely not out to unite people. She's throwing out these ideological bombs. She's an obstructionist."

Let's check off the obligatory shrieking points:

• Is there any conservative that isn't an "archconservative?"
• Why the scare quotes around pro-family?
• The article borrows Nick Coleman's conceit that Arne Carlson is a moral authority within the Republican Party in MInnesota.
• Check out the "GOP Insider" reference. Look for a bull market in anonymous "GOP Insiders", holdovers from the bad old days, when the old "Independent Republican" party of the Carlson years were basically basically DFLers who wore suits.

IIt's hard to know where to start picking apart the strawmen in this piece.

In 2000, she turned her sights to the state Senate, running against Gary Laidig, a 28-year incumbent Republican, in the party's primary. Laidig was viewed as a centrist, and Bachmann's hard-right platform divided longtime GOP diehards. But Bachmann, with a war chest of $43,000 to Laidig's $23,000, won the party's endorsement. [So? Bachmann was a better fundraiser than the lukewarm Laidig, who regarded his seat as a sinecure. Motivation beats inertia. But in the world of the hard left, money that doesn't come from George Soros is a bad thing ]

It was around this time that questions regarding Bachmann's résumé surfaced. ["Surfaced?" Or were manufactured? Follow this section closely] She had a law degree, she said, and claimed to be a tax litigation attorney. [So - does this mean the CP writer has evidence that she had no degree and didn't practice law? ] But opponents said they could find no evidence that she had practiced law. Bachmann sets the record straight by saying she worked in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, representing the IRS against people who underpaid or didn't pay their taxes. She did this from 1988 to 1993. [So if the claim was debunked, why is it in the article? ]

Her law degree, it emerged, is from Coburn School of Law in Tulsa, which is affiliated with Oral Roberts University. [Cue the boogieman!]" She's part of the Jerry Falwell moral majority," says one political observer. ["One political observer? Any one in particular? Just some random stranger who spouts lefty bromides tying Christian conservatives to the dreaded Falwell? ]"That's a legitimate issue if she's running for Congress." When asked about her religous beliefs mixing with her politics, Bachmann responds, "I believe in God. But that is not really relevant."

Nor should it be; can you imagine the City Pages making a Wiccan or Moslem or Buddhist candidate's beliefs a campaign issue? (Other than as hagiographic material, of course?)

See what's going on here? The CP writer is trying to make an issue, not of Bachmann's legal education (there is no issue), but of the irrelevant gossip among unnamed critics of Bachmann's.

Two years later, because of redistricting, Bachmann was facing a 10-year incumbent DFLer for the seat in District 52. By ratcheting up her antiabortion rhetoric, vowing to bring more local control to classrooms, and signing a no-new-taxes pledge, Bachmann defeated Jane Krentz.

The writer seems to imply that Bachmann won despite those stances - like her election is an aberration of some sort.

But what if her career is in itself a rejection of the beliefs that the City Pages and the rest of the local media think are the mainstream? If Bachmann is a bellwether of the state's growing, dynamic conservatism?

Of course, it's Bachmann's social conservatism that makes her a lightning rod for the hard left. The article quotes an interview with Bachman on KKMS, a local Christian station (which is owned by Salem Radio, which also owns AM1280, which broadcasts the Northern Alliance Radio Network. KKMS has no contact with or influence over the NARN's content).

Some politics-watchers in the district, however, aren't sure that issues are driving Bachmann's success. "Voters aren't looking beneath the surface," claims Renee Murray, a Lake Elmo resident who has done some work for the DFL in District 56. "She's bright, attractive, and presents well. I'm not knocking anyone, but we've got a lot of wealthy, affluent people who are busy, and they just see an 'R' next to her name and vote for her." Right. Because Republican voters are mindless lemmings, while the bright lights at Education Minnesota and AFSCME exhaust themselves thinking about their voting.

Look for two years of mindless demonization of aybody to the right of Arne Carlson. This is only the beginning. The left in Minnesota controls the schools, the media, the non-profit community and the three largest cities - and it's scared out of its mind, and regards nothing as beneath ethics to stay in charge.

Autopsy

John Leo on why liberalism has become irrelevant to so many Americans:

Liberals have been slow to grasp the mainstream reaction to the no-values culture, chalking it up to Karl Rove, sinister fundamentalists, racism, or the stupidity of the American voter. Since November 2, the withering contempt of liberals for ordinary Americans has been astonishing. Voting for Bush gave "quite average Americans a chance to feel superior," said Andrew Hacker, a prominent liberal professor at Queens College. We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow. Liberals might one day conclude that while most Americans value autonomy, they do not want a procedural republic in which patriotism, religion, socialization, and traditional values are politically declared out of bounds. Many Americans notice that liberalism nowadays lacks a vocabulary of right and wrong, declines to discuss virtue except in snickering terms, and seems increasingly hostile to prevailing moral sentiments.

Sounds like a day on the Daily Kos.

It's a point that I don't think can be made too often; modern, small-"l" liberalism is inherently autocratic, with the autocrats being those who believe they're entitled to power - political, social, edia (vide the bleating about the crumbling credibility of the media), cultural - by virtue of education, credential, or the pure goodness and superiority of their motives.

And as we've seen in the past few years, autocrats don't like being challenged.

Academy Award Liveblogging

A group of frequently amusing people - th writers of "TopFive.com" and the "Daily Probe" - are live-blogging the Oscars.

I'm in there somewhere.

BTK Killer

According to Wichita police, someone they believe to be the BTK Killer, who has terrorized Wichita for the past thirty years, has been caught. The suspect, Dennis Rader, is a government employee. One of the BTK killer's victims lived six doors away from Rader.

Red has a bit of history:

He sent a note to the Witchita Eagle-Beacon, bitching them out for not granting him some cool killer nickname: "How about some name for me, its time: 7 down and many more to go. I like the following. How about you? 'THE B.T.K STRANGLER, 'WICHITA STRANGLER', 'POETIC STRANGLER', 'THE BONDAGE STRANGER' OR 'PSYCHO', 'THE WICHITA HANGMAN', 'THE WICHITA EXECUTIONER,' 'THE GAROTE PHATHOM', 'THE ASPHYXIATER'".

Matt from Overtaken By Events, a Wichita native, notes::

Having said all that, I just watched my DV recording of the press conference again and am totally sickened by it. This man was on the loose for more than thirty years after his first murder. Thirty years. More than 3/4 of my life. And did they come out and say, "We did everything in our power for thirty years and came up empty. Thank the sweet lord above that his daughter had the courage to turn him in."? Hell no. They spent an hour and 1/2 congratulating each other and patting themselves on the back. I expect that Wichita's workers comp bill is going to skyrocket from all of the dislocated shoulders.

If what the national media is reporting (I obviously can't get local coverage), then that whole press conference was an abomination. Reportedly, the daughter either had suspicions or proof and offered to have her DNA tested against the evidence from some of the early murders. When the similarities showed up, the police were able to start really making some progress. So, while I'm sure the police and other investigative agencies worked very hard for three decades, it would seem that without the intestinal fortitude of a young woman in her early twenties, that national spotlight moment would not have happened quite yet. They should be ashamed for putting forth the impression that it was all about them. Not to mention the short shrift they gave the families of the victims. That young woman should get a medal if the reports are true.

.

Good News and Better News

Jack Kelly from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is rapidly becoming essential. Today's piece on Iraq is an essential.

The good news? There's a quagmire in Iraq.

And it's the media, not the Coalition, that is bogged down:

Those who get their news from the "mainstream" media are surprised by developments in Iraq, as they were surprised by our swift victory in Afghanistan, the sudden fall of Saddam Hussein, the success of the Afghan election and the success of the Iraqi election.

Journalists demand accountability from political leaders for "quagmires" which exist chiefly in the imagination of journalists. But when will journalists be held to account for getting every major development in the war on terror wrong?

The better news?

The elections might have been exactly the turning point the supporters of liberation claimed, and that the left denied:

The number of insurgent attacks has fallen off significantly since the Fallujah offensive last November, and the attacks that are being made are less effective.

There are about 50-60 attacks a day on coalition forces, about half the pre-Fallujah level. Almost all are within the Sunni Triangle, and most are ineffective.

Harbinger of the media quagmire? When Democrat front-runners start defecting from their orthodoxy:

Proof of this was provided by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Iraq is functioning quite well, she said in a press conference in Baghdad Feb. 19. The recent rash of suicide attacks is a sign the insurgency is failing, she said.

"When politicians like [Clinton] start flocking to Iraq to bask in the light of its success, then you know that the corner has been turned," a reader of his blog wrote to Bay.

Clinton endorsing the progress of the war is like Captain Smith jumping on the first lifeboat.

What'll be the real proof that the media is defeated in Iraq? When the left starts trying to claim credit for democracy in the Middle East, the way they eventualy tried to claim credit for victory in the Cold War.

Oh, wait - John Stewart already started, approving of the American achievement in the Iraqi election in the first person plural.

We Happy Few, We Brand of Bothers

I was feeling nostalgic the other day. I took a little detour through my micropunditry past.

Something occurred to me which I'm going to blow completely out of proportion.

Bear with me.

Back about ten years ago, I exercised my inner pundit via email. I subscribed to a regional email listserver, "Minnesota Politics", sponsored by a group called "E-Democracy". E-Democracy's mission statement starts with its goal, "...Improving citizen participation in democracies and communities through the power of information and communication technologies and strategies.

Through collaborative efforts led by active citizens from across the political spectrum, our goals are to:

• Strengthen, expand, and diversify citizen engagement through effective and meaningful online discussions and two-way information exchange on public issues.
• 
  Increase the use and relevancy of democratic information resources that inform citizens about elections, governance, the media and public affairs and help us meet public challenges.
• Build and sustain the unique citizen-based "E-Democracy" model, so active citizens anywhere can join us and work to improve the outcomes of citizen participation in governance and public life in their communities and nations.

Sounds good, right?

Don't get me wrong - there are some very good people working with E-Democracy. But the notion of an institutional, hierarchical setup like E-Democracy, under which a hive of dutiful commenters will have orderly discourse on the issues of the day, seems tailor-made for people with more institutional frames of mind - in other words, people on the left.

And as I've related in this space before, the theoretical fair-to-middling idea has a lot of bugs in real life. E-Democracy has, in my opinion, attracted more than its fair share of petty little martinets as volunteer forum manager, who enjoy the "power" that running a list-server gives them to a rather unseemly extreme.

It should go without saying that the worst of these character are thoroughly biased as re politics. I stayed on the Minnesota Politics mailing lists from 1995 through the fall of 2003, although my interested decreased markedly after my blog started. I won the "most valuable poster" award in 2001 and 2002.

But it didn't take long to notice that while the forums were mostly peopled by DFLers and lots and lots of Greens, the lifespan of a conservative was very short. While many of the liberal commentators you read on the forum today have been there since the beginning (in 1994), the average life span of a conservative on the list was under a year; as far as I recall, I'm the only one that wrote on the forum much longer than a couple of years. Eventually, inevitably, I got "suspended" - for behavior that DFL commentators routinely got away with, and always had.

I was flipping through an old email file, though, and I noticed something; a lot of my favorite Minnesota conservative bloggers got their start on MNPOL: Wog from Wog's Blog, Swiftee from Pair O' Dice, Thorley Winston from Tacitus, American Mind stand-in Shawn Sarazin, and probably a few than I'm missing.

The parallels are obvious; squeezed out of a voice by the allegedly polite company who controlled the Hive Media, we had to find our own outlets. Blogs, for Twin Cities amateur conservative pundits as well as for conservatives nationwide, were the outlet the system denied us; in many ways, they're the poorer for having squeezed us out.

How? The mainstream media's problems are a matter of current market and ratings conversation. As to E-Democracy...

...well, look at how vibrant the discussion is. Or rather, is not. It's an idea whose time may or may not have come and gone - but whose forced homogeneity isn't helping one bit.

Hear It First

The Northern Alliance is going to be the place to tune for this coming election cycle.

Tomorrow at 1PM: State Senator Michelle Bachmann will be on, talking about her just-announced bid for the 6th Congressional District nomination.

Expect to hear all the candidates that matter on the NARN during this campaign. Heck, even Democrat candidates; I can pretty much guarantee you a better, more literate, and more courteous interview, even as opponents, from us than you'll get from, say, the Air America affiliate. Probably a bigger audience, too. Have your people call our people.

Then, at 2PM, we'll be talking with former Semisonic drummer Jake Slichter, author of "So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life", a book I'm told could not have been more interesting if it had been written by a guitar player.

(Kidding. I kid. Tune in).

Coulter on Gannon/Guckert

Democrats in Congress actually demanded that an independent prosecutor investigate how Gannon got into White House press conferences while writing under an invented name. How did Gary Hartpence, Billy Blythe and John Kohn (Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and John Kerry) run for president under invented names? Admittedly, these men were not reporters for the prestigious "Talon News" service; they were merely Democrats running for president.

Liberals keep telling us the media isn't liberal, but in order to retaliate for the decimation of major news organizations like The New York Times, CBS News and CNN, all they can do is produce the scalp of an obscure writer for an unknown conservative Web page. And unlike Raines, Rather and Jordan, they can't even get Gannon for incompetence on the job. (Also unlike Raines, Rather and Jordan, Gannon has appeared on TV and given a series of creditable interviews in his own defense, proving our gays are more macho than their straights.)

Hell, our female pundits - Coulter, Linda Chavez, Laura Ingraham - can probably make most of their male ones cry uncle.

Or "Monkey".

(Via Powerline)

Crowded House

Cherie Pierson Yecke joins the pack in running for the Sixth CD's nomination, joining Michelle Bachmann in the chase.

This is going to be a fun campaign for all us pundits...

Open Letter to Air America Twin Cities

AM950 is the Twin Cities' FrankenNet affiliate. The General Manager is Janet Robert, a very wealthy woman who likes to toss the jing around in pursuit of political positioning (vide her 2002 Congressional run against Kennedy).

Maam, I'd like to start with a little homily:

It was September of 1979. It was my first aircheck review with my boss at my first radio station.

He rolled the tape. The list of radio sins got off to an early start, and kept on going:

• My breathing was atrocious
• While reading news, I sounded like I was reading rather than talking. "Say it, don't read it!, he'd bellow from his office after a bad newscast.
• I mispronounced a word or two
• I had no idea how I was going into half of the breaks
• I just kept on talking during one break - "verbal diarrhea", the boss called it.

I thought about the extensive criticism, the many opportunities for improvement that had been presented to me by this man with thirty years' experience in the business to my four weeks.

And I replied "Screw You".

He looked at me and smiled. "You're right! Screw me! I have no idea what I'm talking about! I'm 49 and have been in the biz since 1949, and you are 16 and started here four weeks ago - I don't know what I was thinking!"

I sure set him straight. The lesson; being a broadcast poster child for the Peter Principle on the radio is perfectly fine, as long as you do it loudly enough!

Of course, Ms. Robert, it wasn't actually I who said "screw you". That was, according to little bird, your morning drive air "talent" Nick Coleman, referring to bloggers who criticized his program on technical rather than political grounds (that'd be me), and demonstrating his Wildean (Wendy, not Oscar) wit and suave, sophisticated argumentation style as usual. Cicero weeps, indeed - your station's website says you "make big brother cry for mama", and I know that after hearing that, I'm sure looking for my kevlar jockstrap. Yessirreebob.

Anyway.

I realize that in the rush to cash in on the bonanza that is Air America, you neglected to hire any staff with any actual radio experience (except for Wild Wendy - and let's be honest, in a fair world she'd be doing the "Action Auction" in DuBuque. But if you're committed to keeping her, here's a tip; before an interview - Valium. Or warm milk. Anything) or knowledge of promotions (your website doesn't list any current events - you think people are going to pay to learn about station events? Note to FrankenNet listeners; I have a beachfront timeshare in Bismark for you).

So in the spirit of improving the art of radio, I'd like to offer to consult with your station on teaching some of your "air talent" the basics of radio. Little things like...

...well, specific can wait. If you read back far enough, there's plenty. I'm not cheap - but either is abject market failure.

Keep in mind that politics plays no role in this offer; a listenable hour of radio is above politics, in my book. It'd be fun to work in a market with a viable opposition radio station - which, sad to say, AAo'M950 is not - a station where one can wrangle with the other guys/gals' ideas wrather than the fact that they sound like someone you hired after an indiscreet night of pineapple kamikazes and loose contracts, or producers who sound like they should be manning the drive-through speaker. Everything about your local programming - every minute of it - sound amateurish. Which causes people to tune out - I'd bet money that in six months, Coleman's numbers will be below Marc Maron's, whatever they were.

I realize that I might arouse the ire of the vast Coleman listening public by writing this, and that they might deluge me with an email or inundate the NARN show with a call.

But to me, good radio is above mere politics.

Have your people call my people, 'kay?

Putting the Punk in Punxatawny

Speaking of whom...

The annual rite of spring here in my little corner of the Midway is Anoka Flash's ceremonial First Tapping of the Kegerator - a keg fridge he keeps in his garage. Once spring springs and the fizzy flows, the boys 'n da hood can be seen in the Flash driveway all summer, looking like the guys in King Of The Hill for the following five months.

It's an event awaited as eagerly as Mardi Gras in this little corner of the world. We check the weather as we leave the house in the morning, lingering a bit to see if the sun feels remotely warm, hoping we're one last chilly snap away from that magical threshold that brings Flash up the driveway with that first sixteen-gallon sign that summer is on the way.

After the kegerator, the blooming of my magnolia bush is almost anticlimactic.

Blast From The Past III

Jim Klobuchar has a blog. More or less.

Don't remember Klobuchar?

He was a columnist at the Strib - pardon the redundancy - for thirty years. He retired sometime in the last decade.

Like Nick Coleman, he tirelessly flogged the mines of overwrought populism. Unlike Coleman, he probably could have figured out that "flogging the mines" was a mixed metaphor.

Like Coleman, he did a firebrand liberal talk show; like Coleman, he didn't belong on the air. Unlike Coleman, he was rational.

Like Coleman, he's a flaming liberal columnist. Unlike Coleman, one got the impression he had spent time gathering some facts before he wrote. One got the impression that there was a human behind the shrill shrieking points. He had a human side - check out his ode to Carl Eller's Hall of Fame induction - that Coleman had twenty years ago, and perhaps still has, lying beneath sedimentary layers of rage.

The blog is slim pickings; it looks like he makes an entry or two a month. If you miss Klobuchar's writing, though...well, here you go.

(Via Flash)

News You Need for a Nation At War

The WaPo on Condi in Europe:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Wednesday dressed all in black. She was wearing a black skirt that hit just above the knee, and it was topped with a black coat that fell to mid-calf. The coat, with its seven gold buttons running down the front and its band collar, called to mind a Marine's dress uniform or the "save humanity" ensemble worn by Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."

As Rice walked out to greet the troops, the coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal the top of a pair of knee-high boots. The boots had a high, slender heel that is not particularly practical. But it is a popular silhouette because it tends to elongate and flatter the leg. In short, the boots are sexy.

Maybe the media is changing. I can't remember every seeing a conservative and "sexy" in the same article in the WaPo.

Give Up A Little Bit

"Give A Little Bit" by Supertramp was one of the songs from seventh grade that I liked. At the time, I liked it a lot. It came out in the first thirty seconds of Supertramp's fifteen minutes of fame, long (why, a year or two, at least!) before the irritating "Take the Long Way Home" and the gloriously snide "Logical Song". It was a fun pop trifle, a fun, hummable tune.

The Goo Goo Dolls, trying to tack a longer tail onto the career bell curve, have done a cover, and not a bad one.

But the dogs of overexposure have been loosed. I'm trying to keep track of all the different versions of the song I'm hearing on commercials lately. I can not, of course, remember what commercials they were on:

• The Eddie Vedder wannabee version, heard on Cartoon Network.
• The guy who sounds vaguely like an accent-less Enrique Yglesias on a radio spot.
• The woman who sounds like someone who sang on a tampon ad, on another radio spot
• The woman from the spot on NBC who sounds a little like Bjork

And counting.

The Only Problem with Michelle Bachmann...

is that she doesn't live in the Fourth CD.

She's announced she's running for the Sixth CD seat.

I've met Bachmann. She's a sound, solid, very conservative candidate. Look for the left to throw the word "moderate" around like it's going out of style.

It's going to be an interesting race.

Rebecca Thoman presents Ollie the Ostrich!

Ask Doug Grow what 2+2 equals.

If he answers "Orange", you'll have solved the mystery behind today's column.

A local gun shop is planning a kids gun safety class.

You just know that's going to drive some paternalistic liberal over the edge.

Grow starts:

Before the gun safety training class that a Minneapolis gun shop owner is planning for Minneapolis kids, all ammunition will be "secured."

Everyone agrees that's a good idea.

After that, though, questions arise about a plan by Mark Koscielski and his friend Joel Rosenberg to offer a free gun-safety program Friday evening at Koscielski's Guns and Ammo, 2926 Chicago Av. S.

The program is for children, 6 years old and up. Pizza and cookies will be served at the class, which is to "take the mystery -- and mystique -- out of guns."

Which would seem a good idea. Liberal-dominated media culture is profoundly hypcritical about firearms; solemnly intoning via public policy that guns are baaaaad, but glorifying them in movies, on TV, and in hip-hop songs and videos.

Beyond that? Guns have always had a mystique for kids, especially boys; they're the fictionalized token in infinite varieties of boys' horseplay. There was a time when that mystique was remedied by fathers who took their boys out and showed them what a 30-06 round would do to a 2x4 - sobering indeed. But those days are past, and urban layout and law make backyard demonstrations of firepower difficult, to say nothing of so many parents' puritan angst over guns.

More on that in a bit. Doug's got some self-righteous sniffing to do:

Koscielski, who seems to thrive on agitating city officials and those who support gun control [Grow states this without context; Koscielski agitates because Minneapolis treats gun owners like incipient criminals, gun stores like porn theatres - Ed.], says that he and Rosenberg are motivated by good intentions. Koscielski says he's weary of reading stories about shootings based on accidents or foolish behavior.

"We had a boy killed because he pointed a pellet gun at a police officer," Koscielski said. "We've had cases where somebody gets drunk, points a gun at somebody and kills them. When I was a boy [in Minneapolis public schools] we had gun-safety training and it didn't seem like these sorts of things were happening."

Koscielski said he and Rosenberg, who are certified firearms instructors, won't be teaching children how to shoot. Rather, they'll be teaching kids what to do if they find a gun.

"We'll be telling them, 'If you find a gun, don't touch! Somebody call 911.' "

But the two men also will teach kids how to handle a gun.

"Take the mystery away," Koscielski said.

I have a stepson. He's 23 now. When he was probably 10, his mother and I taught him the usual response if one of his friends brought out a gun; don't touch, call 911, yadda yadda.

But we also taught him a couple of the key rules - always point them in a safe direction. Always open the action (and how to do it) when picking it up and before handing the gun to anyone, to check if they're loaded. they're always loaded.

One day, at a friend's house, the friend's son brought out one of his dad's hunting rifles. My stepson, properly taught, did exactly the right thing - not only running to an adult, but also telling the other boy (as I recall) how to safely handle the gun until an adult arrived.

Good outcome, right?

Oh, the self-righteous sniffing has only begun:

Margorie Hardy, a psychology professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., has a brief response to the Koscielski-Rosenberg plan.

"You're kidding," she said.

Teaching children how they should react around guns will have no impact on how they will react, said Hardy, who has done studies on children's play and guns.

"I'm sure those children will leave the store telling you it's not safe to handle a gun, but that doesn't mean they won't handle a gun," she said. "It doesn't work to tell a child not to touch medications; that's why we have child-proof caps. It doesn't work to tell a child about the dangers of drowning; that's why we have fences around swimming pools. The only thing that's effective is to keep the environment safe."

Um.

Right.

We teach kids not to steal, yet they steal. We teach kids to respect each other, yet they hit and bully and sometimes rape and rob each other. We teach our kids about self-reliance and free enterprise and responsibility, yet they grow up to vote Democrat.

Ms. Hardy's response - uncritically accepted by grow - is an absurd one; no education prevents all problems. But it increases the odds that any given child will react correctly, rather than incorrectly, in a given situation.

By the way - never forget that "keep the environment safe" is a euphemism for "remove guns from the environement"; naturally, that only applies to the law-abiding parts of the environment.

Beyond that, Hardy's answer reeks of "all children will screw up, which is why we have to restrict everything". Look at the message behind her statement; "teaching kids doesn't do any good". Only action above and beyond that of the parents can keep kids safe.

Now, childproof caps, fences around pools, and keeping ammunition away from kids all make sense - but teaching them proper, safe, responsible behavior helps, too, especially as they get older; I had the fear of G-d put in me about medicine and drowning (mom and dad had no guns); I don't recall ever even trying to open a pill bottle or sneak into a pool.

Gun safety is an adult issue, Hardy said.

Ah. It's that simple.

Ms. Hardy, you should spend a little time observing parents in the real world. They're not all responsible; some of them leave guns out where the kids can get at them. How will the kids respond? If they're not taught - how indeed?

Grow slips from the academically myopic to the absurd:

Her point of view is shared by Citizens for a Safer Minnesota, which has called for tighter control of guns. Rebecca Thoman, executive director of that organization, sounded a little startled by the Koscielski plan. She is concerned that such programs lead to bad public policy.

"We end up with policy in which we believe we just need to train children rather than have tighter restrictions," Thoman said.

Grow barely hints at the context; Rebecca Thoman - who is not only the "executive director" of Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota but practically the only member - Joel Rosenberg refers to CS"S"M as a "checkbook advocacy" group - wants a gun ban, pure and simple. Training - and a decline in accidental deaths that inevitably spring from it - are the last thing she wants. Avoidable tragedy plays into her hands. Rebecca Thoman is a coward, incapable of debating the gun control issue (I have challenged her to public debates, challenges that have gone unanswered), preferring to issue evidence-challenged declarations through her cronies in the press, of whom Doug Grow is a reliable mouthpiece.

She said she fears a resurrection of "Eddie Eagle" legislation, a National Rifle Association-backed scheme that actually had some political support a few years ago. Under this legislation, gun-safety training would have been a part of education for kindergarten through third-grade children in the state.

It gained support, Grow probably doesn't know to mention, because of a highly publicized rash of accidental shootings among children. Less publicized - many of the children lived in the homes of drug dealing parents who left handguns lying around all over the place.

Could the NRA's "Eddie Eagle" program have saved some of those lives? If Rebecca Thoman has her way, we'll never know.

Kudos to Grow, though; he imparts some balance to the story:

But Mike Hammer, the education coordinator for the state's Department of Natural Resources, said he has empathy for Koscielski and Rosenberg. Once upon a time, Hammer pointed out, the DNR had gun-safety training programs in many of the state's school districts, including Minneapolis. But after a number of awful school shootings, anything having to do with guns -- including safety training -- fell out of favor in most school districts.

The DNR still trains about 22,000 Minnesota kids, 11 years old and up, every year. It also has training information on its website for parents and kids.

But much as he believes in safety-training programs, Hammer also appreciates the positions of such people as Hardy. Giving a kid a safety course isn't enough; adult supervision after training also is vital, Hammer said.

The temptation to say "Er, Duh" is nearly overwhelming.

While talking guns, pizza and cookies, Koscielski started recalling the good old days.

"In fifth grade at Bancroft school [in the mid 1960s], we had a Halloween parade through the hallways," he said. "I was GI Joe and I was carrying my .22 rifle. A teacher came up to me and said, 'You don't have ammunition do you?' I said, 'Nope.' She said, 'OK.' "

It's always been a good idea to keep the ammo out of the hands of kids.

That temptation is getting stronger.

Through The Gates, Darkly

Red has a review of Christo's latest installation, The Gates.

She's on target, I think:

Christo, long-crowned the enfant terrible of the art world, has, through his latest ontological oeuvre, transformed our so-called familiar urban landscape of Central Park into something self-referential, stochastic, and yet at the same time mundane. One recalls the Dadaists and the soup cans of Andy Warhol, and one reflects on the normative paradigmatic shift of our hermeneutical age. There are those who will view The Gates as a didactic polemic, little more than a bete noire, still others who will see it as replete with a fertile esthetic, and others will want to burn themselves into a fiery crisp on national television, imitating (perhaps) the Buddhist monks of yesteryear, whose saffron-colored robes The Gates echo, in all their evanescent autarky.

The question remains:

The Gates: a simple recherche into the lost écarts de jeunesse, a Dumbo's feather that lets the viewer soar back to the lost folly of youth? Or a sine qua non of postmodern folly?

The meaning of these 'Gates' might have been comprehensible had we discovered them rising against the warm backdrop of ‘avant-garde’ Seattle, underwritten by Microsoft--but arising as they have, here, in the gritty cold heart of NYC, and funded by so-called 'artists' whose ‘creative’ progeny are all indubitably strange, we find nonsense in the idea that meaning means anything 'sensible' and one rather suspects a joke being played and we, the viewers, don't yet quite ‘get’ it.

I would equate the experience of walking through the exhibit with passing through the birth canal and suggest that those who hate The Gates do so because they despise their own existence. Christo's Gates are a physical representation of the artist's inner dialectic, juxtaposing saffron spirituality and utilitarian steel in a compromised landscape, and bring up the penultimate question: Où les neiges de temps jadis sont?

If we know anything, we know this: Art is neither object nor subject, but the phenomenological intertwining of both so that 'appreciation' (in all its varied and multi- meanings) is born from the simple realization of perception. This recognition allows for art that is neither here nor there, but everywhere. And nowhere.

Christo's animism is at the heart of his challenge to the verity of truth, insofar as it rectifies the humanism of our spatial modality. 'Gates' purports to effect a nouveau realisme in which the actual is unrealized into a cathartic emanence of the whole.

The dialectic of Christo's "Gates" is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of "now-more-than-ever." The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being - the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It's in this context that "The Gates" covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature - the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint - the "Gates" welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The "Gates" are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

As for the sexualized nature-of-being within the context of the exposure: the gates cannot be phallic; by their very nature they must be Sapphic and labile, thus rendering the observer as a sort of unintended symbol of penetration qua probing. It mitigates the very phallocentric nature of our neo-culture where every wardrobe malfunction becomes a gesture of the feminine violent against a landscape of testicular domination. The flowing robes of the gates are by necessity, feminine; they recall the flowing garments of kindergarten teachers, of wash on the line, and the color - an ochre, rather than a true red - dimly recalls menstruation. What Christo has done here is nothing short of genius; the observer-as-penis concept writ large.

As rendered in 'Gates', the effect is homiletic rather than narrative--especially the goose shit on the sidewalks, which provides a whimsical counterpoint as well as a sobering reminder of our paternalistic dichotomy, where all true art is of necessity samizdat, and thus destined to languish in obscurity, ignored by the nekulturny hordes of bourgeois apparatchiks.

I gladly entered the Gates, feeling in them a life-affirming force, but couldn't help leaving with existential angst on my face, remembering Auschwitz.

In John Ashcroft’s America, we are all diaspora.

Just what I was thinking.

Read the whole thing

Black History/Democratic History

Deroy Murdock observes Black History Month with an unusual concomitant February anniversary:

Today marks the 90th anniversary of a very special White House ceremony. President Woodrow Wilson hosted his Cabinet and the entire U.S. Supreme Court for a screening of D. W. Griffith's racist masterpiece, Birth of a Nation. The executive mansion's first film presentation depicted, according to Griffith, the Ku Klux Klan's heroic, post-Civil War struggle against the menace of emancipated blacks, portrayed by white actors in black face. As black civil-rights leader W.E.B. DuBois explained: In Griffith's 1915 motion picture, "The freed man was represented either as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful idiot."

Thumbs up, Wilson exclaimed. The film "is like writing history with lightning," he remarked, adding, "it is all so terribly true."

This vignette — recently recounted in Ken Burns's PBS documentary, Unforgivable Blackness — was neither the first nor last time a prominent Democrat plunged a hot knife in black America's collective back. Each February, Black History Month recalls Democrat Harry Truman's 1948 desegregation of the armed forces and Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson's signature on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the greatest black legislative victory since Republican Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1863. This annual commemoration, however, largely overlooks the many milestones Republicans and blacks have achieved together by overcoming reactionary Democrats.

The House Policy Committee's 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar offers 365 examples of GOP support for women, blacks, and other minorities, often over Democratic objections.

Murdock lists some key items from the Freedom Calendar.

Highlights:

July 30, 1866: New Orleans's Democratic government ordered police to raid an integrated GOP meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150.

September 28, 1868: Democrats in Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 blacks who tried to foil an assault on a Republican newspaper editor.

October 7, 1868: Republicans criticized Democrats' national slogan: "This is a white man's country: Let white men rule."

April 20, 1871: The GOP Congress adopted the Ku Klux Klan Act, banning the pro-Democrat domestic terrorist group.

October 18, 1871: GOP President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched federal troops to quell Klan violence in South Carolina.

September 14, 1874: Racist white Democrats stormed Louisiana's statehouse to oust GOP Governor William Kellogg's racially integrated administration; 27 are killed.

Let's not forget: Republicans rammed the Thirteenth, Fourtheenth and Fifteenth amendments through Congress, frequently over the rhetorically dead bodies of Democrats.

"But that's all over a hundred years ago!"

Er, no:

August 17, 1937: Republicans opposed Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Supreme Court nominee, U.S. Senator Hugo Black (D., Al.), a former Klansman who defended Klansmen against race-murder charges.

February 2005: The Democrats' Klan-coddling today is embodied by KKK alumnus Robert Byrd, West Virginia's logorrheic U.S. senator and, having served since January 3, 1959, that body's dean. Thirteen years earlier, Byrd wrote this to the KKK's Imperial Wizard: "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia." Byrd led Senate Democrats as late as December 1988. On March 4, 2001, Byrd told Fox News's Tony Snow: "There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time; I'm going to use that word." National Democrats never have arranged a primary challenge against or otherwise pressed this one-time cross-burner to get lost.

May 17, 1954: As chief justice, former three-term governor Earl Warren (R., Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation of government schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower's Justice Department argued for Topeka, Kansas's black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924, defended "separate but equal" classrooms.

September 24, 1957: Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock's government schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).

May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the GOP's 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee's Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill's passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.

True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) opposed this bill the very year he became the GOP's presidential standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and called for integrating Arizona's National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the 1964 Act would limit freedom of association in the private sector, a controversial but principled libertarian objection rooted in the First Amendment rather than racial hatred.

June 29, 1982: President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

And let I forget (emphasis mine):

President G.W. Bush named Condoleezza Rice America's first black female NSC chief, then our second (consecutive) black secretary of State. Just last month, one-time Klansman Robert Byrd and other Senate Democrats stalled Rice's confirmation for a week. Amid unanimous GOP support, 12 Democrats and Vermont Independent James Jeffords opposed Rice — the most "No" votes for a State designee since 14 senators frowned on Henry Clay in 1825.

Today, the Democrat approach to blacks is the same as Paul Wellstone's approach to the military; programs. "Bread and circuses", it used to be called.

Read it all.

The Wall, '05

Deacon from Powerline notes this piece from the WaPo.

See if you can tell why it's important.

I'll give you a hint - it comes in a part of the article wherewriter, David Ignatius, interviews Walid Jumblatt.

The article makes a cursory attempt to explain Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Druze community.

I've said it many times on this site, and history bears it out; there is no more dangerous occupation in the world than "Moderate Arab"; the radicals kill you before they go after the Jews and the Americans. Jumblatt knows this, and in many ways serves as a weather vane; the Druze are like the Poles of the eastern Mediterranean, caught between everyone in Lebanon, a country where radical communities gather like the Cantina on Tatooine.

Weathervane. Remember this. Ignatius says:

Jumblatt dresses like an ex-hippie, in jeans and loafers, but he maintains the exquisite manners of a Lebanese aristocrat. Over the years, I've often heard him denouncing the United States and Israel, but these days, in the aftermath of Hariri's death, he's sounding almost like a neoconservative. He says he's determined to defy the Syrians until their troops leave Lebanon and the Lahoud government is replaced.

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

The myopically focused mind - I'll be charitable - chants "the war can never be worth it", while ignoring the real effects our liberation of Iraq is having in that part of the world. Lebanon - for two and a half decades an intractable quagmire - might be on the brink of sorting itself out (at the expense of terror-supporting dictatorship Syria) solely because of the example of democracy popping up next door. When Walid Jumblatt - a human pilot fish if ever one existed - is casting his lot with the West, something important is going on.

Expect the left to:

1. Poo-Pooh this until...
2. ...they find it expedient to claim credit for it. See: Fall of Berlin Wall

Nothing Good

I heard this on the Nick Coleman program this morning:

"Nuthun gud cun cum uv thus dumnuble wur".

Translation: Nothing good can come of this damnable war, I think.

Tell it to the Iraqis that just voted, Nick.

Or don't rights count for brown-skinned people?

Coleman also said - I'm paraphrasing closely - "if you read anything about the history of guerrilla war, you know nothing good ever comes of them". He cited Algeria as an example.

That'd be the same Algeria that spent a decade defeating an insurgency as brutal as the one facing Iraq today, and is today an imperfect and struggling democracy, but a democracy nonetheless.

Monotone - the word describes the Coleman show literally, historically, politically, socially.

You Oughtta Be In Cartoons

Ed at Captains Quarters gets into the latest .

Wow. Last week the MAWB squad, this week Ed.

I suppose he'll get around to the rest of the NARN eventually...

Never Seen Law And Order

I love the old Saturday Night Live sketch, where the clue-free reporters ask Norman Schwartzkopf to divulge the times, places, and units involved in upcoming attacks, as the General does a slow burn at their bone-headitude.

I'm having a flashback. Bush in Europe: No attack on Iran planned, but we could do it if we had to:

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table," Bush said...Bush has walked a careful line between supporting an approach led by European nations to persuade Iran to scrap its uranium enrichment program in exchange for technological, financial and political support without talking about the U.S. reservations about that strategy.

"It's in our interests for them not to have a nuclear weapon," Bush said in a news conference with European Union leaders.

The funny part?

This issue shows, as if any more demonstration were needed, that the left has no concept of military history, or of diplomacy more complex than that of Jimmy Carter.

Not only have they never read The Prince, they haven't watched Law And Order.

Steve Soto at Left Coaster:

So, in the Bush dictionary this means:

a) We are not getting ready to attack Iran; we are ready now to attack Iran;

b) It won’t be us that attacks Iran, it will be the Israelis;

c) I’ve blown stuff out my ass before, so who cares what you think?

Er...yeah? And...?

Like playing good-cop, bad-cop with the mullahs is a bad thing?

Kevin Drum:

I don't get it. If all options are on the table, why is the notion that we might attack Iran ridiculous?

To anyone paying attention? It's not. It's not supposed to be. The mullahs are supposed to know that.

Frederick Maryland (not to be confused with Johnny Knoxville):

Or, to put it another way: "All options are on the table, including the simply ridiculous one."

I'm wondering - what do these people have against disinforming, teasing or manipulating a terror-supporting, nuke-building nation that has murdered tens of thousand people?

Speed

Chad the Elder from Fraters Libertas wants to be able to read more - or, to be fully accurate, to be able to read more in the limited time he has for reading:

These days (actually for some time now) there seems to be so much that I want to read and so little time to do it. I'm always reading at least one book (usually two or three) but I never make much of a dent in my "to be read" backlog, to say nothing of my wish list of books waiting to be acquired. Throw in magazines and the Internet and my scarce time for reading is swamped with potential material. Unless there's a nuclear holocaust tomorrow and I'm the last man on earth suddenly blessed with all the time I need for reading (reason #156 that I'm glad I had that laser eye surgery ), I will never come anywhere near close to catching up.

I feel his pain. Crazy job, blog, radio show, a couple of kids - it's no accident that all the books I'm actually reading are in the bathroom.

Elder's solution? Learn speed reading (about which he asks for information in his post).

I have an approach. Maybe I should market it.

It was May of 1985, the Wednesday of the last week of the last semester of my senior year of college. It was also finals week.

I had pretty much all my work done - with the exception of one last paper for my American Literature class. Not a big deal - a seven page paper on "Big Two-Hearted River" by Hemingway. It was Wednesday, graduation was Saturday - I figured I had some time yet - until Friday. I had not, of course, started reading.

It was 1PM. I went in to take my American Lit final. The professor - who also happened to be my major advisor - asked me "So, do you have that paper done?"

"Er, almost", I responded, waiting for him to tell me that I'd better have it in by Friday.

"Well, you need to get it to me. Senior grades are due at 7PM tonight.

[ SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH ]

"Um, sure. It'll be in later this afternoon".

"OK. Don't miss it..."

No kidding, I thought.

I dashed through the final - which was mostly non-trival essay questions - in near record time, an hour, and then dashed over to my dorm room on the way to the college's computer lab. This was in the days before ubiquitous personal computers; I did most of my term papers on a UNIX terminal which printed to a daisy-wheel printer (using "Roff", an dot-inset text formatting program; if you learned computers any time after 1987, you have no idea what I'm talking about). I sat down, and opened the book.

I had five hours to read the story and write seven coherent pages for the final class in my major.

So I taught myself speed reading, on the fly. I started flipping through the book, looking for parts that looked like they were important, taking notes on the fly. I allotted a fairly absurd, short time for this process; an hour, I think.

But somehow as I continued, my notes began to resemble an interesting story, something I could sink my paper-writing teeth into.

Then I turned to writing. I typed like mad, working from three bullet points that I'd discerned while "speed reading" through the key points of the story (as I saw them as I sprinted by), composing in my head as I typed, silently thanking G-d that I'd taken typing in high school, and that I'd done as much news writing as I had and developed the capacity to compose on the fly.

Long story short; I had eight pages done, edited, re-written, and spell-checked (the system did have that, at least) by 5:45PM. Then I spent half an hour wrestling with the balky daisy-wheel printer and the funky formatting that Roff turned out - followed by a mad sprint to my professor's office, where it was on his desk precisely 40 minutes before deadline.

Oh, yeah - the paper and final both got "A"s, and I aced the class.

Self-preservation is the best speed-reading teacher.

Since that motivates little of my reading these days, though, I may just ping Elder and see what he's come up with...

I'd Like To Thank The Academy

An emailer tells me Nick Coleman named me his "Dingbat of the Week", or some such, on his "program" today.

Did anyone get the details? Please leave a comment.

And if you are a Coleman listener, welcome! We use big words, and there are no pictures - and being a conservative site, we present you with things like "evidence" and require you to "think for yourself" to "draw your own conclusion". It'll be an adjustment.

But all are welcome!

And no good turn should go unrewarded. I declare Mr. Coleman to be Shot in the Dark's "Monotone who can never get to an Actual Point of the Week!"

Die Einzige Sprachpunkt!

When I was liveblogging/broadfisking the Nick Coleman show yesterday, I noted something that, inexplicably, I let slip.

It's really the biggest story of the whole adventure.

It took me a while to remember this bit here:

when the Powerstooges call Jimmy Carter a traitor, slime him like a commie stool or kissing/whipping boy, some kind of closeted commie, this isnt' just an attack on Jimmy Carter - this is intimidating of a fascistic kind that is meant to make people shut up in this county...

"Republicans are fascists" is a meme that has assumed near-official talking-point status on the far, far left. It's popping up with nearly-predictable regularity from the left - and I'm talking the mainstream left, here:

• A U of M professor compares Bush with the Nazis, according to Fraters (Ooops - apparently this is not true).
• The president of the Minnesota State Patrol troopers union compared Republicans to a group with neo-Nazi sympathies and a record of violence.
• Janeane Garofalo exercised her rapier-like wit...ok, meat-cleaver-like wit...

The examples go on, and on, and on.

Is it a failing of the left's rhetorical skills? Or a meme they're circulating amongst themselves to bolster the base's sense of invincible self-righteousness?

I'm leaning toward meme.

Miracle

Today is the 25th anniversary of the "Miracle On Ice".

I am not a huge hockey fan; I'm fairly illiterate about the sport, really. North Dakota, the Sioux notwithstanding, is basketball country once the weather turns (or at least it was when I lived there).

But I am a big history fan. And I remember the win at the Lake Placid games as clearly as can be.

The SI article hints at what the game was about:

Understand the circumstances. Twenty-five years ago, as 20 young skaters prepared for those Olympic Games, Americans were being held hostage in Iran and Soviet troops were marching through Afghanistan. President Carter already had announced a U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow. The U.S. economy was in disarray, with interest rates and inflation soaring.

Professionals were not a part of the Olympics then. There were no Dream Teams of NBA players at the Summer Games, no NHL players at the Winter Games. It was an all-amateur show. At least it was supposed to be.

USA Hockey followed the rules, gathering a squad of college kids and undrafted players and turning them over to Herb Brooks, hockey coach at the University of Minnesota. Brooks was the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. hockey team, which went on to win the gold medal. Every gold after that had gone to the Soviet Union, and there was no reason to believe that would change in 1980.

The Soviets arrived in Lake Placid with a roster of stars. The goalie was Vladlislav Tretiak, who would wind up in the Hall of Fame. The captain was Boris Mikhailov, affectionally known as the Gordie Howe of Gorky Street. The team included a fistful of future NHL players like Viacheslav Fetisov, Vladimir Krutov, Alexei Kasatonov, Sergei Starikov, Helmut Balderis and Sergei Makarov.

But it went deeper than that. For me and, judging by the faces of a lot of moviegoers, a lot of people around my age.

I rarely say this about movies - but last years' "Miracle" did a wonderful job of capturing not only the game itself, but the geist of the zeit. In particular, the opening montage did a masterful job of re-creating the dismal, depressing headlines of life in the US in the half-decade leading up to 1980; stagflation, hostages, WIN buttons, Jimmy Carter, malaise. I have to stop and remember - anyone under 35 has only the most minuscule memories of that era; how can they possibly remember the palpable sense of decline, of national stagnation, that dominated American life before Reagan?

The scene after the US got clobbered in an exhibition game, where Herb Brooks (played by Kurt Russell) drives home in the snow listening to Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech, is another essential. As Saint Paul from the Fraters noted after seeing the movie (in a Fraters piece I can not seem to find), a look around the theatre showed a lot of fortysomethings with their jaws dropping, their faces flashing back to the depression of the era; "...damn, it WAS that bad back then. Carter WAS that big of a hamster...."

I think Ronald Reagan would still have won a landslide in 1980 without the victory over the Soviets in the Lake Placid games. But I think that victory did an awful lot to rouse Americans, to tell them that there was another way, that what goes down must - or can - come back up. Lake Placid didn't put Reagan in the White House - but it certainly shook the cobwebs off of a lot of American hearts, hearts that went to the polls nine months later and demanded more of the same.

I'm going to have to rent the various movies on the subject, and watch 'em with the kids this weekend. There's a history lesson in there.

But Where's The Oil?

Adesnik notes something you're unlikely to see in the major media - the administration's response to an anti-democratic coup in the African nation of Togo:

After my initial criticism of the administration, one liberal realist chided me for assuming that this President literally intended to promote democracy across the globe. Other readers suggested that the US was holding back in order to avoid offending France, the great power historically most influential in West Africa.

Yet it seemed that the White House has surprised all of us. It is working hand in glove with a multilateral organization towards the objective of restoring democracy in Togo. Impressive, no?

I'm trying, and failing, to find Halliburton's interest in Togo.

RIP Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson passed away at 67 today, from suicide.

Although I read Hells Angels and Fear And Loathing once upon a time, they made no impression on my whatsoever. Ditto his political coverage at Rolling Stone. The guy could certainly write - he was an amazing writer. And yet...nada.

My brief career as a journalist was completely unaffected by Thompson's work.

Thompson affected my life in exactly zero ways. Not knocking the dead - merely assessing his work.

Gerard Vanderleun would seem to agree, and then some:

Yesterday, it would seem, he left in the same way that he lived -- gun-crazy, thoughtless, self-obsessed and selfish to the last second. A gunshot suicide at home, leaving his wife and son to discover and deal with his ruined corpse and clean up the room. What a man.

Rest in peace, Hunter S. Thompson.

Feeding The Kitty

I've been doing a little digging here; I'm on the trail of some of the money that ostensibly keeps the local Air America affiliate afloat.

A commenter noted earlier today:

"I heard a union worker call in to a local talk show earlier this month complaining about his union's request for member donations to Air America. At his union meeting, they were asking for $35,000 to help compete with "conservative media."

Now, if you look at the local Air America affiliate's , you'll notice that they have some, er, non-traditional sponsors and, by the looks of it, fundraising schemes:

• One of their sponsors is Chrysalis, a local non-profit womens' advocacy group that gets money from the state as well as from some of the traditional non-profit funding sources well-known to Minnesotans.
• The Mdewakanton Sioux tribe - heavily invested in Native casinos
• Various trade, labor and government unions.
• They're soliciting"memberships" - basically trying to cop MPR's subscription model. The benefits for this "membership" are unclear from the website, but they seem to include actually being told about Air America personalities' appearances - the sort of thing that most stations file under "promotions", on the silly capitalistic theory that getting the word out is a good thing.

I'm doing some digging of my own - but I'm going to ask you, my readers, a favor.

If you know of any other such appeals for financial support, whether through unions, non-profits or other non-commercial entities, please let me know. Drop me a line at "comments" at the address "northernallianceradio", then a dot and "com". Naturally, I'll need to corroborate any tips I get - but I'll appreciate anything you can clue me into.

I have no problem with Air America being on the air in the Twin Cities; I'd just like to make sure that after a year of bellyaching about oxycontin and gay hookers, they are as ethically simon-pure as they demand we be. Seem fair to you?

Thanks.

Anatomy Of A Mugging

There's something about zealots. They have the worst manners.

I've run across this two or three times in the three years I've been running this blog. Twice, I ran afoul of Atrios and Oliver Willis; small packs of their readers came over and befouled my comment section with a bunch of half-reasoned, but fully inflammatory, drivel. And once, a local activist obsessive self-promoter publicized my email address to a batch of gay email discussion forums, bombarding my comment section with inflammatory tripe, and clogging my inbox not only with what I'd have to call "hate mail", but also putting me on every spam mailing list in the western world; my daily spam count jumped from about five a day to between 300-500 spam emails a day over the course of two weeks. I had to change email addresses; not a technical probem - I administer my own email - but a pain in the ass notifying my dozens of family and friend contacts.

And all for what? So a bunch of mental/emotional midgets can get their fairly feeble rhetorical rocks off doing the intellectual equivalent of monkeys flinging poo in their zoo cages.

It goes with having a blog, even a mid-sized one like mine, I guess.

Powerline, Daily Kos and Minnesota Politics are not mid-sized blogs.

Powerline is, of course, the biggest overtly-conservative blog in the business. I know the guys involved; we're all part of the Northern Alliance of Blogs, and we all co-host the Northern Alliance Radio Network. I'm not going to say they're bosom buddies of mine - but I've spent some time with them. John, Scott and Paul are among the genuinely best guys I've met in the past few years. Naturally, being the biggest stars in the right-wing blogosphere, they're also the biggest lighting rods.

I have not met Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zuniga, although I did write for "Political State Report", a spinoff project of his, two years ago. Gapingly obvious point: I disagree with him. No biggie. But the part I find interesting is that there is no way to compare Kos (or the other "heavyweight" leftybloggers, Duncan "Atrios" Black, Oliver Willis or the giggly fratboys at Pandagon) with Powerline in terms of writing skill, research ability, intellectual firepower, or the breadth and comprehensiveness of their network of contacts. Kos recites talking points...no, that's unfair, he's big enough that he dictates the talking points to a fair chunk of the Mad How wing of the party. Atrios specializes in terse, smug snarks wrapped around links, sort of like Glenn Reynolds via Maxine Waters.

What Kos and Atrios (and to a lesser extent Willis and the giggly fratboys) bring to the table, though, is their vast hordes of commenters; generally half-literate intellectual droogs whose reasoning stops at reciting harping points delivered wrapped in scatological packages. But oy, are they dedicated.

On the other hand, Minnesota Politics, a one-man blog run by the anonymous "Minnesota Politics Guru", is unknown. Before last weekend, judging by his sitemeter, MP averaged under 100 visitors a day, probably much less.

Until Sunday.

Kos and Atrios ran a piece last week, essentially yelling "And your dog, too!" at the Powerguys, sending the hordes of flying monkeys to their keyboards to inundate the Powerguys' inboxes with...well, garbage.

What kind of garbage? I talked with John earlier today - and he summed up most of the points that he brings up in this posting today.

In addition to emailing us at our feedback address with every manner of invective, they called my office. My secretary stopped answering my telephone because callers swore at her. The telephone campaign reached a new low this morning, when someone purporting to be a reporter at a gay newspaper in Los Angeles called my office and asked me to comment on a "rumor" to the effect that there are photos floating around of me in a "tryst" with Jeff Gannon. Suffice it to say that these people are beyond unpleasant.

John, like any human, has his limits:

So that's the context in which I was reading emails a couple of days ago. I read about ten in a row that were vulgar and abusive in varying degrees; most were unprintable. At that point I snapped and lost my temper. I sent irate and intemperate replies to the last couple of emails I read--unfortunately, not the most abusive ones, but the ones I read after losing my temper.

One of them, of course, was the email from Mr. Guru, which I cited earlier today. The message was full of chuzzlewitted twaddle, not merely debunked but laughed out of rational conversation - but, as John admits in his mea culpa, by no means the worst he received. Mr. Guru was in the wrong place with the wrong email at the wrong time - or, given that his traffic spiked from the dozens into the thousands over the weekend, maybe the right box, message and time.

Rocket Man's email was out of order - he admits as much - but understandable; the droogs of the left are doing more than flirting with Nick Coleman's petty defamations, they're getting into some serious business, with their rumors and their verbal assaults on Hinderaker's secretary. I'm hoping somebody goes to jail or gets sued back to the Stone Age, honestly. I've been on the wrong end of a petit mal droog attack; I can't imagine what the entire, barking, scratching, poo-flinging Legion of the Invincibly Ignorant must be like. By the way, I've gotten a few comments and emails saying "if you can't stand the heat...", yadda yadda. I'd be interested in hearing if Nick Coleman covers this story (although not interested enough to listen to his show again), considering the, er, interesting phone and email responses I got from him earlier in the winter, answering my thoroughtly professional request for an interview. So to answer the commenters - do we all need thick skin? Sure. But having read, seen and heard the rants of the likes of everyone from Dan Rather (walking off camera) to Al Franken (his little tantrum at the convention) to Kos' downright dishonest, dishonorable reaction to the uproar over his his "screw 'em" comment, it's fairly clear that thick skin is rarer than one might think, and even after decades in the public eye (or months of one-sided adoration by legions of poo-flinging monkeys) develops some gaps.

By the way, Mr. Guru; your big "break" in the blogosphere came about due to a serious ethical indiscretion of your own. You published an email which, however intemperate, was intended as private communication, sent with a presumption of confidentiality. Publishing it is the sort of violation of confidence should earn you a solid non grata label, whoever you are. It won't matter to the lefty blogswarm, of course - to them, ethics is a four letter word.

But among the non-aligned and among those with whom you disagree, what you did should earn you a sound shunning.

Although at a couple dozen visits a day, that'd probably be overkill.

Mistakes happen. Yes, even if you're an unaccountable, unknown, anonymous leftyblogger.

Historical Trivia

Sheila O'Malley's on one of her tears, this time about the founding fathers, in honor of President's Day.

This isn't even your garden-variety Sheila tear, not even one of her legendary ones. The Commonplaces? John and Abby's letters? Cary Grant? Pffft.

If you laid the posts of her President's Day tear end to end, you could stretch them from the UN building to Brooklyn. Going west.

Were they all printed on paper, Brazil would be nicknamed "The North Dakota of the Southern Hemisphere".

If...Oh, just go read it.

When she goes on these tears, I have this vision of Red acting in three plays simultaneously. As in, at the same time, in different theatres, with the same curtain time; doing her part, running offstage to a cab and changing costime en route to the next theatre, doing her part, racing back to the first theatre for her next cue, then cabbing uptown to her other part, then back to Theatre two...

Revolution

Speaking of the Nick Coleman show - I noted while fisking it that he uses wall-to-wall U2 and Pogues music for bumpers and breakbeds.

Now, I've always loved U2 and the Pogues. "Unforgettable Fire" and "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" are two of my favorite albums, ever. We use "Gloria" (from 1981's October as a break bed - and that is one of my favorite songs of all time, perhaps the most wonderful song ever written for a Christian living in, and sometimes of, the world. Two verses of confusion, of confession, leading to the redemptive benediction: "Gloria, in te domine - Gloria, exultate. The song breaks down into a chaotic bridge - the drums and bass suggesting the profane pandemonium (in the classical Greek sense of the term) of The World. It nearly stalls with Adam Clayton's bass solo...

...and then The Edge rallies the troops with a guitar part that's all fanfare, and the band comes back in for the, ahem, glorious coda: "Gloria, in te domine. Gloria, Gloria!". It's the most joyful coda in the history of rock and roll, both in the profane sense - the breaking of the tension is almost orgasmic - and the sacred sense, as the feeling of redemptive joy washes over the song and, - played live - the audience.

Yeah, I'm a fan.

Now, someone told me they heard Coleman explain his use of U2 and the Pogues on the air once; to paraphrase, he was said to have exclaimed something to the effect of "It's Irish revolutionary music, and I'm an Irish revolutionary".

Oy.

Wonder if Nick ever saw "Rattle and Hum".

The movie was a hash, of course. But it had a few great moments.

None was greater than moment at an arena gig in Denver, toward the end of the movie. It was right after they'd gotten news of the Enniskillen bombing - where a group of IRA thugs set off a bomb at a Rememberance Day observance, killing 11, mostly World War II veterans.

If you never remember "Rattle and Hum" for any other reason, remember it for this scene.

The band is onstage, looking visibly shaken, horrified. They're playing a fierce, jagged version of "Sunday Bloody Sunday", their 1983 anthem (which is, by the way, not a revolutionary song, but a jeremiad about Christians, the world, war, the battle for the world's soul; the song ends "...And so the battle's yet begun/to bring the victory Jesus won").

During the bridge, Bono hushes the band down to just the drums and the bass, while the Edge slowly figures and listens.

I'm sick of Irish Americans, who haven't been home in twenty or thirty years, come up to me and tell me about the glory of the revolution. The glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution. Where's the glory in dragging a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and children? Where's the glory in that? Where's the glory in bombing old age pensioners as part of a remembrance day parade, their medals polished up for the day? Where's the glory in that?

Where, indeed?

Where is the glory of your "Irish Revolutionary" bullshit, Nick Coleman? You're in America now. Leave your tired, old "Up the Union" baked wind back in the old country, with all the other squalid ideas and dehumanizing traditions that most of our anscestors came here to escape.

Not subtle, that Bono. Good thing.

Because subtlety is lost on philistines like Nick Coleman.

At the beginning of Rattle and Hum, as Edge is playing the beginning to "Helter Skelter", Bono says "Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We're here to steal it back". It launched a thousand bar band jokes:

MITCH at bar in St. Paul, as "I Think We're Alone Now" starts: "Tiffany stole this song from Tommy James. We're here to steal it back".

Well, Nick, you're the thief; on a trivial, pop-culture level, you're trying to steal U2. On a more substantial level, you're trying to pilfer Minnesota - profaning the sacrifices of my anscestors, who settled in the northwest corner of the state, in the name of more taxes for your precious unions and programs and illusion about this state's history.

We're stealing it all back, Nick Coleman, we band of bloggers. Minnesota, U2, the airwaves, the public discussion, our hard-earned income - all of it.

Revolution. Pffft. What Bono said.

Fisking Nick: Minute By Minute

I'd like set the stage for you.

I'm going to be fisking the Coleman show on two levels.

On the one hand, I'm going to be going after the content itself - the fallacies in his statements and assumptions. These will appear in black.

I'll also be going after his, and his producer's, errors in basic radio technique, the "Radio 101" stuff that separates real radio people from amateurs who are living out the Peter Principle and indulging their and their management's delusions of grandeur relevance on the public airwaves. Comments related to radio technique will appear in blue.

Click on the link below, and we'll get started.

7:21AM- The stream is coming in very badly - and I can't get the show on the actual radio at all. He's ripping on NASCAR - the race goes to "whoever had to go to the bathroom the least". THe fact that there was an american flag and a bunch of "right wing icons" present seems to be bothering him. "I could drive 500 miles in that kind of time".

07:29: He's at least learned to identify his station. On radio, you're supposed to identify your station, or show, or frequency, or something every time you come into or out of a break; it's the stuff that cues people with ratings diaries what to write down. The times I'd heard him so far, he had not identified himself or the station. So he's graduated from remedial radio to Radio 101. Congrats, Graduate!

07:35 - The stream is driving me nuts. I'm trying to get the show on my radio; it doesn't seem to WANT to bring it in. Maybe it knows something I don't.

07:36 - The stream just died. I'll have to try to bring it dinky signal in on my radio now. Media player is "Buffering". Or maybe "suffering", it's hard to tell.

07:38 - Logged into the stream again. It lasted precisely four seconds before it cut out.

07:44 - I found a radio that picks up AM950 - if I turn it on its side and put it on a shelf.

07:46 - Finally got him. He's complaining about his headphones. Notes that it's day 16 or whatever - "We're getting to the point where he have to admit we're doing the show". Isn't that part of a 12 step program? He's reminiscing about being a paper boy. I've heard the show four times, and I think I've heard paper-boy talk twice.

07:49 - His initial attraction to the newspaper business is was sticking his hand into the bundle of fresh newspapers to warm them up. He's talking about his Schmidt column. "Did you read that?", he asks his producer. "No".

Timing would seem to be everything. When the stream went down, he was yakking about Bush not being "the real leader" (or some such). Now, he's just recapping his column from last week - and an innocuous one at that.

07:51 - A shot at the new minnesota, amid his homily to the old flashing Schmidt letters! "Back then, people didn't get up early to go to their jobs in Eden Prairie". Maybe if we put up a wall at the Mendota Bridge to keep people from leaving...

07:52: Two lessons: "I could stay warm in the newspaper business, and Beer was important.". He's still talking about the sign. Which is fine, but about as innocuous as they come.

07:53 - takes a break. "It's seven-fifty-three on Air America Minnesota". Someone must have had a word with him - but it sounds like he's still not entirely sure what he's saying. Winging it. Write your break lines down, or memorize them, or something; you sound like you have no idea how you're getting out of the segment, Nick.

I'm going to list sponsors - not because I want them boycotted (like I have that kind of clout) but so we can tell what grade of sponsors they have.
Spots:

• "Foreign Service" car repair shop
• Tempurpedic Swedish Mattress - it's a network spot. More later.

07:55 - U2 as a bumper, again. As Bono himself asked, "How long, can this go on...?"

07:56 - Did you know that they have a post office at the airport. "Don't you feel lke you're going to get taken out by an anti-terrorist missile?" Producer: Isn't it at Ronald Reagan International. What have we named after Ronald Reagan? Producer: "A pile of dog poo in my back yard". The "producer" sounds like he's still wrestling with puberty. He must be cheap.

07:57 Noting the price of the USS Jimmy Carter - "That's why Hindrocket has torpedo envy".

07:58 - He's dinging on submariners. "That can play with your mind. You have the hot cot thing going on there". Asks "Why are we building 3.2 billion dollar submarines now? It's like Jimmy Carter could have said you can name it for Hindrocket, or Ronnie Reagan". He says the sub can carry fifty nuclear missiles - he's wrong, of course, it carries 48 torpedoes. "He doesn't deserve the slimy right wing attacks...but what about 3.2 billion dollars in housing..." He's sounding like he thinks Carter has some control of that. They played the "Rocket" sounder - hey, that's the kind of promotions you can't buy!

08:00 - U2 is the "Break Bed" - the song they play as they go to break. Coleman didn't do an ID - which is more or less OK, since they just played a recorded ID in this case, but it's just a tad sloppy.

08:01 - the Air America newscaster notes that Hillary! has been breaking ranks with the rest of the Democrats on Iraq. It seems to confuse the newscaster - or make him expect that it'll confuse Democrats. He refers to taLON news. Bet Nick comments on this.

08:03 Ad

• Chrysalis - a women's shelter/program clearinghouse. We'll talk about this later.
• Carpet Network.
• Animal Ark Sounds like a Public Service announcement (PSA). Running PSAs on morning drive - sales must be going well.

08:06 - Bumper, "Beautiful Day", same as the breakbed. I like U2, too, dude, but it's kinda overkill. Playing gamewith myself, guessing the next U2 song. I pick "Sunday Bloody Sunday".

He's playing too much of the song. Takes too long to establish the rhythm of the show.

08:07 - "What's with the Hillary Clinton thing? She's over in Iraq..she's talking like Rummy!...the insurgency is failing...it's her light at the end of the tunnel moment!...she's acted like she's alittle loopy since [she fainted]". Producer notes she sounds like McCain - did I call this above, or not? Woo Hoo!

"Hillary is trying to position herself as a neocon Democrat! This is why I refuse to drink the Democratic koolaid...they're not fighting back...not fighting the enormous resources of the right wing noise machine". "Nobody's going to vote for them". Not that Nick's not trying. Did you know Nick is nobody's monkey?

Hey - I haven't heard "Monkey" yet. I heard it four times in one minute two weeks ago. Did someone have a talk with him, or is he reading all the derision he's getting for it?

Producer notes that Hunter S. Thompson "really messed up my head" as a teenager. Hm.

Coleman: "Did you ever have any worries about your feet?" Ties into JD Salinger's "Nine Stories". It's 8:11, and we're not into a topic.

"If a guy can go around half naked, why can't women?" Hmmm. You wanna take that, Saint Paul?

08:11 - FINALLY into the Gannon/GOOkert. "The more you know about htis, the more disturbing it ". we'll see if they know anything... Talking of connection between Guckert and Karl Rove.

"What were they staying on PowerSTOOGE?".

08:12: They're reading from Powerline, the "PowerStooges". "They got no objection to the fact that he was a gay hooker" I can't actually find the post they're reading. Anyone?

08:14 - Coleman is talking about GOOkert's presence at a leadership institution. "Guess who else went? KARL ROVE!"

That's their big tie!

Guess what, Nick Coleman - I went to the same college as Dick Armey! Thirty-five years later, of course- but I guess that makes me a key player in the Contract For America!

And this comes from where? Name your "source", Nick!

"He's older than Gannon - he could have taught him a lot...", snicker snicker. We've had a few minutes of yuks over the whole gay thing.

His big smoking gun - although they went to this institute at the same time, the conference brags about the connections. He's saying that Guckert's credentials came from Sara McClendon dying hand on her deathbed - proof please? Didn't McClendon have a hard pass?

COLEMAN: "By the way, the fact that he's gay has nothing to do with it!". Coleman says this after five minutes of gay jokes, emphasis mine. This is amazing - they've been tittering about GOOkert's sexuality for ten minutes now, like a couple of guys in a junior high locker room, and now it "has nothing to do" with it? Hm. Ever heard of "Tape", Nick? If these guys were conservatives, the press would be up in arms.

For five straight minutes, Powerline has been as prominent as Guckert. The Powerguys should pay AM950 for the free pluggage.

PRODUCER: The reason the PowerStooges are into this is they're the same thing, minus the prostitution!". Really?

He elaborates: "They're phony journalists on a phony story". Producer sounds like he's shooting spittle onto the mike. He sounds like a chipmunk on a bad day. There's a reference that'll separate the wheat from the chaff, Twin Cities radio trivia-wise.

Bails out to break fast. 08:18 - Break.

• 1-800 Divorce - a McLaw Firm.
• Larry King for Ester-C. It's a network spot - they have to play it to pre-empt Marc Maron's network show, the station makes no money from these spots.
• Oreck Vaccuums - sounds like another network spot..

08:20 - More U2, "Sweetest Thing". Sigh. He's talking about the weather. Fine, but that's right out of two breaks now. Which is fine, if you've got anything to add.

He's commenting on how the National Weather Service wire feed sounds scary. Good that he knows stuff.

Back to GOOkert/Gannon. "The right wing, completely silent". Does nick actually read right-wing blogs? We've been debunking the story all along. "How do you imagine they'd be casting this sotry if he were a Democrat?" I dunno - you think we can rip on gays? If any right-wing blog or talk show spent the time tittering about someone's orientation, there'd be a nastygram from someone faster than you can say "Right Wing Noise Machine".

"He was a pawn, a stool pigeon (?), a stooge, a partisan plant..." OK, Nick - so you have any evidence? You keep talking about this as if it's a known fact...howzabout you favor your audience with the "Facts" you have, but can't quite seem to divulge on the air?

He's noting that GOOkert has a "local echo" - he "worked with" the "Right wing blogs" in South Dakota. He's talking about the local connection. "The right wing blogs did nothign but attack the mainstream media. Then they established themselves a the source of scoops on the campaign. Then after they [tore into] Daschle...guess who was a huge part of all this?...uhhhhhhhhh....Jeff Gannon!" So what's the local connection?

If you listen to (and heaven forfend, believe) Coleman, you think John Lauck was on the GOP payroll. Not quite true - or as we say, a "lie".

"He's the guy from Texas in Washington who was sending dirt and publishing lies about the mainstream media and Tom Daschle...filling the airwaves and blogwaves with filth and fiction (it sounds like Coleman thinks GOOkert had a radio show) against anyone that'd stand up against Daschle in his election campaign".

Did Guckert/Gannon have a radio show? Anyone?

He wants to talk with someone from the Argus/Leader, to get the "Truth"! Hahahaha!

He's tying the SoDak Alliance of Blogs to the NOrthern Alliance - like we're the same thing, reporting to the same boss. He's onto us!

"It's about how do you trust the mainsream media when you have hookers embedding themselves in the news media?" Hm. Good question, Nick- I agree! I don't trust 'em, and it's the likes of Helen Thomas and John Roberts and, yep, Nick Coleman that've done it. By the way - is that quite how you wanted to ask that question?

08:30 - News. Spots at :31

• PSA for the Corn/Soybean Growers/Minnesota Livestock growers.
• Another Ester-C spot. It's network.

08:33 - Woo Hoo! The Pogues instead of U2! Although it's one of their "Revolutionary" songs. Yoo hoo, Nick! You're in America! Leave your squalid anscestral squabbles back in the old country. And remember, my anscestors pillaged, looted, terrorized and dominated your anscestors.

"Every day there's a revelation of what's been done in our name that's hideous and horrible. I think a lot of people dont' want to look at it...I don't hink anyone's paying enough atention. Gotta take in the warsh, watch the all star games, watch the Daytona 500..." Yes, we proles are a simple lot...

He's talking about Abu Ghraib, and an AP investigation. Let's see if he ties this abomination to the "Right Wing Noise Machine", or "PowerTool"/"PowerStool"? The producer and engineer are joking. "Did you order the Code Red?" Is this your first job, kid?

"Where is the outrage? Where is the iterest? I think it's the dumbing down of America continues (sic)...it's Jimmy Carter...when the Powerstooges call Jimmy Carter a traitor, slime lhim like a commie stool or kissing/whipping boy, some kind of closeted commie, this isnt' just an attack on Jimmy Carter - this is intimidating of a fascistic kind that is meant to make people shut up in this county...you have any voices are ment to seem like crazy people".

Really? I had no idea we bloggers were that powerful. Quoting Maher about the survey that supposedly shows high school kids favor censorship: "Where it's coming form is that you can place a right wing stooge...a right wing prostitute..."he's swerved back into Gannon.

So people are apathetic about Abughraib because Jeff Gannon went to the same leadership institute as Gannon/GOOKert? "And the next thing yo know, this WHORE is sitting in the white house!"

He's quoting the "speculation" that Karl Rove is behind getting GOOkert into the White House. So, Nick - can you get some beef behind the speculation? You being a big journalist and all?

And for the third time since I've had the show tuned in, he says that right wing bloggers "are silent" about Gannon/GOOKert. No, Nick - we've covered the story, and especially the gaping inconsistencies in the left-wing horde's take on the story. And we've noted why it's a story - to draw attention from Eason Jordan.

Spots

• Carpet Network again. Sounds local - I get they're getting paid. Note to self - buy carpet elsewhere.
• Denorex. Another network spot.

08:44 - Sunday Bloody Sunday! Only one break off!

Reminiscing about shaking hands with the president. "No not going the bathroom", actually meeting JFK at age 10.

Producer was at the Nobel Peace Conference. Proud of having gotten a "Partial Hug" from Jimmuh Carter.

No phone calls so far.

They're talking about the Presidents they've met. Really, really dull.

08:48 - I've noticed that they're averaging about one local , paying spot (I suspect) per break. Four spots that bring in any revenue per hour. How long can they keep this going? Unless you have George Soros backing you, of course. Seriously - I'm seeing one spot per break/four per hour at the most - that can not be a good sign for their bottom line.

08:49 - Napoleon Dynamite. "The dirtiest Mormon movie I've ever seen". And on, and on. He can identify with Mr. Dynamite being "So surly, so angry". Hm.

08:50 - Spots

• Carpenter's Union. If I'm a carpenter, I'm wondering why my dues are going to this operation. It's an oddly defensive-sounding spot - "There's ntohing wrong with caling myself a craftsman, is there?"
• Shakopee/Mdwakanton Sioux spot against state gaming. That's two local spots in a break! Party time!

We're almost done with the show, and I don't think I've heard him complete one complete, coherent thought.

Back with more Pogues.

08:53 - He's admitting to have not seeing "Miracle On Ice". Talking about the bad reception he had of the 1980 olympics while in Rochester. Fascinating stuff.

08:55 - an almost human moment, reminiscing about Herb Brooks. First moment of the whole show that doesn't ooze either condescension, hatred or selective half-truth...

vIt seems like they've vamping. And vamping. I mean, is the Miracle On Ice really a timely subject right now Seriously - he's wandering among topics with aimless abandon. If I were going to call (as if), I'd have no idea where or when to call in.

Hasn't given out the phone number, he's been dilatory about IDing the station the whole show - the whole effect is confusing and - I think the word is appropriate - aimless.

Talking about getting knocked over on the ice by an Olympic Gold Medalist...

08:58 - Back to NASCAR. He's ripping on the product placement in the winner's circle. This may be the least graceful vamp I've ever heard. He's trying to do a Jeff Gordon impersonation.

Goes out with a Rebel Yell. "The dumbing down of america, but we're standing up for the truth..."

Huh?

Wow.

Beautiful Friggin Day. Again.

Speaking as a radio guy - it sounds like the whole show was very, very badly prepped. It sounds like he had a couple of Gannon/GOOkert talking points and some facile, culturocentric japes at Daytona jotted down, and figured he could vamp on that for the whole time. He meandered from Daytona to submarinest to GOOkert to Powerline to newspapers to the Schmidt sign to Hillary Clinton back to GOOkert to Hockey and back to Daytona, pretty much by whim, not based on any apparent planning or programming motivation.

Here's the deal; a good talk show treats a topic, or an interview, or anything really, like a story. Something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. People - humans - recognize and move to patterns, and feel comfortable when there is a pattern to be found. A topic should have a beginning (explication, some facts, some actual meat for the audience to sink its teeth into), a middle (discussion, calls, some ebb and flow) and an end (a wrap up before you move on. It's not that different from a column, if you think about it (and by all means DO think about it, Air America Twin Cities - that sucking sound is talking to YOU!)

Speaking apolitically, just as a radio guy, the show sounded aimless, drifting on the whims of Nick Coleman's fancy. Which may hold people enthralled in the newsroom, but this is radio. Listen to some real talk show hosts - Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Medved, even the NARN - there's some structure to the show. Which takes preparation, or at least some discerning thought about how the show is supposed to go.

This is not just noodling; morning drive is a time when the average listener is tuned in for 25 minutes. You have to reset your audience at least that often, but more than that, you have to make someone that tunes in for 25 minutes think that they've spent that time well - or they'll tune over to something that does.

It sounds like the only real prep that went into the show was the names that Coleman and his "producer" called people, and the lame-o "Rocket" sounder. It sounds like the only genuine radio knowledge involved in that station is...gone with the previous management? Seriously - this stuff is Radio 102. Any competent major-market program director would know to tell Nick Coleman this sort of thing - assuming they'd have hired Coleman at all. Are there any radio grownups in the building?

Nick Coleman seems to have learned not one iota about radio since his days on KSTP-AM - a show that was equally a muddled, freestyle ramble. On weekend radio, the effect is merely dull (which is why Coleman is not on KSTP anymore). On morning drive? Gaack. Even if I were a liberal - and at one point in my life I was - I'd be downright upset that liberal money was going into putting this on morning drive, a time where one customarily wants your best, most competent talent.

Stepping out of Radio Guy mode and into Blogger mode - what I heard was 90 minutes of name-calling - OK, I suppose it's fun for Coleman to do - and a recitation of talking points. But only the points; I heard lots of things like "the speculation is that Karl Rove got GOOKert into the White House", but none of the actual "evidence" behind the speculation. How would one make up one's mind based on this program? (not that most of the audience, such as it is, is worried about actual evidence and other such confusing impedimenta). Listen to the NARN sometime, Nick - and I'm told you do. We make a claim - and then we go back to the evidence we all cited on our blogs (or as Coleman pronounces it, "Baaa-LOGs") during the week. Try it sometime.

To wrap it up - the whole effect was...amateurish. This is Air America's big effort in the Twin Cities? Janet Robert is paying him how much?

To paraphrase Coleman's swing at the submarine - it's money that should go into housing.

I can look at this as a blogger and conservative, or as a dispasstionate former radio professional, and either way, the Nick Coleman show is an amateurish, wandering, schizophrenic, sophomoric jumble of half-thoughts and half-executed ideas and half-baked, junior-high insults.

I'm dying to see the next ratings book.

Fisking Nick: Introduction

Today, I'll be liveblogging and audiofisking the Nick Coleman show.

Why?

In a famous column a few months back, Nick Coleman solemnly intoned that he "knows stuff", that he's got a "baloney detector". Fair enough.

When it comes to radio, I "know stuff". I grew up in a radio station; I started hanging around KEYJ in Jamestown, ND when I was 15, in the summer of 1978. The boss, Bob Richardson, put me on the air as much to avoid any liability problems as anything.

Since then, I've been a disk jockey, news/sports/talk show producer, reporter, play by play guy, voice-over artist, talk show host (twice - at KSTP-AM from '86-'87 and for the last year on AM1280 with the NARN), and everything in between. I've paid a due or two - at KEYJ, KQDJ, KDAK (all in North Dakota), KSTP-AM, KDWB AM/FM, WDGY (one of its incarnations), KFAI and now AM1280 The Patriot (WWTC-AM). To borrow an obnoxious phrase - I know stuff.

To put it another way, if Nick Coleman believes the "stuff" he "knows" puts him on a plane above mere bloggers, then it's safe to say that the stuff I know about radio puts me at least as far above him.

But I may as well find out, huh?

I joined the festivities late; that fine Prez' Day sleep beckoned. I tuned in at 7:21am.

The Brain Gap

I was raised to be civil - to try to abjure name-calling, to live by the golden rule. I'm not perfect - sometimes I'm less perfect than others, but I do try.

I'll step outside my upbringing for a moment, though, to point out that I've gotten bombed by comments and attention from the readers of a couple of the big leftyblogs in the past. Now, Oliver Willis, Jesse and Ezra from "Pandagon", and Duncan "Atrios" Black are basically little but giggly fratboys whose writing is permanently frozen at the seventh-grade level; their audience, i we judge by their comment sections, are worse, a legion of the invincibly ignorant Kool-Aid junkies who'd do Democrat Underground proud, whose half-witted ranting sat in my comments like a toxic turd that just wouldn't flush. Read the sites, and the comments, judge for yourself.

Attention from the big leftyblogs is ugly, not very bright, and somewhat overwhelming; their hive mentality makes up for what their education, lack of intellectual curiosity and dearth of writing talent short them.

Now, I go a lot easier on the local leftyblogs, because most of them are not as irredeemably, depressingly, completely invincibly stupid as the likes of Atrios, Kos, Willis or Pandagon. And getting mentioned on their blogs doesn't guarantee you dozens, maybe hundreds, of dull-witted, uninformed comments by dullards inflamed by their unquenchable anger mixed with their impenetrable denseness.

UPDATE: More to come in a bit.

Which is not to say that I find Mr. "Minnesota Politics Guru at the Minnesota Politics blog to be impenetrably dense, necessarily. But I'll let you read his question to John Hinderaker of Powerline (annotated with my own responses, because I think piling on is appropriate) and let you judge if Hinderaker's animated response was appropriate:

Your recent post on the JD Guckert/Jeff Gannon story has to be one of the saddest examples of conservative head-in-sand syndrome I have ever seen. [Hey, why wouldn't an insulting intro like that draw a polite response?] You claim that there are three issues being brought up by liberals: 1) He isn't a "real" journalist, [Which the Strib, among others, did in deed harp on] 2) He was a Bush administration plant, [Again, the Strib among others said it in as many words] and 3) He had something (“God knows what) €“to do with the Valerie Plame story. [Would anyone in Washington who didn't have something to do with the Plame story please raise their hands?] Of course, you blatantly ignore the most important issue, the one that is easily found on hundreds of blogs covering the story: how did a person using a fake name get access to the White House? [Which, of course, Guckert did not.] If I applied for a pass to the White House using the name "Max Power", I would not get in unless I had some friends high up at the top. [Perhaps, but then that's not the issue - Guckert used his real name.] A closely-related issue is exactly what the links are between GOPUSA and Talon News. Now, you may think it perfectly acceptable for the President and press secretary to consistently call on a reporter who is working for what is essentially an arm of the Republican Party. If so, it would be nice if you would admit it. That doesn't mean that others aren't allowed to have a problem with that arrangement, however. [Naturally, Mr Guru ignores the fact that Gannon/Guckert did in fact as a number of tough questions from the right, on things like spending.]

You also take Americablog to task for "finding nude photos of Gannon and posting them online." He didn't "find" photos taken by some paparazzi at a secret party; he found websites where Guckert (let's use his real name, not his pretend name) posted his own photos. If you posted photos of your family on your web page and I posted a link to these photos, would that make me a low-life "outing" you? [In that instance, yes it would; John Hinderaker's family is not really fair game Nor are Guckert's photos, in and of themselves (we'll address the "prostitution" angle in a bit). What if Helen Thomas were to post nude pix on the 'net - should that eject her from the White House Press pool?] Come on. Guckert is not ashamed of these photos, otherwise he would not have put them on the web in the first place. If somebody else finds them and points them out to the world, they are doing nothing wrong. [Mr. Guru, what exactly are you getting at? That the White House should be googling to find lifestyle "dirt" on reporters, to bar them from press conferences? Is that what you're after? Because that's the closest to a logical conclusion I can find in that statement.]

Just one, just once, it would be nice to see a conservative with the ability to find fault with other conservatives. I won't hold my breath, though. [Fact: Conservatives are a lot more honest about our movement than the left is. And why should Rocket Man, or any of us, leap into the right-criticism biz? It'd put so any leftybloggers out of work.]

Of course, Mr. Guru sent the above via email, during a Kos-alanche that was burying Powerline's mail servers with a flood of half-literate, un-informed twaddle from people who've intellectually evolved not a jot since fourth grade. Hinderaker allegedly responded:

You dumb shit, he didn't get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties' concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don't bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don't qualify, you stupid shit.

Not exactly civil.

But you know what? He's right. Mr. Guru's letter was wrong at every point; no fake name. No bearing on actual security. No logic (what should the white house do, actively look for lifestyle issues?) There is no there, there.

Would I have responded that way? Maybe not. But I can't blame Rocket Man, either. It was a dumb email.

Mr. Guru closes:

Whatever happened to Minnesota Nice?

It went the way of "Minnesota logical and Minnesota well-educated and Minnesota capable of critical thinking", I guess.

Sorry, Mr. Guru. Consider it a cue to work on the ol' reading comprehension.

UPDATE: A commenter notes that the response seems out of character for Hinderaker. Knowing John, I agree.

I'll dig into this.

Intellectually Depraved

Depraved: Worse than dishonest.

The Strib's editorial on the Gannon/Guckert affair certainly qualifies.

The unsigned editorial starts:

Heard about the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert muck-up in Washington? If you are an aficionado of the blogs, you've heard plenty. They're having a field day with it.

Actually, most significant blogs have written it off as the tempest in a teapot that it is.

Heard about the Eason Jordan flap? If you are an aficionado of the mainstream media, you've heard next to nothing. The Gannon/Guckert "kerfuffle" (there's a word that's gone from cute to intolerable in record time) has gotten all the coverage from the leftyblogs and the mainstream media they ape.

But underneath all the fun lies a serious problem that hasn't got its due from the mainstream press: This White House employs a lot more kinds of fakery than the budgetary smoke and mirrors described in the editorial above.

And the Strib proceeds to show none of it.

Here's a summary: For more than two years, a reporter named Jeff Gannon turned up at White House briefings and press conferences, where he asked softball questions with a decidedly pro-Bush bent. For example, at President Bush's Jan. 26 press conference, Gannon asked how Bush could work with lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Clinton, "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

Good heavens.

Did Helen Thomas or John Roberts have some sort of union entitlement to ask all the absurd, leading, ideologically-based questions?

Gannon/Guckert was like any other reporter for a marginal news outlet - who gets in on a Day Pass, which almost anyone who works for any sort of news organization can get.

Well, it turns out that "Jeff Gannon" is really Jim Guckert, and he was a reporter for an online outfit called "Talon News," which was associated with the online group GOPUSA. com, owned by Texas Republicans. It also turns out that Guckert, in addition to reporting for a phony Web site, has no real journalism training and is a $200-an-hour gay prostitute.

So far so good. We'll come back to this.

He ran numerous Web sites like militaryescortsm4m. com. The photos of Gannon that were displayed on those Web sites left nothing to the imagination about his physical attributes.

So the question becomes, just how did this character get White House press credentials, despite supposed post-Sept. 11 security requirements? Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist who worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, says that "if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover."

The problem, of course, is that even those who originally posited that Gannon/Guckert had used a fake name have retracted their story. It didn't happen.

It's a good thing the Strib are "legitimate reporters". We'd hate to have the Strib's readers getting bad information, like from all those biased, unregulated bloggers.

In other words, the White House wanted him at those briefings and wanted him to ask his softball questions, most likely to divert attention when legitimate reporters were getting too pushy.

So?

Really. So what? Even if it's true - and there's no evidence whatsoever that this was a considered action on the White House's part - why on earth would Ari Fleischer not be entitled to a rhetorical palate-cleanser after dealing with Helen Thomas' bilious bloviation?

This is part of a pattern by Bush's minions to construct a phony reality in news coverage.

Which, we'll discover, was a "pattern" in the same sense that Paula Abdul is a "linebacker":Consider:

• To promote Bush's Medicare prescription bill, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) paid for phony "newscasts" that were distributed to television stations nationwide.A lousy idea, certainly - but unrelated to a reporter getting a day pass to the White House.

• Columnist Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind Act.

Again, wrong on both the White House's and Williams' part - but again, it has nothing to do with the proce of vetting reporters.

• Columnists Michael McManus and Maggie Gallagher were paid to "advise HHS on the Bush administration's marriage policies."

At least in Gallagher's case, it was a typical consulting deal (you year me knocking, Kos?), like many like it; Gallager erred in not disclosing it.

Again, it has nothing to do with reporter getting a day pass.

• Every Bush "town hall" forum during last fall's campaign was carefully limited to supporters who would ask fawning questions. No demonstrators -- indeed, no one wearing an offensive lapel pin -- were allowed in.

Which is garbage; I attended (indeed, I MC-ed) one of Bush's Town Halls last fall. I saw a Democrat shirt in the audience...

...and even so, what of it? It's a campaign stop, not a debate with the audience. There is no requirement the President cede his expensive campaign time to his opponents!

• The Bush Pentagon launched an Office of Strategic Influence to provide "news" to foreign media. When it became known, it was shut down in embarrassment.

The pattern is clear: This administration will do pretty much anything to shape reality to fit its agenda.

As opposed to having a pack of media sycophants shape it for them, the way the Clintons did.

Another powerful tool in its arsenal is intimidation. This is by far the most vindictive administration since Richard Nixon's. Ask the wrong question or write something the White House doesn't like, and your access is cut off. Unfortunately, too many of the real journalists have gone along meekly.

Well, let's be fair; they got plenty of practice going meekly along with Saddam Hussein. Ask Eason Jordan.

As columnist Michael Kinsley observed, if this White House said two plus two equaled five, there would be no shortage "of media to report both sides of the question."

Right. The media are Bush lackeys. Let me sit toward the front of the bus, sir.

Once it was fairly easy to distinguish real reporters from hacks and charlatans, objective news from partisan rant.

Then, all us peasants started getting uppity. That has become increasingly difficult, thanks in part to a Bush White House that finds the confusion useful, to its everlasting dishonor.And thanks also in part to a fifth estate that is confused about its own role - for example, thinking it's part of the political process rather than just reporting on it.

Posted by Mitch at 05:02 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Air America Pundits: Your Show Prep Is Here

Guys and gals: I know how hard show prep can be. I'm a sympathetic, compassionate guy who's been in your shoes. Hey, a two hour show takes a lot of prep. You need shortcuts.

I'm here to help.

• Jimmy Carter was an ineffectual simp of a president who actively sought Soviet collusion in the 1980 election, and has spent 2.5 decades cozying up to tyrants the world over. Most of subsaharan Africa is still reeling from the neo-marxist governments that he unwittingly enabled to sweep the place during his adminstraiton. He should be ostracized by American culture. By my calculation, he needs to build about four million Habitat For Humanity homes to expiate his guilt for his stupidity during and after his admistration. Got nails?
• The Star/Tribune may not be wholly-owned subsidiary of the DFL, but then you'd never really know.
• I'd like to bring back the moderate Minnesota "republicans" of the sixties through the late eighties, too - so I could pelt their whiny, tax-raising, DFL-appeasing mugs with snowballs. I'd haul them into the capitol restroom and give them swirlies until they retroactively joined the DFL. They played a dismal role in contributing to Minnesota's culture of institutional entitlement, and the sick, Stockholm-like syndrome it foisted on our media which constantly pines for the phony, dysfunctional tranquility of that era. Minnesota was tranquil back then - it was the tranquility of the feed lot.
• The Taxpayers League are the real humanitarians.
• If we made handgun ownership mandatory for all law-abiding citizens, Minnesota would be a better place nearly instantly.
• The newspaper columnist is the dodo bird of the 2020s.
• By 2040, people will look back on institutions like the Strib with the same disbelieving disdain that they currently reserve for the HUAC.

Have a good show, guys!

He Blogged a Guy, Just To Watch Him Die

Folsom James Phillips - longtime commenter and email correspondent on all the NARN blogs - posts on the Monkeys that we finally met after all these years.

It was a pleasure!

But I had to respond to this:

It was nice to finally meet Captain Ed, Mitch "Cough Button" Berg, Professor King Banion, and The Rocket Man. A nicer and classier bunch of guys you'll never meet.

He may or may not be right!

But as to the "cough button" - we have none. At the Patriot, we're all in the same room, and there are no cough buttons, just the "on-off" buttons for the various microphones. And even if I turn mine off to cough, the other guys' mikes are still on (unless we have a guest on the phone, in which case I turn the whole studio off to cough).

It's easier to kick the virus than to explain the Patriot's studio...

Get Off My Lawn

I remember when this blog was just getting going. Nobody knew what "blogs" were, of course; "sounds like something that happens after a night of Pfeiffer and Taco Bell" - but that's the least of it.

Way back when, we didn't have things like blog alliances, because nobody knew of any other bloggers - so the journey from five hits a day up into two and finally three digits was excruciatingly slow. I've said it before - I went eight months before my first 100-visitor day, and it took me nearly a year before I was consistenly in three digits' visitors per day.

Today, things are different.

It's been a lot of fun, watching the local blog scene flourish, both in the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers and...well, there are some non-MOB bloggers, but you know what I'm driving at.

So now a brand new blog - a group blog by a bunch of our favorite local female bloggers - has started. And rather than spending months pimping for instalanches, they've got an instant audience...

...and the likes of the inimitable Chris Muir has already done a graphic for them:

Kids today dunno how good they have it.

A Typical Day In The Life Of A Group Of Right-Wing Bloggers

The NARN did its live remote at the White Bear Lake Pontiac/GMC/Hyundai superstore. It was a wondrous day of bashing Jimmy Carter, laughing at the poor and chipping away at both the media's credibility and hammering on the the Minnesota tradition of "one people, one state, one party". Then the Northern Alliance guys slipped away to the Washington Square pub in White Bear Lake. We each ordered a pint of premium ale (because being the patricians we are, we don't drink Budweiser) and settled in for the festivities; in this case, a meeting of the Minnesota Regional Office of the Right Wing Noise Machine..

First, a man who introduced himself as the Cigar Smoking Man, a representative of our mutual master and commander, Karl Rove, stopped by and handed out our profit-sharing checks from Halliburton, and gave us a hearty "attaboy" for our efforts in winning the election. And we got some great news; we're six months ahead of schedule on our regional master plan, the key agenda item being the bringing down of the Star Tribune. The original plan called for the final Sheriff Sale in March of 2010; we're on track for October of 2009. After that, we'll march the newly unemployed Stribbers down Portland Avenue in a procession reminiscent of a Roman triumph, the NARN and conservative MOB members atop SUVs (the Powerguys on Escalades; Ed on a Suburban; the Fraters, King and I on Suzuki Samurai).

All was not sweetness and light, of course; CSM reminded us that there had been some violations of the chain of command in the months before and since the election. We all follow a very circumscribed chain of command, of course; from Rove through CSM through the big clearinghouses (Instapundit, Powerlineblog and Little Green Footballs), who get first dibs on things like the Times, CBS and so on. Then their filter down through the likes of Captain Ed and Vodkapundit; they get to tackle CNN, Fox and MSNBC, those sorts of things. The next tier - Fraters, the Scholars and I - are supposed to cover the locals. Word had gotten out of some of the lower-ranking blogs getting "uppity". And JB Doubtless was late, twice, in howling about CSM's Howling Points. That's not good. "Service in the RWNM favors the tortoise, not the hare", he said cryptically and with a steely expression. We in the Right Wing Noise Machine all have roles to fill, and we fill them exactly according to the plan. Being a right-wing blogger is like working in a union, almost like the military. We have a place in the grand plan, and our job is to execute. So we do.

But all in all it was good. The secret Right Wing Noise Machine handshake and song punctuated our leaving the bar, after which we took crowbars and beat up the workers at a food shelf.

It was a good day to be a member of the right-wing noise machine. A very good day.

This Is A First...

There are some sayings that have passed into the canon of the English language as prime examples of absurd exaggeration.

"My dog ate my homework" is one of them - an example of an excuse so far-fetched, so lame, so beneath-and-below-the-call of rationality as to be too comical to consider. It's the absurd extreme against which all other excuses seem rational.

It should come as no surprise; my son used it today. His teacher called me; apparently, he blamed his missing math book on our puppy, Clu, chewing it up.

No actual book as proof, natch. Just the dog. Who ate it.

Someday when they publish my biography, it'll be shelved in the "warnings" section at Borders.

A Pack, Not A Herd

Passengers foil a bus hijacking in southwestern Minnesota:

As she forced the driver to continue driving, another passenger dialed 911 on his cell phone and reached an emergency dispatcher at the State Patrol office in Marshall. Authorities at first couldn't find the bus, Winkels said: "Whoever called in was unsure of where he was exactly at."

State troopers and authorities from the Rock County Sheriff's Office located the bus and spread stop sticks in its path along Interstate Hwy. 90 about a mile east of the Minnesota-South Dakota border, puncturing the front tires and bringing the bus to a halt, said Winkels.

Two passengers took the knife from the hijacker and held her until troopers and deputies boarded the bus, according to Winkels.

The driver and two passengers were taken to a Sioux Falls hospital for lacerations. The hijacker was identified by authorities as a woman from Pennsylvania. Charges are pending, according to the Rock County Sheriff's Office. She is being held at the Nobles County jail in Worthington, Minn., according to the Sheriff's Office.

A salute to the two passengers to grabbed the woman. I have no idea who you are, but the first drink's on me if we ever meet.

The Weekend

Huge weekend in Shot In The Dark land.

For starters; tomorrow, the NARN will be at White Bear Lake Superstore.

On top of the show, we have prizes, pizza from (I'm told) Green Mill (!), and that whole NARN thing live and in person. Plus lots of great deals on your next car. I really hope to see you all there!

Then, preparations for next week's events - of which more later.

Miscalculation

The Democrats are floggin a calculator to show the purported disadvantages of Bush's social security privatization plan.

The Detailed Explanation of Calculations and Assumptions" included on the page is detailed, yet doesn't list the actual calculations in any depth.

Patrick Ruffini takes it apart.

Ruffini's critique:

• Absurdly Inflated “Promised” Benefits. The Reid calculator projects your “promised” Social Security benefit. What they don’t tell you is that it’s a promise that there is absolutely no way we can pay for under the current system. The Reid “calculator” doesn’t acknowledge what happens when your benefits get slashed by around 25% when the trust fund is exhausted – or the effect of phasing in these cuts earlier. Political Calculations explains why Social Security’s real rate of return will continue on its inexorable path down to zero, and then turn negative, a fact that acknowledged by the far more sophisticated calculator you see posted below.
  
• Wage Indexation. The Reid calculator simply assumes that the wage indexation of benefits will be done away with by inflation indexing. But that’s just one option on the table. Given the wild leap of faith implicit in this assumption, you would think the Reid calculator would be up-front about the specific dollar effect of turning wage indexing on or off. But they aren’t. I wonder why.
  
• Pessimistic Rates of Return. About the only thing the calculator is transparent about is the projected real rate of return on personal retirement accounts – just 3%. But the last time the government examined this question in detail – before the late ‘90s boom – it found the real return on stocks to be 7%. I assume a conservative 4.5% real rate of return on PRAs. By going with 3%, the Reid calculator artificially depresses your PRA-added benefit by 15%, a good chunk of your putative “losses.”
  
• Fuzzy Math? Ironman, who devised the calculator, e-mails with another point of interest:

  If someone born in 1975 and someone else born in 2005 have lifetime average annual salaries of $30,000, and the "Promised" Social Security annual benefits are adjusted to 2005 dollars to eliminate the effects of inflation, how come the dollar values of their "promised" benefits are different?

• 2 + 2 = -17.5! Assume average real wage gains of 2% (the theoretical, best-case rate of return in Social Security -- which will be unsustainable by 2010 based on the program cash-flow) and real rates of return on PRAs of 4.5%. Under Bush’s plan, 37.7% (4 of 10.6 points) of your retirement payroll taxes are set aside for PRAs. What happens when you substitute a 4.5% investment for a 2% investment on the PRA side, and take a 2% investment down to 0% on the remaining 62.3% (to account for wage indexing). Your gains from PRAs outweigh your losses from inflation indexing by about 3 to 2. Even under Reid’s concocted, cherry-picked scenario, his numbers don’t add up.

Ruffini also includes a calculator he ays provides more realistic results, and includes his calculations.

The Anti-Fisk

It's been a long, crazy week. Exhausting, if I say so myself.

I won't say I have writer's block - but let's just say I got up this morning not entirely thrilled at the prospect of having to crank out four or five posts.

When I'm feeling a touch of the blogging blahs, of course, there's no better remedy than reading Nick Coleman. There's usually something in there to inspire some sense of aggressive post-ennui response.

I read today's column.

What the hell?

Today is a red-letter day for St. Paul.

Now if someone could please just find the red letters.

The piece is pleasant, in an innocuous way; Coleman is reporting on the upcoming auction of the old Schmidt brewery, and especially the old, eight-foot-tall red S C H M I D T sign that flashed above the West End of Saint Paul.

Nothing to fisk here.

If you can't count on Coleman to toss fresh pork on the table, who can you trust?

It's gonna be a long day.

Gannon/Guckert Redux

Kevin at Wizbang has the essential FAQ of the story.

Note to all my liberal friends who - still - obsess over Guckert's alleged past as a gay hooker, and wondering how that could have possibly gotten past a background check; Ari Fleischer says:

"The last thing our nation needs is for anyone in the White House to concern themselves with the private lives of reporters. What right does the White House have to decide who gets to be a reporter based on private lives?"

While Kevin from Wizbang notes that "
The bloggers continuing to pursue the story only "succeed" is they can claim a scalp besides Gannon's, which is why they continue to search for new angles to implicated [sic] ANYONE else...", I suspect the main impetus for this story - the Eason Jordan story - is gone with Jordan himself.

Apple Store, 2007

Seems about right.

Mostly safe for work, as long as you don't have a movie screen for a monitor.

Priceless

Fun with Photoshop:

Isn't It Ironic?

Sing along with me:

A starlet
and former child star,
who hates the go-ver-nment,
and opposes the war,

The artist,
a jagged li'l pill,
has now moved to,
the land of George Will.
And isnt it ironic?
I really think a little toooooooooooooo ironic,
and I really do think...

CHORUS:
It's like immigra-ting,
to a land that you've ripped.
It's like a Greenpeacer moving,
to the 'burbs to save the trip,
it's a caree-eer move
when you've been on slow drip,
And who woulda thunk, she did it?

And stars have a funny way, of rationalizing their actions 'cuz it's all OK
when there's no consequences (Da, da, bee bum)

Alanis Morisette is now a US citizen.

I need an excuse to spoof "Unsent", now...

Abandon Ship

The dedication of the attack/special ops submarine USS Jimmy Carter has prompted many a look back at the Carter Administration, from the hilarious to the furious.

I'm going to add my two cents. Eventually.

Paul "Deacon" Mirengoff sums up the growing realization - or re-realization - on the right that not only was Carter a vacuous failure as president; he actually worked to advance evil:

Some folks think that Rocket Man owes President Carter an apology for saying that "Jimmy Carter isn't just misguided or ill-informed. He's on the other side." In my view, Carter owes the American people an apology for the actions cited above, and others. Carter, it seems to me, subscribes to the view that America is, and generally has been, more a force for evil in the world than a force for good. Accordingly, he believes, I think, that the world would be a better place if the U.S. were weaker militarily and less influential. Carter also holds our enemies in higher regard than he holds our friends, particularly in the Middle East. And, as Rocket Man notes above, he is particularly fond of anti-American dictators and, at times, has actively assisted such dictators to our detriment. I'm not sure whether all of this places Carter "on the other side," but it's difficult to understand in what sense he's on our side.

I have a lot of lefty acquaintances who respond "Why are you slandering Carter? He was a good man! He works for habitat for humanity!

Rocket Man shuts that line of thought straight down, citing :

Soviet diplomatic accounts and material from the archives show that in January 1984 former President Jimmy Carter dropped by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's residence for a private meeting.
Carter expressed his concern about and opposition to Reagan's defense buildup. He boldly told Dobrynin that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."

Using the Russians to influence the presidential election was nothing new for Carter.

Schweizer reveals Russian documents that show that in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched businessman Armand Hammer to the Soviet Embassy.

Hammer was a longtime Soviet-phile, and he explained to the Soviet ambassador that Carter was "clearly alarmed" at the prospect of losing to Reagan.

Hammer pleaded with the Russians for help. He asked if the Kremlin could expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter's standing in the polls.

"Carter won't forget that service if he is elected," Hammer told Dobrynin.

Summation:

And most recently, of course, he invited the execrable Michael Moore to sit with him in the former President's box at the Democratic National Convention. Moore is best known for calling Iraq's terrorists, who take sadistic delight in capturing innocent people and decapitating them on camera, that country's "Minutemen," and gleefully predicting that they would defeat the armed forces of the United States. Carter's public embrace of Moore can only be seen as an endorsement of his views. That puts Carter squarely "on the other side."

So: On the one hand, he conspired with the greatest butchers of history, the Soviets, to try to influence the 1980 election, and he's spent the 24 years of his blessed retirement flitting about the globe giving aid and comfort to everyone that burns an American flag.

On the other, he builds houses.

You the the judge.

And yet I have to express my gratitude to Jimmy Carter. Without him, I might still be a liberal.

I grew up in a Democrat household; Dad was a high school teacher, and I'm pretty convinced that if Mom hadn't had three kids by 1968, she's have been some kind of flower child or another. And I followed suit: for "Boy's State" in 1980, I wrote a platform that would have made Paul Wellstone blanche.

But I read a lot of history, even then. And I'd absorbed some of the lessons of Churchill; one doesn't deal with dictators from a position of weakness. And Carter was all about weakness, diplomatically and (almost until the end of his term) militarily.

And as a leader? Oy.

I remember the "Malaise" speech today as clearly as the night I sat there at age 16, dumbfounded for the first time at the sheer idiocy of a "leader".

...after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

I heard the speech - which ended in a resounding call for more bureaucracy - and felt...

...depressed. To me, the message between the lines was "We got ours. You young 'uns aren't going to get quite as much. Deal with it". And I resolved to make a change.

No, I didn't become a conservative that night. I was a month too young to vote in the '80 election, and if I could have I'd have voted for John Anderson, because he was basically a liberal. But he wasn't Carter. The Hostage Crisis was a further nail in the coffin of my liberalism.

The next years were a slow evolution for me, ending with my taking a deep breath and voting for Reagan in '84.

Without Carter and his depthless idiocy - a judgement confirmed over and over since he's been back in "private" life - who knows what might have happened? Not I. But I do know that realizing Carter's unfitness for office was the first time I really questioned the assumptions I grew up with, leaving me open to changing my mind.

For that I thank you, Jimmy Carter. And the next time you fly overseas to coddle some genocidal humonculus, may your plane encounter unintended crosswinds and land at the wrong airport, so the grownups can do their jobs.

Unkept Promise

Last week I promised that I'd do a liveblog of the Nick Coleman show.

Still haven't done it. Mornings are a very crazy time in the Berg house.

However, I have a plan. There will be a liveblog/audiofisking within the next week.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Excessive Joy

I'm sure this would never be allowed in the US:

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

This next quote is priceless:

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Barge into my office. Wreck my business. Take money out of my family's pocket with your pseudo-scientific, agenda-driven drivel.

Why would they not be "amenable to listening?"

(Via Tim Blair)

The story is a gift that keeps on giving.

They had a plan, oh yes indeed:

Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force...When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.

Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others.

They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry” trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.

In a PC-addled city like New Yawk, San Francisco or Minneapolis, you can see this working.

Fortunately, this is London:

But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”

Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion... Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.

“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.”

Before I get the inevitable self-righteous hissy in the comment section; violence is bad. Don't do it.

But yow, this was fun to read.

And when I get to work, I'll look at that file cabinet in a whole new light.

Mulder???

It sounds like Art Bell material: A series of random number generators around the world - little boxes that use fairly trival microcircuits to generate endless streams of random numbers - are analyzed constantly to see if the random results form any sort of curve. Imagine flipping coins constantly, and looking for periods of time in which the number of heads or tails isn't within a whisker of 50%.

Supposedly, says the "Global Consciousness Project", there's something to this.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

(Via Peg Kaplan)

The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year's Eve.

But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001.

As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs.

Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers.

They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights. The implications, not least for the West's security services who constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous.

'I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us,' says Dr Nelson.

What could be happening? Was it a freak occurrence, perhaps?

Apparently not. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more.

Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people.

When seeing these things, I usually go to the the James Randi website, which is usually a good place to find debunkings of the paranormal (when it's not wallowing in misguided atheist propaganda).

Nothing. Yet.

Anyway - skeptical as I am, there's more to it. Worth a read.

Posted by Mitch at 07:46 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Pandering

La Shawn Barber, it should surprise nobody, wasn't impressed with Mad How's outreach to blacks:

I wished I'd bet money on the color of the new Democratic National Committee chair, but I wouldn't have found any takers. We all knew heârd be a white male. So much for sacred "diversity." But I don't think anyone guessed they'd pick Howard "Screaming" Dean. Be careful what you wish for. Check this out:

During a meeting Friday with the Democratic black caucus, Dean praised black Democrats for their work for the party, then questioned Republicans' ability to rally support from minorities.

"You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room?," Dean asked to laughter. "Only if they had the hotel staff in here."

I’ll bet those Black Caucus Negroes just sat there and laughed, totally unaware that their new white chairman had just insulted them (on so many levels). But they’d probably lynch me for publicly referring to them as “Negroes.”

Indeed.

Starting Over

I used to consider Jeralyn Merritt's "Talkleft" to be one of those very, very rare creatures - the intelligent leftyblog.

After hearing her appearing with Hugh Hewitt, Ron Reagan and Monica Crowley on Connected: Coast To Coast (MSNBC) (Transcript via Radio Blogger), it looks like I have to start over:

Let me just say the report said the documents could not be authenticated. And there is a very good reason for that. Because the reporters were working off of copies, and no one has the original. And if you're going to do any kind of forensic document examination, you have to compare a known document to an unknown, and we don't have the known. So all they could say is these documents have not be authenticated. They could not say they were forgeries.

Time for new material, folks.

Like, now.

And the search resumes.

They're Back!

The good news: The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers has a new, all-female group-blog, the M.A.W.B. Squad.

The last we checked, it included the bloggers from Cathy in the Wright, Citizen Jo, and DC from Brainstorming. They go, however, by the names Macaroni Penguin, St. Kate (that one's easy to figure out) and Sandy.

So read them, already!

Dilemma

Arthur Chrenkoff has a problem: Michael Moore not only noticed him, but he was...polite.

Moore (or as Tim Blair refers to him, "Tubby Riefenstahl") refers to the Australian, most famous for his updates on un-covered stories in Iraq, as "...the ever-optimistic Chrenkoff".

Chrenkoff asks:

Does the blogging etiquette suggest that everytime I now refer to Michael Moore on my blog I have to reciprocate in kind and in a similar tone by describing him as "the ever-pessimistic Moore"?

It's probably classier than "Your Circumference".

Just the FAQ, Ma'am

Powerline just printed a "Frequently Asked Questions" list. This reminds me - it's time for me to do the same.

I try to answer my email, but I don't always. So I've put together a digest of my most common questions, and added answers.

Hope this helps.

Q: Have you ever eaten a bug?
A: Unintentionally.

Q: What was your first car?
A: A 1973 Malibu that I bought for $125 and a case of beer. Yes, in North Dakota there's a space for in kind payments on the title transfer forum. Well, there was. And that's my story and I'm sticking by it.

Q: Michael Savage - genius or hateful crackpot?
A: Neither. Crazy like a fox, adept at pushing buttons, laughing all the way to the bank.

Q: What's the best shoe deodorant?
A: Desenex. No contest.

Q: Are you aware of any proof of the existence of Hell?
A: "Captain Planet"

Q: Hillary Duff or Lindsay Lohan?
A: Summit.

Q: Why don't you criticize conservatives?
A: The City Pages, the Strib, Air America, MPR, the U o M, the Saint Paul City Council and Macalester College told me to stay off their turf.

Q: Why does Nick Coleman say "I'm no monkey" 30 times an hour?
A: I don't know, but I'm told it's an improvement, and that I shoudn't ask for details.

Q: Are bloggers going too far in their assault on the media?
A: I'll let you know after we've brought Chris Conangla down.

NARN at the White Bear Lake Superstore!

Join the Northern Alliance at White Bear Lake Superstore this Saturday, 2/19.

We'll have pizza, contests, the whole NARN gang, and of course a lot of great deals on cars.

In the radio biz, I'm kind of wierd; I may be the only person in the racket who loves doing remotes. Granted, these days I don't have to set them up, which helps a lot. But I love getting out of the bunker and meeting the audience. They're usually a great bunch of people, and a blast to meet.

So anyway - hope you can make it to the show this weekend. Did I mention free pizza?

Madness

My mother lived in Turkey for several years. She's told many fascinating stories of a place about which I knew little since about 1920 and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey more or less checked out of history.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Turkey got into the news by reneging on its agreement to help us topple Hussein. The elected a chief executive very sympathetic to the Islamicists.

Time passed.

According to Robert Pollack in the WSJ, a creeping mix of leftism and Islam is spawning a special breed of lunacy

Never in an ostensibly friendly country have I had the impression of embassy staff so besieged. Mr. Erdogan's office recently forbade Turkish officials from attending a reception at the ambassador's residence in honor of the "Ecumenical" Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who resides in Istanbul. Why? Because "ecumenical" means universal, which somehow makes it all part of a plot to carve up Turkey.

Perhaps the most bizarre anti-American story au courant in the Turkish capital is the "eighth planet" theory, which holds not only that the U.S. knows of an impending asteroid strike, but that we know it's going to hit North America. Hence our desire to colonize the Middle East.

It all sounds loony, I know. But such stories are told in all seriousness at the most powerful dinner tables in Ankara. The common thread is that almost everything the U.S. is doing in the world--even tsunami relief--has malevolent motivations, usually with the implication that we're acting as muscle for the Jews.

In the face of such slanders Turkish politicians have been utterly silent. In fact, Turkish parliamentarians themselves have accused the U.S. of "genocide" in Iraq, while Mr. Erdogan (who we once hoped would set for the Muslim world an example of democracy) was among the few world leaders to question the legitimacy of the Iraqi elections. When confronted, Turkish pols claim they can't risk going against "public opinion."

Read the whole thing.

Cosmic Injustice

The Guardian has RSS feeds.

The Times of London does not.

The terrorists have, if not "won", at least scored a major victory.

Glorious Mundanity

The front-runner for Prime Minister in Iraq seems to be steering a careful course between Islam and secularism:

The shy family doctor who became the leading candidate for prime minister Tuesday says ending the nation's rampant violence is his top priority and that U.S. troops would remain as long as they are needed to achieve that goal.

In an exclusive Associated Press interview, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a 58-year-old moderate Shiite Muslim politician who fled a brutal crackdown by Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in 1980, also talked about drafting a constitution that will draw not only on Islam for inspiration.

The great blight of the Arab world for the last century is that the most dangerous job in the world is "Moderate Arab". Moderates in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and much of the rest of the world have been the first target of extremists of both sides - even before Jews and Americans.

This may be the biggest battle to be won in Iraq - the fight to make the world safe for Moslems and Arabs who seek moderation between nationalism, faith, desire for modernism and democracy.

You know - the same thing we Americans take for granted.

Deep Kimchi, Part II

North Korea has nukes.

So what?

Belmont Club notes, correctly, I think, that this may cause Kim Jong-Il more problems than it solves:

In exchange, North Korea may believe that that the declaration it possesses nukes will confer great power status upon it. That would be true if nuclear weaponry represented the acme of technical development it once did. But its effect will now be to force Japan, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea and perhaps Singapore to the crossroads: either obtain ironclad guarantees of inclusion under the American nuclear umbrella or develop nukes themselves. For all these countries, building nuclear weapons will be a trivial task lasting six months and ten minutes. Six months to get approval from their legislatures and ten minutes to build them. Alas for North Korea, Japanese nukes are almost certain to be not only more powerful, but beautiful and imaginative beyond description, if such a word may apply to these infernal engines.

I have questions, though.

Will the Japanese break with their post-war tradition and build nukes? Do Japanese at large see the DPRK as a threat?

Taiwan - I imagine a Taiwanese bomb would tilt a few heads in Beijing.

Still, Wretchard makes a good point, one I've touched on before; Pyongyang has less than a dozen nukes, threatening Seoul. Seoul's allies have thousands of nukes, which could make South Korea an island rather than the end of a peninsula.

Serious Business

As Doug from BoGold notes, the Taxpayers League is getting serious with State Patrol union president Tim Jensen.

I won't reproduce the text of the letter - go visit Doug for that - but this part here is intrigueing:

The League anticipates and appreciates your prompt response to the same and trusts that you and the MSPTA will refrain from any and all untrue, inaccurate and misleading assertions or accusations regarding the League and its activities and positions in the future. Please forward all correspondence regarding the League and this matter to our attention at the address set forth on the first page of this correspondence. Thank you.

I'm no lawyer, but this sort of letter seems, to my imperfect understanding of the law, to be a fairly immediate prelude to legal action.

Sort of a "last chance".

Lawyers - let me know if I'm wrong about this.

DISCLOSURE: While David Strom is a friend and AM1280 colleague, I'm not in the loop with the TPLoM on this one.

See Doug from BoGold's list of articles on the subject.

The Challenge

Luke Francl at NewPat swerves into Lil' Ollie Willis territory, saying saying - the midst of criticizing local conservative bloggers "Kool Aid Report":

It's not like we get paid, unlike some right-wing shills I could name.

Really?

The NewPats have been doing some investigation?

You "could" name them, Luke Francl?

Then do it. You're no Nick Coleman, Luke - you certainly don't need to hide behind an editorial smokescreen, because you'd never defame anyone you disagree with. Right?

So favor the world with the scoop, Luke Francl. What conservative bloggers are on the take and not being up-front about it?

Because I just know the NewPats wouldn't be blowing sunshine up their audience's skirts. Right?

UPDATE: Well, I did say I knew, didn't I? Francl was referring to Williams, Lauck and Van Beek. And he raises an interesting question in the comments - one I'll be going into in a later post.

Transformation

Christo's "The Gates" - in which the artist has hung 7,500 orange, er, sheets from trees and poles in Central Park - is billed as a transformation - the "reclamation" of the space.

John "J-Po" Podhoretz comments:

But there is a wonderfully salutary aspect to "The Gates," and that is how the mobs of people thronging the park seem blissfully unaware that they are walking through reclaimed territory...Christo and Jeanne-Claude wanted to transform Central Park. But that transformation has already taken place. Cops did it. Good policy did it. A good mayor did it.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Death of Microsoft?

Michael S. Malone wonders if Microsoft is doomed:

Great, healthy companies not only dominate the market, but share of mind. Look at Apple these days. But when was the last time you thought about Microsoft, except in frustration or anger? The company just announced a powerful new search engine, designed to take on Google — but did anybody notice? Meanwhile, open systems world — created largely in response to Microsoft's heavy-handed hegemony — is slowly carving away market share from Gates & Co.: Linux and Firefox hold the world's imagination these days, not Windows and Explorer. The only thing Microsoft seems busy at these days is patching and plugging holes.

The thrill is gone?

Does that doom a company these days?

The Creeping Slander

I read Michael Standaert's review of Hewitt's book Blog today.

The review itself is the kind of thing you get when you combine a facile skimming of a book with a pre-ordained review driven by an agenda. Nothing to see here, move along.

Except for a tiny, tossed-off afterthought at the end.

I mean, the review itself is comical; to call Hugh Hewitt "Limbaugh-esque" betrays complete ignorance of Hewitt and talk radio, and tempts one to suspect Standaert is working from a list of talking points. And he numbers strawmen among his acquaintances:

But Lott's and Rather's own miscues and ethical lapses were what ultimately brought them down — not bloggers. It was up to USA Today, part of that liberal mainstream media, to uncover the scandal that journalist Armstrong Williams was being paid by the Department of Education to talk up the federal "No Child Left Behind" program — not bloggers.

News flash: the mainstream media still covers stories. The Williams story shows the extent to which the major leftyblogs are followers and propaganda shills rather than investigators and reporters; it has little to do with Hewitt's book.

No, here's the part I found interesting:

Hewitt ponders a "dozen blogs I would launch" and imagines a central blog that would cover the publishing world, link to Amazon and generate buzz. It would be one that causes book sales to soar when the author of this hypothetical blog praises a book, or plummet when given a fervent thumbs down.

What Hewitt fails to see is that there already is a growing infrastructure of litblogs available that are independent, not beholden to a single publisher and not taking payola to promote or trash competitors' books.

Er...whaaa?

Single publisher? Payola?

Standaert clearly is inferring - within the device of comparing his image of conservative blogs at large with the "infrastructure of litblogs", - that we conservative bloggers all answer to one master, and the master shows his appreciation in cash.

It's the same line Nick Coleman uses with such trained-monkey-like regularity; it's an integral part of the NYTimes' response to Easongate; watch for it to spread up and down the left wing media in coming months. Conservative bloggers are on the take, everybody knows it - so much so, we don't need no steenkin' evidence.

Of course, there's won't be a shred of evidence, and for heaven's sake, pay no attention to the fact that such a hierarchy is a fundamental part of the lefty blogosphere, with Kos working for Howard Dean and other unnamed clients, Atrios and Ollie Willis on the Media Matters payroll, and Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall working for key lefty organs.

Watch for the slander to become the subtext to every story involving the blogosphere in the major media, and their minions.

The Clinton Playbook?

As Michelle Malkin notes in a gangbuster column today, the media is reacting to last week's blogswarm...

...by changing the subject, and by insulting the messenger.

I think there's more to it.

She sums up the responses:

• As I noted earlier, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens rattled off exactly half the story. Stephens sniffed:

  it does not speak well of CNN that it apparently allowed itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew...[the media have] other obligations, too, chief among them to show the good judgment and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional journalism from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs...No doubt this point of view will get us described as part of the "mainstream media." But we'll take that as a compliment since we've long believed that these columns do in fact represent the American mainstream. We hope readers buy our newspaper because we make grown-up decisions about what is newsworthy, and what isn't.

  In other words, Stephens slimes the messenger - but he didn't give the audience the wherewithal to fairly judge the story by bothering to list all of Jordan's attacks on the military. So, Bret Stephens - what was that distinction between "amateurs" and "professional journalism?"
• The NYTimes, as Malkin notes, frames the story as a left vs. right issue, not telling the reader that Rony Abovitz, Rebbeca McKinnon, Senator Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, among others, are hardly right-wing tools.

The priests tire of our heresy. The swarm of mosquitos has drawn more blood than they figured it could, and they think it's time to start swatting.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Remember the Clinton playbook? When attacked, the Clinton Administration exercised the "Three Ds" - Deny, Delay, Destroy.

The mainstream media pieces on the subject - Stephens, Howard Kurtz, etc - have denied in effect that Eason Jordan did anything seriously wrong (by denying the public access to the evidence - his long history of such inflammatory outrages). The World Economic Forum denies us the chance to see for ourselves by sitting on the video.

CNN delays the investigation by shoving Jordan out of the way, sweeping the issue under the carpet. Davos' denial of the video delays the resolution of the story, and provides plausible deniability - eyewitnesses aside - to the notion that Jordan really, really meant anything untoward.

Then there's the third D, "Destroy". The media are laying the groundwork - the namecalling has begun:

• Stephens: bloggers are "amateurs"
• NYTimes: we're "Trophy hunters"
• A commenter listing himself under the name William Boykin, the Special Forces general who controversially invoked God in the counterterrorism discussion and who links to Antiwar.com in his comment on Jeff Jarvis' blog: " "Eason Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a streetgang. "
• Malkin's NYPost piece points us to Bertrand Pecquierie, director of the World Editors Forum, who calls us "sons of Senator McCarthy" - you know you've struck a nerve when the left brings out the "Mc" word.
• Also via Malkin, Steve Lovelady of the CJR: ""The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail".

Malkin, in her NYPost article, refers to several of the above as deranged heavybreathers, who ironically believe the likes of Ed Morrissey, Bill Roggio and Hugh Hewitt are a "lynch mob". I think Malkin sells the media short. I think it's the opening salvo of something much bigger.

Expect the media to start digging into bloggers conservative bloggers' finances, associations and backgrounds, looking for the next Armstrong Williams or Jeff Guckert, trying to pick at the credibility the Blogswarm has accrued.

It's in the playbook.

Undercover of the Blight

Read this editorial in the Strib - "Bush and the Cities/Setback for Urban Renaissance" - and tell me it's not Nick Coleman.

It has all the usual Coleman touchstones.

Clue One: the Noble Wage Serf

Always a "she", always anonymous, always plucky...:

She pours your latte in the morning and sends you off with a smile. But you don't know the rest of her day.

...whose problems over the next few paragraphs pile up like John Cleese's serial frustrations in an episode of Fawlty Towers...:

Driving from the coffee shop to her second job in the suburbs. Struggling with the rattletrap car she bought after they discontinued the midday bus. Getting home too late to deal with the children who, without help from their absent father, are drifting toward trouble. Worrying about whether to pay the rent, fix the TV or buy shoes for the kids.

It's a cartoon. Let's call her Poor Penelope Poverty.

Oh, she's no cartoon to me. I've known a lot of these people. For a time, I was one of them, in ways Nick Coleman (or whichever even-less-excusable writer) can't possibly understand.

And I sympathize with these characters (for that is indeed what they are, in these sorts of columns - cynical caricatures) in ways Nick Coleman or the rest of the Strib editorial board, snug in their Crocus Hill victorians or North Oaks mcmansions or Northeast insta-gentritopias can't possibly.

Which is why it pisses me off that the Strib and so many of its writers treat such people as caricatures to be mined, cynically, for such trite fare.

Clue Two: Big, Bad, Republicans

The Strib continues:

Now, just as she's trying her hardest, President Bush and his junior partner, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, propose to make her life tougher.

It's personal! Big Bad Bush and Terrible Tim want poor Penelope Poverty to roil in pain!

Of course...:

Trips to the doctor for herself and her kids are in jeopardy.

Fact: "MinnCare" entry thresholds, even after the proposed budget cuts, are higher than in any of our surrounding states.

So are food stamps.

Ditto

Clue Three: The Big Cheeses Get The Payoff

Life is a panjandrum of gathering horrors in a Coleman column:

Day care costs may rise. Rent may go up as supplies of affordable housing decline. Fewer cops -- and more drug dealers -- would patrol the streets.

"May".

Her dreams about training for a higher-paying job? Getting a better apartment? Saving for the kids' college? Forget about it. Rich people out in the suburbs need to keep their tax cuts. End of story.

That's how the president's budget looks from the street corners in Minneapolis, St. Paul and many other big cities. That's how it looks to us.

Remember how the article started - with a declaration of an "urban renaissance?"

We'll come back to this:

But the impact runs far beyond a simple assault on the working poor. It stretches to wealthier urban neighborhoods, where, if the president's budget survives intact, it's likely there will be more streets and parks in disrepair, less neighborhood revival and more upward pressure on property taxes -- as federal and state budgets push more costs onto hard-pressed local governments.

So what on earth caused this "urban renaissance", anyway?

Was it massive government subsidy and endless programs? No, we had plenty of them during the nadir of the city - indeed, the programs, which tended to warehouse the poor and the crime-prone in the inner cities, triggering the "white flight" and the throwing up the barricades around the 'burbs in the first place. Superhighways gutted neighborhoods; the poor and crime-prone were warehoused in the gutted shells of the old 'hoods; crime and blight skyrocketed; illegitimacy was subsidized, creating generations of bored, on-the-edge-of-desperation people painstakingly-yet-inadvertently trained to abjure effort and seek the easy path out.

Which drove down property values, which drove out the sort of people who actually invest in communities rather than are warehoused there by a bureaucracy that finds it more convenient to keep them there.

Clue Four: Half The Story

If there's a story that misses slews of key facts - well, you fill in the blanks.

Because you have to:

"There's no way we could do Excelsior-Grand under these conditions," said Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman, referring to St. Louis Park's heralded remake of an aging suburban strip.

Now, the whole story. The "aging strip", a series of dowdy strip malls and meat-market bars, is located in the middle of some of the most desirable real estate in the Metro area, five miles west of downtown Minneapolis. The market would have taken care of it before long...

...but the developers didn't want to wait. They used eminent domain to gut the whole strip of less-than-desirable but successful businesses, to create a renaissance in Saint Louis Park right friggin' NOW!.

Now, what this has in common with the following:

Indeed, the remake of other corridors -- Phalen, Lake Street, West Broadway -- will be less likely if Bush succeeds in collapsing a bundle of community block grants that, since Richard Nixon's presidency, have formed the foundation for a public/private urban renaissance.

Ah, there it is. The Urban Renaissance.

Question: Would this "renaissance" happen without massive government subsidy? Does subsidy create renaissance?

If it did, downtown Saint Paul would be a magnet - the place has sucked up endless public and private subsidy.

Where has such subsidy worked? When there were other, market-driven factors; North and Northeast Minneapolis' cheap, fascinating housing stock and proximity to downtown; West Lake's proximity to Uptown, the Lakes and the thriving boho scene in the Wedge; the Wedge's supply of cheap, funky housing -and on and on.

More half-stories?

The White House says that current development grants "cannot sufficiently demonstrate their measurable impact." That's true in some places. But Minneapolis used federal block grants to launch a city-county drug task force that makes 70 percent of the state's seizures. It used similar funds to turn the Phillips neighborhood remarkably around, reducing crime, creating jobs and showing a substantial return on investment. Now, as it refocuses on jobs for a North Side that's suffering an uptick in gang/drug violence, the White House wants to yank the program.

Yank it? Re-title it? Make it more accountable?

Notice the subtle misdirection: After spending the first part of the article invoking the usual emotional strawmen - Penelope Poverty, the noble, plucky, single-mother-with-two-jobs-and-the-bastard-boyfriend-who-done-her-wrong-who-can't-make-ends-meet, we get to the part that really works: money for cops to put the scum who prey on the rest of the city's residents in jail.

Clue Five: The Party Plug

Would you believe...:

Here's how worried the cities are: Both mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis are open to higher taxes to pay for police -- in an election year.

DFLers promising to raise taxes? What'll they think of next?

Clue Seven: Nonsense

Tell me what this bit means:

Unlike Mayor Randy Kelly of St. Paul, most urbanites didn't vote for Bush in the last election. He won only 21 percent in Minneapolis and 26 in St. Paul. But how will the nation and state benefit by disproportionately punishing these cities and the people who are trying the hardest to hold them together?

Did that make any sense?

Kelly endorsed Bush, so the Feds are punishing Plucky Penelope Poverty?

So we have seven clues on the one hand, and actual figures on the other.

Team effort, maybe?

Lessons to the Press

Jeff Jarvis has the lessons the press should take away from Jordangate:

First, journalist-priests are no longer the gatekeepers in either direction -- to authority and truth for the public, or from newsmakers to the people. Now the public can demand answers from the powerful and the powerful can avoid the press and talk to the public in new ways.

Second, news just speeded up and old media isn't ready for this. We used to control the speed of news because we were the gatekeepers. No more. That is a big disconnect between big and citizens' media: We want answers and we don't want the press or the powerful to take their sweet time to give them to us.

Third, off-the-record is dead. Now that everyone has access to a press -- the internet -- anyone you talk to could be a Wolf Blitzer in sheep's clothing.
Welcome to the age of transparency.

Finally, big media won't get away with portraying the citizens at the gates as serfs and mobs for long or they will storm the place. But the better way to look at it is this: Big media should welcome the voice of the people for now we can work together; now we can find out what the people want to know and help them know it; now we have more eyes and ears where news happens. Now every witness can be a reporter and every citizen a pundit and that is good for news and the democracy.

So - do they get it?

The Wall Street Journal makes me doubt it:

The writers of these columns believe that, in addition to having opinions, we are ultimately in the same information business as the rest of the press corps. Which is why we try to break news whenever we can if a story merits the attention.

What the Jordan flap shows is that the threshold for what "merits the attention" is now determined by a free-flowing information market rather than a coterie of editors. When it came to Jordan, clearly the blogosphere thought that Jordan's remarks were curious - and his pattern of such remarks, and his subordinates' pattern of worse, is noteworthy, the machinations of the editors be damned.

So I'd say lesson one is still begging for attention.

Back to the WSJ, which sniffs...:

So it was only normal for our Bret Stephens to report a January 27 panel discussion he attended at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during which CNN's Eason Jordan appeared to say--before he tried to unsay it--that U.S. troops had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. Mr. Stephens's story appeared the next day in our Political Diary, an e-mail newsletter for subscribers that is part of this Web site. It is the first account by any news organization of what has come to be known as Easongate.

First account "by any news organization" indeed, but it trailed the big blogs by several days. Lesson two.

By now, everyone on the Good Ship Earth knows that this particular story ended Friday with Mr. Jordan's abrupt resignation from CNN. This has certain pundits chirping delightedly. It has been a particular satisfaction to the right wing of the so-called "blogosphere," the community of writers on the Web that has pushed the Eason story relentlessly and sees it as the natural sequel to the Dan Rather fiasco of last year.

But Easongate is not Rathergate. Mr. Rather and his CBS team perpetrated a fraud during a prime-time news broadcast; stood by it as it became obvious that the key document upon which their story was based was a forgery, and accused the whistleblowers of the very partisanship they themselves were guilty of. Mr. Rather still hasn't really apologized.

As for Mr. Jordan, he initially claimed that U.S. forces in Iraq had targeted and killed 12 journalists. Perhaps he intended to offer no further specifics in order to leave an impression of American malfeasance in the minds of his audience, but there is no way of knowing for sure. What we do know is that when fellow panelist Representative Barney Frank pressed Mr. Jordan to be specific, the CNN executive said he did not believe it was deliberate U.S. government policy to target journalists. Pressed further, Mr. Jordan could only offer that "there are people who believe there are people in the military who have it out" for journalists, and cite two examples of non-lethal abuse of journalists by ordinary GIs.

None of this does Mr. Jordan credit. Yet the worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony.Lesson four goes begging. The people who assume the WSJ editorial board tells the whole and nothing-but truth will never know Jordan's long history of such "dumb" remarks.

Again, the dog ate lesson four.

Good News

Captain's Quarters' Ed's wife Marcia is in line for a pancreatic transplant she needs - and apparently an excellent match has been found.

Ed asks for everyone's prayers and best wishes for both his wife and for the unfortunate but generous donor and the family - families, really - involved.

On Dean

I have little to say about the coronation of Dean that I haven't said already.

Why not check out Chris Dykstra at NewPat for the take of someone who actually wishes Dean well?

I am looking forward to a Democratic era in which we are not constantly adjusting our worldview to fit the current incarnation of a republican message.

Far better, indeed, to adjust it to the prevailing winds in the Democrat party.

Dean is uncompromisingly moderate.

Only in the sense that Atomizer is an uncompromising teetotaller.

Pro-business, fiscally disciplined, tough on crime,

...when and only when he was governor of Vermont, where he had to deal with both the relatively conservative natives as well as the lunatics who'd fled Boston.

sensible about gun-control

Bzzzt. He inherited Vermont's eminently sensible stance on gun control (i.e. don't), and had the common sense not to muck with it, earning high NRA rankings by default. He has also opposed legislation that would protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits arising from the illegal, criminal, uncontrollable use of their products, which is the sort of de facto gun control an ur-liberal has to practice in a state that doesn't een require permits to carry a concealed firearm.

and strong on civil rights. Yet he has not just won the keys to set the democratic message. He's taken on the responsibility of building the party infrastructure and unifying the base.

Read: Expelling the moderates.

He'll have his work cut out for him.

Indeed. And nobody in the US is happier than I that he's taking it on.

I don't know what to hope more for: that he fails, or that he succeeds.

From Small Threats, Big Things One Day Come

First, Jo threatened to board up the attic.

Then, Cathy spawned a great idea - a group blog by a bunch of women who met via the MOB (to the best of my knowledge).

Just do it!

They Still Don't Get It

Kevin Drum in the WashMonthly shows why the left really hasn't woken up yet, describing Easongate:

And Eason Jordan? At a private, off-the-record meeting at Davos he made an inflammatory accusation about the military killing journalists and then backed down (literally) seconds later at the same meeting. Since then, he has consistently said that he spoke hastily and emotionally and didn't intend to imply any kind of deliberate military policy.

Drum, naturally, ignores Jordan's pattern of making the same remarks in other places.

How many times is a slip of the lip really a slip, Kevin Drum?

Gannon

I've had some comments (online and verbal) and emails asking why I've harped on Eason Jordan, but not on the Gannon "story".

Several reasons:

1. Gannon is nobody. He writes for "Talon News", a small news service with virtually no reputation at all - my impressions of the operation was that it was somewhere between Debka and Capitol Hill Blue in terms of general degree of respect. It's conservative - but I've found no reason to especially care about either the service or its reporter, Gannon.
2. So he was admitted to White House press conferences - held up by the leftyblogs as a sign of collusion between the White House and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Bollocks, of course - as Hugh pointed out last night, while permanent places in the White House press corps are hard to get, the "day passes" that Gannon/Guckert used are fairly simple to get for anyone who can pass a security screen.
3. As to the collusion - why is it any more shocking that someone like Gannon would toss Bush a softball than that Helen Thomas would harp at him like a kid who'd stepped in her begonias (or, for that matter, toss Clinton softballs)?
4. Gannon/Guckert was linked to gay porn sites. Several possible responses:

   STRAIGHT MALE MITCH: Hm. Not my idea of fun.

   LIBERTARIAN MITCH: As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, so what?

   HYPOCRISY-HAWK MITCH: Notice how Kos harped endlessly on Guckert/Gannon's orientation? Love the way Democrats treat any of "their" groups, Blacks or Gays or Asians or Women - as heretics if they are remotely Republican.

   BLOGGER MITCH: Wow. Someone on the internet making money through shady means. What'll he do next? Consult for unnamed candidates? Go to work for George Soros? Oy.

   CYNICAL MITCH: I think their biggest problem with Guckert/Gannon's sites is that they weren't being displayed in enough libraries.

   LEFTY-BLOG CRITIC MITCH: The only reason this is a story is because it, like the Mattis "story", gives the leftyblogs and media something with which to counterprogram the Eason Jordan scandal. Pathetic.

This is a non-story, flogged to try to divert attention from a story that's non-going-away.

On The Brink

Feeling much better, today, now that ironically I have no national radio to do.

Will blog more later today.

Deadblogging the Debate

It's been a crazy week.

Tuesday when the Fraters and I came into the studio to fill in for Hugh Hewitt, AM1280's operations manager Patrick Campion asked "So, you do know what the schedule is for Thursday, right?" That's rarely a good start.

But it was OK - "they" wanted us to fill in for Hewitt for the last two hours of yesterday's broadcast, while Hugh prepped for the debate. Cool.

Then, literally seconds after we signed off the Tuesday broadcast, Generalissimo Duane sheepishly came on the talkback. "Eric Hogue [sp] bailed on me - can you do it?"

My soul groaned. I was so sick, hacking my lungs out periodically (although I'm sure I covered it very well). Not another...

...naturally, we did it.

Wednesday went fairly well - I only had to step out of the studio for a gag-level coughing fit once.

And last night's proceedings - with Elder, King, Captain, Lileks, and a mobile Saint Paul - were as much fun as I've ever had on the radio, coughing aside. In fact, given Hugh's state, I was happy to say I wasn't the sickest person on American radio by a long, long shot.

More on the debate later; check out Bogus Gold for a very capable liveblogging.

As a personal note, I take great satisfaction in knowing that the NARN got more positive national coverage in the past week than the Nick Coleman show ever will. Note the adjectives.

Demonology

I'm seeing a pattern here.

(Some things are too obvious even for me to miss).

The Star/Tribune is maintaining via its editorial board and its star columnist Nick Coleman that the right wing of the blogosphere is on the payroll of powerful right wing boogeymen financiers.

The president of the Minnesota State Patrol Employees' union has compared the Taxpayers' League with the Posse Comitatus, a dangerous racist tax-protest group. I'm told that to many liberals, "Neo Nazi" is almost as bad as "Neocon".

C.Ford Runge is comparing David Strom to the devil - literally.

Nationally, once Hillary Clinton claimed a "vast, rightwing conspiracy" and Bill famously blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on talk radio, it was all history; the lefty has been turning up rocks and seeing (so they say) a massive conspiracy, absent any quaint relics like "proof".

It's called "demonization", and I think it's part of a concerted campaign by the the DFL (in Minnesota) to build a huge army of strawmen in time for the next election.

Why?

To cover the fact that they still have no ideas.

Bummer

The DFL ranks, frankly banking on Franken, feel blank and rank as Franken's wanking tanks.

Thanks!

Baby Steps

I've been listening to a bit more of the Nick Coleman show, mornings on our local FrankenNet affiliate; call it "training" for my upcoming live-blogging/live-fisking of his program. I'm up to a minute at a shot before I cringe from professional horror and turn to something less embarassing. But I came back and tried again, maybe five or six times. I'm nothing if not persistant.

Quote of the morning:

CALLER (a shrill, fifty-something sounding woman): "We critical thinkers just knooooow the Republicans are wrong about everything!

This may be the hardest project I've ever had to bite off.

Prayers eagerly accepted.

Upside: "Listen to Nick" would make a fun, but short, drinking game. Say, take a drink every time Nick says "Wingnut" or "Monkey" or "Right Wing Wanker".

Downside: It's bad form to be puking drunk by 7:30AM.

Not A Joke?

Franken is apparentlygoing to announce his candidacy for the Senate:

Last year, Franken said he wanted to run for the Senate in 2008. But last night he told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that he is now considering his candidacy for next year.

In the wake of Jesse Ventura and now, apparently, Franken, sources tell Shot In The Dark that Herve Villechaise, Gary Coleman, Flavor Flav and Anna-Nicole Smith are also considering moving to Minnesota to run for elective office.

My hunch: Franken's "bid" is a publicity stunt for FrankenNet, which will spiral straight into the toilet without its star, with lawsuits no doubt to follow. Bad for business (unless, of course, Franken knows something about the network's future we don't know yet). It'd be a stunt, moreover, that would get him plenty of exposure for running for the so-called "Wellstone" seat in '08 against Norm Coleman.

Problems with my hunch: If Franken's serious, '06 is a much better chance for Franken than '08 against a popular, successful incumbent like Nahm "Not The Crazy One" Coleman.

Much better hunch: The NARN has four years of grade-A material in front of it.

Prost!

Announthement

Um...the Dayton verthuth, er, Kennedy blog thayth that, um, um, Al Franken ith going to have...um...have an announthement about...um....

...um...

...um...

...whether Franken ith going to run for Mark Daytonth Thenate...um...theat in Two Thouthand...er...Two Thouthand Thix.

No word on whether he'll need...um...Catherine Lanpher to make him thound...um...[chew chew chew]...profeththional.

Or not.

Um...

Strom Responds to Jensen

David Strom has a classy yet pointed response to State Patrol Troopers Association president Corporal Timothy Jensen's article in the union newsletter:

Let me be absolutely clear: I believe Trooper Jensen is an honorable man and would never act on his implication that the Taxpayers League is equivalent to a group of murderous thugs, or truly be suggesting that others do so. But for the President of the State Trooper's association to even flirt with the implication calls for an apology.

The State Troopers are heroes. They put their lives on the line daily to aid and defend the public. Not only do they defend the public and the law, but they respond when citizens are most in need of help, at considerable personal risk. It saddens me that Jensen's actions have reflected at all poorly on those troopers.

He owes them an apology even before he apologizes to me.

Jensen is reportedly on vacation; we'll have to wait a bit for his response.

Another Wacky Day

If you heard the NARN - King, Captain, Trunk and I in this case - filling in for Hewitt last night, I've been sick as a dog. Again.

I'm going to spend the day trying to get more or less healthy for this evening's Patriot Forum. This has been the craziest week in a long time; two nights in for Hewitt, tonight's festivities, tomorrow (maybe) at Buck Hill, and Saturday's show, which promises to be a zoo.

Posting will likely be light...

...no, wait. Every time I say that, I do a Mitchalanche of almost Sheila-like posting madness.

So no promises. I'll just get through the day, and try to show up tonight hacking a little less than I have been.

KARE11

KARE11's Jana Shortal did a piece on Blogs on last night's 10PM news.

The piece was interesting inasmuch as it showed me a side of blogging that I have, in three years, completely ignored; blogging about things other than politics and current events. They spent some time with Ron Wade, a Saint Paul Saints employee who writes - this astounds me - a diary blog. Kind of a fun one. I didn't know you could do that with a blog. I might have to try that.

The report also spent a pretty fair amount of time on a woman, Tammy Tucker, who writes a blog called A More Perfect Union, in which she seems to take Wild Wendy seriously and asks for more taxes, and which seems to have a grand total of seven posts in nearly four months - roughly 15 minutes' production for the combined Minnesota Organization of Bloggers.

Speaking of which...

Attention, news media; I have a real story for you. Why not do something on the MOB? The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, a group which is completely unique in the entire United States, mostly but not exclusively conservative (let's face it, most of the really good blogs in the Twin Cities do lean right, but tthere are excellent blogs in the center and on the left), a group that formed for purely social reasons but is starting to generate an interesting critical mass of writing, cross-pollination and ideas. OK, maybe it's more of an MPR thing (paging Christopher Lydon!).

It was fun to see some of the footage they shot of the radio show, featuring Powerline! andabunchofotherlocalbloggers. The camera really does add twenty pounds. But to be fair, it added ten pounds to my voice, too.

Bit by bit, the media will get it right. Thanks, Jana Shortal!

Click here to read and/or view the piece.

Hollywood Goes To War?

USA Today had a piece the other day about Hollywood's response to the Iraq war.

No, really. They have one. I was amazed, too.

The piece starts:

In a reflection of America's conflict in Iraq, a proliferation of TV and film projects is focusing on the U.S. military, the war or both.

Big-screen ventures in the works range from dramas (No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, set to star Harrison Ford; and Jarhead, about the Gulf War and starring Jamie Foxx and Jake Gyllenhaal, opening Nov. 11) to comedies (The Tiger and the Snow, starring Roberto Benigni) and documentaries (Gunner Palace, opening March 4).

I'm almost interested in "No True Glory", which is an adaptation of a not-yet-released book by Bing West, author of (among others) The March Up, one of the best books yet about the Iraq War.

More:

Television is even more emboldened:

• Three cable channels are solely devoted to all things military.

• Award-winning producer Steven Bochco is creating Over There, a drama series about an Army unit serving in Iraq, set to air this summer on FX.

• Even NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives has a plotline about a Marine who is deployed in the war on terror.

Bochco. Ugh. Stand by for the world's first military soap opera.

I don't know about you, but I'm picturing "NYPD Blue" with tanks; Dennis Frantz will play a crusty, complex general with a dark side.

But not any and every angle of war is being depicted. One aspect is glaringly absent from most projects: negativity. The U.S. soldier is the hero; his cause is just. Storylines featuring the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or war protests are no-nos.

"That gets you into arenas of policy," says Bochco, who has written four episodes of Over There, which is filming in Santa Clarita, Calif. "We'll be telling the story about young people's experience in war. I've always tried to stay off a soap box. I don't think proselytizing is good storytelling."...FX's John Landgraf, who came up with the idea of setting a show in Iraq, says it's surprising there haven't been more projects about recent military conflicts.

"The best purpose of television and film is to tell stories that are truthful and of the moment and dig into the human experience," Landgraf says. The Iraq war "is such a grand natural human drama."

But it's also an explosive issue that can alienate viewers and advertisers. Criticize the war, and you could be accused of criticizing the warriors, Maltin says. Even Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's scathing documentary of the Iraq conflict and the war on terror, was careful not to attack the troops, he says.

"In Vietnam, the anti-war movement gradually became an anti-military, anti-soldier attitude," a concept that was reflected in pop culture, says Bing West, 62, who is writing the Battle for Fallujah screenplay with his son, Owen, a Marine infantry officer.

"The films coming out now are pro-soldier. I think it genuinely says that Americans across the political spectrum have a strong degree of admiration for the military" despite how they might feel about the war in Iraq, West says.

Alternate explanation: Hollywood looked at the results of the last few elections and realized that the MASH market is dead and gone.

I'll be interested in seeing No True Glory. The rest? Not so much.

Beneath Contempt

Are you, like many Minnesotans, tired of having your taxes jacked up endlessly by a legislature that cares more about feeding the state bureaucracy than about your family's bottom line?

Did you send a buck or two to the Taxpayer's League, or vote for Governor Pawlenty and your state legislator because they took the TPLoM's "No New Taxes" pledge?

According to the head of the Minnesota State Patrol's Trooper's Association, you're no better than a racist, cop-murdering thug.

Read on.

----------

The late seventies and early eighties were a lousy time in rural North Dakota. The farm market was beginning to enter another wave of technological transformation that was making hordes of family farms obsolete; productivity was driving prices down below the point where lots of farmers could make ends meet.

Faced not only with a changing way of life, but an eroding income and evaporating lifestyle, people whose families had been on the land for generations, going back to their respective old countries were faced not only with career changes that nothing in their backgrounds could prepare them for, but bankruptcy and endless harassment by creditors, lawyers, and the IRS.

Faced with this choice, most farmers moved into other lines of work, or relocated, formed co-ops. They adapted.

Some, desperate for answers, saw the government as the primary problem - a common thread on the prairie, endless and expensive farm subsidy programs notwithstanding. They griped about the feds over coffee and donuts in countless, dying small town cafes.

Some of those people - very few - found their answers in anti-government groups - Christian Identity, the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, and the Wisconsin-based Posse Comitatus, among a welter of others. The Posse preached that all government above the county level was illegitimate, that the federal income tax was unconstitutional, and that races should not mingle. They were frequently calleld "Neo-Nazi", and as much as those groups intermingled, some members no doubt were. I wouldn't have let them babysit my kids.

----------

The nineties were a lousy time to be a constructionist and advocate of limited, restrained government in Minnesota. You had your choice of political parties; the pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-intervention party that favored raising taxes to pay for endless spending programs in an ever-expanding budget - or the DFL. Conservatives were held at arm's length even within the GOP.

That began to change later in the decade. There were lots of factors in this change; younger conservative turks moving into leadership within the party; the rise of talk radio, giving voice to the formerly silent conservative undercurrents in the state and party; and the Taxpayers League, which may not have been the first conservative lobbying group in Minnesota, but it was the first to get any traction.

David Strom is the relentlessly upbeat leader of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota. A lapsed academic but a bon vivant in good standing, he leads a group with a fairly simple agenda; lower taxes, more government accountability, more taxpayer voice in government.

Read the website. See if you can find any references to violent resistance, racial separation, sabotage of the tax system, dismantling of government...anything.

Take a moment and try. Please.

----------

Corporal Timothy Jensen is the president of the Minnesota State Patrol Troopers' Association, a public employees union.

Jensen, writing in his capacity as president of the MSPTA in the Winter '04/05 edition of the union's house organ, starts out with a recollection:

That Sunday in February 1983 was my first introduction to the world the violent tax protesters. While attempting to serve a warrant for a probation violation on a tax protester named Gordon Kahl, Federal Marshal Ken Muir and Deputy Marshal Bob Cheshire were executed on a North Dakota highway.

Cops are sensitive about other cops' deaths in the line of duty. I'll buy that, and accept that as a reason for Jensen's hyperbole.

But according to James Corcoran, a former Fargo Forum reporter whose book Bitter Harvest was the definitive history of the event, the marshalls, along with a squad of Stutsman County deputies and Medina (ND) police, were waiting for Kahl at a roadblock. Knowing the Posse members to be armed, the police carried shotguns and assault rifles. The Posse fired first, the Marshalls went down firing. It was murder, and it was a ghastly crime that killed two good men. But it was no execution; they had the ability to fight back.

But that's not the story. Jensen continues:

During my time in Clay County [the Moorhead area] I remember several confrontations with Posse members. One confrontation still haunts me as a near-death experience. I stopped a Posse member one evening in a rurual location, nowing the slug had an outstanging warrant. The man was well known to law enforcement as a problem billy With no assistance available for miles, I confronted the man alone. He decided he would not be taken into custody, and the fight was on. We fought on the blacktop, on the shoulder, and in the ditch. He broke away and ran into the woods where I followed him and tackled him. We fought until we could not fight anymore As he pinned me in the dirt, I drew my gun with every intention of killing him before he killed me...for 22 years, I have had no use for radical tax protesters. They are irratitional and a danger to a democratic society.

I know you are wondering, what in the world is he rambling about now?

Indeed, but not for long.

As radical as the Posse Comitatus is about protesting taxes, we have a radical anti-tax organization within our own state that advocates some of the same Posse principles. Where the Posse uses violence and irrational right-wing beliefs to advance its cause, our Minnesota organization uses money, threats and political blackmail to enforce its anti-tax, anti-government agenda.

WHAT organization?

The organization is proud of its "no new taxes" pledge it has blackmailed many of our elected officials into signing, and posts its conquests prominently on its
website. Although the organization isn't obviously violent, its final result is just as dangerous. We have radicals dictating how our quality of life will be affected.

Got that? He's talking about the Taxpayer's League of Minnesota.

According to the head of a state employees union, lobbying to lower taxes and make government more accountable and transparent is morally equivalent to being a racist, cop-murdering radical separatist.

No, I'm not making a specious rhetorical connection; he's speaking literally (emphasis mine):

Whether you dress a tax protester in camouflage with an automatic rifle, or in a business suit with a laptop computer, the protester is still nothing more than a radical. Our Minnesota quality of life is too precious to be lost over a blackmail pledge. Let's get on with the people's business. Our quality of life is slipping away.

So there's no difference at all between someone who protests taxes through the courts, the legislature and at the polls - the way our country is supposed to work, via the democratic system - and someone who secedes from the system and threatens to kill anyone who tries to drag them back?

We allow this man to carry a gun? To write tickets? To carry out snap judgements about the activities of the rest of us?

That phrase - "Let's get on with the peoples' business" - echoes the justification for some of the most ghastly crimes of the last century. Minnesota's "quality of life" - defined earlier in the piece as "valuable public employees, expected services..." - are "slipping away", more or less like the Posse thug on that road in Clay County so long ago.

Lefties - you think you have no stake in this? How is this different than saying "An anti-war protester is no different than a terrorist?" If any conservative - much less David Strom - had said any such thing, they'd be pilloried, lynched from the nearest rhetorical lamppost.

Corporal Jensen owes us, the people who pay his salary, an explanation. Is "lobbying for a more accountable government" morally the same as "killing cops"? Really? Is wanting my state government to give me much better explanations for where my tax money goes than in the past the same as trying not to pay at all? Is exercising my right as a law-abiding citizen and voting for the candidate who promises to hold government accountable the same as drawing a bead on a cop at a roadblock and squeezing the trigger?

Is that where you want this discussion to go?

By the way - while the publication is apparently not printed by the government, the MSPTA represents a labor force that is entirely paid by the taxpayer, and whose budget is entirely paid by dues deducted from public employee salaries.

Corporal Jensen owes us - the good, patriotic, law-and-order supporting citizens he so casually defames in his article - an apology. Please - take a moment and contact:

• Your legislator
• The Department of Public Safety
• Governor Pawlenty

This is outrageous.

[Note to completists - read the whole article right here.]

Good for Minnesota. Bad for NARN.

Mark Dayton is apparently not running for Senate again:

Dayton, a department store heir who tapped $12 million from his own fortune to finance his 2000 campaign, also faced a fundraising hurdle. He has said he would be unable to finance the 2006 campaign on his own, and would seek private donations, but had only about $177,000 in his campaign account at year’s end. He has said his campaign likely would need $15 million or more.

Dayton’s popularity began to sink after he made a controversial decision last fall to temporarily close his Senate office for several weeks during Congress’ pre-election recess out of fear of a terrorist attack. Heaped with ridicule by Republicans, Dayton defended his decision, which was based on a review of a classified CIA report about a doomsday scenario on Capitol Hill.

His decision to pull out nearly two years before the election would open the door for other Democrats with Senate aspirations to enter a race in which several Republicans have expressed interest in running.

Republican Reps. Mark Kennedy and Gil Gutknecht, as well as former senator Rod Grams -- the man Dayton ousted in 2000 -- have all expressed interest in Dayton’s Senate seat.

One senior Democrat in Washington said Dayton’s decision ``doesn’t surprise me.’’

``It’s an uphill climb for him,’’ this individual said. ``He has become somewhat of a target for the Republicans.’’

Minnesota's gain is the Northern Alliance's loss; we just lost two guaranteed years of material.

Not as bad as the guys from Dayton v. Kennedy, of course.

The Left and Jordan

Josh Marshall: [crickets]

Matt Yglesias: starving crickets]

Atrios: [neglected crickets]

Oliver Willis: [bored crickets]

The giggly fratboys at Pandagon: [crickets playing hackey sack]

Kos: [crickets travelling in immense unthinking hordes]

I'm just saying.

No, I'm not. There's more.

Leftybloggers; why the silence? Do you think that if you just poo-pooh the whole thing, like you did with Rathergate and the Swiftvets, it'll all just go away?

And if you're a Democrat - blogger or not - what do you think you have to gain from a media that plays the kinds of games CBS and, apparently, Jordan (as the senior news executive at CNN) play?

If you answered "It helps us win", you've just confirmed a caricature I'd hoped didn't exist in nature.

Barring that, though - what's the answer?

Thanks. No, Really, Thanks

This story is crazy enough in its own right:

Jeffrey Swisher was caught using a videocamera to peer up the skirts of teenagers at a mall, and law enforcement officials were eager to put him behind bars for a long time.
His punishment: 10 days in jail. A loophole in Virginia law meant prosecutors were only able to convict Swisher of disorderly conduct.

Prosecutors across the country are vexed by similar loopholes preventing them from imposing harsh — or often any — punishments on similar defendants. Victims of video voyeurism are often horrified to find out that what has happened to them isn't even illegal in most states.

Not sure what the law is in Minnesota [perverts, move along - Ed.], and I'm sure there's a first amendment issue involved anyway (call it "art", what the heck, you'll probably get an NEA grant).

But that's not the part about this article that amazed me. That came next:

The Internet has only exacerbated the problem. Type the words "upskirt" and "downblouse" into the search engine Google, and millions of Web sites popup.

Is someone getting a kickback from the pr0n sites, or what?

A Worthwhile Question

Sysyphus asks:

If the military is really targeting reporters, how is it that Helen Thomas and Molly Ivins are still around?

When I was younger and more impulsive, I learned that nothing good could come of asking "what journalists would you like to see have a date with a 155mm Time On Target barrage?"

Nothing good at all.

The Sound of Clue Being Had

As Radio Blogger's transcript of Hugh Hewitt's appearance on Kudlow and Cramer shows, Larry Kudlow understands the Eason Jordan scandal.

Ships That Pass In the Night In Detroit

"Terry" left a comment in yesterday's post about people wanting to emigrate from the US because they just can't handle any more George W. Bush:

I ran across this story yesterday on the web & because they never mentioned the immigrant stream headed the other direction (Canada to US) I did a little research.

Canadian immigration officials & lawyers mentioned in the article Mitch quotes from that they may see 18,000 US to Canada immigrants this year rather than usual 6,000. No idea how many will make that move permanent rather than temporary, eg renounce their US citizenship. The US population is now approaching 300 million. 25,000 Canadians emigrate to the US each year, mostly doctors and other health professionals. Apparently they don't do well under Canada's single-payer national health plan. The population of Canada is a bit over 45 million.

A great point. And I've read the same figure.

If the figures were in relative proportion to the population, the Canadian emigration numbers would translate to 270,000 Americans leaving every year.

I've read - but can't confirm right now - that nearly half of the Canadian efflux is from the healthcare industry. Anecdotally, probably the wealthiest man in my hometown was a Canadian urologist who left Winnipeg in the seventies to move to North Dakota, settling in Jamestown and starting a practice that paid for a huge house, a string of businesses around town that served as either extra change or tax writeoffs, and enough sports cars (he raced as a hobby) for a good-sized Shrine parade.

You just couldn't do that in Winnipeg.

Is that a good thing? Why not?

In any event, I'm happy to trade doctors for web designers any day.

When You Think You Have It Bad

Wog from Wog's Blog is on his way to the workhouse:

I am waiting for my ride to the workhouse to turn myself in.

Rumor has it that Ramsey County plays games with electronic monitoring prisoners by keeping them in jail for a couple of nights while they "process" your paperwork. Hope that's not true, but when I wave my bag of prescriptions at them, maybe they'll want to kick me today.

Hopefully he'll be able to tell the story soon.

Digital Underground

I was reading Doug from Bogus Gold, one of my favorite "new" bloggers, is contributing to the excellent Dayton v. Kennedyt blog. Actually, BoGold and DvK are among a long list of local blogs that have started - or become apparent to me, anyway- in the past year.

I use SharpReader at home to do most of my blog reading these days; it's faster and easier than flipping through the blogroll on my site itself. And on my SharpReader, I have a long, long section labelled "MOB", short for "Minnesota Organization of Bloggers". They're a wildly eclectic bunch - from the eclectic Doug to the acerbic Nihilist to the astute Jay Reding to the astringent Chumley to the ass-focused Ryan (yes, dude, you probably are typecast...) to the only non-Mitch person that's ever written on "Shot...", Steve Gigl of Giggleblog...

...you get the point. I remember pretty distinctly how wierd it felt just a little over two years ago, when the Fraters and I realized, almost simultaneously, that each of us weren't the only bloggers in the Twin Cities, and Saint Paul told me about this other blog, Powerline, that was pretty good too. Today, they're busting out all over the place.

When Hugh Hewitt christened the Northern Alliance, around the time of the '02 elections, he named it because it seemed that we conservative bloggers were a beleaguered minority in the middle of stereotypically liberal Minnesota.

Here in the uber-stereotypically-liberal Twin Cities, we really are, of course. Which brings me to my question; why have the Twin Cities turned into such a center for right-of-center blogs?

Leave a comment; I'm curious.

Random Notes to Lefty Commentators

Just a few notes:

• Lefty Bloggers: I realize that Atrios and Ollie Willis and the giggly fratboys at Pandagon use the term all the time, and that probably gives it the imprimatur of authority that assuages your hive mentality soothes your inner Borg appeals to the relentless, insecurity-driven groupthink that drew you to leftism in the first place draws you to such things, but referring to conservatives as "wingnuts" every. single. time. you. talk about them kinda dulls the edge on that there edgy humor. Just saying.
• Speaking of relentless repetition, I caught about thirty seconds of Nick Coleman's "radio show" this morning, mainly to get an idea of when it was o so I could live-blog it, as promised, later this week. No kidding - thirty, maybe forty seconds. I heard the word "Monkey" at least four times, and "wingnut" twice. By my count, that averages out to 640 "Monkeys" and 320 "Wingnuts" per program. Ask yourself; what would Oscar Wilde do?
• General note to lefty bloggers: Merely stating "you're wrong" doesn't make it so.

That is all.

We're Everywhere

Join me tonight asShot In The Dark Radio the Northern Alliance fills in for Hugh Hewitt on his nationally-syndicated show from 5-8PM Central Time.

Also - we'll be on KARE11 - the local NBC affiliate - on Wednesday's 10PM news. I've known a number of KARE11 producers over the years; if anyone can find a way to cut all reference to me from footage of our radio show, they're the ones who can do it!

All NARN, all the time!

Why Do Kos And Atrios Hate The Truth?

"Daily Kos" kontributor DavidNYC writes:

The cynicism and duplicity of the Bush Administration rarely fazes me. But I continue to be amazed by the GOP's ability to claim they "support the troops" while consistenly trying to screw them.

Duncan "Atrios" Black - an employee of Media Matters, a Soros-affiliated PR agency that shills for Democrats - said:

Bush Hates Veterans

Budget drastically increases their cost of healthcare.

Sounds drastic, right?

Pfft. It's Atrios and Kos.

It's almost as if Michelle Malkin is responding to them:

But here's one thing I bet they won't mention: the Bush proposal is targeted at middle- and upper-income veterans whose disabilities aren't service-related. And here's another: Bush is asking for a total of $71 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the next fiscal year, up nearly 50 percent (from $48 billion) when he took office.

The truth is an inconvenient thing, innit?

Leaving the Sandbox

Some of the overly-emotional Democrats that felt their worlds had been yanked from under their feet with the election are, ostensibly, following through with their plans to emigrate.

Some of them are practically caricatures come to life:

Melanie Redman, 30, assistant director of the Epilepsy Foundation in Seattle, said she had put her Volvo [I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Ed.] up for sale and hopes to be living in Toronto by the summer..."I'm doing it," she said. "I don't want to participate in what this administration is doing here and around the world. Under Bush, the U.S. seems to be leading the pack as the world spirals down."

Redman intends to apply for a conjugal visa, which can be easier to get than the skilled worker visa that most Americans require. To do so, she must prove she and her boyfriend have had a relationship for at least a year, so she has collected supporting paperwork, like love letters, to present to the Canadian government.

Oh, that's rich.

REDMAN: "Yes, I'd like to apply for a visa to live in Toronto with my Canadian boyfriend".

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "Er, yes. With your boyfriend, you say? Hm. Well, you qualify for our special visa for 30-and-under girlfriends. (NOISES OFF: Other officials muting their snickering). We'll need documentation...

REDMAN: "Er, like what?"

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "Er, like love letters...."

REDMAN: "Um, OK..."

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "...and photographs. Lots of photographs proving you have a conjugal relationship. Yes, pictures"

REDMAN: "Er...all right, I can produce them...are you sure that's what you need? I've never heard of a visa application that required..."

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: (Waves picture of George W. Bush)

REDMAN: "Ok, Ok, I have some polaroids..."

ANOTHER CANADIAN OFFICIAL, CAMERA: "And Videos!"

FIRST CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "Oh, yeah. Videos. Videos are very important to get the special girlfriend visa...Yes, videos! Heh heh"

REDMAN: "Er...well...I'm not sure..."

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "Hey, I do impressions! Wanna hear my favorite? Ahem - [PUTS ON COWBOY HAT] Edumification!"

REDMAN: "VHS or DVD?"

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "Preferably letterboxed DVD. And they have to show the full depth of the relationship...heh, heh"

REDMAN: "And that's all I need?"

CANADIAN OFFICIAL: "Then there's the in-person test..."

Ms. Redman continues:

"I'm originally from a poor, lead-mining town in Missouri, and I know a lot of the people there don't understand why I'm doing this," she said. "Even my family is pretty disappointed. And the fact is, it makes me pretty sad, too. But I just can't bear to pay taxes in the United States right now."

On the bright side, Ms. Redman is a fairly dim-sounding woman working for a fairly pedestrian-sounding (albeit noble) non-profit; we're probably not missing out on a lot of taxes.

As to some of the others...well, their own words tell the story best.

Christopher Key knows exactly what he would be giving up if he left Bellingham, Washington.

"It's the sort of place Norman Rockwell would paint, where everyone watches out for everyone else and we have block parties every year," said Key, a 56-year-old Vietnam War veteran and former magazine editor...But leave it he intends to do, and as soon as he can. His house is on the market, and he is busily seeking work across the border in Canada. For him, the re-election of George W. Bush was the last straw.

"I love the United States," he said as he stood on the Vancouver waterfront, staring toward the Coastal Range, which was lost in a gray shroud. "I fought for it in Vietnam. It's a wrenching decision to think about leaving.

No, Mr. Key. You don't "love the United States". If you did - if you, and any of the lemmings that are following your lead, had any comprehension of what the United States was all about - you'd participate in the political process, and try to challenge via the open democratic system the things you disagree with, trying to win people over to what you consider the right way (or keep your mind open to the notion that you might learn something from those you so despise). Sort of like those of us who chafed at the thought of a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did.

But you're not, Mr. Key. You're taking your toys and leaving the sandbox and going where the warm, safe blankie of mother government will tuck you in at night.

But America is turning into a country very different from the one I grew up believing in."

That's right. When I was a kid, the opposition actually believed in what this country was supposed to be about.

Good riddance. Stay gone.

It's Everywhere

Val Prieto has the same crud that I've had...

...for the past four weeks.

Now King and Red Are is Going To Be Insufferable

All roads lead to Boston.

CORRECTION: King wants no part of it! Title has been corrected accordingly.

However, Red is in full Patriot-ic fettle. But if you work for Fox Sports, steer clear - your nosehair will get singed.

Nigel Columnist: Cashier's firing is bitter pill for her customers

I got this from my favorite paper, by general pundit Nigel Columnist:

Angela Stakanycz is enjoying things she never had time to enjoy before, such as having lunch with friends. But she's not just breaking bread with pals. Her lunch mates are her customers.

"I've never had time for lunch in my entire life before, except after funerals," she says. "Now I'm having the time of my life. Aren't people way cool?"

Not everyone would include human beings and "way cool" in the same sentence - some newspaper columnists think that people are pretty repellent, all in all - but Angie Stakanycz loves life, which is why dozens of her customers have been lining up to get on her smoke break schedule and give her hugs. She needs them.

Stakanycz, 24, is a popular cashier with a loyal group of 2,500 customers, many of whom testify enthusiastically about her conversational skills and urge to talk at length with every customer that comes to her cash register. But at the moment, Stakanycz no longer is their cashier.

After 2 years as cashier at the GonzoMart on 94th Street in Bloomington, Stakanycz was abruptly dismissed from the staff on Jan. 10, and told to leave. Customers who came by to buy gas and peanut butter cups from her the next day were told simply that Stakanycz had left GonzoMart, and that they could pay their money to one of the convenience store 's other cashiers and have a nice day.

Her bewildered customers -- most of whom have been seeing her for months -- suspect that Stakanycz was dismissed because she treated them as people, not as customers.

"She commits to her customers whatever time they need," says Hector Bartleby, one of Stakanycz's erstwhile customers. "She doesn't have ring the register to know who you are or what your cigarette preference is: She knows everything about you. This is exactly the kind of cashier everyone is looking for and can never find."

Most of Stakanycz's 2,500 customers had no idea what happened to her, and -- as often happens in an employment dispute -- the reasons for her dismissal are unclear. A spokesperson for GonzoMart declined to comment on Stakanycz's firing, saying employment law prevents the company from discussing the reasons for her dismissal. One former manager noted anonymously "Angie, she talk so much with cusomters, it takes 40 minutes for customer to get through the line. We not pay her to talk. We like Angie, but she just talk, talk talk talk. I have business to run!"

Stakanycz's brother, meanwhile, also had little to say.

"We will not speculate as to GonzoMart's motivation," says Jeff Stakanycz. "But we will unequivocally state that we are not aware of any wrongdoing on the part of Angie, or of any customer-care issues."

GonzoMart, which employs about 500 cashiers in five midwestern states, has the right to terminate employees with 60 seconds’ notice. But Stakanycz was only given 21 seconds to clock out and sign her last time card before being told to leave the convenience store . She says she wants her customers to know that she didn't do anything wrong:

"I don't have any problems with alcohol or customer relations or drugs or cash-handling judgement," she says. "I get extremely high customer satisfaction reviews, and the only things I'm addicted to are coffee and smokes and "bad boys" and Metallica. I'm not a controversial person. I'm not secretive -- everybody who buys Powerball tickets from me knows everything about me. I will do anything to help my customers."

Her devoted customers say she was particularly good at dealing with customers whose personal problems were complicated and who needed extra time. But in a world where convenience stores are under increasing pressure to process customers as quickly as you can get seen at an Allina clinic, there isn't much room for a cashier who takes as much time to chat up a customer as a customer wants.

A study by the New England Journal of Retail showed that the average convenience store cash-wrap transaction is just 20 seconds long. But Angieela Stakanycz doesn't believe in Jiffy Lube customer service.

Stakanycz says she saw up to 400 customers a day, but often worked 12-hour days, staying even after the convenience store was supposed to have closed and the receipts were supposed to have been deposited and the security system turned on to finish seeing them all.

"I work as long as necessary to see the people who need to be rung up," she says of her practice. "That's the glory of it all: We're here for each other, and that's always been my style. My allegiance is to the people I've had the pleasure of seeing. What hurts me is that now these people don't have a cashier."

Her large number of customers ranged from adolescents to people in their 90s and included mechanics, lawyers, other cashiers, postal carriers, newspaper columnists, schizophrenics, and performance artists. If there was one common denominator, it may have been that her customers were fiercely loyal.

“I had to wait an hour to see her the first time," says Bartleby, whose wife, father and children also bought gas, cigarettes and cat food from Stakanycz. "But after your first visit, you wouldn't mind waiting four hours. I think that's what [GonzoMart] didn't want. She spends a lot of time with customers, but they want cashiers to get the customers in and get them out."

"I can't even put into words how upset I am about this," Grone says. "To take away our cashier with no notice and no explanation is beyond belief."

Many of Stakanycz's customers express a similar attachment to their former cashier, and a similar sense of anger at her abrupt dismissal.

"This has just been devastating for a lot of people, and it came as a complete shock," says Joanna Plubadouf, an Eden Prairie psychotherapist who was one of Stakanycz's customers and who has dozens of Stakanycz's other customers among her own list of clients.

"A lot of her customers feel that it's a betrayal by the system, that they've been cut off from a very important and very trusted cashier," Plubadouf says. "Angie Stakanycz is incredibly skillful. She's very willing to deliver customer care in her own way -- spending more time, staying late. She's formidable and she's unique. Unfortunately, often times in large systems, being formidable and unique can be threatening to people. But I'm utterly puzzled."

Bert DuToit, a laser eye surgeon whose wife, Buffy, was among Stakanycz's customers, is also among the mystified.

"Angie's really a wonderful cashier," he says. "She's almost a dying breed -- a cashier who spends a lot of time with her customers and knows them not just by the hot dogs and coffee they buy, but as human beings. Maybe she's not the kind of person who should be working for a big corporation more interested in efficiency and speed. She'll schmooze with her customers as well as take care of them. And they really do love her."

And so Angiela Stakanycz, ex-cashier., waits for what's next, enjoying lunches with her customers, hanging out with her boyfriend, Raoul, and wondering where she will work again.

That's all she wants to do.

"The issue isn't me," she says. "The issue is all these wonderful people who have been left stranded, without their cashier. People are in shock over this. Is there a place for comprehensive conversation with compassion in this world? I've had the glory of seeing the greatest people. That's what hurts. If GonzoMart called up and said, 'Oops, we made a terrible mistake,' I would be back at work tomorrow morning.

"I just want to see my customers."

Oh, all right. It's a spoof.

I know. Meow.

The above, of course, is lifted from Sunday's Nick Coleman column in the Strib, via the miracle of global search and replace. [LEGAL NOTE] It is intended as satire. [/LEGAL NOTE]

Going to the doctor sucks. The personal touch of doctors like Dr. Cain, the subject of the column is a rare thing indeed - and has been since I was a kid. And having been fired from more jobs than many people have in their lives, I appreciate the shock of it all, and feel Dr. Cain's pain. Really.

But Allina is a business, for better or worse. Their job is to try to manage the cost of health care. If you've looked at your premium statements, you know this is a difficult business, one that involves carefully minding the little things, and occasionally the big things (fairly ruthlessly judging whether a procedure will be cost-effective in treating a patient given their condition, age, and the cost and reliability of the treatment - and if you're a single-payer health-care proponent and think that that sounds positively ghoulish, and don't see the contradiction, you really need to do some reading). In between and on a more mundane level, one of the ways this is done is by getting the most productivity possible out of doctors. "Productivity", in this case, is measured in patient visits per day. Doctors' time is not cheap, especially when grinding through a huge number of primary-referral patients whose cases are, to them (naturally) the most important thing in the world, but to the HMO are as routine as can be. Dr. Cain, the doctor in Coleman's column is a doctor I'd love to have as a patient - indeed, if she resurfaces in a clinic that's in my provider's network, I'd love to try to sign up. But if I were an Allina exec, knowing that time is money, in the sense that it's peoples' ever-tighter-stretched premium dollars paying for the luxury of that one doctor's benificence - it'd make for a tough decision. But the decision was there; Dr. Cain, like the cashier in my spoof, spent time - her employer's time - on things that made the patient/customer (and the reader) feel better, things that I'd love to have in my own doctor visit (but have never expected) - but that take away from the return on the premium dollar spent by the other patients, the clinic, and Allina (a non-profit corporation) as a whole - which is conceptually not much different than a cashier that doesn't work according to policy. Work sucks.

I worked for a company that ran a number of major HMOs. It is an essentially cold-hearted business underpinning a field that by its nature should not be. It's a creature of adaptation, designed to make the best of a very difficult situation, the current near-hyperinflation of health care costs. It was difficult, learning of the case management procedures and their impact on the lives of real people, in some of the extreme cases that occasionally pop up, even knowing that those procedures were what made health care affordable at all to the employers, unions and other providers involved. I was happy to leave the business.

The funny part? I'd suspect (but can not confirm) that faux-populist Coleman favors single-payer health care, the fabled (and much-fictionalized) Canadian or British systems or some such. And in those systems the "abuses" and depersonalization that Coleman laments in his column are ever more the rule than even the most hidebound procedurally-addicted American HMO.

By the way, the column provides ample evidence that Coleman is populist like a faux. Read this:

"I had to wait an hour to see her the first time," says Grone, whose wife, father and children also saw Cain. "But after your first visit, you wouldn't mind waiting four hours. I think that's what [Allina] didn't want. She spends a lot of time with patients, but they want doctors to get the patients in and get them out."

A whole hour? Shut my mouth!

Where in the world does Nick Coleman go to the doctor? Between checking in and waiting in the exam room, I haven't waited less than an hour to see a doctor more than a few times in my adult life, or with either of my kids, including quite a few emergency room visits (and even those were usually well over an hour). And that's right, Mr. Grone; Allina wants to get its money's worth out of ever minute of its doctors' time. It's a part of keeping things affordable for the rest of us.

NOTE: The "column" by Nigel Columnist was created by editing and adding to Nick Coleman's column. I cite Coleman's column as the original, and do not claim that it is original writing. The editing was done for purely satirical purposes.

Geek Heaven

There's a new chip in town:

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics

If I read this correctly, it means that the Flash games my son plays will crash it in one fourth the time of current chips.

The Peasants Are Restless

Johh Hinderaker gets more interesting phone calls that I do:

Friday morning, I was sitting in my office when my telephone rang. On the phone was a soft-spoken man who said, "I'm calling for Mr. John Hinderaker."

"Speaking," I responded, in the brusque tone I use when fielding cold calls.

The man said, "My name is James Watt."

Mr. Watt is retired now, and has been out of public life for many years. He is a kindly gentleman who, with the aid of his grandson, enjoys surfing the web and keeping up on the news of the day. And he is understandably unhappy about being casually defamed by Bill Moyers.

Read the rest of the piece.

Is He, Or Isn't He?

The federal program to train and authorize airliner pilots to carry firearms while flying has been training and licensing pilots:

Aviation sources tell Time that more than 4,000 pilots are authorized to carry guns, and each day they fly armed on more flights than do air marshals. The gun-toting pilots, who fly unidentified, now constitute the fourth-largest federal law-enforcement group in the U.S. Pilots in the program, as well as the Transportation Security Administration (tsa), which runs it, claim it has been a big success.

Of course, being a government program, there has to be a problem:

Except for an arrest last month of an armed pilot who allegedly arrived at work drunk, there have been no problems like inadvertent discharges or illegal use of weapons, which often occur among new officer groups. But some pilots complain that the tsa has never embraced the idea, providing little follow-up after training and denying them basic intelligence data like the weekly suspicious-incident reports. "The government wants it both ways," says one pilot. "They want us to protect aircraft, but they don't want to pay much for it, cover us for injuries or even really treat us as law-enforcement officers." tsa officials insist they are proud of the program and are reviewing how to offer more assistance and training.

(Via Vodkapundit)

Reaganmas 2005

Today is the 94th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan.

Why do I make a fuss about it? Two reasons:

1. It irritates the bejeebers out of my liberal friends
2. There are things about the history of the last thirty years that I'm fairly certain my kids will never be taught in school. Like so many of those things, it's my job to fix that.

And so we celebrate Reaganmas.

Why does it matter?

For starters, he is the soul of "Red", Serious America. He was born in rural western Illinois, went to an obscure college in the middle of nowhere, and did not play the academic paper chase that obsesses so much of the chattering class. He was no Ivy Leaguer - something his critics treated like a scarlet "A", but was irrelevant to his supporters. He was not unlike most Americans, when he started. He made a career of parlaying not a lot of raw material - academic "credentials", formal acting training, or political obsession - into great things. This is the heart of Red America - function beats form.

And then there's the Cold War, his greatest legacy.

I've related the story before; I grew up in North Dakota during the Cold War, not far from the missile silos. I wondered - why have kids when they're all going to get blown up anyway? I started the eighties as a Democrat - although I detested Jimmy Carter, and would have voted for John Anderson (a "Republican" the likes of Nick Coleman would love) had I been a month older and able to vote. I was mortified by Reagan; I bought the left wing bilge machine's tripe about Reagan (the liberal media is not a product of the nineties), how he was going to take us into a war for oil and destroy the economy even worse than Carter had.

And yet, I watched - and was, along about 1983, converted. It took me a while to realize that another key tenet of the fantasy-based community's liturgy, "We're Smarter!", is dubious at best. Conservatism is counterintuitive. We're raised from childhood to care for others, share, help the unfortunate, give the shirt off your back to the needy; it takes conscious thought to realize that people are better at this than governments.

And I saw Ronald Reagan embody Churchill's great lesson - fascism and totalitarianism must be faced with strength, not supplication. I watched the Cold War end. And as my daughter was born, in 1991, I saw the bombers come off alert, and the missiles start getting decommissioned.

So every year I take the kids out to dinner at a little diner down the street, and talk about the lessons of Reagan's life and presidency and their impact on their lives - they who were both born years after Reagan left office. Tomorrow I'll put a bowl of jelly beans on top of my credenza, for people to grab as they go by.

Happy Reaganmas!

Where Radio Angels Fear To Tread

I missed the first week of the Nick Coleman radio show. It's not hard to do.

Mornings, of course, are the most hectic time of the day in the Berg household. I have to squeeze in some blogging, naturally, and then between 6:30 and 8:00 the kids and I have to get up, get showered and dressed, and meet the bus or get in the car and race to school and work. I have a nice, short drive to work for a change, so my morning radio listening amounts to about ten minutes as I careen down Ayd Mill Road. I usually spend that time doing something I enjoy - listening to a CD, or Ingraham, even MPR or (rarely) Barnard.

To top it off, even if I wanted to catch the show, it'd be hard to manage; the local FrankenNet website doesnt' yet bother to list Coleman's show. I'd have to assume it's on some time before Wild Wendy's little two hour study in shrill.

But the reports I've gotten suggest the Coleman show is a treasure trove of material. And so my mission is clear. I've gotta live-blog Coleman's show.

Some morning this week - I don't know which one, yet - I'm going to take an hour off from work, get the kids up and dressed early, park myself next to the radio with the laptop, and relate the proceedings. Who knows - one can always learn something from a fellow radio professional.

I'm going to head out and buy coffee now.

Three Years

Yesterday was "Shot In The Dark's" third birthday. I can't believe I missed it!

If you'd told me three years ago that this site would be drawing 2,000 visits a day, would be in the top 400 in the Bear Ecosystem, and would have been parlayed into a talk show, I'd have probably figured you were one of those people who yells at invisible tormentors at the bus stop and supports Howard Dean. The whole project started out as a spur-of-the-moment whim; I read about Andrew Sullivan somewhere, got the link to Blogger.com, and set up the original "Shot".

I never figured, honestly, that I'd ever draw more than a dozen or so readers a day . I was happy with that, actually. Beyond that, it's all gravy.

So thanks to all of you for helping me turn my little spur of the moment whim into a 90-minute-a-day addiction!

The Warrior and the Gerbil

Picture this.

Imagine a group of 18 year old American kids; snotty, insolent, spoiled (even the ones from poor backgrounds; by world standards, we're all spoiled rotten), used to being held to low expectations, triained by a media society to expect instant gratification. Beyond that, they're products of an educational system spawned in the anti-militaristic seventies that exalts self-esteem but has forgotten self-respect, which misses the point on character, and has tried to train them - especially the boys - to be non-competitive, docile and feminized. They're products of a society where the notion of "service" is foreign. They're the children of the "Me" generation, swaggering around with their pants around their thighs and their underwear up to their armpits, ignorant of history but up to the minute on Allan Iverson and Paris Hilton.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to teach them - the one percent of them that choose the military - how to endure brutal privation, obey orders that can range from arbitrary to insane without trivial question, and at the end of the day to compete in the toughest match there is, modern, man vs. man combat. Not with video-game consoles and missiles, but with rifles and grenades and sheath knives, at ranges so close you can see, and sometimes touch, or be splattered by, your enemy. And then, you must lead them into a fight for their lives, and the lives of their squad-mates.

On top of that, you must teach them something their fathers and grandfathers never had to learn; to switch from lethal focus to compassion, or at least prudence, instantly. In the heat of battle. Where a mine or a sniper or a suicide bomber could be around every corner.

Any takers?

James Mattis is.

Lt. General James Mattis commanded the First Marine Division in Iraq, during the march to Baghdad, the longest overland push in the history of the USMC. He's got a long history as the kind of warrior you want to have defending you.

Oh, yeah - he talks trash:

According to an audio recording of General Mattis's remarks obtained by The Associated Press, he said: "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil."

General Mattis continued: "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

Lots of it:

The general is no stranger to controversy. After marines under his command seized an airstrip in Afghanistan at the start of the war against the Taliban, he declared, "The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan."

The remark grated on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who with other Pentagon officials considered the remark impolitic given the administration's stated goal that the United States was freeing Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban, not seizing land in a Muslim nation.

I find it amazing that a media that lionizes sports figures and pop music stars who talk the kind of smack that makes Mattis' remarks sound almost innocent, can then turn around and take offense when a man whose job is to teach our shiftless 18-year-old boys to be 19-year-old men, and lead them into battle, talks in a manner that speaks to those same rough-hewn fighting men (and women), rather than 55-year-old former anti-war protesters who work as news executives or bureaucrats.

Read The March Up, by Bing West and Ray Smith; the story of Mattis' drive on Baghdad, it shows Mattis is a measured, even compassionate a warrior as can be imagined.

This rhubarb shows us a number of things:

• There's a gulf in perception between our society's chattering classes and its warriors. Read Mattis' actual remarks, including the context (absent from most headlines, and certainly from most leftyblogs' treatment of this flap); you know he knows who he's talking about; you know he's not talking about indiscriminate, joyful mass-murder.
• This incident highlights another key difference; our military - and, I argue, "red" America, the part that's serious about the challenges that face our nation - thinks in terms of tangibles. Function is more important than form. The chattering classes - the left, "silly America", the fantasy-based community - obsesses over The Message. It's the Gospel According to Clinton; the Message is the Medium, as well as the Goal and the Product. It's better to look good than to feel good - or maybe better to say the right thing than do the right thing.

The kicker? Five will get you ten that there's not an Afghan or Iraqi that doesn't understand exactly what Mattis is saying.

As we've seen pretty clearly in this past week, the chattering classes could learn a lot from the Iraqis. And General Mattis, for that matter.

George Patton also got into a lot of trouble for running his mouth off. Like Mattis, he was no fool; he knew what he was doing. He was leading Americans to do something Americans hate; put themselves into a uniform and, forgoing the routines and rewards of civilian life, to go overseas to fight a war that 48% of the population supports either not well or not at all, to risk their lives and be underpaid for it, to sleep in the mud and go days without sleep and to occasionally have to tourniquet the stump of your buddy's leg and throw a grenade into a roomful of other guys who'd gladly do the same to you, and maybe come home in a box in the bargain. Patton, and Mattis, understand; they're leading Americans to be something Americans are, naturally, not; warriors.

On that count, Mattis has delivered, and in epic portion.

But, again, to a good chunk of our chattering classes, "delivery" isn't as important as "appearance".

Three Thousand Words

Chris Muir sums up the state of the media with Tuesday's Day By Day.

Class Act

New Washington governor Christine Gregoire blames a death threat on talk radio:

Washington State's new governor, Christine Gregoire, has received a death threat. She tells the Seattle Times, she blames "the level of discussion on some of these talk radio shows" for whipping up people.

Michelle Malkin, in covering the story, quotes Stefan Sharkansky,who writes:

For Gregoire to equate public outrage over serious failures of government with death threats, is not merely a ridiculous mischaracterization, it's an attempt to delegitimize and stifle dissent. Appalling."

Prediction: look for the left to blame the alternative media - talk radio and blogs - for everything that goes wrong for the next few years.

Schmeling

Perhaps from the "I had no idea he was alive" files: Max Schmeling is dead at 99.

He was famous for his title bouts against Joe Louis. He served as a paratrooper in the German Army in WWII.

Schmeling is an amazing figure. Although Hitler used his boxing for propaganda purposes, Schmeling refused to join the Nazi party, and indeed may have been a hero:

However, history will remember him for what he achieved outside rather than inside the ring. The story of Max Schmeling is the story of a hero, who during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, saved the lives of two young Jewish brothers named Lewin. A decent man in conflict with the Nazi regime and racial policies of Hitler's Third Reich, and a man who demonstrated extraordinary generosity, righteousness and humanitarianism. Yet Schmeling never once revealed his heroism.

In an article, published in History Today, two professors at the University of Rhode Island, Robert Wiesbord and Norbert Heterich, tell how Schmeling agreed to hide the two teenage sons of a Jewish friend of his, David Lewin, during the awful time of Krystallnacht, November 1938 when Nazi pogroms against the Jews reached new heights.

He kept the Lewin boys, Henry and Werner, in his apartment at the Excelsior Hotel in Berlin, leaving word at the desk that he was ill and no one was to visit him. Later, when the rage of hate died down a little bit, did Schmeling help them flee the country to safety. They escaped and came to the United States where one of them, Henri Lewin, became a prominent hotel owner. This episode remained under shrouds until 1989, when Henry Lewin invited Schmeling to Las Vegas to thank him for saving his life. To this day, Henri Lewin believes that he and his brother owe their lives to Max Schmeling and he is convinced that Schmeling himself could have died for his humanitarian gesture.

Schmeling obviously survived the war, although his boxing career did not. Eventually he became a successful businessman and a philanthropist.

It's hard to imagine a sports figure like Schmeling today.

12 Years Ago Today

My "little guy", Sam, is 12 years old today.

The day he was born, life was otherwise hitting bottom. I was getting the crap kicked out of me; I'd been trying to change careers for a year; I'd spent most of the previous year working for $7 an hour at a litigation support company. Two months before Sam was born, I got a my first technical writing job...

...with a company that stiffed me for most of what they owed me and went out of business.

So the day Sam was born, we (his mother, half-brother, sister and I) got power-shutoff and eviction notices. The wheels were coming off.

But within a month of Sam, I got my first decent job. It was a long road back, but it started right around then.

So - happy birthday, Sam, my little good luck charm!

One False Idea

I was listening to MPR the other day. "All Things Considered" had a bit on a non-profit group that was presenting an "opera" in Fargo, "One False Move".

The opera addressed female bullying.

"Ironic", I thought.

In the seventies and eighties, following on the heels of research that alleged that girls were short-changed in the educational system - that boys were called on more frequently in class and that young girls' psyches were brutalized by a masculist society - and that the education system needed to change. Girls needed to become more assertive; government programs sprang up to direct girls into math and science; the self-esteem of the nation's girls became a national priority among the professionally concerned.

On a more sinister tack, boys were regarded as the problem. Based on the research of the likes of Carol Gilligan and others, the education system made a priority out of changing boys - indeed, changing boyhood. Early childhood theorists prevailed on educators to try to make boys act more like girls, encouraging cooperative play and verbal games, punishing competition and rough-housing.

Of course, that research has been shown to be bsed on incredibly flawed "science" - indeed, to have been the result of research that relied on wholesale abrogation of the rules of academic research. Christine Hoff Summers' The War On Boys gutted Gilligan's body of research like a rotten fish...

...but it takes more than mere conclusive refutation to change the education system.

But that's not the point.

"One False Move" purports to relate the story of couple of girls, one-time best friends, whose friendship, and eventually lives, are ruined by the culture of petty, brutal bullying that is such a part of teenage girl life.

If the music I heard on ATC was any cue, the "opera" must be musically dreadful:

"Don't be caught stealing the limelight

If the limelight isn't yours, beware.

Don't admit you have a social conscience

If the others think it's cooler not to care.

Never state opinions of your own.

Never let on who you really are.

Never doubt that you could be alone

For the rest of your life

With an invisible scar

From that unplanned, unconscious one false move.'

This could be considered a form of bullying in its own right.

But I got to thinking - what happened the last time we got concerned with how our kids grow up?

Twenty years ago, the Department of Education bought into the notion that girls are short-changed by schools, based on flawed research including Gilligan's. Today, girls are a majority of college students in most fields (except in science and technology) and in absolute numbers. Worse - boyhood, or at least the outward manifestations of boyhood, competition and roughhousing and boisterousness, have been banned from schools and turned into minor aberrations.

So what happens if the professionally concerned take on female bullying? We'll end up with gangs of gun-toting girls terrorizing the schools...

Is this actually an issue? How much consciousness do we need to raise, here?

Perils of Pragmatism

I originally found this before the Inauguration. It got lost in the shuffle - but in the wake of the SOTU speech, seems even more appropriate.

It's Victor Davis Hanson, on the perils of poo-poohing idealism.

He goes back to the Peleponnesian wars [1]:

My favorite example of castigating idealism is far older and from fourth-century B.C. Greece. By the 370s B.C. idealists were firmly in control of the government of conservative ancient Thebes, and turned an oligarchic Boeotian Confederacy into a real democracy. Convinced after their victory at Leuktra (371 B.C.) that a wounded Sparta was still a perennial threat, the new Boeotian democrats mobilized a Hellenic coalition of the willing to drop the old realist idea of containment or of just waiting for Sparta to attack.

Thus they embraced the preemptive act of invading Sparta and freeing 250,000 Laconian and Messenian indentured serfs or helots ("those taken"). The preemptory invasion was aimed at bringing freedom and democracy to Greeks heretofore deemed less than fully Hellenic and thought incapable of self-governance. Indeed, over the past century thousands of helots had been arbitrarily executed and routinely tortured and humiliated by their Spartan overlords. The Boeotians thought that by freeing the helots and creating autonomous democracies on Sparta’s borders they could remake the Peloponnese and end the old pathology in which a professional Gestapo-like military coerced their neighbors and meddled abroad, while fed and supported by a veritable nation of serfs.

The subsequent successful invasion led by the general Epaminondas was one of the few military operations of the ancient world that had real elements of idealism. Yet the circle around Epaminondas was also suspected of being influenced by the Pythagoreans, zealots who had fallen under the spell of the subversive and dangerous teachings of Pythagoras. The latter purportedly had promulgated weird notions, ranging from the equality of women to vegetarianism, and his work seems to have influenced Plato. Perhaps, Pythagoras was an ancient bogeyman not unlike the contemporary Leo Strauss, and was used to explain the otherwise inexplicable fact that the Boeotians of all people went into the heart of darkness to free the people of the Peloponnese.

One last thing about such appreciation of idealism in foreign policy: After Epaminondas emasculated Sparta, liberated the helots, and fostered a democratic Peloponnese, the Thebans, far from hailing the hero, put the returning commander on trial for usurping his prescribed tenure.

The more things change, the more they…

On the other hand, Epaminondas didn't have to face Nancy Pelosi.

[1]Which, indeed, Hanson does even when figuring a way to remove mold from his shower; classics profs are like that.

Mao Betta Blues

Reader Corey from Minneapolis writes:

I was in the Uptown transit station and on the bench, laid for anyone to find - not unlike a Christian tract laid in phone booths, bus seats, utility bills by believers with a zeal for evangelism - was...

could you guess?

... a copy of "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung"

Is this the famous little red book all citizens of Communist China were required to carry and read periodically?

It also had a sticker which read as follows:

"Howdy! Hola! Bonjour!Guten Tag!
I'm a very special book. You see, I'm traveling around the world making new friends. I hope I've met another friend in you. Please go to www.BookCrossing.com and enter my BCID number (shown below). You'll discover where I've been and who has read me, and can let them know I'm safe here in your hands. Then ... read and release me!"

Now, I knew the Twin cities was a bastion of leftists, but I thought they'd try to be a LITTLE more subtle than this!

Well, to be fair, they've never had to be - and they rarely feel the need to be.

I remember in the late eighties - around the time of the end of the Cold War - some group of Twin Cities communists plastered "Communist Party of Minnesota" stickers around the U, Dinkytown, Uptown, all the usual haunts.

The stickers had a phone number, which I promptly called, and called several times over a few months, which was never answered and had no answering machine...

Upside, Corey; Mao probably is a more appealing leftist than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Gag Me

The NARN filled in for Hewitt tonight. Captain Ed and I talked State of the Union first hour, and the Powerguys and I talked with John Podhoretz and Larry Schweikart, author of the Patriot's History of the United States.

So far, so good.

But the cough bug I've had for the past three weeks came back and bit me with a vengeance near the bottom of the hour. I got this insane itch in the back of my throat in the middle of talking about Social Security, and started coughing uncontrollably. Worse, it messed up my voice for the whole segment. Worse yet, it triggered my gag reflex.

Compelling radio, indeed.

Kudos to Ed, who managed to vamp for a solid couple of minutes while I fought chundering. That's radio, baybee!

Hopefully I'll be done with the hacking by Tuesday...

Follow-Up

Steve Gigl at the newly-christened Gigglepundit followed up on my question from the other day; what did Nick Coleman have to say about hunger during the Clinton Adminstration. He followed up with a Lexis/Nexis search.

The results were...well, read it.

Tune In!

Join the NARN as we fill in for Hugh Hewitt this afternoon - 5-8 Central time on a Hewitt affiliate near you!

The Dem Response

I missed most of Dingy Harry's bit, but the part I caught intersected with the thing that jumped out at me about Pelosi's response; they both invoked the "F" word (Faith) and, for that matter, G-d himself, very prominently. I'm biased, obviously, but Nancy Pelosi invoking the Almighty seems akin to sending Hillary Clinton into a bowling alley to guzzle Budweiser with the locals.

And their "support for the troops" followed a pattern I used to lampoon when the late Senator Wellstone exhibited it; it all came down to another entitlement, for Pelosi; a new GI Bill, another new spending program. Not that that's not important - the veterans of this war deserve no less than those of WWII, although the situation is very different. But entitlements don't win wars - and at the moment, winning is what our troops need. Part of that is presenting a front to the terrorists that they won't find encouraging.

They both flunked, on that count.

Let's Get This Party Started Right

We're a week away from the Patriot Forum - and it keeps getting better and better!

We're going to be giving away copies of Hugh Hewitt's book, Blog ticket orders of $69 and up.

And in the spirit of Valentine's Day, you can "Feel the Love with Hugh and Peter". AM1280 The Patriot will be doing a number of other giveaways for some pretty cool "romantic" things - hotels, spas, dinners, the whole romantic works. The theme is "feel the love with Hugh Hewitt and Peter Beinart." To qualify for the free book they have to order over the phone 651-289-4444 or go to the tickets website.

Hope to see you there!

Day Four

This is four straight days I've gone without listening to the Nick Coleman show on the local FrankenNet affiliate.

Wonder if I can go the distance?

And for those of you who've heard the show, what is "the distance?" Predictions?

State of the Union

So much for backing off the gas.

Some of the landed punditry thought the President would do a less aggressive speech last night, after the ambitious rhetoric of the Inaugural.

I was glad to see they were wrong.

I didn't try to liveblog the event - I've found it's easy to miss the forest for the trees when you do that. My daughter and I watched the speech, though - and our consensus was "he's spending some of that political capital he was talking about after the election."

As a conservative, I'm glad he mentioned the Gay Marriage amendment. As a small-l libertarian, I'm glad he only mentioned it a little, and moved on; he does have political capital, but spending it on gay marriage when there's a war to win and a tax system to reform would be like buying jewelry with the mortgage money. Gay marriage is a state issue, and the states are deciding it.

His domestic agenda was a troika of things that will alternately inveigle peals of joy and squawks of disdain from both sides of the aisle; education, healthcare and social security reform - led off by the call for fiscal discipline that so many on the right have awaited. At the end of the spending section, his tagline was "we should spend wisely, or not at all" - angling for the right.

He tacked right back to the left in his education section; "No Child Left Behind" may or may not be effective (I'm a detractor), but either way, it is a big government program.

There were two things that popped into the speech that surprised me; appointing Laura Bush to head a "three-year initiative to help organizations keep young people out of gangs, and show young men an ideal of manhood that respects women and rejects violence", and a federal effort to expand the use of DNA matching to validate death penalty convictions, and to train defense counsel to more competently represent capital defendants.

----------

It was, of course, in the foreign policy section of the speech that he took the Dems to school. He took the Democrats' nattering about "exit strategies" and kicked it to the floor; the exit will be when the job is done.

Good.

And he showed he'd learned the lesson of Reagan - and absorbed one of his own successes. He expanded, de facto, the "Axis of Evil", adding Syria (albeit not in as many words) to the spot vacated by Iraq. Emphasis is mine:

Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act, and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom.

His homage to the election was brilliant, and straight out of the Reagan playbook. The camera noted a number of men, apparently Arab, waving blue fingertips as they applauded. And Bush's guests in the gallery - Taleb al-Suhail, and the family of Marine Sgt. Norwood, killed in Fallujah - were the subject of the key moments of the speech. The cynic might say the moments were manipulative; the idealist would counter they were brilliant, and of course they're manipulative; speeches like this are intended to motivate, to lead, to inspire. Cynical or idealistic, the moment was stunning, straight from the Reagan playbook.

I'm going to swerve into conjecture here.

This was a speech that could only come from a man who knows he has momentum. A simple majority in the general election, control of Congress, some solid (if underreported) successes in the war and the economy, a good showing against his opponents in the Tsunami tragedy, and, biggest of all, stunning, unpredicted successes in the Afghan and Iraqi elections - Bush has had a good couple of months, has a roll of political mojo to burn, and he knows it.

And it shows.

Kos of Death (or: How I Learned To Love The Daily Kos)

Markos Moulitsas is big. Real big.

Among Democrats.

That's a good thing for Republicans.

Dean Barnett writes in the Weekly Standard about the Kos phenomenon.

The piece explains from whence Kos came, and the sheer magnitude of his site's popularity - including his growing stature as a kingmaker in the Democratic Party.

If you're a Republican, you should be getting all tingly right about now:

Yes, Kos is definitely on a roll. This week, under the headline "They Finally Fear Us," Kos excerpted a Los Angeles Times story which reported that in spite of some unease with the idea of a Dean chairmanship, prominent Democrats were loath to speak out against
the Vermont governor, lest they enrage the increasingly powerful lobby of Internet activists personified and led by Kos. As Kos astutely summarized the situation, the Internet activists are in the process of achieving parity with special interest groups like NARAL, the unions, and the NAACP. What he doesn't point out is that those groups for the most part maxed out long ago in terms of power and influence. The Kos community is still in its infancy.

And yet, even in its' infancy, it shows a wondrous ability to get ordinarily-sensible Democrats to shuck their common sense and dive into the intellectual mosh pit.

Kos did a lot to bring you Mad How - the man who (like so much of Kos' readership) hates Republicans. As the influence of Kos along with other far-left groups radicalizes the Democratic base, look for the Dean phenomenon - much heat and money and flash, little light and traction outside the radical base and pan - to entrench itself in the Democratic party.

Maybe sooner than later:

In recent days, Kos has begun suggesting that someone challenge conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary. Given Kos's recent successes, Lieberman would be wise to not take this threat lightly.

Either would Connecticut's Republicans. The "threat" of a Kos-endorsed, lavishly-financed Deaniac opponent to the responsible, useful Joe Lieberman should give hope to the beleaguered GOP in the NYC 'burbs.

Many in the conservative blogosphere have been quick to label Kos a "moon bat" because of his unforgiving left-wing politics and his strident tone. Kos in turn dismisses these critics as "wing nuts." (Who says dialogue in the blogosphere isn't edifying?) This kind of juvenile give and take, however, obscures the vital fact that Moulitsas leads an influential movement, a movement whose influence is likely to grow even larger.

Actually, the juvenile give and take shows how circumscribed the influence will be outside the radical base. The term "wingnut" itself does, indeed, show Moulitsas' influence among the radical base; many of the less-intelligent leftyblogs use "wingnut" almost exclusively as a synonym - indeed, the synonym - for Republican these days, and no doubt will until Kos coins another such trifle. And yet real America - grown-up America, the America that has to get along in the real world and play well with others - looks on that kind of moronic name-calling the same way they do little kids dashing about the lobby of the theatre, screaming and smacking into people - an irritant that does nothing to endear their parents to anyone.

Kos gets 400,000 page views a day? If it spreads his influence throughout the party, let a million pages be viewed. It's gold for us.

Next To Fall?

The blogs are swarming after Eason Jordon.

The CNN executive, who gained transient infamy for revealing that he'd directed CNN to sit on stories of Hussein's brutaility to avoid getting the CNN Baghdad Bureau shut down, has been caught by multiple sources claiming that the US military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq.

Captain Ed and LaShawn are all over it, as it Hugh.

Will Dan Rather soon have company in palookaville?

King 1 Coleman -1

King Banaian vs. Nick Coleman on economics?

Oh, yeah. It's ugly. Like, Mike Tyson vs. Carrot Top ugly.

Read it. And then ask the Strib why they foist such illiterate twaddle on their readers.

On Dean

The editors of NRO have a fantastic editorial about the ascent of Mad How:

The appeal of Howard Dean is simply this: He has stood up at regional meetings of (generally left-wing) DNC members and delivered versions of his usual rants, prompting members to applaud and feel good about themselves as they bask in the old-time religion. That's it. As Dean said at the New York meeting, "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for," in a typically crude statement. The spectacle of his candidacy steaming toward the chairmanship makes a mockery of New Republic editor Peter Beinart's call for a return to the moral seriousness and maturity of the Democrats circa 1948. The DNC is looking as though it can't even muster the moral seriousness and maturity of the Democrats circa January 2004, when they relegated Dean to a devastating third-place finish in Iowa.

So what does the lefty blogosphere think about Mad How?

They seem, so far, to be as quiet as they were...after the Iraqi elections.

Down, Boy

The Strib says former Senator Rod Grams is thinking about running against Mark Dayton in '06:

Grams said Tuesday that he's had about a dozen conversations with Republicans and former supporters who have asked him to consider a run for the party's nomination, so he intends to begin talking to other activists and party leaders.

"If it looks very promising, and I think it might, then I would toss my hat in the ring," said Grams. "I just want to be a little more sure."

He defeated DFLer Ann Wynia in the 1994 U.S. Senate race before losing his reelection bid to Dayton.

And in his six years in the Senate, Rod Grams accomplished more than Paul Wellstone did in 12, and vastly more than Brave Sir Mark Dayton will do in his entire career.

Of course, the media in '00 was in the bag for Dayton; they harped endlessly on Grams' divorce and personal life (ignoring Mark Dayton's rather spotty history in that area), and pinned the antics of his estranged son Morgan (of whom he had never had custody, and who was raised by his ex-wife). They did everything but deploy armed thugs to GOP districts to deliver the election to Dayton.

Grams certainly has a following among the grass roots in the party, where he's known as a great guy. When I was heavily involved with the concealed carry reform movement, Grams was a genuine friend of the Second Amendment.

But politics is dicey about comebacks. Says "Politics in Minnesota"'s Sarah Janecek

Unfortunately for him, Republicans not long ago witnessed a comeback attempt [former Sen. Rudy Boschwitz in 1996] and they lost."

I'm a big tossup on Grams. Unlike Mark Kennedy, he's a proven quantity in the Senate. Also unlike Kennedy, he's lost.

Who else? Mary Kiffmeyer is an appealing candidate, and she's stirred things up as Secratary of State - but the stuff she's stirred up is the kind of thing that only wonks care about. Rep. Kennedy is an obvious front-runner, but he has to work on his campaigning. Gutknecht, I think, would have a very hard time running in the Metro. Brian Sullivan did well in the chase for the '00 gubernatorial nod - his strong showing is responsible for Pawlenty being as conservative as he is - but he's no more conservative or popular than Grams; I'd be worried about them splitting the conservative vote and handing the nomination to someone too moderate. Two years ago, I thought State Auditor Pat Anderson would be a natural choice, but personal turmoil and the "Telegate" "scandal" took her out of the public eye. It's a shame.

The DFL, of course, reacts like any politician would react when tied to a brick like Mark Dayton:

DFL Party communications director Bill Amberg said the flurry of explorers "is the Republicans' business and not for us to worry about right now. ... Mark is continuing to show the people of Minnesota an honesty and straightforwardness that is increasingly rare, and whether his opponent is Grams or Gutknecht or Kennedy or Kiffmeyer, he will build on those strengths and win reelection."

Right. That's just what I was thinking.

The Return?

I thought about doing a full-scale fisking of Nick Coleman's latest self-righteous jeremiad - but I"m at the point where I almost feel I could re-use pieces of earlier fiskings (much as Coleman seems to re-us bits and pieces of columns).

But I read the opening:

Minnesotans with lungs were advised to hold their breath Tuesday, and children and old people were told to stay inside while gas guzzlers gridlocked the roads as usual. In case you still haven't got the picture of what is happening in our backsliding country, the president will give us his report tonight on the state of the nation.

Here's a sneak preview from a Twin Cities suburb. You want to know the state of the nation? It's hungry.

I braved the toxic air Tuesday to visit a food shelf in the shadows of the gasoline refinery in St. Paul Park. The place is called Friends in Need, and last year it served almost 2,800 families -- twice the number it served five years earlier -- and the need is expanding every year.

...and wondered, "What did Nick have to say about hunger during the Clinton Administration?"

Where was the official conscience of the Twin Cities Media during the nineties? When a homeless foot fell in the Twin Cities, was Nick tying it to the Legislature? Was he blaming the failing schools on Roger Moe? Was he trolling schools looking for books when Bill Clinton ran the show?

Anyone with Lexis/Nexis wanna take a whack at that?

It Could Be Real...

Dean Ascends:

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose failed presidential bid in 2004 established the power of the Internet as a campaign tool, seems poised to assume the leadership of the Democrat party, according to a report in The New York Times.

As the news broke, White House political advisor Karl Rove released a statement denying any role in Mr. Dean's election as DNC chairman.

If Rove issues a denial in the woods and nobody listens...

Underrated: Part 2

Red writes about one of my favorite movies, the criminally-underrated Fearless, with Rosie Perez and Jeff Bridges.

Their Own Petard

The left - and a fair chunk of the right - is distrurbed that one in three US high school students would seem to approve of one kind of censorship or another:

The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Asked whether the press enjoys “too much freedom,” not enough or about the right amount, 32% say “too much,” and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

The temptation is to say "thanks for nothing, liberals - your speech codes and a monolithically leftist educational academy and education system have finally done what the right has been warning you about for decades; created a generation of students that have no idea about this country's civic traditions, beyond an ability to regurgitate key facts about the civil rights movement.

Of course, the USA Today story presents none of its methodology. More on that later.

Chris Dykstra echoes a lot of leftybloggers in solemnly intoning that it represents the "Birth of Fascism". But remember - births involve parents.

The study's methodology page doesn't say what these students' teachers know about the subject, or whether the subject is even taught in their schools.

Judging by what my kids - in sixth and eighth grade - tell me, it's never really come up.

So - is this the "birth of fascism", or just a "dawning realization that our school system doesn't teach democracy very well?"

Gerbil of the Apocalypse

Nick Coleman has a radio show.

Er, whatever.

Luke Francl says:

This ought to raise some wingnuts' blood pressure. For that reason, if no other, I find this amusing. Hopefully, no one pops a vein...[and, in a later comment] My interest in his show is entirely based on the possiblity that one of you crazies will have a coronary.

File this under "Delusional". The only veins that will pop over a Coleman radio show will be popped from excessive laughter.

If you've never heard Nick Coleman on the air, you're in for a treat, where "treat" equals "fiesta of ineptitude". His voice is the closest to a monotone that I've ever heard on a radio that didn't come from a high school wrestling coach.

Blazing wit? Listening to him trying to pick up a straight line is like watching a fat man swing at a Santana slider with a folding chair.

The only way he can stay properly on mike is if is face is lashed to it.

The funniest part - besides the fact that AM950 manager Janet Robert thought Coleman would be a marketable air talent - is that Nick Coleman was the one that groused and phumphered about amateur bloggers stepping on his turf; he's the guy who "knows stuff", doncha know. And now, he's going to be a major-market morning host at a big...market...[I can hardly control myself]...station...

...anyway, after Coleman's spittle-flecked vituperation about Powerline and the rest of us crashing his party, (even though they are more professional and accountable than he is in his writing), it's funny to watch Nick putting on his DJ costume and acting like a broadcaster, even though he has paid precisely zero dues in the business (his KSTP show made Oliver Willis' podcasts sound acceptable), and quite audibly knows nothing about radio, and seems to confuse "talk show" with "sitting around a barber shop and bitching about the world".

This should be really...

...dull.

Assuming the story is true, of course. The AM950 website is silent about any Nick Coleman show.

Maybe they're not so dumb.

UPDATE: The Fraters' Atomizer did me one better; he listened to the show this morning, earning the Northern Alliance "Take One For The Team" award for '05. At least he confirms the show's existance.

Choice quotes:

And...to a caller with an opposing view "Take a shower, get dressed and go get a job."

Indeed.

And I loved this:

"I'm nobody's monkey."

No, Nick. You're everybody's monkey. You bounce about shrieking frenetically, but one shriek sounds pretty much the same as all the others. And when all is said and done all you have is a bunch of crap stuck to the walls.

Hewitt V. Beinart: Get 'em While They're Hot

I'm looking forward to being at the next Patriot Forum, Thursday, February 10, with most of the rest of the Northern Alliance, watching Peter Beinart and Hugh Hewitt debating the future of the Democratic Party.

The event is filling up fast, still. And we'd really, really love to have you there. Go online to buy tickets, and join us a week from Thursday!

Unintended Consequences?

When you make prostitution legal, only non-prostitutes will be criminals?:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

You're an American. You read that, and think "Hahahaha! This is like the episode of The Partridge Family where 12-year-old Danny gets drafted because of a Draft Board bureaucratic screwup! Hilarious!

Actually, the brothel has the law on their side.

Germany legalized prostitution two years ago. Brothels pay taxes, provide the government-mandated benefits every other German employer must kick in - in other words, they're legit.

And like all legit people and businesses, they have rights:

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

Too hard to distinguish from bars...? Not the bars I went to when I was in Germany, but whatever.

So here's how it played out:

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel...When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

The regulations say so!

And for the newly-legit business owners, it makes sense:

Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits.

"Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" said Miss Ulyanova.

I gotta hand it to the Germans. When I was a Libertarian, I sort of tepidly agreed with the notion that the problems involved with prostitution, like drugs, came from their illegality more than the actual service or substance involved.

That, of course, was before I remembered the whole "equal protection" thing.

I wonder if Jesse Ventura's read this yet?

Turning Point

A commenter on a Mudville Gazette piece about CBS' coverage of the election noted:

It's like 1989 all over again. The media has been forced to reluctantly acknowledge something beautiful and wonderful is happening: the birth of a new democracy.

When Dan "The Soviet people like communism" Rather started talking about the positive changes in Eastern Europe, you knew the Soviets were done. Now he's reporting positive news from Iraq.

I'm going to indulge in fantasy here: maybe the media (as oppose to the left, to whom the media largely belong but whom the media don't completely represent) learned its lesson in Eastern Europe, where they all but declared democracy dead within a year of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. It made them look (to those who care, an admittedly small number) stupid.

I know. Probably not. The American public doesn't have a 15 year attention span, why would the media that helped make them that way?

A guy can dream, can't he?

"Why Do They Hate Us?"

Remember the eighties?

Ronald Reagan called the USSR the "Evil Empire". The western intelligentsia pummeled Reagan; it wasn't nuanced enough. And people in the Eastern Bloc protested against Reagan in droves.

And yet today in the former Warsaw Pact, Reagan is revered. Natan Sharansky discusses how the news of the Evil Empire speech was received in the Gulag - like freedom was finally attainable.

Seeking parallels can be tricky - but sometimes they just come to you:

The man replacing the mayor of Baghdad — who was assassinated for his pro-American loyalties — says he is not worried about his ties to Washington.
In fact, he'd like to erect a monument to honor President Bush in the middle of the city.

"We will build a statue for Bush," said Ali Fadel, the former provincial council chairman. "He is the symbol of freedom."

3/4 of Iraq is delirious with freedom today, ready to take on the brutally difficult jobs of rebuilding a nation shattered by four decades of gangster rule, convincing the other quarter of the people to join in the process, and evicting or killing the one percent of deadenders that'd rather fight than switch.

Twenty years from now, what will be the "Evil Empire" speech that the new generation of Iraqi leaders harken back to, the little blink that started the germ of hope in their hearts?

Here's how you'll know that's happened:

• When the left starts trying to take credit for the fall of Hussein
• When they start claiming that it was inevitable.

I give them about five years.